Ascent to the Good

Ascent to the Good

The Reading Order
of Plato’s Dialogues
from Symposium to Republic

William H. F. Altman

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Title: Ascent to the good : the reading order of Plato’s dialogues from Symposium to
Republic / William H. F. Altman.
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 in memoriam Gregory Vlastos (1907–1991)
A scholar and a gentleman who was kind to me
Socrates: “Very well,” I said: “since we have reached this point, my boys,
let us take heed not to be deceived [ἐπειδὴ ἐνταῦθα ἥκομεν, ὦ παῖδες,
πρόσσχωμεν τὸν νοῦν μὴ ἐξαπατηθῶμεν].”
Lysis 219b5–6

Socrates: Still, if we are going to do this, for my part I think it is necessary

for all of us to be competitive in relation to knowing the truth, what it is [τὸ
ἀληθὲς τί ἐστιν] concerning the things of which we are speaking, and what is
false; for it is a common good to all for this to become clear. I will go through
with the argument as it seems to me to be, but if to any of you I seem to be
confirming to myself things that aren’t so, it is necessary to take me to task
and to refute [ἐλέγχειν] me.
Gorgias 505e3–506a3

Cleitophon: Making an end of it, Socrates, I finally asked you yourself about
these things as well, and to me you said of justice that it is to harm one’s
enemies and help one’s friends. But later, the just man seemed to never
harm anyone but to do all things for the benefit of all [πάντα γὰρ ἐπ᾽ ὠφελίᾳ
πάντας δρᾶν].
Cleitophon 410a7–b3
 Contents

Acknowledgements  xi
Abbreviationsxiii
Preface: Ascent to the Good xv
Introduction: Aristotle and Plato xxxix
1 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως
after Symposium1
§1. The Good and the Beautiful in Plato’s Symposium1
§2. Systematic Socratism 26
§3. Plato’s Deliberate Use of Fallacy in Lysis-Euthydemus  53
§4. The Play of Character and the Argument of the Action 92
2 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 119
§5. Between Euthydemus and Meno  119
§6. Socratism and the Knowledge of Good and Bad 143
§7. The Return to Athens in Laches and Charmides  183
3 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 213
§8. From Gorgias to Republic213
§9. Plato’s Confession  234
§10. Gorgias and the Shorter Way 270
§11. Protagoras Revisited  300
§12. Gorgias and the Longer Way 328

ix
x Contents

4 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 367

§13. Divine Dispensation and its Discontents 367
§14. “Meno the Thessalian” and the Socratic
Paradox Revisited  397
§15. Hypotheses and Images in Meno:
Introducing the Divided Line 424
5 Before and After Cleitophon461
§16. Looking Forward: Answering Cleitophon’s
Question (408e1–2) 461
§17. Looking Backward: Socrates as an Obstacle to
Socratism (410e7–8) 490
Bibliography511
Index549
Index verborum569
Index locorum573
About the Author 591
 Acknowledgements

During the fall of 1978, Gregory Vlastos taught a course about Socrates at
the University of Toronto while living at Massey College. As a Junior Fellow
at the College and as graduate student in philosophy enrolled in his course,
I spent a great deal of time with Professor Vlastos, most of it in lively conver-
sation over daily breakfast. It is in gratitude for those happy hours of dialogue
and debate that I have dedicated this book to his memory; despite my youth-
ful intemperance in expressing opinions strongly opposed to his own, his
kindness was exemplary and he always remained the gentleman. And there
is more: while writing this book—especially while reading the articles and
books of those who followed in his wake—I have come to respect him even
more than I did in life, and for all our disagreements, I miss not only the
gentleman but even more the scholar.
As originally conceived, the project of which this book is part was to con-
sist of three volumes, one dedicated to Plato’s Republic and the other two to
his pre- and post-Republic dialogues, respectively. When the book covering
the latter swelled to unforeseen dimensions, it became necessary to split it
into two parts, and this meant—if the study of Republic were to remain in
the middle, where it belonged—that the as yet unwritten volume on the pre-
Republic dialogues would likewise need to be divided. At the time, I resisted
these decisions but in retrospect they have proved providential. It is therefore
a delight to express my gratitude to Jana Hodges-Kluck whose energy, intel-
ligence, and professionalism are entirely responsible for this transformation;
over my objections, Jana is responsible for making Plato the Teacher bet-
ter than I could have made it. Among the other professionals at Rowman-
Littlefield, I would also like to thank Julie Kirsch, Joseph Parry, and Trevor
Crowell.

xi
xii Acknowledgements

This book was written in Brazil, and it came into being where and when it
did as a result of a conversation with Maicon Engler in January 2017. Profes-
sor Engler is one of the few people I know for whom the following advice
would have had any relevance: “If you ever write a multi-volume work, write
the first volume last.” At the time, I was writing a chapter about Protagoras,
and, still thinking in terms of three volumes, thought that I was following my
own advice; it occurred to me only later that if the advice was good, I needed
to follow it myself and write this book first, the one that begins after Sym-
posium. In addition to Maicon, it is a pleasure to thank Pedro Baratieri and
Gustavo Ribeira de Mello for not only keeping me on my toes as a teacher,
but for many provocative questions and even more illuminating observations.
Thanks also to Yuri Almeida, Deysielle Chagas, and Rodrigo Viana.
Among my colleagues in the United States, I am particularly grateful to
Mitch Miller, Peter Minowitz, and Roslyn Weiss; your friendship and support
mean more to me than you can know. Both Roslyn and Owen Goldin were
kind enough to read and comment on the manuscript; if I had followed more
of their advice, this would be a better book. Ruth Scodel and David Sedley
were always ready to help me over difficult hurdles, and Kasia Jazdzewska
asked me the most important question, the one about Chion of Heraclea.
I would also like to thank Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Jeff Dean, Mateo Duque,
Scott Hemmenway, Greg McBrayer, Avi Mintz, Debra Nails, Aakash Singh
Rathore, Naomi Reshotko, Christopher Rowe, Malcolm Schofield, Rosa-
mond Kent Sprague, and Sophia Stone.
Finally, and most importantly, there is my family. My grandchildren
Eliza and James have been a daily source of delight, and I am grateful to the
Graded School in São Paulo for hiring their parents Erin Rafferty and my
son Philip, the true Mr. Altman. From my son Elias, I have received not only
familial but also technological support; your advice and courage are both
indispensable and inspirational. The delightful Betsy West and my faux bro’
Oren Jacoby have once again allowed me to make the most of New York,
and my brave and brilliant sister Leslie Rescorla has been a rock of strength
and support. I continue to travel alongside my parents, Oscar L. Altman and
Adeline F. Furness, whose differences in life have borne fruit long after their
deaths. But first and foremost, as the daily source of my inspiration, and the
spiritual as well as physical basis of my life as a scholar, stands my beloved
wife Zoraide: your bright-eyed delight, passion, caution, and loving support
command my respect, gratitude, and love; for all you have done to make this
book possible, my darling, there are no unsung words.
Calais, Vermont
July 16, 2018
 Abbreviations

BPA backward pointing allusion

BP Equation  the beautiful is pleasant
CA the craft analogy
CPV courage is a part of virtue
CK-DD courage is knowledge of what is to be desired and dreaded.
CK-FGB courage is knowledge of future goods and bads
CPH Callicles-Plato hypothesis, that is, the hypothesis
that Callicles is who Plato might have become
D Deman number; see his Le témoignage d’Aristote sur Socrate
FGB future goods and bads
GB Equation the good is beautiful
GP Equation the good is pleasant
GoodE the eudaemonist good
GoodT the Idea of the Good
GTBM good things benefit me
IOV instrumentality of virtue
IV identity of the virtues
K virtue is knowledge
KAH knowledge of Athenian history
K-F knowledge of the future
KGB knowledge of goods and bads
KNV knowledge necessary for virtue
KSV knowledge sufficient for virtue
LSJ A Greek-English Lexicon
LW Longer Way
MAXHAP maximum happiness achievable in the circumstances
MES means-ends structures

xiii
xiv Abbreviations

NGNB neither good nor bad

PP Platonic paradox
PP-1 it is better to suffer injustice than to do it
PP-2 injustice punished is preferable to injustice unpunished
PP-3 rhetoric’s legitimate purpose is self-accusation
PP-4 the best way to harm a person is to ensure they avoid
punishment
PTI Penner, Taylor, and Irwin
ROPD reading order of Plato’s dialogues
RPT repeat-performance theory, sc. of Protagoras
SB self-benefit
SI Socratic Intellectualism
SI-A SI (Santas, Irwin, and Cooper)
SI-B SI (Penner, Taylor, and Rowe)
SocratesE Socrates in the early dialogues
SP the Socratic paradox, i.e., nobody errs willingly
SP-1 Socrates himself as paradox
SP-2 SP
SP-3 Socrates’ Divine Sign
SW Shorter Way
SW-1 SW must be understood in relation to the LW
SW-2 justice as psychic harmony in SW
SW-3 eudaemonist element of SW
SW-4 connection between SW and Second Part of Divided Line
SW-5 four virtues as defined in SW
SW-6 city/man parallelism in SW
TAL terminal argument in Laches
TEA the eudaemonist axiom
UV unity of the virtues
 Preface
Ascent to the Good

This book focuses on the longest and arguably the most important of Plato’s
so-called Socratic dialogues. Gorgias, Meno, and Euthydemus are consid-
ered here and Protagoras will repeatedly reappear. Although there is some
question about the purely Socratic credentials of several of these longer
works, the shorter and less controversially “Socratic” dialogues are also
well represented: Lysis, Laches, and Charmides join their four longer sis-
ters. Apart from the three short dialogues connected to the trial and death of
Socrates,1 the only missing “Socratic dialogues” are the Hippias dyad, Ion,
and Menexenus, all among its most anomalous members. In short, consider-
ing the dialogues it covers and its dedication to Gregory Vlastos—influential
creator of SocratesE,2 and thus, for present purposes, the founding father of
the category—this book’s subject matter could easily be mistaken for “Plato’s
Socratic dialogues.”3
It would be too much to say that unlike Vlastos, I recognize no such
category. Nevertheless, my emphasis on Platonic pedagogy will ultimately
call into question the separate existence of “Plato’s Socratic dialogues.”

1
 The rationale for interpreting Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, and Crito in the context of Theaete-
tus, Sophist, and Statesman is developed in William H. F. Altman, The Guardians on Trial: The
Reading Order of Plato’s Dialogues from Euthyphro to Phaedo (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016),
hereafter “Guardians on Trial.” Abbreviations for Plato’s dialogues—for example, Tht., Sph., and
Plt.—will be in accordance with Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon
[hereafter “LSJ”], revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the assistance
of Roderick MacKenzie and with the co-operation of many scholars, with a Supplement (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1968 [first edition in 1843]), xxxiii.
2
 See Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1991), 46.
3
 Albeit not by Vlastos himself; in addition to Vlastos, Socrates, 46–47, see Gregory Vlastos,
Socratic Studies, edited by Myles Burnyeat (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
29–33; here he explains why Euthd., Ly., and Hp. Ma. should be regarded as “transitional.”

xv
xvi Preface

The separate status of these “early” dialogues arises or rather has arisen from
what I regard as an excessive scholarly concern with the order in which Plato
wrote them, and thus with a more or less likely story about what will be
called “Plato’s Development.”4 Very roughly, this concern has created a her-
meneutic tradition that has configured most of the dialogues under consider-
ation in this book as “early” (or “transitional”) in an overarching story about
Plato’s gradual ascent (or decline) from an originally Socratic orientation to
something more distinctively Platonic. I will be calling that conception into
question by examining the dialogues under consideration in the context of the
pedagogical purpose of the dialogues as a whole.
In ongoing opposition to reading the dialogues as evidence for this or
indeed for any other story about Plato’s Development, my approach empha-
sizes not the order in which Plato wrote the dialogues (hereafter “Order of
Composition”), but their “Reading Order,” a hermeneutic approach based on
two indisputable facts: (1) the founder of the Academy was a teacher, and (2)
Plato’s dialogues are delightful to teach, that is, eminently teachable. From
these facts I deduce the hypothesis on which this study is based: (3) Plato’s
dialogues, properly arranged, constituted and more importantly continue to
constitute the curriculum of his Academy.
We know next to nothing about “Plato in the Academy,”5 and this tabula
rasa opens the gateway for reconsidering the historical question of how he
taught his students. On the basis of the hypothesis governing this study, one
might well raise the historical question of what the Academy would or must
have been like if the dialogues constituted its curriculum. But this question
will remain secondary to the one that guides me throughout: What can we
learn about the dialogues themselves from the hypothesis that they consti-
tute—once having been properly arranged in accordance with Plato’s own
clues—a coherent, integrated, and progressive curriculum?6 Consider this
question in relation to three others that Guy Field (1887–1955) raised about
Plato, along with his own sensible response to them:

4
 Cf. Hans Raeder, Platons philosophische Entwickelung, second edition (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner,
1920 [first published in 1905]).
5
 For what little we do know—a series of ancient anecdotes, many of dubious value—see the chapter
of this name (119–150) in Alice Swift Riginos, Platonica: The Anecdotes Concerning the Life and
Writings of Plato (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976); hereafter individual anecdotes will be cited as, for
example, “Riginos §75” (on 119–121).
6
 Relevant to both questions is Holger Thesleff, Studies in Platonic Chronology (1982) in Platonic
Patterns: A Collection of Studies by Holger Thesleff, 143–382 (Las Vegas, NV: Parmenides, 2009);
while he is interested in the genesis, revision, and extra-Academic dissemination/publication of the
dialogues, I am agnostic about their genesis—particularly with respect to Thesleff’s characteristic
concern with multiple editions and revisions—and solely concerned with their intra-Academy or
rather academic use. For a well-deserved homage to Thesleff, see Debra Nails and Harold Tarrant
(eds.), in collaboration with Mika Kajava and Ero Salmenkivi, Second Sailing: Alternative Perspec-
tives on Plato (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 2015).
 Ascent to the Good xvii

For whom did he write the dialogues? What aim did he hope to achieve in them?
What was their relation to his oral teaching? Some answer must be attempted,
though it can only be a conjecture.7

Since the questions that give rise to my own conjecture must be asked, there
must be some value in an answer based on the best textual evidence we have,
and that is Plato’s dialogues themselves.
Considering the unquestionable facts that Plato was a teacher and that his
dialogues are eminently teachable, it is remarkable that they have never been
studied before on the basis of this particular hypothesis.8 In reconsidering
them in this light, the established category of “Plato’s early dialogues” will
take on a new meaning, based on an observation about effective teaching.
Although this observation is by no means Plato-specific, he paradigmati-
cally and effectively implements it: a well-designed curriculum must begin
with simple and accessible lessons before progressing to more difficult ones.
I will therefore be re-examining “Plato’s Socratic dialogues” not as if they
constituted the products of a specific phase of Plato’s Development, but as
a necessary part of a larger structure: an integrated and coherent curriculum
that proceeds step by step over an articulated course of study, all the while
testing the degree to which the student has grasped what has come before, and
gradually ascending to lessons that are more complex and abstract. And it is
to the latter, and particularly to the Idea of the Good as described in Republic
6–7, that the word “ascent” in this book’s title refers.
To the extent that all of the dialogues considered in this book are “pre-
Republic” in this pedagogical sense, there must necessarily be considerable
overlap between them and what are conventionally called Plato’s “early” or
“Socratic dialogues.” It is therefore in relation to Republic, viewed as the ped-
agogical center and midpoint of a progressive and multi-dialogue curriculum,

7
 G. C. Field, Plato and His Contemporaries: A Study in Fourth-Century Life and Thought (London:
Methuen, 1930), 59; with regard to this second question, there is no evidence to indicate that Plato’s
“oral teaching” ever addressed the question of how the dialogues or even any particular dialogue
should be correctly interpreted.
8
 For some important steps in this direction, see Michael Erler, Der Sinn der Aporien in den Dialo-
gen Platons: Übungsstücke zur Anleitung im philosophischen Denken (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1987),
283–288, citing (on 286n28) as his predecessors Gerhard Müller, “Philosophische Dialogkunst
Platons (am Beispiel des Charmides).” Museum Helveticum 33, no. 3 (1976), 129–161, Hartmut
Erbse, “Platon und die Schriftlichkeit.” Antike und Abendland 11 (1962), 7–20—although a better
choice would have been Hartmut Erbse, “Über Platons Methode in den Sogenannten Jugenddia-
logen.” Hermes 96, no. 1 (1968), 21–40, especially “ein nach psychagogischen Gesichtspunkten
aufgebauter Lehrgang” on 39, and “der Leser, sein Schüler” on 40; note as well the quotation from
Otto Apelt, Platonische Aufsätze (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1912), 211–212 in 40n1—and
especially Charles H. Kahn, “Did Plato Write Socratic Dialogues?” Classical Quarterly 31 (1981),
305–320, on 316: “Their [sc. Plato’s Socratic dialogues] ideal reader, capable of following up the
hints and movement of thought from one dialogue to another, would be a pupil or associate of Plato
in the Academy.”
xviii Preface

that “Plato’s Socratic dialogues” will be reconsidered here. To borrow a term

from Charles H. Kahn, they are best understood as “proleptic,”9 but here
I will give Kahn’s useful term a rather more pedagogical twist. The dialogues
considered in Ascent to the Good are designed to prepare Plato’s readers,
best understood as his students—first in the Academy, and now in its virtual
and eternal descendent as constituted by his dialogues, here reimagined as
its curriculum—to discover and embrace the message of the Allegory of the
Cave: Justice requires philosophers, now reconfigured as an imaginary City’s
Guardians,10 to return to the shadows for the instruction and benefit of others
even if doing so does not conduce to their own safety or happiness.11
And it is with the first appearance of the word “happiness” that the dedica-
tion of this volume to Vlastos becomes intelligible. It is precisely the eudae-
monist orientation of the philosophy of Socrates—and thus of most every
post-Vlastos discussion of “Plato’s Socratic dialogues”—that the philoso-
pher-turned-Guardian must overcome. How Plato prepared his readers for
this self-sacrificing idealism, based as it is on the transcendence of the Idea of
the Good as opposed to what is merely “good for me”—inseparably imminent
within my own life however construed—is the ongoing subject of this book.
This way of reading the Platonic corpus will not be defended ab ovo here: it
depends, to begin with, on Plato the Teacher. But despite being only part of
a larger project, Ascent to the Good does have a single theme: the student’s
gradual emancipation from an exclusively eudaemonist conception of the
Good (hereafter, in honor of Vlastos, “the GoodE”) as performed or rather
provoked in the pre-Republic dialogues. To be more specific, this book will
chart the pedagogical process through which Plato intends his best students to
transcend happiness as their ultimate good,12 overcoming as they do so what

9
 In addition to Kahn, “Did Plato Write Socratic Dialogues,” 310–311, see Charles H. Kahn, “Plato’s
Charmides and the Proleptic Reading of Socratic Dialogues.” Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988),
541–549, and especially Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of Literary Form
(Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). With “proleptically,” cf. Vorläufigkeit in
Erler, Der Sinn den Aporien.
10
 By “Plato’s Guardians” I do not mean the imaginary φύλακες of the hypothesis-based City who
are compelled by its founders to return to the Cave (R. 539e3–4; cf. 520a8) but rather those readers
who decide to do so voluntarily (R. 520e1) “in the other cities” (R. 520b1–2); see William H. F.
Altman, Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012), hereafter
abbreviated as “Plato the Teacher.”
11
 Cf. Aristotle, Politics, 2.5 (1264b15–17); this text will be quoted and discussed in the Introduction.
For English translations of Aristotle, I have generally relied on Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Com-
plete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, two volumes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1984).
12
 Trailblazing is Sara Ahbel-Rappe, “Cross-examining happiness: Reason and community in the
Socratic dialogues of Plato” in David Sedley and Andrea Wilson Nightingale (eds.), Ancient Mod-
els of Mind: Studies in Human and Divine Rationality, 27–44 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2010), on 31: “Socrates never argues for the truth of the premise that all people wish
to be happy; indeed, he fears it may be foolish even to question it. Second, the interlocutor always
agrees to the principle without argument.” With a broader conception of “the Socratic dialogues,”
she could have added Smp. 205a1–3 to the texts considered on 30–31.
 Ascent to the Good xix

is best, most beneficial, or simply good for them. I will therefore challenge
what Vlastos called “the Eudaemonist Axiom” in his 1991 masterpiece:13 not
only does it fail to explain the intrinsic justice of the Guardian’s return to the
Cave at “the crisis of the Republic,”14 but in what follows I will try to show
that Plato has prepared his readers to recognize that failure long before he
makes it indelible in the single most important passage in Plato’s dialogues
as a whole.
Of course not all of Plato’s readers have recognized the Allegory of the
Cave as such; Aristotle, for example, never mentions it. This mention of
Plato’s most famous student is not gratuitous but thematic: it is because
Aristotle, unlike Plato, really is a eudaemonist, and also because he famously
distinguished Socrates and Plato in a number of relevant ways emphasized
by Vlastos,15 that the contrast between Plato and Aristotle must quickly take
center stage, and in the Introduction, a distinctively Aristotelian way of
reading Plato will be challenged, along with the academic structures that are
ultimately responsible for the tenacity of this way—or rather “ways,” since
there prove to be at least two of them—of interpreting the dialogues. But at
the core of what I regard as a misreading is “Aristotle’s view that the charac-
ter Socrates in the dialogues is sometimes a historical portrait, while at other
times merely a mouthpiece for Plato’s own views.”16 I will be questioning this
distinction throughout.
With the exception of Laws and Epinomis, all of Plato’s dialogues are
Socratic in the sense that “the character Socrates” appears in every one of
them, and is the main speaker in all but six more.17 The distinction between “a
historical portrait” of Socrates and using him as “mouthpiece” is not derived
from Plato, but rather from Aristotle and then generalized in this form by
others; this should create an initial suspicion that it is a misreading of the
dialogues, and it is my intention to justify and augment that suspicion in the
Introduction. More generally, however, the separation of Plato’s Socratic dia-
logues from all the rest of them depends on the testimony of a student who,
however praiseworthy in other respects, never embraced the transcendent

13
 Vlastos, Socrates, 203.
14
 In that Socrates’ trial and death instantiates the consequences of the philosopher’s return to the
Cave—see R. 517a4–6—Euthphr., Ap., Cri., and Phd. (the dialogues of Thrasyllus’ “First Tetral-
ogy”) should be regarded as post-Republic, a placement that justifies their connection to obviously
“late” dialogues like Tht., Sph., and Plt. (see first note above). All citations of the dialogues will be
based on John Burnet (ed.), Platonis Opera, volumes 2–5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901–1907),
E. A. Duke, et al. (eds.), Platonis Opera, volume 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), and (as in the
case of R. here) S. R. Slings (ed.), Platonis Rempublicam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). Except
where indicated, all translations will be my own.
15
 Vlastos, Socrates, 91–98.
16
 George Rudebusch, “Christopher Rowe’s Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing.” Philosophi-
cal Books 50, no. 1 (January 2009), 55–62, on 56.
17
 Although Socrates appears and speaks in Clt., Ti., Criti., Prm., Sph., and Plt., he is the primary
speaker in none of them.
xx Preface

Idea of the Good or mentioned the Allegory of the Cave.18 Instead, Aristotle
divided Plato’s dialogues against themselves, and therefore made it difficult
for all of the rest of us to grasp that Plato’s Socrates, without ever being either
the historical Socrates or Plato’s mouthpiece, is everywhere and always
advancing Plato’s pedagogical project.
Although other versions of Socrates will be mentioned in what follows—
for example Aristotle’s Socrates or Xenophon’s19—the unqualified name
“Socrates” will never refer in what follows to anyone other than Socrates as
he appears in Plato’s dialogues.20 Among them, by contrast, the only relevant
or rather properly Platonic distinction seems to be between, for example, the
young Socrates of Parmenides—and any other dialogues in which Socrates
is of indeterminate age, as in Philebus—and the old Socrates of Theaetetus,
Euthyphro, Sophist, Statesman, Apology of Socrates,21 Crito, and Phaedo.22
It is indeed this distinction that explains why the first three dialogues of
the First Tetralogy of Thrasyllus, despite their conventional status as early
or Socratic, are not considered in this book, and also why, when they are
discussed elsewhere, they are considered in the context not only of Phaedo
but of Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman.23 When Reading Order is as
clearly marked as it is in the case of the First Tetralogy (and its interstices),
it deserves more emphasis than the dominant paradigm of Plato’s Develop-
ment based on Order of Composition has accorded it, and since the alternative
paradigm on offer here is based on the pedagogical purpose common to all of
Plato’s dialogues, Socrates—whether young or old, ironic or serious, ignorant
or knowing, deceptive or sincere—will remain Plato’s throughout.

18
 For Aristotle’s version of the Allegory, preserved in Cicero, De natura deorum, 2.95, see my The
Revival of Platonism in Cicero’s Late Philosophy: Platonis aemulus and the Invention of ‘Cicero’
(Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016), 166–69.
19
 See in particular Louis-André Dorion and Michele Bandini (eds.), Xénophon, Mémorables, two
volumes (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2000 and 2011), Louis-André Dorion L’autre Socrate: études sur
les écrits socratiques de Xénophon (Paris: Belles lettres, 2013), and Olga Chernyakhovskaya,
Sokrates bei Xenophon: Moral – Politik – Religion (Tübingen: Narr, 2014). See also Dorion’s
contributions to the “companion” volumes listed in the following note.
20
 For recent contributions to the better understanding of Socrates, see Sara Ahbel-Rappe and
Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), A Companion to Socrates (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), Lindsay
Judson and Vassilis Karasmanis (eds.), Remembering Socrates: Philosophical Essays (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2006), Donald R. Morrison (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Socrates (Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and John Bussanich and Nicholas D. Smith (eds.),
The Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
21
 On Ap., see Ahbel-Rappe, “Cross-examining Happiness,” 37–40 (“The Good of Others”).
22
 For the indeterminate age of Socrates in Phlb. and Cra., see The Guardians in Action: The Post-
Republic Dialogues from Timaeus to Theaetetus (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016), chapter five.
Hereafter, this will be abbreviated: Guardians in Action.
23
 See Guardians on Trial, Preface. For the conventional route to a similar destination, see Robert
G. Hoerber, “Plato’s Euthyphro.” Phronesis 3, no. 2 (1958), 95–107, on 100: “according to Ross’
table, the Euthyphro is the only one of the shorter ‘Socratic’ dialogues which employs terminology
suggestive of transcendence.” The reference is to W. D. Ross, Plato’s Theory of Ideas (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1951).
 Ascent to the Good xxi

The question of Reading Order may seem outlandish today, but this is
merely an accident of the comparatively recent reception of Plato’s dialogues.
It was only at the beginning of the nineteenth century that scholars began
focusing their attention on Order of Composition and thus what we could
learn from them about Plato’s intellectual growth or—out of consideration
for the German origins of this way of reading Plato’s dialogues—his Denk-
bewegung.24 Concern with Reading Order, on the other hand, is both ancient
and well documented, and in addition to those like Proclus, Olympiodorus,
and Damascius who commented on Plato’s Alcibiades Major,25 Thrasyllus
seems to have been motivated by the notion while arranging the dialogues
as they have come down to us in his edition.26 In the Introduction to an as
yet unwritten Ascent to the Beautiful,27 I will discuss the connection between
Friedrich Schleiermacher’s decision to drop Alcibiades Major from the canon
and the subsequent rise of the historicist approach to Plato’s Development, a
somewhat ironic result since Schleiermacher’s own approach to ordering the
dialogues was primarily pedagogical, as mine is as well.28
The easiest way to explain the difference between Reading Order and
Order of Composition is to use my own case as an illustration. As indicated

24
 See Karl Fr. Hermann, Geschichte und System der Platonischen Philosophie, part 1 (Heidelberg:
C. F. Winter, 1839) for the origins of this development; for the connection between it and stylom-
etry, cf. Lewis Campbell, The Sophistes and Politicus of Plato with a Revised Text and English
Notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1867), on which see Guardians in Action, 378 and 424. Cf. David
Wolfsdorf, Trials of Reason: Plato and the Crafting of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 6: “The rise of stylometry also corroborated the growing developmentalist concep-
tion of the organization of the corpus into early, middle, and late periods. In other words, correctly
organized and understood, the dialogues bear witness to a process of intellectual development
over the course of Plato’s philosophical career. Developmentalism, first influentially formulated in
Karl Friederich Hermann’s Geschichte und System der platonischen Philosophie (1839), became
ascendant in the nineteenth century.”
25
 For the ancient commonplace that Alc. was the first dialogue a student should read, see Diogenes
Laertius 3.62; cf. Nicholas Denyer (ed.), Alcibiades, Plato (Cambridge, UK and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 14: “By late antiquity this had become the standard view.”
For more detail, see the admirable introduction to A. Ph. Segonds (ed.), Proclus: Sur le premier
Alcibiade (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1985).
26
 Harold Tarrant, Thrasyllan Platonism (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). It is probably
not entirely accidental, for example, that the dialogues considered in this book, with the exception
of Clt.—which Thrasyllus joined to R., as I do as well—are found in two consecutive tetralogies in
his edition, that is, the Fifth (Thg., Chrm., La., and Ly.) and Sixth (Euthyd., Prt., Grg., and Men.).
27
 A forthcoming (2020) work-in-progress to be called: “Ascent to the Beautiful: The Pre-Republic
Dialogues from Protagoras to Symposium.” Cf. “Aufstieg zur Idee” in Nicolai Hartmann, “Das
Problem des Apriorismus in der Platonischen Philosophie” (1935) in Hartmann, Kleinere Schriften,
volume 2, 48–85 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1957), on 56.
28
 See Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Über die Philosophie Platons, edited by Peter M.
Steiner with contributions by Andreas Arndt and Jörg Jantzen (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1996) and
Julia A. Lamm, “Plato’s Dialogues as a Single Work of Art: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Platons
Werke” in Anne Balansard and Isabelle Koch (eds.), Lire les dialogues, mais lesquels et dans quel
ordre: Définitions du corpus et interpretations de Platon, 173–188 (Sankt Augustin: Akademia,
2013).
xxii Preface

by the following table, the present book is the fourth of a series in terms of
composition (first column), but second in relation to a more natural reading
order (second):

1. Plato the Teacher 1. Ascent to the Beautiful

2. The Guardians in Action 2. Ascent to the Good
3. The Guardians on Trial 3. Plato the Teacher
4. Ascent to the Good 4. The Guardians in Action
5. Ascent to the Beautiful 5. The Guardians on Trial

What is debatable in Plato’s case is unquestionable in mine: I know for a

fact the order in which I wrote—or in the case of the as yet unwritten fifth—
the order in which the series as a whole will someday have been written.29
My claim is that Plato could easily have done something similar: he could have
intended his dialogues to be read in a different order from that in which he
wrote them. To take the most obvious example, while I have claimed in Ascent
to the Beautiful—the first instance in the text of the fiction described in the last
note—that Plato introduced his students to philosophy with a careful reading
of Alcibiades Major, I did not claim there or anywhere else that he wrote that
dialogue first. As to the order in which he did write them, on this question
I remain entirely agnostic,30 and considering that many have devoted so much
energy to answering that kind of question—albeit only since the beginning of
the nineteenth century—the absence of any further attempt to do so here is of
no long-term consequence in the grander sweep of things Platonic.
What I do believe is of serious long-term consequence is that the Order of
Composition has exercised, virtually unchallenged, a hegemonic and baleful
influence for the last two hundred years, and that it remains too potent an
adversary to be merely ignored in practice rather than directly challenged
in theory. There are doubtless many encouraging signs that for a younger
generation of Plato scholars—those who will dominate the field for the rest
of this century—Order of Composition is losing or has even lost its impreg-
nable place, but these scholars seem to regard it as sufficient to state for the
record that their own work on any given dialogue does not materially depend
on its place in Plato’s Development as measured by stylometry. Having
cast aside this yoke without a struggle, they quickly become impatient with
any ordering that prevents them from reading Plato freely, as they see fit.

29
 With the facts now having been clearly stated, I will—for the sake of the future reader who encoun-
ters my books for the first time in the proper reading order—maintain the fiction that Ascent to the
Beautiful has already been written, which in fact it has not been.
30
 See William H. F, Altman, “The Reading Order of Plato’s Dialogues.” Phoenix 64 (2010), 18–51,
on 38–39.
 Ascent to the Good xxiii

While sympathetic to this desire for complete interpretive freedom, it is pre-

cisely because I have long suffered under the complete lack of it that I have
embarked on a project that does not simply ignore but rather directly chal-
lenges what has for too long been the reigning paradigm.
A moment’s consideration will confirm the view that the question of read-
ing order is in any case inescapable: all of us create for ourselves the de facto
order in which we personally read the dialogues of Plato, or at least those we
have read. To begin with, it can do no harm to suggest that more of us should
own up to the responsibility of reading all of them before we become expert
in interpreting just one of them; I’m attempting to make that task easier, or
rather to show how Plato has already done so. As for those we have all read,
the fact that the dialogues of Thrasyllus’ First Tetralogy are often those we
read first should not be considered an example of untrammeled free choice:
there already exists—and will exist, at all times and places Plato is read—not
only each reader’s de facto reading order, but also a reading order de jure,
temporary though any form of it may be in the grand sweep of Plato’s ongo-
ing reception.
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, a huge portion of scholarly
effort has been expended to ground this de jure ordering on a scientific basis,
ignoring entirely the concept of “reading order”—except in its virtually invis-
ible de facto form—for the sake of the real, historical, or scientific order of
Plato’s dialogues, that is, the order in which, as his thought developed, he
wrote them. I am mounting a radical challenge to this project on the grounds
that it ignores the fact that Plato was a teacher and that every effective
teacher’s curriculum has a very different kind of development built into it: the
student’s graduated and well-tested academic progress. Unlike the attempt to
arrange the dialogues by Order of Composition in order to illuminate Plato’s
Development, a reconstruction of the Reading Order of Plato’s dialogues
(hereafter “the ROPD”) requires us to treat Plato not only as a teacher but also
as our teacher. He is, in any case, mine.
When we begin to ask in what order Plato intended us to read his dia-
logues, we gradually come to realize that he has done more than challenge
us to solve the difficult but highly entertaining problem that I am attempting
to solve here: he has, more importantly, taught us how to read. Guided by
the hypothesis that Plato has sown hints and clues about the ROPD in his
dialogues, we must learn to read him more carefully in order to search for
them, and thus to understand him better after we find them. I intend to prove
that he has sown these clues deliberately and done so brilliantly. In searching
for them, we begin to read with, not against him; he is not a patient whose
development it is our self-appointed task to analyze but rather our preceptor,
concerned throughout not with his own intellectual progress, but rather with
xxiv Preface

ours. By treating Plato as a teacher,31 we repeatedly find him to be the best of

them.32 And in accordance with the critique of writing he places in Socrates’
mouth in Phaedrus, we will ultimately discover that Plato the Teacher has
managed to write a text about the Beautiful, the Good, and Justice, indelibly,
in our souls. The reference to “hints and clues” likewise points to a new way
of reading Plato.
My project aims to show, for example, why the elementary Alcibiades
Major is, as many ancient Platonists believed, the best place to begin the
study of Plato, and yet why we should nevertheless take seriously Plato’s
indications that the first conversation between Socrates and Alcibiades takes
place immediately shortly after (i.e., with no written dialogue intervening)
the showdown in the garden of Callias so vividly and artfully described in
Protagoras.33 Whether in practice as in Alcibiades Major, or in theory as in
a long series of dialogues between Protagoras and Meno, Plato is naturally
concerned with a teacher’s question—can virtue be taught?—and if I can
show that an effective reading of Republic not only presupposes the student’s
familiarity with Protagoras, Alcibiades Major, and Meno, but that their
author has left us indications in Republic that this is the case, the existence of
“Plato the Teacher” gradually becomes obvious, especially since no arcane
art of reading is presupposed. To take an example pertinent to this book
rather than to Ascent to the Beautiful, the fact that Socrates leaves Agathon’s
victory celebration in Symposium for the Lyceum, is discovered en route to
it in Lysis,34 and wrestles there with the combative brothers in Euthydemus,
explains why its first chapter considers Lysis and Euthydemus together, while
its first section looks back to Symposium, the dialogue that precedes them in
the ROPD.
The reconstruction of the ROPD is not, however, an end in itself: instead
it offers a better way of understanding Plato’s dialogues. This is partly a
question of macrocosm: I am offering a reading of Plato that finds a place
for everything he has been thought to have written since the time of Thrasyl-
lus, and in revisiting issues of authenticity, this macrocosm will be used to

31
 See A. K. Cotton, Platonic Dialogue and the Education of the Reader (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014) and Samuel Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education (London: Routledge, 1988).
32
 Although the search for the Reading Order depends on the extra-textual διδαχή embodied in the
question with which Phaedrus begins (Phdr. 227a1; see the title of §6), the answering of it forces
us to subject the text to a more thorough kind of ἀνάκρισις.
33
 For recent attention to this question, see Laurence Lampert, How Philosophy Became Socratic: A
Study of Plato’s Protagoras, Charmides, and Republic (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2010), 141–44; Robert C. Bartlett, Sophistry and Political Philosophy: Protagoras’ Challenge to
Socrates (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 226–27n4; and Ariel Helfer, Socrates
and Alcibiades: Plato’s Drama of Political Ambition and Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2017). For settling this quarrel in Lampert’s favor, Alc. 111a14 is decisive; the
young man learned this ingenious argument at Prt. 328a1.
34
 See Altman, “Reading Order,” sections 3 and 4.
 Ascent to the Good xxv

locate the place of every dialogue within it. But this also implicates micro-
cosmic considerations: the relationship between specific texts in, for example,
Theages, to other texts in Gorgias, Meno, and Republic. While some clues
to the ROPD are conspicuous—for example, Socrates’ departure for the
Lyceum in Symposium or the King Archon’s at the end of Theaetetus—others
are more difficult to spot. The amazing thing is that the passages that contain
the most important hints about the ROPD are sometimes important for inter-
preting both the dialogue that contains them and the neighboring dialogue
that they echo or foreshadow, illuminating in the process the importance of
such passages for interpreting that dialogue.35
To take the earliest and thus paradigmatic example, consider the amazing
result reached at the climax of Protagoras (Prt. 359e3–360a8) that since (1)
going to war is noble, fine, and admirable (hereafter I will translate τὸ καλόν
simply as “the Beautiful” with the understanding that the previous trio of
English adjectives, along with “fine,” apply to it as well), (2) the Beautiful is
the Good, and (3) the Good is the Pleasant, it therefore follows that going to
war is pleasant. For the student troubled by this dubious argument—that is,
the student who takes “(1)” to be true, “(2)” to be false, and χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά
(“beautiful things are difficult”) to be proverbial (Hp. Ma. 304e8)—the pas-
sage in Alcibiades Major where Socrates proves to Alcibiades that the Just
is the Advantageous (Alc. 114e7–116e1) jumps off the page,36 not least of all
because of the wedge it drives between life, which is good even if achieved
by cowardice, and courage, which is beautiful even when it results in death.
The fact that Alcibiades would prefer death to cowardice (Alc. 115d7) is
therefore more than simply one additional clue that Alcibiades Major follows
Protagoras: the tension between the two relevant passages just described
opens up the problem that will dominate the pre-Republic dialogues between
Protagoras and Symposium—that is, the subject matter of Ascent to the
Beautiful—where the Beautiful ultimately comes into its own at the culmina-
tion of Socrates’ account of Diotima’s discourse. As marked by Alcibiades’
preference for the Beautiful exemplified by courage over the good of life—
and thus a fortiori of a happy life—the dialogues climaxing in Symposium
prepare the reader for the subject of this book: the more difficult “Ascent to
the Good” in the dialogues between Symposium and Republic. With courage
having been basely described in Protagoras, it is beautifully described in
Alcibiades Major, but there is no way to defend incurring wounds and death
by coming to the aid of your friends in war (Alc. 115b1-c5) as either pleasant,

35
 For example, the reference to “the Eleatic Palamedes” at Phdr. 261d6 (a) anticipates Parmenides,
(b) looks back to Timaeus-Critias, and (c) flags a passage that is also crucial for interpreting Pha-
edrus itself; see Guardians in Action, chapter 2.
36
 See Helfer, Socrates and Alcibiades, 48–61 and 184–85.
xxvi Preface

advantageous, or good, if, that is, the latter means “good for me.” To recur
to the Eudaemonist Axiom: painful and life-ending self-sacrifice, no matter
how beautiful the actions that lead to it truly are, is not good if the Good is
nothing more than my own happiness and whatever technique (or τέχνη) may
help me to maximize it.
Here, then, the contrast between “Plato’s Socratic dialogues” and what
I am calling “the Reading Order of Plato’s dialogues between Symposium and
Republic” becomes acute despite the fact that both descriptions have much the
same referents. When Vlastos describes Lysis as “one of those earlier dialogues
where Plato’s thought still moves within the ambit of his Socratic heritage,”37
and contends that the “first friend” cannot be “the Platonic Form of Beauty or
Goodness” because “there is not one word or phrase in Lysis to name a tran-
scendent Form of this (or of any other) kind,”38 he states with great clarity, first,
the kind of claim it is my purpose to challenge by offering an alternative to the
Order of Composition paradigm, and second the kind of fact for which I will
offer an alternative explanation. But linking all such refutations and alternative
explanations will be an overarching and ongoing concern with the pedagogy
of Plato the Teacher—for if I had my way, each of the five volumes would
have had this as their title—which consistently configures us, his readers, as
his students and true addressees, and advances by reading the dialogues as a
coherent if also dialectical curriculum I call the ROPD:

1. Protagoras 19. Timaeus

2. Alcibiades Major 20. Critias
3. Alcibiades Minor 21. Phaedrus
4. Erastai 22. Parmenides
5. Hippias Major 23. Philebus
6. Hippias Minor 24. Cratylus
7. Ion 25. Theaetetus
8. Menexenus 26. Euthyphro
9. Symposium 18. Republic 27. Sophist
10. Lysis 28. Statesman
11. Euthydemus 29. Apology of Socrates
12. Laches 30. Hipparchus
13. Charmides 31. Minos
14. Gorgias 32. Crito
15. Theages 33. Laws
16. Meno 34. Epinomis
17. Cleitophon 35. Phaedo

37
 Gregory Vlastos, “The Individual as Object of Love in Plato” in Vlastos, Platonic Studies, second
edition, 3–42 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 6.
38
 Vlastos, “Individual as Object,” 36.
 Ascent to the Good xxvii

Ascent to the Good covers the eight dialogues between Symposium and
Republic, and is divided into five chapters. The first introduces a discussion
of Lysis and Euthydemus by first revisiting the relationship between the Good
and the Beautiful in Symposium. Chapter 2 considers Laches and Charmides,
while the third, the book’s longest and central chapter, is devoted to Gorgias.
It should be clearly understood from the start that since the pedagogical con-
nections between the dialogues are my primary concern, the chapter divisions
are in no case absolute: there will be, for example, discussion of Laches and
Charmides not only in chapter 2 but in chapters 1 and 3 as well. In chapter 3,
I will revisit Protagoras, not only in the context of Gorgias, but also in
relation to Laches, Meno, and Republic, three other dialogues to which it is
closely related. While connections to Republic will be emphasized through-
out, this emphasis will increase in chapter 4, especially in relation to the use
of Hypotheses and Images in Meno. The passages connecting Theages and
Cleitophon to Republic have already been discussed in Plato the Teacher,
so here emphasis will be placed on how their connections to Gorgias and
Meno strengthen the case for their authenticity. Chapter 5 will show why
Cleitophon’s conundrum is the natural outgrowth of the series of dialogues
that precede it after summarizing the argument for reading it as an introduc-
tion to Republic.
But while this chart is still within easy reach, a more general comment must
be made about the scattered placement of the three great dialogues of the so-
called “middle period”. In the reigning Order of Composition paradigm, Sym-
posium, Phaedo, and Republic collectively constitute a distinct stage of Plato’s
Development intermediate between his “(early) Socratic dialogues” and a
later, critical, and revisionary stage initiated or exemplified by Parmenides.
While Republic maintains its middle position in the alternative paradigm
based on Reading Order, Symposium and Phaedo do not, and with the death of
Socrates placed at the end of the series, the positions that “the older Socrates”
takes there are less easily configured as “outgrown” on the basis of what “the
younger Socrates” learns in Parmenides. Although the justification for the
late placement of Thrasyllus’ First Tetralogy will be found in The Guardians
on Trial, it is the central position of Republic that provides that justification’s
core: Socrates is put on trial, refuses to escape from prison, and is put to death
because he has returned to the Cave in accordance with Justice. Like the Cave
that Plato uses to teach it, Justice depends entirely on the Idea of the Good,
and in order for the student to grasp the Good as an Idea—and not on a eudae-
monist basis as “my good,” or (my) happiness, or as the τέχνη that maximizes
it—a rigorous program of mental gymnastic is required.
It is this gymnastic program, appropriately introduced with Socrates on
his way to the Lyceum in Lysis, that is the subject of Ascent to the Good.
But Plato has not neglected to give the student considerable musical training
xxviii Preface

beforehand, and that training—culminating in the simultaneously comic and

tragic Symposium—is the subject of Ascent to the Beautiful. Like the place-
ment of Phaedo at the end of the Reading Order, the placement of Symposium
halfway between its beginning and the middle must also be understood in
relation to Republic. Alcibiades, who dominates that prior phase from Pro-
tagoras to Symposium and then appears no more, knows from the start that
courage unto death for the sake of one’s friends is preferable to one’s own
life. But as Plato well knew, the temptation to find the Good in one’s own
happiness is at least as strong as any decent person’s innate abhorrence at
being told that self-interest is Beautiful. Already prepared to challenge the
flat equation of the Beautiful and the (eudaemonist) Good in the juxtaposition
of Protagoras and Alcibiades Major, and then further prepared to find the
transcendent Beautiful of Symposium in Hippias Major,39 the student’s prior
ascent is presupposed in Republic 5, where discussion of Beauty precedes the
introduction of the (transcendent) Good.
As indicated by the two parentheses in the preceding sentence, “the Good”
is an ambiguous term: it can be the GoodE—the eudaemonist or “human
good,”40 best understood as “the good for me”41—or it can be the transcendent
Idea of the Good, hereafter “the GoodT.”42 Enshrined in Republic 7 thanks
to the Allegory of the Cave, the latter is distinctively Platonic; the former
is paradigmatically Aristotelian. But even in Republic, the philosopher’s

39
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §11.
40
 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.6 (1096b31–34; translation by W. D. Ross, revised by J. O.
Urmson): “And similarly with regard to the Idea: even if there is some one good which is univer-
sally predicable of goods or is capable of separate and independent existence, clearly it could not
be achieved or attained by man; but we are now seeking something attainable.” For “the human
good [τὸ ἀνθρώπινον ἀγαθόν],” see 1.7 (1098a16). Cf. William J. Prior, “Eudaimonism and Vir-
tue.” Journal of Value Inquiry 35 (2001), 325–342 (first words): “Eudaimonism is the view that
the fundamental intrinsic value in ethics is the human good. In particular, eudaimonism is the view
taken in some attempts to justify ethical conduct in terms of its contribution to an agent’s own
good. All of ancient moral philosophy is eudaimonistic. Aristotle’s position in the Nicomachean
Ethics is the best known example of a eudaimonist theory of ethics available today. It is also the
most plausible.”
41
 For the dative implicit in the “the Good for me,” see Rachel Barney, “Notes on Plato on the Kalon
and the Good.” Classical Philology 105, no. 4 (October 2010), 363–377, on 367.
42
 For an early attempt to eliminate the distinction between the GoodT and the GoodE by reconfig-
uring and reducing the Idea of the Good to Happiness, see Peter Stemmer, “Der Grundriss der
platonischen Ethik. Karlfried Gründer zum 60. Geburtstag.” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forsch­
ung 42, no. 4 (1988), 529–569, on “das eudaimonistische Gute” (547); although a dialogue with
Stemmer’s work—see also Peter Stemmer, Platons Dialektik: die frühen und mittleren Dialoge
(Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1992), 152–167—will continue in the notes, the Anglophone
provenance of Socratism (cf. Platons Dialektik, 156n16 and 162n43 with “Grundriss,” 534n11,
541n34, 549n67, and 553n84) as well as this study’s dedication and argumentative structure dictate
that Terry Penner, not Stemmer, will remain the primary representative of the attempt to collapse
the GoodT/GoodE distinction in favor of the GoodE in both notes and text; in particular, see Terry
Penner, “The Forms, the Form of the Good, and the Desire for Good, in Plato’s Republic.” Modern
Schoolman 80 (March 2003), 191–233.
 Ascent to the Good xxix

happiness-forgoing decision to return to the Cave is the great exception in an

otherwise eudaemonist defense of justice,43 and it is only through the Divided
Line that we discover why this must be so: the Idea of the Good can only
be reached by specifically transcending “the good for me.”44 It is by using
the GoodE as a hypothetical springboard (R. 511b5) that Plato’s Guardians
accomplish their dialectical ascent to the un-hypothetical GoodT, and it is
therefore because Plato is preparing us to ascend to the GoodT in Republic
6–7 that his Socrates champions—albeit not without encountering difficulties
in the process that will prove to be insuperable45—the GoodE in “the Socratic
dialogues.”
In the Reading Order paradigm, then, “development” is not Plato’s but the
student’s, and sorting out the ambiguity of “the Good” is central to develop-
ment in that pedagogical sense. For this reason, “the Equation of the Good
and the Beautiful,” hereafter “the GB Equation,”46 is central to the archi-
tecture of the pre-Republic dialogues: by recognizing the inadequacy of the
GB Equation when “the Good” in question is the GoodE, the post-Symposium
student will then be prepared—through rigorous gymnastic training, most of
it staged in gymnasia47—to grasp the GB Equation’s truth, which emerges
only when the Good joins Beauty as a separable, transcendent, and fully
existent Platonic Idea. Ideally, then, the student should already have been
impregnated with the Idea at the heart of Plato’s Republic after having been

43
 See Penner, “The Forms,” 226–27n11, especially “this detail [sc. ‘I refer here to a detail of
Plato’s construction of the ideal state, wherein he speaks of forcing the guardians to abandon their
happiness-producing contemplation of the Forms in order to go back down into the cave, and then
says they do it willingly since they recognize that this compulsion is just’] is too incidental for it to
outweigh virtually every other bit of evidence on the treatment of happiness in the Republic” and
culminating with: “It [sc. this ‘detail’ or ‘incidental evidence’] is certainly not enough to outweigh
the undeniable fact that the main point of the Republic is that the just person is happier than the
unjust person.” Cf. Stemmer, “Grundriss,” 541n34.
44
 Cf. Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981),
259: “The culmination of the whole journey is comprehension of the Form of the Good—and this
is precisely not what is good for the seeker, or good for others, or good in relation to anything or
anyone, but simply and unqualifiedly good, in a way that is completely impersonal and indifferent
between individuals.” Cf. Penner, “The Forms,” 228n13.
45
 Penner, “The Forms,” 196: “It is true that Socrates says that wisdom is the only thing good in itself,
so that it might seem that he could not also say that happiness is good in itself.” Cf. “it is true” on
215 and “it can be very tempting indeed” on 191.
46
 The most comprehensive investigation of the GB Equation is Nicholas P. Riegel, “Beauty and its
Relation to the Good in the Works of Plato” (doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 2011);
see also Nicholas Riegel, “Goodness and Beauty in Plato.” Archai 12 (January-June 2014), 147–
158; Barney, “Notes,” and Gabriel Richardson Lear, “Permanent Beauty and Becoming Happy
in Plato’s Symposium” in J. H. Lesher, Debra Nails, and Frisbee C. C. Sheffield (eds.), Plato’s
Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception, 96–123 (Washington D.C. and Cambridge,
MA: Center for Hellenic Studies and Harvard University Press, 2007).
47
 Ly., Euthd., La., and Chrm.; the insight that the pre-Symposium dialogues are rather “musical”
than “gymnastic” emerged over the course of many productive discussions with Gustavo Ribeiro
de Mello.
xxx Preface

introduced to Diotima in Symposium; the dialogues between them, carefully

supervised and orchestrated by a midwife’s son, are best understood as the
salutary labor pains that must precede the happy birth (Tht. 151a5-b1, cf.
150b6-c3). But the priority of Symposium in the ROPD—the justification for
which necessarily depends in large measure on Ascent to the Beautiful—will
not be used to bypass, overlook, or short-circuit the eudaemonist reading of
“Plato’s Socratic Dialogues” in Ascent to the Good. On the contrary, that
reading will be emphasized, and its ablest proponents will therefore be my
primary interlocutors.
After all, perhaps the most famous iteration of the GB Equation is found
in Diotima’s speech (Smp. 204e1–2), quickly followed by the identifica-
tion of Happiness—understood as that which all men seek (Smp. 205e6–
7)—and the acquisition of goods (Smp. 204e5–205a8). The metaphors of
labor pains and rigorous gymnastic training are therefore to this extent to
be taken literally: the process of emancipating the Idea of the Good from
the eudaemonist Good—that is, the GoodT from the GoodE48—can only be
achieved with great effort and is something Plato never expected would or
could be achieved by every student; it will therefore ultimately depend on
θεία μοίρα (“divine dispensation” at Thg. 128d2 and Men. 99e6) as much
as it does on effective pedagogy (see §13). By the time the Reading Order
reaches Meno, Plato will have found a way to address the question that
takes center stage in Protagoras precisely because it stands at the center
of the Academy’s purpose: Is virtue teachable? Recollection dissolves
the dilemma on which Socrates will skewer Alcibiades at the start (Alc.
106d4–6) with the third possibility: Plato the Teacher will provoke his
students to discover the truth for themselves and then repeatedly test them
to make sure they have done so. He will dangle falsehoods before them
deliberately, and Socrates’ opening claim that virtue cannot be taught is
merely the first of these.
It is only Plato’s ideal students—the ones I am calling his Guardians—who
will successfully refute this claim, just as it is only those honest enough to
admit that they have done wrong willingly who can begin to understand the
Socratic Paradox.49 This kind of pedagogy is necessarily so sinuous and dia-
lectical that it is no wonder that juggling the various paradoxes or doctrines

48
 Cf. Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 114: “We can make a
broad distinction here between two conceptions of goodness: goodness transcending a human life
and goodness in the living of a human life. One version of the former is a Platonic theory, where
we are motivated to aim at goodness that we can at best glimpse only partially and in an inadequate
way in living a human life—in Plato’s own case (in the Republic at least) the Form of the Good.”
49
 In the singular, this term will refer broadly to the claim that nobody errs willingly, beginning with
Prt. 345e1–2. For discussion of “Socratic Paradoxes” in the plural,” see Ascent to the Beautiful,
§4; and §13 below.
 Ascent to the Good xxxi

associated with many of the most accessible dialogues—the Socratic Para-

dox, the Craft Analogy, the Unity of Virtue, and Virtue is Knowledge—has
flourished under the protection offered by the dogma of Plato’s Development,
allowing scholars to posit an early Socratic phase wherein they can safely
offer and reject various synthetic solutions on the basis of the GoodE with no
reference to the later and strictly Platonic Idea of the Good, that is, the GoodT.
As will become obvious in The Guardians in Action and The Guardians on
Trial, the debate between “the unitarians,” who champion “the Unity of Pla-
to’s Thought,” and “the revisionists” (who claim that Plato revised or aban-
doned what used to be called “Platonism”) becomes most acute in relation to
the so-called late dialogues, but the fundamental question is inescapable and
must be faced from the start. My own position involves an ongoing triangula-
tion: I follow the revisionists in emphasizing doctrinal discontinuities—like
the difference between the GoodE and the GoodT—but employ the hypothesis
of dialectical pedagogy to vindicate an ultimately unitarian and Platonist
position. Whatever may be the intellectual appeal of discovering unity in
dissonance, common sense repeatedly abets a lazy literalism. The result is a
flattening out of the sinuous twists of Platonic pedagogy—the kind of teach-
ing that binds the Reading Order into a coherent curriculum—by means of a
linear Order of Composition paradigm that removes conflict by recourse to
development and revision. At the heart of this commonsense alternative is the
view that Plato, like all the rest of us, must have changed his mind over the
course of writing his dialogues, and that an approach like mine ignores this
universal truth about the human condition.
In response, let me speak proudly: Plato was a genius, and at the core of his
achievement was and is an awareness that in the midst of perpetual change,
flux, development—what he called Becoming—there exists something
unchanging. If, like the other teachers we know, Plato had joined somebody
else’s school as an apprentice educator, the commonsense objection would
have some bite; he would gradually learn his craft, leaving behind in his dia-
logues a paper trail of his progress. But he didn’t. I am claiming, then, that
Plato founded the Academy only after he had discovered something worth
teaching there,50 and my further claim is that the Idea of the Good, presiding
over a realm of unchanging Being, was what inspired him to teach others—
for their own good, and for the good of his city—from the start. It’s not that
Plato didn’t have a life or never changed; especially in the dialogues covered

50
 Cf. Charles H. Kahn, “Plato and the Unity of the Virtues.” Phronesis, supplement volume 2 (1976),
21–39, on 34: “The theory of Forms, as presented in Symposium, Phaedo, and Republic, is no doubt
Plato’s own work. But one of Plato’s motives in elaborating that theory must have been to provide
some philosophical content for the notion of wisdom that makes a man like Socrates possible.” For
the centrality of Smp., Phd., and R. in Kahn’s hypothesis of “proleptic composition,” see Kahn,
Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 59–60.
xxxii Preface

in Ascent to the Good, beginning with the family portrait he offers us in Char-
mides, he will tell us a great deal about himself, and playful self-references
abound, especially in Symposium where he stands revealed as the greatest
Athenian dramatist. And as he allows Diotima to suggest, Plato’s wondrous
dialogues are speeches to youngsters that are one and all the expression of his
love for others, including us, and each of them born in the Beautiful.
The Reading Order paradigm therefore leaves plenty of room for develop-
ment in Plato’s dialogues, but the process that unfolds in them constitutes the
intellectual and spiritual growth of the student, not Plato’s own, and proceeds
through the reader’s confusion, impregnation, labor pains, birthing, and test-
ing. There is no good reason, of course, to imagine that the whole of the
ROPD was mapped out in advance before Plato had written a single dialogue,
and it may well be the case that Plato wrote the dialogues in the order in
which most scholars presently arrange them; as already stated, I am agnostic
on this question. What I do believe is that Dionysius of Halicarnassus pre-
served two important truths about the old Plato: he remained concerned with
putting things in the proper order and he was working on his dialogues, all of
them, until the end.51 It is with this old Plato in mind that I have attempted to
reconstruct the ROPD as he left it to the world, probably after countless revi-
sions and repeated tinkering; I leave it to others to explore how it gradually
came into being. But even if we were sure as to the order in which Plato wrote
his dialogues, that would not tell us how those dialogues should be read, and
the way I read them discovers what remains unchanging in Plato’s thought,
and places that in the dead center of things. Frustrated with the limitations of
a nineteenth-century paradigm that excises some dialogues and relegates oth-
ers to an outgrown stage of Plato’s Development—and consistently advanced
by scholars with little sympathy for the transcendent Ideas at the heart of
Platonism—I am therefore offering a twenty-first-century alternative.
Although the following seven principles that guide this reconstruction
project have already been described elsewhere, they will be repeated here for
the reader’s ease:

§1. The first principle is the absolute primacy of pedagogical concerns: the
Reading Order is reconstructed throughout on the principle that the student
progresses step by step from the simple to the complex, and must always
be adequately prepared to take the next step. To take the first example: it is
certainly Plato’s concern for effective pedagogy that justifies both the authen-
ticity and priority of the elementary Alcibiades Major,52 and it is no accident

51
 On De compositione, 3.16, see Altman, “Reading Order,” 39–40.
52
 See Olympiodorus, Life of Plato and On Plato First Alcibiades 1–9, translated by Michael Griffin
(London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 19–21, 36, and 83.
 Ascent to the Good xxxiii

that a concern for reconstructing the Platonic Reading Order would quickly
but quietly disappear after Friedrich Schleiermacher proposed that Alcibiades
Major should be dropped from the canon.53

§2. Freed at last from the metaphysical baggage of Neoplatonism, any peda-
gogical justification for regarding Alcibiades Major as a wonderful way to
introduce the student to the Platonic dialogues immediately confronts the post-
Schleiermacher objection that it, along with seven other dialogues (and the
bulk of Letters), aren’t by Plato. The second principle of the Reading Order
proposed here is that none of the thirty-five dialogues transmitted by Thrasyl-
lus will be considered inauthentic a priori, and a new criterion for authenticity
will be employed: a dialogue is authentic when it fits snugly, in accordance
with sound pedagogical principles, between two other dialogues, that is, the
one that precedes and the one that follows it in the ROPD.54 In Ascent to
the Good, this principle will be used to justify consideration of Theages and
Cleitophon.55 But no less importantly, “the principle of the snug fit” will also
be used throughout to justify the particular placement within the ROPD of those
dialogues universally acknowledged to be authentic.

§3. The third principle is that dramatic considerations are our best guide to
the ROPD and therefore trump more speculative principles in cases of con-
flict: the introductory Alcibiades Major alludes to and therefore follows the
more difficult Protagoras (cf. Alc. 111a1–4 and Prt. 327e3–328a1) despite

53
 Conversely, it was the renewed interest at the turn of the century in Alcibiades Major in particular that
has finally made it possible to renew the Reading Order question; see Jakub Jirsa, “Authen­
ticity of the Alcibiades I: Some Reflections.” Listy filologické/Folia philologica 132, no. 3/4
(2009), 225–244. In addition to Denyer, Alcibiades, some salient moments are Julia Annas, “Self-
Knowledge in Early Plato” in D. J. O’Meara (ed.), Platonic Investigations, 111–138 (Washington,
D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1985), Jean-François Pradeau (ed.), Alcibiade. Platon; traduction
inédite par Chantal Marbœuf et Jean-François Pradeau; introduction, notes, bibliographie et
index (Paris: Flammarion, 1999); Gary Allan Scott, Plato’s Socrates as Educator (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2000); and Marguerite Johnson and Harold Tarrant (eds.). Alcibi-
ades and the Socratic Lover-Educator (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).
54
 Naturally John Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (eds.) Plato, Complete Works, edited with an Intro-
duction and Notes (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997) deserves prominent mention for not only
paying increased respect to the Platonic dubia, but also for reminding readers of reading order,
as especially x: “Thrasyllus’ order appears to be determined by no single criterion but by several
sometimes conflicting ones, though his arrangement may represent some more or less unified idea
about the order in which the dialogues should be read and taught.” Cf. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic
Dialogue, 48, on “an ideal reading order.”
55
 In rejecting a proposal for a book to be called “Reading Order and Authenticity: Restoring the
Platonic Dubia,” an anonymous referee wrote of me: “He assumes that if the reading order of a
spurious dialogue can be justified its authenticity is thereby established. But this is not so. For
instance, it is conceivable that later teachers in the Academy produced certain spuria precisely for
pedagogical reasons.” As soon as a new criterion of authenticity emerges, the defenders of a tired
post-Schleiermacher orthodoxy must deploy a new objection that confirms, if only in the minds of
Plato’s imagined imitators, the pre-imitation reality of an academic Reading Order.
xxxiv Preface

principle §1. But this does not mean that fictional chronology always trumps
sound pedagogy: Parmenides is too difficult to be read first, the fact that
Menexenus is older in the ostentatiously anachronistic Menexenus than he is
in Lysis is offset by the relationship of both dialogues to Symposium. As a
general matter, relevant chronological connections are generally dramatic and
obvious, as in the priority of Theaetetus to Euthyphro, and the latter’s prior-
ity to Sophist-Statesman. Notwithstanding, dramatic connections between
dialogues need not always be chronological, and therefore a much broader
conception of dramatic detail will be employed in reconstructing the ROPD.

§4. With a title suggesting a beginning and a dramatic setting that wakes the
dawn (Prt. 310a8; cf. Phd. 118e7–8), Protagoras is both a difficult dialogue
and a very vivid one: it brings to life the historical context for even the dullest
student but would confuse even the brightest about a wide variety of impor-
tant subjects. This is characteristic. The fourth principle is that Plato employs
“proleptic” composition: he begins by confusing the student in an ultimately
salutary manner, that is, about things that it is pedagogically useful for the
student to be confused, and in particular, whether virtue can be taught.

§5. The fifth principle is the absolute centrality of Republic,56 and more specifi-
cally of the Allegory of the Cave. Although less accessible to those who have
not recently completed the series of dialogues beginning with Protagoras and
ending with Cleitophon (cf. R. 520b6–7), Republic 6 and 7 contain the essence
of Platonism, a claim central to the present study. Plato’s Socrates does not
know that he knows nothing—he is rather not thinking himself to know the
things that he does not (Ap. 21d7–8; cf. 29b6–7)—and Plato’s use of the dia-
logue form does not preclude the fact that he has “a teaching.”57 In short, Plato

56
 Contrast Julia Annas, Platonic Ethics, Old and New (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999),
95: “If we try to jettison the assumptions that the Republic is a contribution to political theory,
and that it is obviously the most important and central of the dialogues, the natural culmination
of a development from the Socratic dialogues, and if we try to restore it to its ancient place—one
dialogue among many in which Plato develops an argument about the sufficiency of virtue for hap-
piness—we shall have done a great deal to restore balance and proportion to our study of Plato’s
thought.” There is a pre-established harmony between this position, her “Plato the Sceptic” in
James C. Klagge and Nicholas D. Smith (eds.), Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues,
43–72 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), on 70, and Annas, Introduction, 250–252 and 273.
57
 Contrast Leo Strauss, “Plato” (1963) in Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (eds.), History of Political
Philosophy, third edition, 33–89 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1987), 33, followed by
Michael Frede, “Plato’s Arguments and the Dialogue Form” in James C. Klagge and Nicholas D.
Smith (eds.), Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues, 201–219 (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1992), especially on 214; for “knowledge of ignorance,” see Strauss, Natural Right and
History (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1953), 32; “On Plato’s Apology of Socrates and
Crito” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 38–66 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press,
1983), 42; and my The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (Lanham, MD:
Lexington, 2011), 17n65, 61n151, 209, 218, 274, 505, and 509.
 Ascent to the Good xxxv

the Teacher most certainly has a teaching,58 and the most important source
for it is his Republic, and more specifically its most famous and anthologized
part: the Allegory of the Cave. He is therefore both a philosopher and a
teacher: a teacher who, while alive, taught others to philosophize and who—
especially when the dialectical unity embodied in the ROPD is recognized—
continues to do just that through his writings. The dialogues as a whole are
intended to transmit that teaching through (1) the dialectic represented in the
dialogues, (2) the dialectic between the reader and the dialogue,59 and (3) the
inter-dialogue dialectic between the dialogues when read in the proper order.
But “(2)” nevertheless deserves the most emphasis: the real Platonic dialogue
is always between Plato and the student.

§6. The basic principle underlying this classification is that Platonism, more
or less as traditionally understood,60 can most easily be found in Symposium,
the great central books of Republic, and in Phaedo.61 In accordance with the
importance of the visual revelation that is the Platonic Idea, the relevant por-
tions of these dialogues will here be called “visionary.” As a result, the Plato
who emerges from the reconstructed ROPD will closely resemble what used
to be called “a Platonist,”62 with the Ideas, Recollection, and Immortality all
remaining central to his concerns. In other words: Plato has a visionary teach-
ing, “Platonism” is a perfectly good term for that teaching, and he expressed
his Platonism in his dialogues.

§7. The seventh (and final) principle is more difficult to elucidate. To begin
with, it identifies testing—by means, as it were, of the ancient analogue to
the true/false question—as a crucial element of Platonic pedagogy. I call this
pedagogy “basanistic,” from the Greek word βάσανος, which means: “test,”
“torture,”63 or—in the passage from Gorgias I regard as paradigmatic (Grg.
486d2-e6)—“touch-stone.” Along with proleptic and visionary, the basan-
istic element is best understood as one of three theoretical and hypothetical
springboards (R. 511b6; cf. Smp. 211c3) toward exegetical, hermeneutic, or
even visionary clarity rather than as a rigid and exclusive technical term.

58
 For criticism of Frede, “Plato’s Arguments” (see previous note) and others, see John Beversluis,
“A Defense of Dogmatism in the Interpretation of Plato.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy
31 (Winter 2006), 85–112.
59
 See Jill Gordon, Turning Toward Philosophy: Literary Device and Dramatic Structure in Plato’s
Dialogues (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1999), chapter 2.
60
 For discussion, see Guardians in Action, §19.
61
 Cf. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 142 and 274.
62
 Cf. Dominic Scott, “Plato.” Phronesis 60 (2015), 339–350 on 349: “In his new book, Lloyd Gerson
asks whether Plato was a Platonist, a question that many would answer in the negative.”
63
 Cf. M. T. Tatham, The Laches of Plato, with Introduction and Notes (London: Macmillan, 1891),
67 (on La. 188a): “βασανίσῃ, ‘examines.’ There is not necessarily any allusion to torture, which is
not implied in the primary meaning of βάσανος.”
xxxvi Preface

Although there is a meaningful sense in which a given dialogue can crudely

be called proleptic, visionary, or basanistic, it is better to think of this triad as
interrelated elements that can also be deployed in a single dialogue, or even
in a single passage.64

It is the last of these seven principles that deserves further comment, espe-
cially since the hypothesis that Plato uses basanistic pedagogy is the primary
exegetical innovation introduced in Plato the Teacher and its companions,
and because its use is explored, elucidated, and defended in all five volumes.
In the two books devoted to the post-Republic dialogues, the basanistic ele-
ment is primarily deployed in the context of what Plato has already taught
through Socrates in Republic 6–7; it is here that I triangulate between Revi-
sionism and Unitarianism. In relation to the central Republic, then, the dia-
logues that follow it are dominated by Plato’s use of the basanistic element,
while the pre-Republic dialogues—including, of course, those under consid-
eration in Ascent to the Good—are best understood as primarily proleptic.
But here great caution is necessary: although the pre-Republic dialogues are
intended to prepare the student for reading Plato’s Republic, this does not
mean that the basanistic element is absent in them.
Consider the following features of Protagoras: (1) the first thing Socrates
asks his unnamed interlocutor to confirm is that he is an admirer of Homer
(Prt. 309a6), (2) he prefaces his examination and questioning of Hippocrates
by explaining that he was “testing his strength” (Prt. 311b1; cf. 341d6–9,
342a1, 348a1–6, 349c8-d1), and (3) in the midst of his exegesis of Simonides
(Prt. 339e5–347a5), and before he introduces SP (“the Socratic Paradox”) at
345d9-e3, he says: “Let us, then, examine this in common, all of us: whether
in fact I am saying what’s true” (Prt. 343c6–7; cf. 358a3–4). In relation to
“(1)” my point is that Plato will test his reader’s understanding of Homer,
especially in Hippias Minor, long before he has opened up any visionary
vistas of his own; he will do something similar with the history of Athens in
Menexenus. As for “(2)” the fact that there are so many references to test-
ing in Protagoras indicates that Plato is introducing the reader to his use of
basanistic pedagogy from the start: like Hippocrates, our mettle is going to
be tested. Finally, and even more generally, “(3)” states with great clarity
the first principle of reading Plato well: we are always being asked whether
we regard as true what his characters are presently saying. The fact that this
principle (or warning) is surrounded on both sides with the language of test-
ing—as indicated by the passages cited in connection with “(2)”—and that it
stands in the middle of a passage where even the strongest defenders of SP as

64
  As in R. 347d2-8; see Plato the Teacher, §8.
 Ascent to the Good xxxvii

the cornerstone of “the philosophy of Socrates” must admit that Socrates

is being playful if not downright mendacious,65 tends to support my claim,
developed at length in Ascent to the Beautiful, that Plato tests us from the
start by means of deliberate deception, applied, for example, to Homer in
Hippias Minor, and to Thucydides in Menexenus. In the context of Lysis and
Euthydemus, this point will receive further attention in section 3.
On the basis of these examples, then, the use of the basanistic element does
not entirely depend on the visionary teaching of Republic 7. But Plato deploys
deliberate deception in the pre-Republic dialogues to prepare the reader for its
post-Republic use, and I will show that Plato prepares the reader in this way
from the start, beginning with Protagoras and Alcibiades Major, particularly
by means of the slippery phrase εὖ πράττειν (ambiguously “to fare well,” “to
be happy,” “to succeed,” but literally “to do well”). Using the three examples
enumerated above, the basanistic element can be used to test our knowledge
of other writers as well as of Plato himself, and less schematically, basanis-
tic pedagogy on either side of the Republic uses deliberate deception to test
the student’s grasp of the truth, always implicitly raising the question posed
explicitly in Protagoras (see xxvi) and Gorgias (see τὸ ἀληθὲς τί ἐστιν in
epigraphs). The most familiar cases of this kind of pedagogy are the best:
in addition to the true/false example used to introduce principle 7, every
multiple-choice question requires the teacher to create several deceptive and
temptingly plausible falsehoods in order to determine whether the student
will cleave to the only accurate alternative. While I am naturally not claim-
ing that Plato invented the modern multiple-choice test, I will show that he
makes use of the pedagogical principle behind it. As Socrates explains (and
then enacts) in Hippias Minor, one who knows the truth is best situated to lie
about it, and doing so, moreover, is a perfectly reasonable thing for a teacher
to do, especially one whose goal is to provoke students to remember what
they already know, and who therefore aims to inscribe his teaching not in any
one written discourse but to re-inscribe it in their souls.

65
 The bare fact of “Socratic Irony” is sufficient evidence that we need to put ourselves on guard; for
the ongoing pedagogical benefits of irony, see Jens Oliver Krüger, Pädagogische Ironie—Ironische
Pädagogik, Diskursanalytische Untersuchungen (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011); see especially
“Sokratische Ironie” (195–204).
 Introduction
Aristotle and Plato

After explaining why the soul of Orpheus chose to be born again as a swan,
Er adds in Republic 10 that he saw a swan “and other musical animals [καὶ
ἄλλα ζῳα μουσικά]” choosing a human life (R. 620a3–8).1 He offers no
explanation for this, and none is needed, and for the same reason that in
Republic 1, the man who is not μουσικός quickly finds Socrates calling him
not only “unmusical” (ἄμουσος at R. 349e2) but also senseless, and bad (R.
349e1–6). If any ancient philosopher had said that “man is a musical animal”
or that “all men by nature desire to sing,” it would have been Plato.
For Aristotle, by contrast, who famously does make generalizations of this
kind about man as such, μουσικός is the paradigmatic accident, and his many
references to “musical Coriscus” are the result.2 Even if Aristotle regarded
“musical” as something quite like a necessary accident of man as such,3 and
he naturally never says that it is, he doesn’t explain how it could possibly be
so: man in general would presumably need to be musical potentially and thus
that being μουσικός in the individualized way that Coriscus is repeatedly said
to be musical would constitute that potential’s actualization. But he never
says anything like this, nor does he claim that musical capacity is analo-
gous to “natural virtue.”4 He does, however, address the reader directly in

1
 When I have included Greek is included in brackets, as here, I have generally converted nouns (or
phrases) in oblique cases to their nominative forms and used present infinitives for verbs and par-
ticiples; my intention is to discuss Plato’s words in their most commonly and easily recognizable
forms whenever possible. Note also that all brackets in quoted material are mine; when there are
already brackets in the quoted material, I will use {these} instead.
2
 Beginning in Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations; see 1.17 (175b19–23), 1.22 (178b39–179a3), and
1.26 (181a10–11).
3
 See Aristotle, Metaphysics, 5.6 (1015b16–32).
4
 Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 6.13. Edward C. Halper suggested as much to me in email cor-
respondence; I am very grateful for the assistance of the greatest Aristotle scholar (in my opinion, of
course) the United States have produced, the plural here being appropriate for the author of One and
Many in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, as well as respecting the ancient Problem of the One and Many.
xxxix
xl Introduction

Metaphysics Z: “The essence of each thing is what it is said to be in virtue of

itself. For being you is not being musical [μουσικός]; for you are not musical
[μουσικός] in virtue of yourself.”5 This remarkable statement points to a seri-
ous historical and unfortunately ongoing problem for the reception of Plato’s
dialogues: no true musician believes that being musical is what Aristotle calls
“an accident,” and even though interpreters can read Plato’s words without
being truly musical, they cannot read his dialogues well.
Reading Aristotle is different, and that’s because if he was musical, and
I doubt that he was, it doesn’t show.6 In any case, he invites us to read him
exactly as if he were telling us the truth and telling it to us straight. And this
is the crucial point: when interpreters assume that the same is true for Plato,
they prove that they are out of their depth, for Plato is far too musical to be
read in that way. There are times, for example, when Plato makes something
conspicuous by its absence, and “to play the rests as well as the notes” is
something any musician understands perfectly. But I doubt that Aristotle ever
entertained such a self-contradictory notion, and those who think as he does
make poor interpreters of Plato when they read the great dramatist, poet,7
and musician as if he were (a not yet fully systematic) Aristotle. To put the
problem in Platonic terms: the ability to interpret Plato is not some kind of
technical knowledge or τέχνη, because if it were, the same interpreter who
could say “many and fine things [πολλὰ καὶ καλά]” (Ion 533b8) about Aris-
totle could do the same for Plato.
Plato anticipates the problem in Ion: the rhapsode can effectively bring to
life all the characters in Homer, explaining their intentions and those of their
creator, but when the subject is another poet, like Hesiod, he admits that he has
nothing worthwhile to contribute but instead is prone “to nod off [νυστάζειν]”
(Ion 532c2; cf. LSJ: “to be half asleep, doze”). Socrates never allows Ion to
demonstrate his ability to act out and interpret Homer, and thus Plato gives
us no indication that Ion’s is an empty boast. But when Aristotelians read

5
 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 7.4 (1029b13–16); W. D. Ross translation.
6
 For an attempt to find a poet in Aristotle, see Fran O’Rourke, Aristotelian Interpretations (Sallins:
Irish Academic Press, 2016), 1–43; for Aristotle as “musical” in a polyphonic or dialectical sense,
see Maurizio Migliori, “Introduzione” to Migliori (ed.), Organon, Aristotele (Milan: Bompiani,
2016), lvii–lxii, and Arianna Fermani, “The Multifocal Approach as an Assumption of the Com-
plexity of Reality: A Few Insights” in Elisabetta Cattanei, Arianna Fermani, and Maurizio Migliori
(eds.), By the Sophists to Aristotle through Plato, 7–31 (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2016). A more
dialectical (and ironic) version of Aristotle emerges in Ronna Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with
Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
7
 Cf. James Adam, “The Vitality of Platonism” in Adam, The Vitality of Platonism and Other Essays,
edited by Adela Marion Adam, 1–34 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 9: “The
ancients were in the habit of saying that if the Muses spoke in Greek, they must have spoken with
the tongue of Plato. But it is not only in his style and language that Plato is poetical: his philosophy
itself is steeped in poetry, and we shall altogether fail to understand his significance in the history
of human thought unless we realize this indisputable fact.”
 Aristotle and Plato xli

Ion, they probably imagine that Plato is criticizing the inspired rhapsode for
his lack of technical knowledge or τέχνη, thereby proving themselves to be
blissfully unaware that it is not by a τέχνη that one interprets the dialogues
of Plato, least of all by means of that specific τέχνη—let’s call it (a profes-
sor’s) “expertise in Ancient Philosophy”—that makes one equally capable of
interpreting both Plato and Aristotle when they discuss the same things. Only
a musician would get the joke that it requires nothing less than an inspired
speech from Socrates to show Ion that he lacks the requisite τέχνη. But given
the fact that Aristotle’s Poetics never mentions the Muses,8 we are entitled
to ask: what does Aristotle know of divine inspiration?9 Anyone who could
imagine herself as merely one in a long chain of rings that originates with a
Muse would not have found it so very difficult to accept that the Platonic Idea
could and indeed must be what Aristotle calls “separate.”
To interpret Plato well, the reader must not be accidentally musical but
actually so, like the cicadas (Phdr. 258e6–259d9). For who else but such as
they, entranced by song, could forget their dancing bodies, and stop eating
long enough to cause them to die? It was to remind us of what is infinitely
beyond ourselves—not to explain (away) the causes of all the world’s won-
ders—that Plato wrote his wondrous dialogues, and through our wonder and
awe at that inspiring and otherworldly reminder, to discover for ourselves what
we still owe to him and our fellows until we get there. The student of Plato
must never cease to wonder, and like Immanuel Kant at night,10 or Sir Isaac
Newton walking along the beach,11 must remain essentially a child. And never
has a teacher created a more entertaining problem for an eager child than the one
that has allowed me to remain a detective, searching through these jewels of
highly polished literary art for the kind of clues that have led to a reconstruction
of the ROPD. It is ultimately a symphonic experience, and one must be able
to find harmony in discord if one is to make any progress. But if it is through
the recognition that Plato was a teacher that one begins to understand why his

8
 Cf. Riginos §75: “Plato established a temenos of the Muses in the Academy.” Our sources are
Olympiodorus and Diogenes Laertius, and despite the pervasive skepticism of Riginos, Platonica,
she concludes her comment on this anecdote with (121): “even if Plato did establish a Mouseion in
the Academy it was probably not intended as a cult of the Muses but was meant to emphasize the
connection Plato saw between philosophy and music.”
9
 See Maicon Reus Engler, “Secularização e Practicidade: A Poética de Aristóteles em sua Relação
com a Teoria da Arte Grego e com a Filosofia Tragica” (Doctoral dissertation, Universidade Federal
de Santa Catarina, 2016). Cf. William Chase Greene, “Plato’s View of Poetry.” Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology 29 (1918), 1–75, on 33n1: “Aristotle’s purposes and views are so different that
his writings are in this matter [sc. poetry] a misleading guide to the meaning of Plato.”
10
 “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and
steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
11
 “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy
playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a pret-
tier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
xlii Introduction

musical dialogues must entertain while they instruct, it is only by grasping

that Plato remains your teacher that anyone can seek him out, and someday
look him in the eye.
It should be obvious from the diverse interpretations his dialogues have
spawned that this is no easy matter, for it is a difficult thing to catch the
swan.12 But treating him with respect is a good place to start, and using the
Order of Composition paradigm to explain away any inconsistencies in his
dialogues as “changes of mind” is a particularly unsatisfactory basis on which
to try to get to know him,13 and deeply unmusical. As a teacher, Plato’s goal
was to implant the hidden harmony within his students, and he knew that only
discord and dissonance—to apply musical terms to the deliberate use of false-
hood and deception (ἀπάτη) in basanistic pedagogy (see §3)—would do so.14
Consider the following example: In the context of outlining a curriculum for
musical education, the Athenian Stranger claims in Laws 7 that unsettling con-
tradictions (τὰ ἐναντία ἄλληλα ταράττοντα at Lg. 812e5)—and he seems to have
what we would call “harmony” and “counter-point” in mind (cf. ἑτεροφωνία,
ποικιλία, and σύμφωνον καί ἀντίφωνον; Lg. 812d4–e5)—slow down the learn-
ing process and “produce poor learning [δυσμάθεια]” (Lg. 812e6). Our response
to this statement, and thus to Plato’s Laws, determines the extent of our own
musical education. If we accept it at face value, equipping it with what I will
call “a deadpan reading,” and insist that since Plato wrote it (and indeed wrote
it at the end of his life) he must have believed it “at the end of the day,” we fail,
for it is impossible to imagine that the author of the Platonic dialogues regarded
ἑτεροφωνία as an obstacle to learning. Instead, “trust but verify” is Plato’s edu-
cational credo: never assume that students get your point until they have rejected,
on their own, its basanistic counter-point. As a result of his use of deliberate
ἀπάτη to test us, Plato would scarcely be surprised to hear, however disappoint-
ing it would be for him to do so, that Laws and his other “late” dialogues “repre-
sent a movement away from a conception of human happiness as a purification or
flight of the soul from the sensible to the intelligible, as in the Phaedo, towards a
focus on the harmony of the individual as a psychosomatic whole.”15

12
 “Just before his death Plato saw in a dream that he became a swan [cf. Diogenes Laertius 3.5] and,
leaping from tree to tree, he frustrated the attempts of the bird-catchers to try to hunt him down.”
For this anecdote and its ancient sources, see Riginos §5. See also Eugenio Benitez, “Plato the
Swan: Interpretation and the Hunt for Plato’s Doctrines.” Arhe 7, no. 13 (2010), 15–32.
13
 Cf. C. D. C. Reeve, “Motion, Rest, and Dialectic in the Sophist.” Archiv für Geschichte der Phi-
losophie 67 (1985), 47–64, on 62: “We all know, of course, that Plato was a great literary artist and
a great teacher as well as a great thinker. And we know that art is artful and that teachers often leave
dangling puzzles to test their pupils’ acumen. But we often read Plato as if his art and pedagogi-
cal purposes were extraneous to his thought. The result is that we often get the thought wrong.”
14
 Cf. “stimulus, the shock of surprise and contradiction, the pleasure of discovery” in Adam, “Vital-
ity of Platonism,” 33.
15
 Chad Jorgenson, The Embodied Soul in Plato’s Later Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2018), i.
 Aristotle and Plato xliii

Easily dismissed as outgrown, Phaedo and the other great dialogues of

“the middle period” now stand halfway between the “not yet” of the early
and the “no longer” of the late dialogues; this periodization creates a cordon
sanitaire around “middle period Platonism” as if it were a disease. Preserv-
ing a movable feast of mindless monody at the expense of wonder-inducing
dissonance, the proponents of Plato’s Development can readily imagine the
author of Phaedo abandoning “the practice of death” while dying. Reading
Order creates a more harmonious arrangement, replacing the “not yet” of
the pre-Republic dialogues with “proleptic preparation,” and the “no longer”
of the late ones with “basanistic testing.” And instead of combining the
great dialogues of the “middle period” into a single isolatable package, the
reconstructed ROPD places (1) two antithetical dialogues (Protagoras and
Phaedo)16 at its beginning and end, (2) the acme of Platonism in the middle
(Republic), and (3) the first glimpse of the transcendent (Symposium) halfway
between the beginning and the middle. Instead of valorizing Laws as his “last
word,” the Reading Order paradigm encourages the musical reader to recog-
nize that it was certainly not Plato who believed that ἑτεροφωνία, ποικιλία—
let alone the dialectical interplay of σύμφωνον and ἀντίφωνον—conduce to
δυσμάθεια. He not only wrote dialogues but also deliberately created a dis-
sonant dialogue of (dissonance-filled) dialogues.
Although it has not been Aristotle’s temperament—unmusical though it
may have been—but his testimony that has done Plato the greatest harm, it is
more specifically the way others have used his testimony and not always that
testimony itself. For example, and in contrast with many modern versions,
Aristotle’s Plato (1) famously separates intelligible Forms from sensible
things, (2) never identifies the Good with Happiness,17 and (3) distinguishes
mathematical objects as “Intermediates” from fully separable Forms;18 as a
result, Aristotle’s Plato remains what I am calling a Platonist.19 But since
Aristotle, beginning with his phrase “the later-written Laws [οἱ ὕστερον
γραφέντες],”20 is the primary source of the Order of Composition paradigm,

16
 See Guardians on Trial, §18.
17
 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.6–7; cf. Aristoxenus, Harmonics, 30–31 (translation by Alice
Riginos): “When Plato announced that he would give a lecture entitled ‘On the Good’ the audience
came with the expectation that it was a human good which would be discussed. As a result they
felt disappointed and departed.”
18
 Note that there can only be “intermediates” if there are fully separate Ideas. For the critical
importance of distinguishing (“self-predicating”) Ideas like the Good or the Beautiful from a ver-
sion of “Plato’s Theory of Forms” that ignores the distinction between Ideas and Intermediates,
see Penner, “The Forms,” 225–26n8, culminating with: “I am unclear what evidence normally
deployed to show the presence of self-predication in Plato would allow an interpreter to just pick
and choose which Forms he or she will call self-predicational and which not.”
19
 See Plato the Teacher, 319–322; Guardians in Action, §11; and Guardians on Trial, §16.
20
 Aristotle, Politics, 2.6 (1264b26–27).
xliv Introduction

Plato can also be reconfigured as increasingly Aristotelian,21 and a fearsome

double-envelopment of Platonism becomes possible when Aristotle’s testi-
mony about Socrates is combined with what he writes about Plato’s “Unwrit-
ten Teachings.” By interpreting Plato’s “early” dialogues as evidence for
Aristotle’s version of Socrates and then reading that position forward and by
interpreting the “late” ones as embodying Aristotle’s version of the Unwritten
Teachings and then reading that position back,22 it has now become possible
“to play both ends against the middle,” and the sanitary cordon is becoming
tighter.
On this book’s cover is the well-known detail at the center of Raphael’s
“School of Athens,” and particularly in the context of this Introduction, this
beautiful image is both classic and appropriate. Although wildly inappropri-
ate for a serious book, there is another image that might have been more
revealing, and which must appear here only in words.23 It is a New Yorker
cartoon by Daniel Brustlein—he signed himself as “Alain”—depicting a
pipe-smoking gentleman attempting to retrieve a book that he has found on
a shelf between two bookends. These bookends are remarkable and create
the cartoon’s humor: in the form of two powerful Atlas-type strongmen,
they appear to be applying so much pressure from either end of the row of
books that the hapless reader is finding it impossible, despite his well-drawn
efforts, to prize free the central and desired book. This cartoon image illus-
trates the central claim of this Introduction: (“middle period”) Platonism is
under attack from two sides both of which depend on Aristotle’s testimony,
one based on the early dialogues of Plato, the other on the late ones, one
originating in Germany, the other coming from “the English-speaking
peoples.”
From “the German side,” the post-World War II scholars of Tübingen
have used Aristotle’s testimony about Plato’s Unwritten Teachings to build
a case for reconfiguring the Idea of the Good—lodged though it is at the
dead center of Plato’s central Republic—as something the arithmetic lesson
Socrates gives us in Republic 7 should really have been sufficient to make
us see that it is not:24 the nimble, worldly, and transcendence-transcending

21
 For “the Aristotelian τέλος of Plato’s Development,” see Guardians in Action, 424.
22
 As in Hans Joachim Krämer, Arete bei Platon und Aristoteles: Zum Wesen und zur Geschichte der
platonischen Ontologie (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1959), 490–505. For early criticism of this aspect
of the founding document of the so-called “Tübingen School,” see Hanns-Dieter Voigtländer,
“Review of H. J. Krämer, Arete.” Archiv für die Geschichte der Philosophie 45 (1963), 194–211,
especially 209–210; see Hans Joachim Krämer, “Retraktationen zum Problem des esoterischen
Platon.” Museum Helveticum 21, no. 3 (1964), 137–167 for his characteristically forceful response,
especially on 165–166.
23
 It is posted to my academia.edu site under the title “Bookends.”
24
 See Plato the Teacher, §28. Cf. Guardians in Action, 251n176 and 421–422.
 Aristotle and Plato xlv

One,25 the unifying principle of “cosmos” and “order.”26 Despite a heavy-

handed emphasis on “the critique of writing” (or Schriftkritik) in Phaedrus
that allows the School’s scholars to find supporting evidence anywhere that
Plato can be imagined as withholding from his readers the whole story—and
that’s pretty nearly everywhere for reasons that have nothing to do with the
One and the Indefinite Dyad—this interpretive equivalent of Alain’s muscu-
lar bookend exerts its pressure on Plato’s “middle period” primarily by means
of his later dialogues, and in The Guardians in Action, it was therefore with
this Aristotle-based pressure that I was forced to wrestle.
In Ascent to the Good, I will be wrestling with pressure exerted from the
other side of the shelf. However apparently different in temper and meth-
ods, there is a well-matched Anglo-American counterpart to the Tübingen
School:27 a second bookend applying pressure from the other direction, this
time by means of Aristotle’s testimony about Socrates with its pressure being
applied though the “early” or “Socratic dialogues.” It is this pressure that
must justify my regrettable emphasis on Anglophone scholarship in what fol-
lows; in the wake of Vlastos,28 it is the pre-Republic or “Socratic” dialogues
that have engrossed the lion’s share of Anglophone attention to Plato. Since
Aristotle’s Socrates did not separate the Forms,29 and since Plato’s early
dialogues depict the historical Socrates as Aristotle describes him,30 it has
therefore become possible to squeeze “the middle” from “the English side” as
well as the German, creating in the process a characteristically English hybrid
I will call “Palmerstonian Platonism.”31
This interpretive move reaches its most radical conclusion in reconfiguring
the Idea of the Good as our own Happiness—“the best, noblest [κάλλιστον is
the superlative of καλόν], and most pleasant thing” as Aristotle calls it32—in
which (it can easily be claimed) all men have an eternal and perpetual interest,

25
 See especially Krämer, Arete bei Platon und Aristoteles, 547–548.
26
 On κόσμος and τάξις in Grg. as anticipating the Unwritten Teachings, see Krämer, Arete bei Platon
und Aristoteles, 57–83. As an account of originating ontological principles, the German term for
these teachings is Prinzipienlehre.
27
 See most recently Hans Joachim Krämer, Gesammelte Aufsätze zu Platon, Dagmar Mirbach (ed.),
(Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2014). More accessible is Dmitri Nikulin, (ed.), The Other
Plato: The Tübingen Interpretation of Plato’s Inner-Academic Teachings (Albany: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 2012).
28
 For his critique of the Tübingen School, see Gregory Vlastos, “Review of Hans Joachim Krämer,
Arete bei Platon und Aristoteles.” Gnomon 35, no. 7 (November 1963), 641–655.
29
 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1.6 and 13.4 (1078b9–17); cf. Vlastos, Socrates, 91.
30
 Vlastos, Socrates, 97.
31
 “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and per-
petual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
32
 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.7; 1099a24–25 (W. D. Ross translation, revised by J. O. Urm-
son); cf. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1.1 for the fullest Aristotelian account of the Good, the Beau-
tiful, and the Pleasant as a triad. Cf. n116 on lxvi below.
xlvi Introduction

and must therefore necessarily and blamelessly follow.33 No longer the uni-
tary and separate Idea that Aristotle famously attacked in Nicomachean Eth-
ics 1.6, Plato’s Good is displaced in a eudaemonist version of “the philosophy
of Socrates”—anchored in Plato’s own dialogues thanks to Aristotle’s way
of understanding them—and thereby loses its Platonic transcendence just as
surely as it does when reconfigured more systematically, à l’allemande, as
“the One.”34 Indeed if virtue has no other purpose than securing our own Hap-
piness, the resulting “Unity of Virtue” (hereafter “UV”) becomes the ethical
equivalent of the unifying One of the ontological Prinzipienlehre: virtue as
knowledge (hereafter “K”) is the One that brings unity to the many virtues
(cf. Lg. 963c5–964a5).
The cartoon’s hapless book-lover must struggle against the combined
strength of two muscular bookends at the same time; here it is thankfully a
case of two discrete wrestling matches fought out in two different gymnasia.
But the opponent remains the same, and it makes good sense that any attempt
to revive Plato as the living teacher of an eternal curriculum would speedily
need to come to grips with Aristotle. Behind “the philosophy of Socrates”
and “Plato’s Unwritten Teachings,” disparate in style and content as these
two phenomena certainly are stands the Stagirite: that is the first and crucial
point. Although only one of the two is called “unwritten,” there is a sense in
which both are, for every version of Socrates depicts him as writing nothing.
But there is a critical difference: Aristotle is in control of what we can know
of the Unwritten Teachings, and even if someone were to demonstrate suc-
cessfully that they are not only absent from but are even incompatible with
what is written in the dialogues, their nimble defenders could continue to
maintain their necessarily secret reality. By contrast, any reconstruction of
“the philosophy of Socrates” must depend on what Plato has written, and thus
on a certain way of reading his dialogues, i.e., Aristotle’s.
In both cases, then, we are dealing with Aristotle, and the limited extent of
his musicality points toward the way I will grapple with him in both cases,
different though they may be. In the case of the things that Aristotle tells us

33
 In addition to Penner, “The Forms”—for example, 195: “this reading takes at face value the Repub-
lic’s claim that justice makes each of us happier, and sees no reason for denying that for Plato in the
Republic, as for Socrates, the good person is the person good at getting his or her own happiness.
No morality over and above the search for one’s own happiness.”—see also Terry Penner, “The
Forms in Plato’s Republic” in Gerasimos Santas (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic,
234–262 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006); for Penner’s earlier writings, see Naomi Reshotko (ed.),
Desire, Identity, and Existence: Essays in Honor of T. M. Penner (Kelowna: Academic Printing
and Publishing, 2003), ix–xi.
34
 See especially Hans-Joachim Krämer, “Über den Zusammenhang von Prinzipienlehre und Diale-
ktik bei Platon; Zur Definition des Dialektikers Politeia 534 B–C.” Philologus 10 (1966), 35–70,
and “Platons Definition des Guten” in Eva Büchin (ed.), Denken, Gedanken, Andenken: zum 90.
Geburtstag von Elspeth Büchin, 135–140 and 203–205 (Meßkirch: Gmeiner, 2009).
 Aristotle and Plato xlvii

that Plato said that are not found in the dialogues, my response is not to deny
that Plato said them but rather to assert that Aristotle misunderstood what
Plato meant by saying them. The same applies to the dialogues on which
Aristotle depended for his reconstruction of Socrates, and in particular it
applies to the way he read the two dialogues on which he grounds the separa-
tion between Socrates (on the one hand) and Plato speaking through his char-
acter Socrates: Republic and Protagoras. In these dialogues, Plato’s Socrates
says incompatible things, and it is upon that incompatibility that Aristotle
bases his distinction. In response, I will suggest that this distinction rests on
several misunderstandings, but that their origin remains the same: Aristotle
rejected the transcendent Idea of the Good. Whether as cause or result, he
must also have misunderstood the playful, humorous, and musical techniques
that Plato used to get his students first to embrace and then to defend it.
Since both Protagoras and Republic survive, it will be easier to illustrate
Aristotle’s misunderstanding of both when the time comes; in the case of “the
unwritten teachings [τὰ ἄγραφα δόγματα],”35 it is more difficult because in
that case we have nothing except Aristotle’s testimony. But perhaps this is
enough: for example, Aristotle tells us that Plato defined a point as an indi-
visible line, and I believe him: Plato did so to describe it. But I also believe
that Plato knew this “definition” was inadequate, and that he employed it as
a test,36 using the ἀπάτη intrinsic to basanistic pedagogy in order to deter-
mine whether his auditors would recognize its inadequacy for themselves, as
indeed Aristotle did.37 Aristotle’s mistake was that he failed to recognize why
it was so easy for him to demonstrate the inadequacy of “indivisible line” as
the definition of a point, and he makes the same mistake in the case of Ideal
Numbers. In Metaphysics M and N, he demonstrates at length why treating
numbers as if they were some one thing other than a plurality of units creates
problems—indeed the same Problem that arises by treating a line as indivisi-
ble38—and he thinks he is refuting Plato by doing so.39 Once again, Aristotle’s

35
 Aristotle, Physics, 4.2 (209b14–15).
36
 See Plato the Teacher, §28.
37
 See Aristotle, Physics, 3.6; 206a16–17: “There is no difficulty in refuting the theory of indivisible
lines.” But the most important text is Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1.9 (992a19–24); there Aristotle adds
the crucial piece of countervailing evidence that Plato was wont to call the point “a geometrical
fiction [γεωμετρικὸν δόγμα]” (992a21), which is exactly what I take Plato’s actual position to have
been: it is a hypothesis, as recognized by W. D. Ross, Aristotle’s Metaphysics: A Revised Text and
Commentary, two volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 2.207 (for further discussion, see
Plato the Teacher, 306–311). Note that if Plato himself coined the phrase τὰ ἄγραφα δόγματα, the
meaning of δόγμα in the phrase γεωμετρικὸν δόγμα—which Aristotle suggests he did use, and used
repeatedly—may well be relevant to their pedagogical value, and in any case, the word is based on
δόξα, that is, opinion (cf. LSJ).
38
 On “the Problem of the One and the Many” (or simply “the Problem”), see Guardians in Action,
§11. The key point is that two or more things cannot be one.
39
 See Julia Annas, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Books M and N; Translated with Introduction and Notes
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 16–18.
xlviii Introduction

testimony also preserves evidence about Plato that suggests why Plato would
test his students on such matters, in the decisive case because he regarded
mathematical objects as “intermediate” between sensible things and Ideas.40
But the critical point for now is that Aristotle seems to have mistakenly
believed that he was refuting Plato when he was actually confirming him.41
In turning to the pre-Republic dialogues, the same observation applies,
but now with greatly increased stakes, especially when writing in English.
Advancing the claim that Plato regarded Ideal Numbers, spawned by the
One and Indefinite Dyad, as nothing more than a pedagogically useful fic-
tion might be considered heretical on the Continent, but the parallel claim
about “Socratic intellectualism” is barely thinkable in Anglophonia. To begin
with, then, Aristotle’s testimony about Socrates can be divided into three.42
The first part deals with methodology, and identifies the quest for universal
(ethical) definitions, the use of induction, and the first steps toward the syl-
logism as Socrates’ most important methodological contributions; since Aris-
totle will build on these, he makes no effort to refute Socrates here.43 Nor does
he do so with his claim that Socrates did not separate the (ethical) Forms, as
Plato did; here again he can use (his version of) Socrates as support, but now
in express opposition to Plato.44 But the third part—the one that is crucial in
Ascent to the Good—is different: in the realm of ethics and “moral psychol-
ogy,” Aristotle describes “Socratic intellectualism” only to refute it.45
Aristotle’s testimony about “Socratic intellectualism” is the most impor-
tant of the three parts in the present context because it depends so heavily
on Plato.46 This in itself is a good thing: Plato’s dialogues can be read on
their own, and here there is no need to seek for inconsistencies in Aristotle’s
own testimony, since such inconsistences as are relevant can be found in

40
 See Annas, Metaphysics, Books M and N, 19–21 and especially Appendix D.
41
 For another example, see Guardians on Trial, 393n211.
42
 My discussion of Aristotle’s testimony about Socrates depends on Father Th. Deman, Le
témoignage d’Aristote sur Socrate (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1942) and will use his numbering
system in the following style: “D” (for Deman) followed by an Arabic number.
43
 See D25–D28, with comment in Deman, Le témoignage d’Aristote, 75–82. See also Anton-
Hermann Chroust, “Socrates in the Light of Aristotle’s Testimony.” New Scholasticism, 26, no. 3
(July 1956), 327–365, on 331–333 and 336–338.
44
 See D26–D27; on this, see Chroust, “Socrates,” 328–331, climaxing with: “the Aristotelian refer-
ences to Socrates and his conceptualist method are part of Aristotle’s critique and refutation of
the Platonic Theory of Ideas [the attached note cites D25, D26, and D27].” Cf. Heinrich Maier,
Sokrates: Sein Werk und geschichtliche Stellung (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr: 1913), 91–94.
45
 See D29–D41; I will be concentrating on the three passages from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
(D31, D37, and D40) as well as D32 (from Magna Moralia). See Maier, Sokrates, 81–91, and
Chroust, “Socrates,” 348–355 and 359–360.
46
 See Roslyn Esther Weiss, “The ‘Socratic’ Paradoxes in Plato’s Hippias Minor and Protagoras”
(PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1982), 344–350. For Aristotle’s dependence on Xeno-
phon, Memorabilia, 4.6, see Maier, Sokrates, 94–102, especially 99n1, and Chroust, “Socrates,”
334–335 and 339–342.
 Aristotle and Plato xlix

the dialogues. But my basic claim applies here as well: Aristotle can refute
Socrates—for everyone would admit that Aristotle rejects Socrates’ (alleg-
edly) mistaken identification of the virtues with knowledge (that is, K) and
his equally mistaken denial of the possibility of incontinence (ἀκρασία)—
because that is what Plato expects his readers to do. The problem is that few
would admit that it is Aristotle’s version of Socrates, and not Socrates, who
makes these mistakes, and even fewer who would acknowledge that the prin-
cipal source upon which the third part of Aristotle’s testimony of Socrates
most heavily depends is a deadpan reading of Protagoras, a reading I am
claiming that Plato himself expected his Guardians to outgrow.
So successful has Aristotle been in shaping the tradition’s conception of
Socrates that the most incisive and critical examination of his testimony
was published before the First World War,47 and even after A. E. Taylor had
exploded the hypothesis that we can distinguish between the literary Socrates
Aristotle finds in Plato’s dialogues and “the historical Socrates” because the
Stagirite refers to the latter as Σωκράτης and the former as ὁ Σωκράτης,48
W. D. Ross saw nothing unpardonable in his attempt to resuscitate it in 1924.49
As demonstrated by the fact that Aristotle places in the mouth of Σωκράτης
things “he” said in both Menexenus and Protagoras,50 there is no good way
to distinguish Aristotle’s Socrates from the literary sources upon which his
Socrates depends,51 and that really means upon his way of reading those
sources.
Above and beyond the fact that Aristotle failed to embrace the Idea of the
Good as separate—let alone my controversial suggestions that he lacked the

47
 Maier, Sokrates; for context, see Deman, Le témoignage d’Aristote, 10–21: Maier is discussed on
17–18. On the Anglophone reception of his work, I can’t understand why a failure to discuss Aris-
totle’s claim about Cratylus’ early influence on Plato (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 987a32) tells against
Maier in Daniel W. Graham, “Socrates and Plato.” Phronesis 37, no. 2 (1992), 141–165, on 160.
48
 A. E. Taylor, Varia Socratica (Oxford: James Parker, 1911), 40–51. For the origins of “Fizgerald’s
canon,” see William Fitzgerald, Selection from the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle Containing a
Delineation of the Moral Virtues with Notes and an Introductory Discourse (Dublin: Hodges and
Smith, 1850), 163.
49
 Cf. Ross, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, xxxix–xli, especially: “In Rhet. 1415b30 we have λέγει
Σωκράτης ἐν τῷ ἐπιταφίῳ where the Menexenus is referred to; it is pardonable to suggest that in
this one passage ὁ has dropped out before the similar letter σ.” No it isn’t. Cf. Taylor, Varia Socrat-
ica, 46 (he is concluding his amusing discussion of this text which begins on 45): “Really, nothing
could be stronger proof of the fact that Aristotle applied no criticism whatever to Plato’s account
of Socrates, but took it with the proverbial foi de charbonnier, than his ascription of a sentence of
the Menexenus to Socrates, unless it be the astounding passage of the Politics (B 1264b24), where
the Laws are discussed as ‘discourses of Socrates.’” This passage will be discussed below, and
Aristotle deserves this criticism (cf. Guardians on Trial, 210n5) but Taylor is wrong on a crucial
point: Aristotle did apply criticism to “Plato’s account of Socrates” by attributing the partition of
the soul to Plato, not to Socrates (see below).
50
 Cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 3.14 (1415b30–32), and Nicomachean Ethics, 7.3 (1445); cf. “this one
passage” in previous note.
51
 See Chroust, “Socrates,” 331–332 and 364–365.
l Introduction

temperament to read Plato musically and thus failed to recognize Plato’s use of
basanistic pedagogy—an impartial reader would be hard-pressed to maintain
that Aristotle read Plato well if only on the basis of the following statement:

Thus while [μὲν οὖν] all the discourse of Socrates [οἱ τοῦ Σωκράτους λόγοι]
have a striking quality [τὸ περιττόν]—also cleverness, and originality and an
inquiring character [καὶ τὸ κομψὸν καὶ τὸ καινοτόμον καὶ τὸ ζητητικόν]—nev-
ertheless [δέ] for all things [to be done] beautifully is equally difficult [καλῶς
πάντα ἴσως χαλεπόν].52

Without denying that Plato regarded “beautiful things as difficult [χαλεπὰ τὰ

καλά],” a scarcely impartial Platonist like myself can find plenty of objec-
tionable things in this backhanded compliment. By means of this sentence’s
μέν/δέ structure, Aristotle can appear to be praising Plato on the one hand
while attacking him on the other. To begin with, the compliments in the
μέν-phase are peculiar: τὸ περιττόν means literally “odd,” and is clearly
ambivalent (cf. LSJ), while there are numerous passages in the dialogues
that prove that τὸ κομψόν in particular is no compliment at all (e.g., Phdr.
266d9). As for the δέ-phase, I can’t expect all of my readers to agree with me
that however difficult it clearly was for Plato to have written his dialogues so
beautifully, Aristotle’s dismissive καλῶς not only applies, but, that thanks to
what Socrates calls “logographic necessity” (Phdr. 264b7), it applies at least
to πάντα ἴσως (which might also be translated “all things perhaps”) if not to
“all things” simpliciter (ἁπλῶς).
But since Aristotle is discussing Plato’s Laws in Politics 2.6, the fact that
he includes it among οἱ τοῦ Σωκράτους λόγοι—Laws in fact being one of
only two Platonic dialogues in which Socrates is not present—should per-
suade any fair-minded reader that by twenty-first-century standards, Aristotle
is a poor reader of Plato’s dialogues: he fails to distinguish between Plato’s
characters and indeed—with one particularly unfortunate exception, as we
shall see—between Plato and his characters.53 Bearing in mind that Politics
2.6 also includes Aristotle’s reference to “the later written Laws,” the chapter
completes an interpretive trifecta with the following comments about Plato’s
Republic:

On these points [sc., ‘whether Farmers and the Artisans are excluded from gov-
ernment or have some part in it, and whether these classes also are to possess
arms and to serve in war with the others or not’] Socrates [ὁ Σωκράτης] has
made no decision, but though he thinks that the women ought to serve in war

52
 Aristotle, Politics, 2.6; 1265a11–13.
53
 See Guardians in Action, 36–37 on “as Plato says in Timaeus” (Aristotle, Physics, 4.1; 209b11–12).
 Aristotle and Plato li

with the Guardians and share the same education, with other things extraneous
to these [τὰ δ᾽ ἄλλα τοῖς ἔξωθεν] he has filled up the discourse [πεπλήρωκε τὸν
λόγον] as well as concerning education [καὶ περὶ τῆς παιδείας] of what sort it
is necessary the Guardians’ shall be [ποίαν τινὰ δεῖ γίνεσθαι τῶν φυλάκων].54

Echoing the summary of Republic that ὁ Σωκράτης gives in Timaeus (Ti.

17c1–19b2),55 Aristotle gets as far as the Second Wave of Paradox in this
extraordinary passage. To characterize what is found in the remainder of that
λόγος as τὰ δ᾽ ἄλλα τοῖς ἔξωθεν is a gross misreading of Plato’s masterpiece
on too many levels to count. It assumes that the details of the City’s organiza-
tion were Plato’s principal concern in Republic, and that what Aristotle calls
περὶ τῆς παιδείας is somehow extraneous to that concern; in fact, the problem
of how the Guardians should be educated is the ongoing theme of Plato’s
dialogues as a whole. If asked to summarize the Republic, any undergraduate
who spoke of what happens after the Second Wave of Paradox in this man-
ner, having demonstrated a narrow literalism as well as a profound misun-
derstanding of Plato’s intentions, would deserve a failing mark. In short, this
is a reading of Plato’s Republic that only the most determined partisans of
Aristotle—by no means a null set, it should be added—could possibly defend.
The question of how Aristotle’s partisans read Plato’s Republic becomes
even more germane to “Socratic intellectualism” in this passage from the
Magna Moralia:

After these [sc. Socrates and Pythagoras] Plato divided the soul into the rational
[τὸ λόγον ἔχον] and irrational part [τὸ ἄλογον]—and in this he was right—
assigning corresponding virtues to each; as far as this, admirably [καλῶς], but
after that, no longer rightly.56

In embryo, Aristotle’s rejection of “Socratic intellectualism” is already vis-

ible, since his version of Socrates manifestly did not admit the presence of τὸ
ἄλογον in the soul.57 What becomes visible here is that Aristotle’s followers
followed their master in sharply distinguishing the Socrates of Republic from
the Socrates of, for example, Protagoras. On my account, this involves a
triple mistake: (1) Aristotle assumes that what Socrates says in Protagoras
is what the historical Socrates thinks, (2) he assumes that what Plato says
through Socrates in Republic 4 is what Plato thinks—and this is the only

54
 Aristotle, Politics, 2.6; 1264b34–1265a1 (H. Rackham translation modified).
55
 See Guardians in Action, 1–2.
56
 [Aristotle], Magna Moralia, 1.1; 1282a23–27.
57
 For background on bipartition and the tripartite soul, see D. A. Rees, “Bipartition of the Soul in the
Early Academy.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 77, pt. 1 (1957), 112–118, and P. A. Vander Waerdt,
“Aristotle’s Criticism of Soul-Division.” American Journal of Philology 108, no. 4 (Winter 1987),
627–643.
lii Introduction

time he will distinguish Plato from one of his characters because Socrates
will not partition the soul—and (3) he fails to grasp that from Protagoras to
Republic, what Socrates says reflects and advances Plato’s concern περὶ τῆς
παιδείας and more specifically with ποίαν τινὰ (i.e., what kind of education)
δεῖ γίνεσθαι τῶν φυλάκων, including us, his readers, among οἱ φύλακοι.
For now, the second mistake is the crucial one. Just as Aristotle is exces-
sively concerned with, for example, the Farmers and Artisans in Politics, so
too it was natural for his followers to be so with the psychological dimension
of the Shorter Way when it came to the soul as opposed to the City:

the only work of Plato to which [Magna Moralia] 1182a24–30 can refer is the
Republic. In representing tripartition as a division into ἄλογον and λόγον ἔχον,
therefore, the author uses a kind of short-hand to refer to the psychology of the
Republic.58

There are a number of considerations that make the first chapter of Magna
Moralia a useful text, beginning with the fact that it offers the clearest con-
tinuous statement of the distinction between Plato and Socrates. Naturally it
will be the Nicomachean Ethics on which further discussion of Aristotle’s
testimony about Socrates will rely, but the criticism of Plato that follows
Aristotle’s praise for partitioning the soul expresses with great clarity a
way of reading Plato’s Republic that is likewise characteristic of Aristotle’s
followers:

For he [sc. Plato] mixed up and yoked together virtue with the treatment
of the good [τἀγαθόν; the whole phrase is τὴν γὰρ ἀρετὴν κατέμιξεν {καὶ
συνέζευξεν}εἰς τὴν πραγματείαν τὴν ὑπὲρ τἀγαθοῦ]. Which cannot be right, not
being appropriate. For in speaking of the things that really are [τὰ ὄντα] and of
truth [ἀλήθεια] he ought not to have discoursed about virtue [ὑπὲρ ἀρετῆς]; for
there is nothing common to this and to that.59

Since Aristotle thought that Plato, unlike Socrates, divided the soul into
three parts, it makes sense that his followers would fail to recognize why
Plato thought it was both appropriate and necessary to combine a discussion
ὑπὲρ ἀρετῆς—and about Justice in particular, which demands a measure of
self-sacrifice—with what he calls ἡ πραγματεία ἡ ὑπὲρ τἀγαθοῦ: the justifica-
tion for doing so is precisely what distinguishes the Longer from the Shorter
Ways.60 It thereby becomes possible to criticize Plato for mixing ethics and

58
 P. A. Vander Waerdt, “The Peripatetic Interpretation of Plato’s Tripartite Psychology.” Greek,
Roman and Byzantine Studies 26, no. 3 (Autumn 1985), 283–302, on 297.
59
 [Aristotle], Magna Moralia, 1.1 (1282a27–30).
60
 For the distinction, arising from R. 435d2–3 and 504b2, see Plato the Teacher, chapters 3 and 4.
 Aristotle and Plato liii

ontology while at the same time praising him for partitioning the soul. As a
result, it is still with an Aristotelian way of reading Plato’s Republic that we
are concerned:

Only the Republic couples the psychological doctrine and investigation of τὸ

ἀγαθόν to which the author here objects, and it presents them in the order cor-
responding to the author’s criticism. If this interpretation is correct, τὴν γὰρ
ἀρετὴν κατέμιξεν εἰς τὴν πραγματείαν τὴν ὑπὲρ τἀγαθοῦ refers to the exposition
of τὸ ἀγαθόν in the Republic.61

It is therefore not surprising that the author of Magna Moralia 1.1 will distin-
guish what’s good “simply [ἁπλῶς]”—that is, the GoodT—from “the good for
us”62 before echoing the master by identifying the latter as Happiness in 1.2.63
This is not to say that Aristotle’s reading of Republic lacks all merit, or that
he completely ignores the Longer Way while devoting so much more atten-
tion to the Shorter. To begin with, he recognizes the centrality of the Idea of
the Good, and pays both Plato and Platonism the compliment of attacking
it—most famously in Nicomachean Ethics 1.6—and that criticism is there-
fore echoed in Magna Moralia 1.1. But his criticism of Republic in Politics
2.5 deserves notice as well:

And moreover, while also depriving the Guardians of happiness [εὐδαιμονία],

he says that it is necessary for the lawgiver to make the whole city happy
[εὐδαίμων].64

The question of the Guardians’ εὐδαιμονία arises first in response to Adei­

mantus in Republic 4 (R. 419a1–421c6), and it is to this passage that Socrates
refers (R. 519e1–520a5) when Glaucon’s objection in book 7 (R. 519d8–9)
leads to “the crisis of the Republic” (R. 520b5–c3). Aristotle makes a good
point: by compelling the Guardians to return to the Cave, the lawgiver may
well be depriving them of happiness (cf. R. 521a3–4). But if so, that depriva-
tion can only be justified in the case of those who no longer regard their own
εὐδαιμονία as the Good, for only these—Plato’s true Guardians—will freely
choose to do what the merely imaginary Guardians of a hypothesis-based
City must be compelled to do. The merit of Aristotle’s reading of Plato’s
Republic is therefore its consistency: it makes sense that he will reject the
Idea of the Good, deplore the diminution of the Guardians’ happiness, and
regard as fully Platonic what Socrates says about the partitioning of the soul.

61
 Vander Waerdt, “Peripatetic Interpretation,” 297n36.
62
 [Aristotle], Magna Moralia, 1.1; 1282b3; cf. 1183a11–12 and 1183a35.
63
 [Aristotle], Magna Moralia, 1.2; 1184a8–19.
64
 Aristotle, Politics, 2.5; 1264b15–17.
liv Introduction

Thus far, I have been considering what the author of Magna Moralia says
about Plato, partly because both his praise and blame depend on the Peripa-
tetic reception of Plato’s Republic, and partly because those comments are
tied directly to the what he has already written about Socrates:

After him [sc. Pythagoras] came Socrates, who spoke better about these things
[περὶ ἀρετῆς and αἱ ἀρεταί], but even he was not successful. For he used to make
the virtues sciences [ἐπιστῆμαι; the whole phrase is τὰς γὰρ ἀρετὰς ἐπιστήμας
ἐποίει], and this is impossible. For the sciences all involve reason, and reason
is to be found in the intellectual part of the soul. So that all the excellences,
according to him, are to be found in the rational part of the soul [τὸ λογιστικὸν
τῆς ψυχῆς μόριον]. The result is that by making the virtues sciences, he is doing
away with the irrational part of the soul [τὸ ἄλογον μέρος τῆς ψυχῆς], and is
thereby doing away both with passion and character; thus he has not been suc-
cessful in this respect in his treatment of the virtues.65

To begin with, it is important to recognize that this succinct statement of

“Socratic intellectualism” echoes Aristotle himself.66 But the third and final
reason I have emphasized Magna Moralia 1.1 is that my primary concern in
the book that follows is not so much with Aristotle himself as with those who
followed him in making the presence of τὸ ἄλογον μέρος τῆς ψυχῆς the line
that divides Plato from (his) Socrates:

One very striking consequence of this [sc. ‘Socratic intellectualism generates all
action from the single desire, common to everyone, for his or her own maximal
available happiness or good over the rest of his or her life’] is an utter rejection
of the perspective involved in Plato’s parts of the soul doctrine (as also in Aris-
totle’s psychology of action, following Plato’s).67

Written more than 2,000 years after Magna Moralia, this sentence depends
just as heavily on Aristotle’s way of reading Plato as its unknown ancient
author did. As the parenthesis indicates, Aristotle will reject “Socratic intel-
lectualism” just as Plato did, but that should not disguise the fact—obvious
in Magna Moralia—that the original distinction between it and “Plato’s parts
of the soul doctrine” depends on Aristotle’s testimony about Socrates; so
too does the distinction between “Plato’s Socratic dialogues” and his (“later
written”) Republic. Note that instead of using the Order of Composition

65
 [Aristotle], Magna Moralia, 1.1; 1282a15–35 (St. George Stock translation modified).
66
 See Vander Waerdt, “Peripatetic Interpretation,” 297n37.
67
 Terry Penner and Christopher Rowe, Plato’s Lysis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 227. For a detailed review of a book that will be receiving attention in chapter 1, see R.
M. Dancy, “With Friends, ‘More Is Going on than Meets the Eye.’ A Discussion of Terry Penner
and Christopher Rowe, Plato’s Lysis.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 31 (2006), 323–347.
 Aristotle and Plato lv

paradigm to show that it is actually “Plato’s parts of the soul doctrine” (like
“Aristotle’s psychology of action”) that constitutes “an utter rejection of the
[earlier Socratic] perspective,” this sentence allows the two incompatible
perspectives to meet on an equal footing. But despite the fact that both of its
authors will reject Aristotle’s “perspective” (along with Plato’s), the histori-
cal roots of their incompatibility claim—culminating in an ahistorical objec-
tion that causes an earlier perspective to be treated as “an utter rejection”
of a later one—are to be found in Aristotle. The interplay of the two can be
illustrated by this passage from the same source:

we regard fundamental Socratic and Platonic positions as nearly identical

save on one point. . . . Socrates—the historical Socrates as Penner thinks, the
Socrates of a certain fairly well-marked part of Plato’s stylometrically early
dialogues as Rowe is inclined to think, though he is close to moving to Penner’s
view—is fundamentally at odds with Plato on the implications of only one ques-
tion: a question about psychology of action.68

Although Aristotle is not mentioned here, he is ultimately and equally

responsible for the positions of both Terry Penner and Christopher Rowe.
Although Aristotle will go on to refute the kind of intellectualism he attri-
butes to Socrates,69 his testimony has proved to be the decisive factor in
the reconstruction of “the historical Socrates” that Penner and many others
embrace.70 But it has proved to be just as decisive in grounding the distinc-
tion between “Plato’s stylometrically early dialogues” and the Republic-
based “psychology of action” that both Penner and Rowe use to distinguish
(on “only one question”) the “fundamental Socratic and Platonic positions.”
It is true that the use of “stylometrically” might confuse an honest person on
an important point, implying as it does that Rowe’s decision to distinguish
“Plato’s early dialogues” from his Republic depended simply on stylometry
rather than on the attempt to justify Aristotle’s distinction between Socrates
and Plato by inventing stylometry.71 And it is perhaps for this reason that it is
Penner, and not Rowe, who has expressed with clarity and perfect candor the
dividing line between Socrates and Plato:

68
 Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 195n2.
69
 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 7.3.
70
 For valuable historical background, see Hayden W. Ausland, “Socrates’ Definitional Inquiries and
the History of Philosophy” in Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), A Companion to
Socrates, 493–510 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006).
71
 See Guardians in Action, 424.
lvi Introduction

“Socrates” I shall here use for the Socrates of the Protagoras; “Plato” refers to
the Socrates of the Republic.72

“Penner’s Golden Footnote” echoes Aristotle and thus depends just as unmis-
takably on his misreading of Plato’s dialogues as does the author of Magna
Moralia.
There is a difference of course: first Penner and then Penner and Rowe
will resuscitate as defensible the same “Socratic intellectualism” that Aris-
totle was the first to distinguish from “Plato’s parts of the soul doctrine” in
order to grapple with and refute it. But the points in common are decisive,
depending equally on three mistaken assumptions about how we should read
Plato: (1) that what Socrates says in Protagoras represents what “the histori-
cal Socrates” or “the Socrates of a certain fairly well-marked part of Plato’s
stylometrically early dialogues” actually believed to be true, (2) that what
Socrates says in Republic 4 about the tripartite soul represents what Plato
actually believed to be true, and (3) that Plato’s dialogues can be divided
against themselves in this way. In contrast to the last of these, I regard all of
Plato’s dialogues as equally subservient to Plato the Teacher’s ultimate aim:
to teach us how to discover virtue for ourselves in the light of the transcen-
dent Good. In relation to that aim, neither Protagoras nor Republic 4 should
be regarded as any more or less “Socratic” than the other, for both are equally
Platonic, and for much the same reason: they both serve as springboards to
the Idea of the Good.
Obviously Ascent to the Good is only one part of an ongoing attempt to
demonstrate the dialectical unity—a unity, that is, that explains the disso-
nance between, for example, Protagoras and Republic 4 as deliberate rather
than doctrinal or developmental—of Plato’s pedagogical project as a whole.
To prove the existence of that project is my purpose throughout. Since the
Idea of the Good is central to that project, Plato the Teacher has already
defended a reading of Plato’s Republic that emphasizes the inadequacy—
however dialectically necessary that inadequacy may in fact be—of the
Shorter as opposed to the Longer Way. In this book, Protagoras and other
“Socratic dialogues” will play a similar role. Having now used texts from
Aristotle’s Politics and the Magna Moralia to situate a certain way of under-
standing Socrates in the context of a deeply flawed way of reading Plato’s
Republic, it is now time to demonstrate Aristotle’s dependence on Protago-
ras, using for that purpose his Nicomachean Ethics.

72
 Terry Penner, “Thought and Desire in Plato” in Gregory Vlastos (ed.), Plato: A Collection of Criti-
cal Essays, II: Ethics, Politics, and Philosophy of Art and Religion, 96–118 (London: Macmillan,
1971), 96n1. Penner’s most significant publication on Prt. (note the absence of Plato in its title)
is Terry Penner, “Socrates on the Strength of Knowledge: Protagoras 351b–357e.” Archiv für die
Geschichte der Philosophie 79 (1997), 117–149.
 Aristotle and Plato lvii

In the canonical work on Le témoignage d’Aristote sur Socrate (1942),

Father Thomas Deman identified four passages from the Ethics—there are
also six from the Eudemian Ethics73—that name Socrates, but only three of
them relate to intellectualism;74 writing in English, Anton-Hermann Chroust
divided one of these three into two, and added another that does not actually
name Socrates.75 In his comments on the three relevant passages, Deman cites
Protagoras as the principal source for all three;76 Chroust identifies Protago-
ras as the source of four of the five, the partial exception being part of one of
Deman’s three.77 As far as the rest of the corpus Aristotelicum is concerned,
there is naturally a ripple effect: for example when the author of the Magna
Moralia claims that Socrates identified the virtues with ἐπιστῆμαι, he is echo-
ing one of Deman’s three passages from Nicomachean Ethics, which in turn
echoes the end of Protagoras (Prt. 361b).78 But by far the most famous of
these passages relates to Socrates’ denial of ἀκρασία:

For Socrates [Σωκράτης] was thinking that it would be strange if—with

knowledge being present—some other thing should overpower it, and ‘drag
it about like a slave [περιέλκειν αὐτὴν ὥσπερ ἀνδράποδον].’ In fact Socrates
[Σωκράτης] used to combat the view altogether, as there being no such thing as

73
 D17, D23, D29, D30, D35, and D36.
74
 The outlier is D24; the relevant passages are D31, D37, and D40.
75
 See Chroust, “Socrates,” 352–355; he divides D40 and describes the additional passage on 354:
“Nicomachean Ethics 1113b14–17 contains a reference to the saying that ‘no one [οὐδείς] is
wicked by his own volition [ἑκών] nor happy against his will.’ This reference, which probably
alludes to Socrates, has a parallel in Protagoras 345d.”
76
 See Deman, Le témoignage, 91 (on D31), 102–104 (on D37)—both La. and Xenophon’s Memora-
bilia, 3.9.1–3 are also mentioned as possible sources—and 112–115 (on D40).
77
 Chroust, “Socrates,” 354: “Nicomachean Ethics 1147b3–15 [this is the last part of D40] is based
on the Charmides in general.” For the current status quaestionis, cf. Louis-André Dorion, “The
Rise and Fall of the Socrates Problem” in Donald R. Morrison (ed.) The Cambridge Companion
to Socrates, 1–23 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 16: “Regarding Aristotle,
the vast majority of positions that he attributes to Socrates can be traced to Plato’s dialogues, so it
is difficult to concede that Aristotle’s account of Socrates constitutes an independent source.” Cf.
Nicholas D. Smith, “Aristotle on Socrates,” in Alessandro Stavru and Christopher Moore (eds.),
Socrates and the Socratic Dialogues, 601–622 (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2018), best under-
stood as a response to “skeptics” (like Dorion; cf. 602n5) who “dismiss the Aristotelian testimony
as too dependent on Plato” (602).
78
 The passage in Magna Moralia about Socrates (1182a15–23) quoted above is D32; on it see
Deman, Le témoignage, 92–94; his comments on D33 (Magna Moralia 1183b8–11) on 95 are more
interesting, especially on the use of the plural ἐπιστῆμαι: “Cette constance de la formule dans les
trois Éthiques est remarquable.”
lviii Introduction

incontinence [ἀκρασία], maintaining that nobody [οὐδείς] acts contrary to what

is best [πράττειν παρὰ τὸ βέλτιστον] except through ignorance.79

This is the only text in Nicomachean Ethics that uses Plato’s own words
while referring to something Σωκράτης says in Protagoras—hence Harris
Rackham’s decision to use quotation marks—but it is important to note that
in addition to the direct allusion (Prt. 352c1–2), the reference to the Socratic
Paradox beginning with οὐδείς is based on other passages in Protagoras as
well (Prt. 345d9–e4 and 358b6–c1).80 Given the “obvious reference,”81 it is
impossible to claim that Σωκράτης (here without the definite article) refers
to “the historical Socrates” as opposed to the Socrates Aristotle finds in “the
Socratic literature,”82 and naturally those who want Aristotle to offer indepen-
dent information about Socrates do whatever they can to resist the point that
Heinrich Maier made with emphasis: “Aristotle’s notices about Socrates’ ethi-
cal views do not possess a self-standing authority as a source [einen selbständ­
igen Quellenswert],”83 that is, that Aristotle’s acquaintance with Socrates

79
 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 7.3; 1145b23–27 (Rackham modified), that is, D40, on which see
Deman, Le témoignage, 112–114. Note that Fr. Deman himself, although preserving the insights
of Maier and others, concludes his discussion of Aristotle’s testimony with the following at least
semi-circular claim (116): “Le rapport de nos textes avec le Protagoras n’autorise nullement à
penser que cette pensée socratique n’aurait eu aux yeux d’Aristote qu’une existence littéraire.
Il invite bien plutôt à reconnaître le valeur documentaire que possède, pour les éléments tout au
moins qu’Aristote en a retenus, ce dialogue de Platon.”
80
 See Chroust, “Socrates,” for the suggestion that another passage (Prt. 357c–e) “might possibly be
detected at the bottom of Nicomachean Ethics 1145b21–27.”
81
 Cf. Sir Alexander Grant, Bart., Ethics of Aristotle; Illustrated with Essays and Notes, two volumes,
fourth edition, revised (London: Longmans, Green, 1885), 2.197: “The omission of the article
before seems to show that the real man, and not the personage of Plato’s dialogues, is referred to,
(see above, note on Eth. 6.13.3 [Grant discusses Bishop Fitzgerald on 188]), but yet the words of
the passage before us have obvious reference to Protagoras 352b.” This is a distinct improvement
on Ross, who does not mention 1145b23–24 in his defense of “Fitzgerald’s canon.”
82
 On Aristotle’s references to οἱ Σωκρατικοὶ λόγοι, see D1–D3 and Deman, Le témoignage, 25–33,
especially this on 29: “Il serait aussi absurde de croire qu’Aristote ici ne pense pas principale-
ment aux discours de Platon que de supposer qu’il entend quelque autre auteur lorsqu’il dit dans
Politiques, 1265a11 [sc. the passage from 2.6 quoted and discussed above], que tous le λόγοι de
Socrate montrent τὸ περιττὸν καὶ τὸ κομψὸν καὶ τὸ καινοτόμον καὶ {τὸ} ζητητικόν.” See also
Deman’s justification on 9 for excluding consideration of Aristotle’s use of οἱ τοῦ Σωκράτους
λόγοι to describe Laws.
83
 Maier, Sokrates, 90. Cf. C. C. W. Taylor, “Socratic Ethics” in Barry S. Gower and Michael C.
Stokes (eds.), Socratic Questions: New Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates and its Significance,
137–152 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), on 138: “Of course, we cannot simply take it
for granted that Aristotle’s evidence is independent of Plato.”
 Aristotle and Plato lix

was exclusively literary.84 About the literary basis of Aristotle’s remarks

about “Socratic intellectualism,” Maier is specific: “They derive neither from
an oral tradition nor from a judicious critical study of the Socratic literature;
in short they are obtained from the Platonic Protagoras.”85 Although Chroust
endorses this conclusion,86 it is Maier alone who makes the following point:

In reality, it is merely out of interest in the subject that Aristotle in the Nicoma-
chean Ethics wants to grapple with a particular ethical theory that he finds sup-
ported literarily in Plato’s Protagoras.87

By suggesting that Aristotle is deriving an ethical theory from Protagoras

and attributing it to Socrates for the principal purpose of disagreeing with it
and then proving its inadequacy, Maier opens the door to the possibility that
Aristotle was at least in part doing what Plato expected all of us to do, just as
I am claiming he did when he objected to Plato’s definition of a point as an
indivisible line. But in another sense, Aristotle is once again missing Plato’s
real point: he fails to entertain the possibility that Plato himself, not Socrates,
is responsible for whatever inadequacies “Socratic intellectualism” may have,
whether with respect to the tripartite soul, the dramatic circumstance of Pro-
tagoras itself, or both.88 Naturally Aristotle does not examine the passage he
quotes in context, and therefore neither asks himself why Socrates compares
knowledge to a slave nor examines the role that Protagoras’ response to
Socrates’ words play in the famous sophist’s eventual defeat. While further

84
 For an exclusively literary solution to Aristotle’s curious use of “the older Socrates” (D17, D29, and
D40), cf. [Aristotle], Magna Moralia, 1183b9–10 (D33) with Plt. 283b4–5; Aristotle, Metaphysics,
1036b24, with Plt. 262a3–263c6; and Ernst Kapp, “Sokrates der Jüngere.” Philologus 79 (1933),
225–233, 230 (on Kriterium) with Plt. 263b6–10; on this account, the author of Magna Moralia
should have identified his ὁ Σωκράτῆς as “the younger Socrates” (since neither Xenophon’s nor
Plato’s Socrates ever says the kind of thing we find in Politics, 1253a9) and what Aristotle calls the
παραβολή of the Younger Socrates in Metaphysics would be believing that δυ’ εἶναι ζῷων γένη (Plt.
263c5–6), a juxtaposition ἐπὶ τοῦ ζῷου that confuses μέρος and εἶδος.
85
 Maier, Sokrates, 90.
86
 Chroust, “Socrates,” 355: “From this [sc. 348–354] we may conclude that the Aristotelian refer-
ences as found in the Nicomachian Ethics, have Plato’s Protagoras as their primary source or
model.” His remarks on the Eudemian Ethics and Magna Moralia follow on 355–360, ending with
a similar statement.
87
 Maier, Sokrates, 91.
88
 My own position on this question, discussed below in §3, is anticipated by Mark L. McPherran,
“Socratic Piety in The Euthyphro.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 23, no. 3 (July 1985),
293–309, on 309: “Piety is also linked to the rest of the virtues by philosophy. That is, the human
knowledge of the virtues sought by philosophy is only possible by performing a pious activity
which, if performed correctly, results in the proper knowledge of piety.” Like philosophy (cf. Smp.
204a1–b5 and Ly. 218a2–b3), piety and “the rest of the virtues” depend as much on (Socratic)
ignorance as on knowledge, and the knowledge in question is what Socrates means by “human
wisdom” (Ap. 20d8 and 23a7; cf. Guardians on Trial, 38–41), not the kind that would unify the
virtues in Prt. even if Socrates were sincerely seeking it.
lx Introduction

discussion of such things will be found elsewhere,89 the unique place of

Protagoras in the ROPD—a matter that will receive further attention in §11
below—suggests why Aristotle found more of Socrates than Plato in that
brilliant dialogue.
When he first encountered Socrates, Aristotle was a seventeen-year old stu-
dent at the Academy.90 Being something of a country bumpkin by Athenian
standards when he did so,91 it was natural that Protagoras in particular would
have a great impact on him, as it clearly did,92 and he therefore assumed that
the Socrates he met in it was the real one. By the time he found this same
Socrates saying incompatible things in Republic—perhaps now under the
sixty-year-old Plato’s own tutelage, perhaps not—he explained the discrep-
ancies with the hypothesis, unconfirmed by Plato himself but perhaps widely
shared by his students,93 that the Socrates of this lengthy and extraordinary
dialogue was no longer Socrates himself but Plato. Quite apart from Socrates,
then, this was a misreading of Republic: it was in book 7, not in book 4 that
the tracks of Plato were really to be sought. But having refused to seek him
there—and that means having failed to find him—the erstwhile bumpkin, who
would blossom into Plato’s most famous critic by replacing the GoodT by the
GoodE, found less and less reason to reject the Socrates of Protagoras for the
sake of Republic 7, and therefore made the necessary division elsewhere, in a
place commensurate with his reading of Republic as a whole.
The easiest way to misunderstand the things Socrates says in Protagoras—as
I am claiming Aristotle did and as so many others have done—is to ignore the
fact that Plato has staged an unforgettable contest in the garden of Callias (ἀγών
at Prt. 335a4), and that Socrates says what he says there in order to win it,
never more so, indeed, than when he twits Protagoras for allowing knowledge
to be dragged about like a slave (Prt. 352b1–c7) in order to overcome his initial
reluctance (Prt. 351b7–d7) to accept the equation of the Good and the Pleas-
ant (cf. Prt. 351b7–c1, 355b3–c8, and 358a5–6). We will therefore only solve
he riddle of Aristotle’s Socrates when we realize that Aristotle too is engaged
in an ἀγών:94 he thinks that the Socrates of Plato’s Protagoras is wrong about

89
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §2.
90
 See Kapp, “Sokrates der Jüngere,” 225–226, citing Aristotelis qui ferebantur librorum fragmenta
collegit Valentinus Rose (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1886). For analysis, see Ingemar Düring, Aristo-
tle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1957), part 3, chapter
6, and following note.
91
 Cf. “provincial pupil” in Carlo Natali, Aristotle: His Life and School, edited and translated by D.
S. Hutchinson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 17.
92
 See Henry Jackson, “Aristotle’s Lecture-Room and Lectures.” Journal of Philology 35 (1920),
191–200, for the claim that there was a painting of Socrates’ feigned departure from the garden of
Callias in his classroom.
93
 Cf. Maier, Sokrates, 78: “Daß die Ideenlehre Platos ausschließliches Eigentum war, das war, ohne
zweifel auch innerhalb der Akademie, ein offentliches Geheimnis.”
94
 Cf. Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates, 4.
 Aristotle and Plato lxi

ἀκρασία and the virtues, but instead of seeing Plato’s hand in making him so,
he can gain a victory over a great Athenian philosopher by treating him as sim-
ply Socrates and using Plato’s own considerable authority against him.
But the more important phase of Aristotle’s ongoing ἀγών is with Plato,
and it was therefore not enough to use the authority of (the Shorter Way) Plato
against Socrates: in the decisive case, he would use the authority of (someone
else’s version of) Socrates against Plato.95 If Maier is correct that Xenophon’s
Memorabilia 4.6.13–14 played a decisive part in Aristotle’s description of
Socrates’ methodological contributions,96 this shows that he could use a non-
or at least pre-Platonist Socrates against the separate Ideas, a task for which
any version of Plato’s Socrates was ill-suited.97 Aristotle’s decision to split
Plato from Socrates in the way he did therefore had the following advantages
for him: (1) he could use (Xenophon’s version of) Socrates against Plato
on the Ideas while going (the now apparently real) Socrates one better by
erecting the mighty syllogism on those rude foundations, (2) he could use (a
Shorter Way version of) Plato against (the) Socrates (of Protagoras) on the
presence of τὸ ἄλογον in the soul while going on to offer a much improved
syllogistic account of ἀκρασία, and (3) by playing both of his rivals off
against each other (concealing the parenthetical qualifications I have added
while doing so), surpassing both even when they were right, he could win the
ἀγών, for it was only by overthrowing both Socrates and Plato that Aristotle
becomes the greatest Greek philosopher. While exploring the stratagems of
this ambitious and able competitor, however, it would be a mistake to lose
sight of the bumpkin altogether.
Regardless of Aristotle’s motives or personal experiences, the long-term
result proves the process to be a circular one:

Aristotle was a both a historicist about Socrates, and also a developmentalist

about the appearance of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues. Perhaps either or both

95
 Cf. Gail Fine, “Separation.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 2 (1984), 31–87 (last word).
96
 And I believe that he is; indeed reading Maier’s discovery of this connection (Sokrates, 91–102)
is what we used to call “a mind-blowing experience,” and his finding is not easily dismissed,
especially given Heinrich Maier, Die Syllogistik des Aristoteles, three volumes (Tübingen: H.
Laupp, 1896–1900). Note that Smith, who believes he is defending the independent value of Aris-
totle’s testimony by emphasizing his reliance on Xenophon as well as Plato—see “Aristotle and
Socrates,” 602–603, 608–609, and especially 613–614—does not mention this aspect of Memora-
bilia 4.6 (cf. 608) and cites Maier only in passing (601n2).
97
 Cf. Maier, Sokrates, 94: “Aber ist es überhaupt denkbar, daß Aristoteles den scharf pontierten
Gegensatz, den er zwischen der sokratischen und der platonischen Doktrin konstruiert, doch wieder
zuletzt auf Platos Zeugnis stützte?” What gives Maier’s pages their tremendous shock value (see
previous note) is that although he has already raised the logically prior question “wie ist Aristoteles
zu dieser Auffassung der sokratischen ‘Philosophie’ gekommen?” (93) before the first question
I quoted; he will answer both three sentences after it: “niemand anderes als—Xenophon.” Inci-
dentally, my “any version” is too strong: the Socrates of Phlb. is best suited to this purpose, but
Aristotle could scarcely identify Socrates with “him,” for there he was more likely to find himself.
lxii Introduction

of these positions are mistakes. But if they are mistakes, at least contempo-
rary historicist developmentalists can count themselves as being in very good
company—and as taking an approach to ‘Socratic philosophy’ that has very
deep roots in the history of thought that go all the way back to the time of
Plato.98

Nicholas Smith is right, and those roots go all the way back to Aristotle’s first
encounter with Protagoras. The problem is that while defenders of the Order
of Composition paradigm regard the “early” or “Socratic” dialogues as the
validation of Aristotle’s testimony, it is really Aristotle’s testimony about the
intellectualism of “the historical Socrates,” derived from his characteristically
deadpan reading of Protagoras, that is the basis of the Order of Composition
paradigm.99 In the Reading Order paradigm, by contrast, it is Plato’s students
who are expected to develop beyond their initial response to Protagoras—
especially since that response was likely to be a thoroughly bemused confu-
sion100—but not by dividing Plato from Socrates, and least of all by doing so
on the basis of imagining that Plato reveals himself in his mighty Republic
along the Shorter Way.
If, as I believe, Socrates in Plato’s dialogues is never anything more or less
than Plato’s Socrates, he is—to hammer the point—always advancing the
pedagogical goals of his creator. But when quarantined between by a pre- or
even anti-Platonist Socrates in the early dialogues, and a post-Platonist Plato
teaching the Prinzipienlehre in the late ones, “the middle cannot hold,” and
thus an Anglo-German Alliance—one that bridges the Analytic-Continental
divide—makes it difficult to prize Platonism free from the two mighty book-
ends that confine it, especially because the most radical of the Anglo-Amer-
ican “Socratists” are just as intent on finding Aristotle’s version of Socrates
in the late dialogues as the scholars of Tübingen are on finding the Unwritten

98
 Smith, “Aristotle on Socrates,” 620. Cf. John M. Cooper, “Plato’s Theory of Human Motivation.”
History of Philosophy Quarterly 1, no. 1 (January 1984), 3–21, on 17n1: “verbal echoes with the
Protagoras (compare 352b8–c2) strongly suggest that he relied directly on Plato’s dialogues at
least some of the time for his conception of the historical Socrates’ philosophical views. So Aris-
totle’s treatment of Socrates confirms the correctness of this convention, however antecedently
dubious it might seem.”
99
 Cf. Gregory Vlastos, “Socrates.” Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988), 89–11, on 108:
“Thus the fact that in his account of all the main Socratic positions Aristotle records he relies so
heavily on Plato’s earlier dialogues as his source does not impair the value of his testimony. Quite
the contrary. It is a powerful attestation of the confidence he reposes in those dialogues as a source
of Socratic philosophy.”
100
 Cf. Charles H. Kahn, “Plato and Socrates in the Protagoras.” Méthexis; Revista argentina de
filosofia antigua 1 (1988), 33–52, on 36: “In the Protagoras, on the other hand, nothing is straight-
forward, everything is problematic: the hedonism, the final judgment of teachability, the nature
of virtue itself and the relation between its parts, not to mention the discussion of the Simonides
poem.”
 Aristotle and Plato lxiii

Teachings in the early ones. By “Socratists,”101 I mean those scholars who

follow Vlastos in reading the early dialogues of Plato as “Socratic dialogues,”
and thus as expressions of “the philosophy of Socrates” which Plato will then
modify or reject.
My objection to this approach is pedagogical and is based on Reading
Order. Instead of using Aristotle’s distinction between Socrates and Plato
to divide the early from the middle dialogues, I read the former as neces-
sary parts of an integrated curriculum whose purpose is to prepare students
for the latter.102 My goal, then, is to show that Plato’s dialogues are not “a
house divided against itself.” All thirty-five of them collectively constitute
a well-ordered, integrated, and essentially musical curriculum—one that
uses dissonance deliberately for the sake of a higher harmony—with a
unitary intent: to persuade the student to Return to the Cave. In the Preface,
I emphasized what Vlastos called “the Eudaemonist Axiom” (hereafter
“TEA”), and in Plato the Teacher, I reviewed the extensive scholarly
debate about the gap between the tripartite soul and the Guardian’s obliga-
tion to return to the Cave.103 Socratists direct our attention elsewhere: even
if TEA were undermined in Republic, it is unquestionably upheld in the
Socratic dialogues of Plato, and once those dialogues—thanks to Aristo-
tle—become an isolatable group, whatever problems may arise in Republic
are problems for Plato but not for Socrates.
But thanks to Aristotle once again, it is not the Allegory of the Cave in
Republic 7 but the tripartite soul of Republic 4 that has come to represent the
most significant difference between Socrates and Plato for the post-Vlastos
Socratists.104 In the nineteenth-century salad days of the Order of Composi-
tion paradigm, and arguably even for Vlastos himself,105 it was a different

101
 Cf. “Socraticism” in Michael C. Stokes, Plato’s Socratic Conversations: Drama and Dialectic in
Three Dialogues (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 321 and 452–453, and
“Socraticist” in Lloyd P. Gerson, From Plato to Platonism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2013), 49–50. See also 53: “The doyen of modern Socraticism in the English-speaking world is
unquestionably Gregory Vlastos.”
102
 Cf. Charles H. Kahn, “Plato and the Unity of the Virtues.” Phronesis, supplement volume 2
(1976), 21–39, on 24: “Plato may still be feeling his way in the Protagoras and the Meno. Or he
may be sure of the way but concerned for the moment only to prepare the minds of his readers
for the fuller statement to come.” He identifies Ernst Kapp as his teacher in this piece (37–38n2);
note also his parenthesis there: “I am sure that Symposium was written (or at least designed to be
read) before the Phaedo.” Not surprisingly, Kahn is the foremost Anglophone critic of the value of
Aristotle’s Socratic testimony; see especially his Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 79–87.
103
 See Plato the Teacher, §19.
104
 Cf. Cooper, “Plato’s Theory,” 3: “That Plato in the Republic is self-consciously rejecting this
Socratic theory [sc. ‘virtue is essentially a property of the intellect’] is by now well accepted
[thanks to whom?]; and most philosophical readers no doubt agree [once again with Aristotle]
that the Republic’s theory [cf. the article’s opening words: ‘everyone knows that in the Republic
Plato advances the theory that the soul has three independent parts’] is a distinct improvement.”
105
 Cf. Vlastos, Socrates, 53–80.
lxiv Introduction

story: the decisive dividing line was the status of the separate Forms, and the
relevant question in considering the place of each Socratic dialogue in Plato’s
Development was informed by its degree of distance between what Socrates
had to say there and the (fully developed) “Theory of Ideas.” As a result,
when Vlastos considers “Aristotle’s Testimony” in his Socrates, he divides
his attention unequally between using it to prove that the Theory of Ideas is
not Socratic and that the tripartite soul is exclusively Platonic.106 In discuss-
ing the latter he wrote: “Thus the Aristotelian view of Socrates unequivo-
cally assigns to him, in opposition to Plato, that intellectualist conception of
motivation and of the nature of moral virtue which reduces courage [note the
characteristic emphasis on Protagoras] and each of the other virtues to forms
of knowledge,” and then went on to use Aristotle’s reference to Protagoras
in the Nicomachean Ethics to show that Socrates, but not Plato, upheld “the
impossibility of incontinence,” which he called “that most perplexing of the
consequences of a reductively intellectualist psychology.”
It would be too much to say that these specific passages blazed the trail for
the more radical Socratists who would follow in Vlastos’s footsteps: albeit
on the basis of what they had learned from him, they had already turned
that trail into a highway by 1991. Ten years earlier, when Vlastos issued the
second edition of his Platonic Studies,107 he emphasized from the start that
he was now obliged to respond to a way of reading Protagoras introduced
by Penner in 1973,108 and then “adopted (with minor modifications)”109 by
C. C. W. Taylor and Terence Irwin;110 in the notes, he coins the acronym
“PTI” to stand for Penner, Taylor, and Irwin.111 It is to these scholars that
my term “radical Socratists” will refer, and I want to emphasize that all three
distinguish Socrates from Plato primarily on the basis of a deadpan reading
of Protagoras that upholds—again following Aristotle—Socrates’ denial of
incontinence in that dialogue as Socratic as opposed to Plato’s (later) moral
psychology based on the tripartite soul in Republic 4.112 I will reserve the

106
 Cf. Vlastos, Socrates, 91–95 and 95–97.
107
 Gregory Vlastos, Platonic Studies, second edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1981).
108
 Vlastos, Platonic Studies, xi; cf. Terry Penner, “The Unity of Virtue.” Philosophical Review 82
(1973), 35–68.
109
 Vlastos, Platonic Studies, xi.
110
 See C. C. W. Taylor (ed.), Plato, Protagoras; Translated with Notes, revised edition (Oxford:
Clarendon Press 1991 [first edition 1976]), and Terence Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory: The Early
and Middle Dialogues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
111
 Vlastos, Platonic Studies, 420 and 427.
112
 Cf. Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 313: “on the view Plato promotes in the Republic, human
beings combine rationality with irrationality. Further, the irrational in us [cf. τὸ ἄλογον] can over-
come the rational [cf. τὸ λόγον ἔχον]: we can behave ‘akratically,’ i.e. in an ‘un-self-controlled’
way. Again like the Plato of the Republic, Aristotle deliberately turns his back on Socratic
intellectualism.”
 Aristotle and Plato lxv

term “the most radical Socratists” for Penner and Rowe, who will play a
significant role in this book; what distinguishes them is a bold and eager will-
ingness to expand the reach of Socratism to include Symposium and Republic
6–7, above all by equating first Beauty and then the Good with εὐδαιμονία,113
i.e, by replacing the GoodT with the GoodE.
Both the contrast and continuity with Aristotle are striking. To begin with,
unlike Penner and Rowe, Aristotle knows that Plato’s Idea of the Good is not
εὐδαιμονία, and he attacks Plato primarily because it is not; in that crucial
sense, he is infinitely closer to understanding Plato than Penner and Rowe
are. But I have tried to show that despite some effort to conceal the fact,114
Aristotle is ultimately responsible for their errors. Although Aristotle rejected
the kind of intellectualism he found in Protagoras and attributed to Socrates,
he laid the foundations for the project Vlastos championed: to discriminate
the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues from the equally Platonic Socrates of
the middle and later ones. Building on the foundation Vlastos gave them,
the most radical Socratists—paradoxically by rejecting Aristotle’s critique
of Socrates, and thus defending the philosophy of Socrates against Plato’s
“moral psychology”—ultimately prove themselves true to his spirit, for
instead of rejecting Plato’s Idea of the Good as Aristotle did, their project is
to show that not even Plato embraced it, that is, that he was an Aristotelian
on the decisive question of the GoodE.115
My emphasis on the most radical Socratists in this book is best under-
stood as musical. By creating a ruthlessly coherent system of eudaemonist

113
 For useful discussion of Penner (62–67) and Rowe (68–72), see Gerson, Plato to Platonism,
62–72.
114
 See Christopher Rowe, “‘Just how Socratic are Plato’s “Socratic” dialogues? A response to
Charles Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue.” Plato: The Internet Journal of the International
Plato Society 2 (2002); http:​//gra​mata.​univ-​paris​1.fr/​Plato​/arti​cle30​.html (accessed September 15,
2016), especially “The Value of Aristotle’s Testimony,” about which he concludes: “So it would
be good if the case for a Socrates in Plato did not have to rely too heavily on him [sc. Aristotle].”
More accurate is an earlier remark: “The amount that Aristotle tells us is relatively small; but
he is always there, if the hypothesis of a Socratic period in Plato is in need of support. Indeed,
we could probably not have understood Aristotle’s brief remarks without the Socratic dialogues,
which serve to give them shape and sense.” Nor could we understand them as we do without those
remarks.
115
 As already indicated in the Preface, it is with Anglophone Socratists that I will be in dialogue as
far as the text is concerned; nevertheless, the importance of Stemmer, and especially of his 1992
Platons Dialektic, should not be overlooked. It is undervalued (“this is not a revolutionary work”)
by David Rankin, “Plato’s Dialectic.” Classical Review 44, no. 2 (1994), 297–298, and Günter
Figal takes Stemmer to task on 476 of “Platons Dialektik. Die frühen und mittleren Dialoge by
Peter Stemmer.” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 48, no. 3 (July–September 1994),
474–477, for failing to consider “die prinzipientheoretische und axiologische Bestimmung des
Guten in ihrer Zusammengehörigkeit” (a criticism that points to the possible synthesis of Tübin-
gen and radical Socratism) rather than for reducing the GoodT to the GoodE, which is principally
what makes his “a revolutionary work.” For a more thoughtful response to the crucial passage
(184) in Platons Dialektik, see Francisco J. Gonzalez, Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice of
Philosophical Inquiry (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 361n14.
lxvi Introduction

Socratism whereby all agents invariably pursue the good for themselves, the
astute Penner provides Rowe—a gifted, diabolically clever, and enviably eru-
dite classicist116—with a philosophical foundation that allows him to create a
powerful and revealing counter-point to Platonism. Since I do not think the
Athenian Stranger speaks for Plato, I do not regard the interplay of σύμφωνον
and ἀντίφωνον as deleterious to the learning process, nor do I believe that
Plato believed that ἑτεροφωνία conduces to δυσμάθεια (Lg. 812d4–e7). Dia-
lectic is therefore not only what takes place within the Platonic dialogues,
but also between them, forcing us to bring harmony out of dissonance. But it
also takes place outside of them, and by illuminating its apparently Socratic
or rather “Socratist” negation, the most radical Socratists make Platonism
conspicuous by its absence, and this makes them of inestimable value to a
Platonic rhapsode, that is, to one who is just as determined to say πολλὰ καὶ
καλά about Plato as Ion is about Homer but who must nevertheless enter into
a dialogue with Plato’s ablest critics for much the same reason that a musician
must be able “to play the rests” and not just the notes.
In identifying myself as a Platonic rhapsode—for nothing would make
me happier than reciting Plato aloud in Greek and expounding him in pub-
lic—I am admitting that Plato’s Ion is my favorite dialogue. And since Ion is
generally reckoned to be a preening and ignorant coxcomb, it certainly can-
not be construed as boastful to say that I identify with him, especially since
the way that he feels about Homer and Hesiod is exactly the way I feel about
Plato and Aristotle. Let me confess: the Stagirite puts me to sleep. Without
laying claim to divine inspiration, I freely admit that for me the interpretation
of Plato does not depend on a τέχνη: if it did, I would arguably be qualified
to be what I am not, that is, “a Professor of Ancient Philosophy,” equally
prepared to expound Aristotle and Plato, to say nothing of the Presocratics
and the Hellenistic schools. But here’s the thing, and this may well be con-
strued as boastful: not only do I think that there should be room in the field
for a high school teacher like me to publish books like mine, but I’m equally
certain that the characteristic τέχνη of the Professor of Ancient Philosophy,
largely because it demands equal expertise in Aristotle, has not served Plato
well, and in this Introduction, I have tried to show the sense in which it has
done him irreparable damage.
I will continue to write, however, in the naïf’s adolescent faith that this
damage can be repaired. Whereas most professors read Plato as if he were
one of them, I will read him as if he were a high school teacher—teaching

116
 He wrote his doctoral dissertation about Aristotle; it was published as C. J. Rowe, The Eudemian
and Nicomachean Ethics: A Study in the Development of Aristotle’s Thought (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge Philological Society, 1971). See also Christopher Rowe, “A Reply to John Cooper on
the Magna Moralia.” American Journal of Philology 96, no. 2 (Summer 1975), 160–172.
 Aristotle and Plato lxvii

seventeen year-old country bumpkins, as it were117—thus reenacting a naïve

and I hope pardonable instance of “to each his own.” But it sure is daunting
that a broad consensus among Professors of Ancient Philosophy has made
this so very difficult for me: the most accessible dialogues—not only Alcibi-
ades Major, Alcibiades Minor, and Erastai, but also Hippias Major and even
Ion—have either been purged from the canon or have narrowly escaped
being so, especially since if Aristotle had not mentioned Lesser Hippias and
Menexenus, they too would have fallen under the ban.118 Nor is this the only
example, as I have tried to show, of Aristotle having come to possess the
ultimate authority in deciding how Plato should be read, an authority that no
matter what his other merits may be, the author of Politics 2.6 clearly does
not deserve. In any case, if we could be sure that Plato had not used these
elementary dialogues to introduce youngsters to philosophy, perhaps they
really would be unworthy of him.
But since we know that he was a teacher, and that his dialogues are emi-
nently teachable, would someone please explain to me why it is that a high
school teacher from the United States of America gets the chance to be
original in the twenty-first century A.D. for suggesting that Plato used his dia-
logues—once having been arranged in a progressive and symphonic order—
to teach his students in the Academy? Pending some other explanation for
this amazing oversight, I blame an overreliance on Aristotle. Temperamen-
tally unsuited to understand the musical playfulness of Platonic pedagogy,
philosophically allergic to Platonism as a direct result of that unsuitability,
and determined to become a great philosopher in his own right—arguably the
greatest of them all, if, that is, he could surpass both Socrates and Plato—
Aristotle has taught too many professors to read Plato as if they were read-
ing someone like him. They are not.119 A Platonist, by contrast, must see the
invisible and hear the unheard, and Plato’s readers are making music, playing
the rests as well as the notes, and resolving their teacher’s deliberate disso-
nances in the inspired precincts of their awestruck souls as they make their
ascent to the Idea of the Good.

117
 Cf. Field, Plato and his Contemporaries, 37: “This [sc. Aristotle’s arrival at the Academy] was in
367, when he was seventeen years old, an interesting indication of the age at which it was possible
to begin study there.” Cf. “15–18” on 38n3.
118
 See W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, six volumes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1967–1981), 4.191 and 4.312.
119
 Introduced in Gregory Vlastos, “The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides.” The Philosophical
Review 63, no. 3 (July 1954), 319–349, “the Self-Predication Assumption” (i.e., “any Form can
be predicated of itself” on 324) is based on the Aristotle-inspired notion that we are predicating
goodness of the Form “the Good.” We are not. The luminosity of the predicate shines forth as Idea.
 Chapter 1

Lysis-Euthydemus
Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως
after Symposium

§1. THE GOOD AND THE BEAUTIFUL

IN PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM

The last chapter in Ascent to the Beautiful centered on Symposium, and

its concluding section identified the critical moment in Socrates’ Diotima
discourse as the implementation of the GB Equation at 204d4–e7:1 when
Socrates finds it impossible to say what the lover of “the beautiful things”
gains from them, Diotima makes it easier (εὐπορώτερον) for him to respond
that the one who gains “the good things” will be happy (204e6–7).
By paying close attention to the wording of the more difficult and as yet
unanswered question—“what [τί] will there be [future of εἶναι] for that man
for whom [the dative ᾧ] the beautiful things [τὰ καλά] come to be [γενέσθαι]?”
(204d8–9)—I showed that it is finally answered at 211d8–212a7: having
properly climbed the ladder (ἐπαναβασμός at 211c3) of τὰ καλά, it is the
wondrous vision of the Beautiful Itself (αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν at 211e1), “precise,
pure, unmixed,” that is achieved at the end of the ascent. The eudaemonist
answer, by contrast, achieved effortlessly as a result of substituting ἀγαθόν
for καλόν, is merely a rung on Diotima’s ladder, indeed the stage of the climb
that the philosophic lover must specifically transcend. And it is more: it is a
shortcut that Plato uses to prefigure the Shorter Way in Republic,2 the inad-
equacy of which we are already being prepared and challenged to discover.3

1
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §17. All otherwise unidentified references in this section are to Smp.
2
 See Plato the Teacher, chapter 3.
3
 Cf. Erler, Der Sinn der Aporien, 262–265 and 289–290; unfortunately, Erler frequently tacks toward
Tübingen, especially at the end (294–295; cf. 291n50).

1
2 Chapter 1

The division between Ascent to the Beautiful and Ascent to the Good arises
from two different ways of interpreting the implementation of GB Equation
at this crucial passage’s center. Only the first of these ascents, described in
the earlier book, leads to the post-eudaemonist vision of the Idea of Beauty.
This book, by contrast, will explore the other alternative, and follow, to the
extent possible, the apparently easier pathway of regarding the substitution
as legitimate, revealing, and paradigmatically “Socratic.” By starting with
the GB Equation and then by identifying the acquisition of good things (τὰ
ἀγαθά) as the basis for securing the happiness all of us seek (205a2–8), this
pathway’s destination is my own happiness and/or whatever it is that maxi-
mizes it.4
To be perfectly clear: I regard only the first of these paths as the legiti-
mate one, and maintain that it alone is consonant with Symposium, Republic,
and all the dialogues between them. This does not mean, however, that the
other path is nothing more than an Aristotle-inspired misreading of “Plato’s
Ethics,”5 even though it is that as well (see Introduction). Instead of simply
dismissing the eudaemonist reading of the dialogues between Symposium and
Republic—the kind of reading championed by those who regard (most of)
them as (most of) “Plato’s Socratic dialogues” (see Preface)—I will argue
in what follows that it was the musical Plato who made this kind of reading
possible, erroneous though he regarded it to be, and that he did so deliber-
ately, providing for his readers in the process a kind of “gymnastic” exercise.
How can this be? Informing Plato the Teacher as a whole,6 the answer to this
question is that Plato uses basanistic pedagogy.7
In the Preface, I mentioned “triangulation” in the context of unitarian and
revisionist readings of the post-Republic dialogues, yielding a kind of dialec-
tical unitarianism based on a radicalized version of the revisionist approach
to Plato’s “late dialogues.” A similarly triangulating strategy will now be
applied to the dialogues between Symposium and Republic. In the case of the
late dialogues, revisionism maintains that Plato revises, modifies, or rejects
the characteristically or traditionally “Platonic” positions of the middle
period, a commitment to the separate and transcendent Ideas in particular.
Instead of minimizing the extent of this revision, as traditional unitarians
must do, I follow the most extreme revisionists in reading, for example, Soph-
ist, as a radical rejection of Plato’s own position as the foremost “friend of

4
 For the problem requiring this use “and/or,” see §2 below.
5
 Cf. Terence Irwin, Plato’s Ethics (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
6
 By adding “as a whole” to Plato the Teacher, I will hereafter refer to all five volumes devoted to
the reconstruction of the ROPD; without that addition, it will refer only to the third and central
volume of that series.
7
 See principle §7 in the Preface.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 3

the forms.”8 Only in this way can “the late dialogues” meaningfully test the
reader’s commitment to the Ideas.

For myself, I prefer a more radical solution, for I have serious doubts about the
importance, for the whole Socratic-Platonic project, of Platonic Forms (what-
ever these may turn out to be).9

Provocatively and programmatically in his “The Symposium as a Socratic

Dialogue,” but with more detail in his 1998 commentary on the dialogue,10
Christopher Rowe has made the best possible case for a strictly eudaemonist
reading of the Diotima discourse that challenges the true and time-honored
notion that “Beauty itself” is a transcendent “Platonic Form.”
By examining the strengths and weaknesses of that case, I will lay the
groundwork not only for juxtaposing Symposium with Lysis, as Rowe does
as well,11 but also for placing Lysis directly after Symposium in the ROPD.
Although I will be arguing that Lysis along with Euthydemus is importantly
concerned with the closely related question of Socrates’ deliberate use of fal-
lacy (§3), it is primarily the reader’s grasp of the transcendent Beautiful, just
introduced in Symposium, that is being tested in the basanistic Lysis. As a
result, the student can only pass that test by rejecting the deliberately inad-
equate but nevertheless teacher-created alternative, based on the GB Equa-
tion (Smp. 204e1–2; cf. 201c1–2), that Plato has already imbedded as an
outgrown stage in the Diotima discourse. And this, of course, is exactly what
Rowe thinks that it isn’t.12 And there is even more at stake, further justifying
this emphasis on the most radical Socratists. Thanks to Penner’s influence on
Rowe, emphasized by the latter in his commentary’s Preface,13 this section

8
 See Guardians on Trial, §2; more general remarks on Revisionism and Unitarianism will be found
in Guardians in Action, §13.
9
 Christopher Rowe, “The Symposium as a Socratic Dialogue” in J. H. Lesher, Debra Nails, and
Frisbee C. C. Sheffield (eds.), Plato’s Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception, 9–23
(Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2006), 18.
10
 See C. J. Rowe (ed.), Plato: Symposium; Edited with Introduction, Translation and Notes (Oxford:
Aris and Phillips, 1998).
11
 Rowe, “Symposium as Socratic Dialogue,” 23n31: “I further, and more radically, propose that even
the Republic itself should be seen as building on the outcomes of the Lysis and the Symposium,
rather than overturning them.” On this basis, he can place Smp. among the “early” or “Socratic”
dialogues; see Christopher Rowe, “Socrates in Plato’s Dialogues” in Sara Ahbel-Rappe and
Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), A Companion to Socrates, 159–170 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006),
165, 169n1, and 170n4.
12
 Cf. Laszlo Versényi, Socratic Humanism, with a Foreword by Robert S. Brumbaugh (New Haven,
CT and London: Yale University Press, 1963), 176 (last word): “Oedipus at Thebes still remains
more admirable [καλός?] than Oedipus at Colonus, and Socrates in the Apology, the Socrates of
the lesser myseries, a greater man than Socrates in the Phaedo and in the Greater Mysteries of the
Symposium.”
13
 Rowe, Plato: Symposium, viii: “and above all to Terry Penner, whose influence on the present
volume is out of a all proportion to the single acknowledgement to him that it contains.”
4 Chapter 1

not only prepares for the discussion of Lysis and Euthydemus in the context
of Reading Order (i.e., this chapter’s subject), but also raises the single most
important question about the ROPD’s spiritual center: the Allegory of the
Cave in Republic 7. Before returning to Rowe’s reading of Symposium, some
preliminary remarks about Platonism are therefore necessary.
In Plato the Teacher, I examined the various attempts that have been made
in the last century to explain or dissolve what Donald Morrison has aptly
called “the great messy hairball”14 in Plato’s Republic. Dissolving this prob-
lem has led to an ongoing attempt to show that the choice for justice can be
defended on a eudaemonist basis—and more specifically given the account
of justice in book 4—that can explain (away) why philosophers would return
to the Cave at the expense of their own happiness.15 As I understand it,
Platonism is best understood as Plato’s answer to this question: it is in the
light of the transcendent Idea of the Good (i.e., the GoodT) that Plato’s true
Guardians return to the Cave, and as illustrated and instantiated by that return,
Justice—always with the capital “J” to distinguish it from the paired defini-
tions of justice in Republic 4—is the voluntary sacrifice of Happiness (i.e.,
the GoodE) in the light of the GoodT.16
Although “An Intellectual History of the Return”17 naturally takes account
of Irwin, Vlastos, and David Sachs,18 the story begins in 1912 with the words
of H. A. Prichard:

To show that Plato really justifies morality by its profitableness, it is only nec-
essary to point out (1) that the very formulation of the thesis to be met, viz.,

14
 Cf. Donald Morrison, “The Utopian Character of Plato’s Ideal City” in G. R. F. Ferrari, The Cam-
bridge Companion to Plato’s Republic, 232–255 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 242–243: “the great messy hairball of the issue that is the philosopher’s return to the cave
has no clear resolution without importing a great deal that is not explicit in the text, so any answer
that is put forward by its advocates is speculative.” What actually creates the problem is the incon-
sistency of the eudaemonist definition of justice reached in book 4 (along the Shorter Way) with
a return to the Cave that is evidently not in the self-interest of the Guardian; it is therefore not a
question of importing—the resolution has been present from the dialogue’s opening word—but of
subtracting, i.e., of regarding the Shorter Way as deliberately inadequate.
15
 Cf. Stemmer, “Grundriss,” 541n34 (“kann ich hier nicht nachgehen”) with Penner, “The Good,
Advantage, Happiness,” 132n36: “I realize that this lecture leaves hanging many explananda: for
example, the qualitative preponderance of political—and utterly non-Socratic—material [sc. in
R.]: will it all be adequately accounted for by the change in Plato’s psychology of action? Another
example: the guardians’ motives for returning to the cave, and the like. I shall try to deal with each
such difficulty as it shows up, or, at any rate, as I become able to do so clearly and convincingly.”
16
 Cf. Jorgensen, Embodied Soul, 158: “Political activism is a burden that the philosopher might in
certain circumstances have to assume, but it is not an integral part of the good life. On the contrary,
any engagement in politics will come at the cost of the philosopher’s own eudaimonia.”
17
 Plato the Teacher, §19.
18
 Cf. David Sachs, “A Fallacy in Plato’s Republic.” Philosophical Review 72, no. 2 (April 1963),
141–158, and Plato the Teacher, 217–218. For the response of Vlastos to Sachs, see 219–221;
Irwin’s Symposium-based solution is discussed on 226–227.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 5

that justice is ἀλλοτριὸν ἀγαθόν [another’s good], implies that any refutation
must consist in showing that justice is οἴκειον ἀγαθόν, i.e. really, as the context
shows, one’s own advantage, and (2) that the term λυσιτελεῖν [to be profitable
to] supplies the keynote not only to the problem but to its solution.19

In this context, consider the conclusion of Rowe’s comment on Symposium

206a1–2 (“there is nothing else that people are in love with except the good”):

It may well be better, as Terry Penner has proposed to me in conversation [this

is the acknowledgement mentioned above], to go in the direction suggested
by Prichard: ‘{t}here is no escaping the conclusion that when P. sets himself
to consider not what should but what actually does, as a matter of fact, lead a
man to act, when he is acting deliberately, and not merely in consequence of an
impulse, he answers: ‘The desire for some good to himself and that only’ (H.
A. Prichard, ‘Duty and Interest,’ reprinted in Moral Obligation, second edition,
Oxford, 1968, 218).20

By acknowledging his debt to Prichard here, Rowe inadvertently but usefully

situates his reading of Symposium in the context of my reading of Republic.
Under-determined as it may otherwise appear to be,21 the Idea of the Good
in Republic 6–7 cannot be “the Good” to which Penner’s citation of Prichard
is pointing Rowe. Whether as Happiness or whatever it is that achieves or
maximizes it, it is our Good that is desired, and thus a thing to be achieved
by us and in our lives.22 Forcefully imaged as outside the Cave in which
we—“our bodies, our selves”—are confined, the Idea of the Good can only
be reached once the Guardian-in-training has been weaned from confusing it
with “some good to himself and that only,” and in a nutshell, this is the lesson
plan of the dialogues under consideration in Ascent to the Good. The earli-
est evidence that the Idea of the Good cannot be this kind of embodied or
egoistic Good is the ascent to the Beautiful that culminates in Symposium,
where αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν has been revealed as “pure, clean, unmixed, and not
contaminated with things like human flesh, and color, and much other mortal
nonsense” (Smp. 211e1–3; translation Rowe). This is why Beauty as revealed

19
 H. A. Prichard, “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” Mind (n.s.) 21, no. 81 (January
1912), 21–37, at 22–23.
20
 Rowe, Plato: Symposium, 181. Prichard gave this lecture in 1928. See Plato the Teacher, 210n65
for the influence of John Cook Wilson on Prichard; for Cook Wilson himself, see Index entries
in Guardians in Action, 495 and Guardians on Trial, 579; in the latter, 444n391 is particularly
important.
21
 See Iakovos Vasiliou, Aiming at Virtue in Plato (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2008), 31n26, 40n46, 230, 230n35, 243, and 259.
22
 Hence the dialectical importance of Penner, “The Forms,” beginning with (191): “It can be very
tempting indeed.”
6 Chapter 1

in Symposium is recalled in Republic 5 (R. 479a1–2) as a first stage on the

ascent to the Idea of the Good.
But the opposite point of view has its uses. Consider this illuminating pas-
sage by Heda Segvic, on which I have commented in brackets:

We should set aside the complaint [no we shouldn’t; it is this very problem
that leads us home] that Socrates wavers between two different questions—the
question of what is good [sc. the GoodT], and the question of what is good for
the agent [sc. the GoodE]. The more basic question for him is: what is good? He
does also think that everyone seeks his own good [the basis for this ‘also’ will
be central to this study]. However, since ‘what is good for the agent’ has little
antecedent content [my emphasis] it is left open what the content of the ultimate
good will turn out to be. The ultimate good need not be egoistic.23

The great benefit derived from Penner’s Socratism is that it fills in Segvic’s
missing “antecedent content” by configuring the GoodE as necessarily
egoistic. By doing so, Penner helps us to see why Plato can leave “the
ultimate good”—about which Segvic is right, both about “the more basic
question” and that it “need not be egoistic”—otherwise underdetermined.
In other words, rather than reaching a non-egoistic ultimate good through the
underdetermined character of the GoodE—as Segvic is suggesting that we
should—it is the egoistic over-determination of it by the most radical Socrat-
ists that leads us home, through dialectic, to the otherwise underdetermined
but necessarily transcendent GoodT.
The following gives some indication, appropriately antithetical to my own
purpose, of what “dialectic” means in this context:

Our contrasting Socrates and Plato—or the early and the late Plato—is . . . heu-
ristic: We juxtapose two elements or two stages of Plato’s thought and radicalize
their conflict, regardless of the extent to which this conflict was reconciled by
Plato himself, merely in order to crystallize the opposition between two trends
of thought: Humanism and transcendent philosophy.24

Although “the extent to which this conflict was reconciled by Plato himself” is
my primary concern, it is likewise my intent to “radicalize their conflict,” albeit
not by positing any revision or confusion on Plato’s part, and above all not by
valorizing what Laszlo Versényi calls “[Socratic] Humanism.” On the other

23
 Cf. Heda Segvic, “No One Errs Willingly: The Meaning of Socratic Intellectualism.” Oxford Stud-
ies in Ancient Philosophy 19 (2000), 1–45, on 21–22n24.
24
 Versényi, Socratic Humanism, 174n80; the ellipsis replaces “fragmentary (it concentrates on par-
ticular tendencies rather than on the whole of Plato’s work) and,” which I have deleted because a
reconstruction of the ROPD must necessarily consider “the whole of Plato’s work.”
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 7

hand, the conflict Versényi is emphasizing and radicalizing is the one I empha-
size and radicalize as well, likewise for a dialectical (or in his terms “heuristic”)
purpose, but to antithetical effect, that is, one in favor of the (Platonic) tran-
scendent, not the humanist-existentialist,25 here configured as Socratic.
The reason that Prichard was wrong about Plato is what happens in Republic 7:
having caught sight of an at least equally transcendent Good, the student is con-
fronted with the problem of the Guardian’s return to the Cave.26 Admired for
its beauty by most every student of Plato, and made vivid at the culmination of
the ROPD by Socrates’ disinterested willingness to face death, the Allegory of
the Cave is and was intended to illustrate the great exception to TEA. In Prich-
ard’s immediate wake, J. B. Mabbott pointed to the exceptional nature of the
philosopher’s return to the Cave in 1937,27 and the Cave Allegory is the center
of Platonic pedagogy precisely because Plato is challenging the student to dis-
cover or recollect other-regarding and self-sacrificing Justice for themselves,
albeit after having been trained as they have been not only by Symposium but
also by Gorgias and Meno, particularly the parts of those great dialogues that
have traditionally caused them to be identified as “transitional” (or “Platonic”)
as opposed to the rest of “Plato’s Socratic dialogues.”
Having now seen him trace his intellectual pedigree back to Penner and
Prichard,28 it is time to return to Rowe himself, noting once again that his
comment is attached to the words “there is nothing else that people are in
love with except the good” (206a1–2). He mentions Penner while comment-
ing on this text because he does not regard the substitution of the Good for
the Beautiful at 204e1–2 as an easy and illegitimate shortcut as I do; instead,
the Good in its Penner-influenced configuration as the good for us, happi-
ness, or whatever knowledge, virtue, or τέχνη maximizes it—the details will
be discussed in §2—is the goal of all our desires, wishes, and (particularly
in the context of a Socratic Symposium) the sole object of our love.29 Rowe’s

25
 Cf. the last word of Thomas Gould, “Socrates as an Existentialist.” Arion 3, no. 1 (Spring 1964),
112–115.
26
 Appropriately identified as “the ace in the whole” of his opponents in Penner, “The Forms,”
226–27n11.
27
 See J. D. Mabbott, “Is Plato’s Republic Utilitarian?” Mind (n.s.) 46, no. 184 (October 1937),
468–474, on 474, discussed in Plato the Teacher, 211–213.
28
 For Penner on Prichard, see Terry Penner, “Plato’s Ethics: Early and Middle Dialogues” in Mary
Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin (eds.), A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, 151–169 (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2006), 159–160, and, for more detail on the intellectual trajectory that begins
with him, his “Socratic Ethics: Ultra-Realism, Determinism, and Ethical Truth” in Christopher
Gill (ed.), Virtue, Norms, & Objectivity: Issues in Ancient and Modern Ethics, 157–187 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), on 158n2.
29
 Cf. Angela Hobbs, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good (Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 258: “He [Alcibiades] has absolutely no inclina-
tion to use his love for Socrates as a step in the ascent from such personal and sensuous passions
towards love of the impersonal and non-sensible Form of Beauty itself.”
8 Chapter 1

interpretive task with respect to Socrates’ Diotima discourse is therefore to

strip “the impersonal and non-sensible Form of Beauty” of its merely meta-
phorical trappings so that a recognizably Socratist (i.e., eudaemonist) Good
can become, in accordance with 206a1–2, “what actually does, as a matter
of fact, lead a man to act, when he is acting deliberately, and not merely in
consequence of an impulse” (Prichard).
Leaving to others an analysis of how Rowe removes a metaphorical husk
from the philosophical kernel, I want to draw attention to the rather more con-
crete obstacle that Plato places in the path that leads to this kind of reading.
Rowe is too good a scholar to completely ignore this obstacle, but if he faced
it as honestly as he should have, his interpretive goal could not be attained.
Plato, meanwhile, demonstrates that he anticipates an interpretive move
like Rowe’s by making the obstacle at once irremovable and subtle: it can
be overlooked but, once having been seen, it cannot be removed. After this
admittedly cryptic and merely proleptic introduction to what follows, I will
begin its unpacking with the observation that Rowe’s comment on 206a1–2
is one of three such comments he cites while discussing 201c1–2 (“And yet
you said it so beautifully . . . don’t you think that what is good is also beauti-
ful?”). In concluding his discussion of this iteration of the GB Equation, he
writes as follows:

Insofar as he [sc. Socrates] is presently occupied in an ad hominem refutation

[sc. of Agathon], there can be no presumption that S. himself is endorsing the
proposition in question [sc. the GB Equation], and indeed there is what might
look like good evidence that he shouldn’t be.30

Before continuing the quotation, it is important to realize that whatever

that evidence may end up being, what separates my reading of the Diotima
discourse from Rowe’s is precisely the GB Equation: he ultimately needs it in
order to validate “Symposium as a Socratic Dialogue” while my reading sees
it as a deliberately inadequate and (merely) dialectical shortcut that the reader
must identify as such, despite the fact that Socrates is so obviously preparing
us here for the crucial substitution at 204e1–2. With that background now
clarified, Rowe will mention next “what might [my emphasis] look like good
evidence” for my position:

Diotima has taught him (a) that people love nothing except the good (206a1–2)
[and this passage, of course has already been discussed above], but (b) that love
is not of the beautiful (206e2–3).31

30
 Rowe, Plato: Symposium, 172 (on 201c1–2).
31
 Rowe, Plato: Symposium, 172 (directly following previous blocked quotation).
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 9

In case it is not immediately obvious why Diotima’s claim that love is not
of the Beautiful but rather “of procreation and giving birth in the beautiful”
(206e5; translation Rowe) tells against the GB Equation, it is because we are
being confronted with a self-contradiction: if the Good is the Beautiful (i.e.,
if Socrates is affirming the GB Equation and not just using it as a temporary
expedient), and if we do not love the Beautiful but only procreation in the
Beautiful, then it is not true that “there is nothing else that people are in love
with except the good.” And that is why, to salvage his eudaemonist reading
on the basis of the GB Equation, Rowe continues:

On the other hand, 204e ff. [he is referring to the substitution passage at 204d4–e7,
and e1–2 in particular] apparently shows her [sc. Diotima], and S., happily
behaving as if ‘good’ can readily be substituted for ‘beautiful’ in any context.
The question here is, then, scarcely a ‘little’ one. See further 204e1–2n., 206a1–
2n. [this is the Penner-Prichard note, quoted above], 206e2–3.32

Before turning to his comments on 204e1–2 and 206e2–3, let’s take a

respite from Rowe by turning to the actual passage in Plato he is discussing:

And Agathon said: ‘I seem to be in danger of having known nothing about

the things I was saying then.’ ‘And yet beautifully [καλῶς] indeed you spoke,
Agathon. But say yet a small thing [σμικρόν]: do not the good things [τἀγαθά]
seem to you to be beautiful [καλά]?’ ‘To me indeed they do.’33

How many of Plato’s jokes are we prepared to find here? Is it not obvious
that the only thing that Agathon has spoken καλῶς is that he had no idea what
he was talking about then? And apart from his (retrospective) confession of
ignorance, is he really any better off now? Does he not act as if he thought
that he is? But how can he really be if Socrates is being facetious when he
suggests that identifying good things with beautiful ones is a small matter?
My ongoing claim is that the relationship between the Beautiful and the
Good is by no means simply σμικρόν, but is rather a small and easy way
of bringing to light great and difficult issues. Furthermore, my ongoing
claim that this relationship proves to be of crucial importance in interpreting
the pre-Republic dialogues is strengthened, not weakened, by the fact that
Socrates treats the GB Equation as a small matter here. It is not primarily
that Socrates is lying, or employing his famous Socratic irony; instead, it is
Plato the Teacher who is warning us to be on our guard—even before we

32
 Rowe, Plato: Symposium, 172 (directly following previous blocked quotation).
33
 201b11–c3. We have been prepared to recognize that what Socrates calls σμικρόν is anything but
by Prt. 328e3–5.
10 Chapter 1

become his Guardians—that the GB Equation is not σμικρόν,34 and thus that
when the substitution of τἀγαθά for καλά a few pages later at 204e6 makes it
easier for Socrates, we should recall, and in specific contrast to a Good like
that of Prichard or of Penner and Rowe, that “beautiful things are difficult”
(Hp. Ma. 304e8).
Despite the diffidence of Socrates in asking Agathon to confirm the
GB Equation, despite the suspiciously easy path that Diotima offers Socrates
by substituting the Good for the Beautiful, and finally despite her denial
that Beauty is the object of love only a few lines after claiming that the
Good is, Rowe’s eudaemonist (or “Socratic”)35 reading requires him to base
his argument on the last claim, and thus on an uncritical acceptance of the
GB Equation on which it depends. From the easier Good to Happiness, from
the universal wish for the good things that lead to Happiness to the love of
the eternal possession of the Good, Diotima’s discourse, beginning with the
substitution that follows her first unanswered question, culminates with her
second: in what kind of action will love manifest itself, and what will be its
characteristic product (206b1–3)? It will be in the course of answering this
second question—the first will be answered only at the end of the ascent by
the vision of the Beautiful Itself36—she will use the words Happiness (208e5)
and the Good (207a2) for the last time in her discourse, the latter in a revealing
conditional: “if indeed love is of permanent possession of the good.”
The most basic thing that Rowe’s account must ignore is that the Diotima
discourse itself, not unlike the dialogue as a whole,37 is an argumentative lad-
der corresponding to the one described in the part reserved for the “higher
mysteries.” The substitution of the Good for the Beautiful is merely a rung
on that ladder, designed to be superseded (cf. 211c3 and R. 511b5), and the
ultimate goal of the ascent is not the Good—at least not the pre-Republic and
intrinsically human Good of εὐδαιμονία,38 attained through mere mirages
of virtue (212a4) in our mortal and all-too-human flesh (211e2–3)—but the
vision of the Beautiful,39 and the λόγοι that have been fathered by it (210d4–6),
the most beautiful of which being the one we are presently reading in

34
 Cf. Nicholas Denyer (ed.), Plato, Protagoras (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008),
86 (on Prt. 316a6).
35
 See Rowe, “Symposium as a Socratic Dialogue,” 19.
36
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §17.
37
 Cf. Richard Foley, “The Order Question: Climbing the Ladder of Love in Plato’s Symposium.”
Ancient Philosophy 30 (2010), 57–72.
38
 Last mentioned at 208e4. When Phaedrus first mentions εὐδαιμονία at 180b7, it is arguably
reserved for the dead (cf. 180b4–5 and the speech’s last word at 180b8); it figures prominently as
a distinctively human good in the speeches of Eryximachus (188d8) and Aristophanes (189d2).
39
 Cf. Alexander Nehamas, “Beauty of Body, Nobility of Soul: The Pursuit of Love in Plato’s
Symposium” in Dominic Scott (ed.), Maieusis: Essays in Ancient Philosophy in Honour of Myles
Burnyeat, 97–135 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), on 133: “In beauty, Plato saw not just
a promise of happiness but a pledge of virtue as well.”
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 11

Symposium.40 It is not only that Plato is a teacher, and as such concerned with
someone else’s spiritual growth, but also—by aiming his pedagogy at that
student’s embrace of something beyond both student and teacher—it must
always be student-centered.
To clarify that “it,” basanistic pedagogy depends on the student’s
response. If not everyone will be able to follow Diotima’s lead (210a1–2),
it is nevertheless Plato’s intent to make every student who can do so his
equal, and it is through his voluntary dependence on his reader’s response
that he accomplishes this result. When his Socrates uses Diotima to tell us
that Alcestis sacrificed herself for her husband for the sake of her own fame
(208c1–e1), we can, to be sure, count on Plato’s help—he has allowed his
Phaedrus to introduce her with a nobler account (179b5–d2)41—but the ulti-
mate power to recognize what it really means “to give birth in the Beauti-
ful” belongs only to those students who recognize Plato himself as midwife
to their own ability to reject the egocentrism (or “psychological egoism”)42
that is itself the basanistic antithesis of the primordial altruism—in the
most radical sense of “other”—that is the transcendent Idea. But it would
be misleading to refer to eudaemonist egocentricism as a mere springboard
or stepladder to the Idea of the Good: it is rather the necessary ἐπίβασις
(R. 511b5) or ἐπαναβασμός (Smp. 211c3) that we will need both to use and
overcome on our ascent.
This is a crucial point. The justification for giving the most radical Socrat-
ists so much attention in this book is that it is specifically by overcoming their
position that one reaches Plato’s own. By configuring the Idea of the Good
as the GoodE, the most radical of Vlastos’s heirs have made it possible for
the rest of us to see why it was unnecessary for Plato to define the GoodT: it
was sufficient to show that it was more than the GoodE. It is therefore insuf-
ficient to claim that the most radical Socratists are merely wrong to configure
the GoodT as the GoodE: to hammer the point, they are wrong in a useful and
dialectically necessary way. I intend to show that Plato abets but does not
confirm that erroneous configuration before undermining it in Republic 7.
Therefore, as deeply un-Platonic as this configuration is in a theoretical or
doctrinal sense, it is perfectly Platonic in a dialectical and pedagogical sense,
and that for the same reason that, for example, Epinomis is a genuine Platonic

40
 Cf. Christopher Janaway, Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 79, beginning with: “Symposium 210a–212a is among the most elevated and
beautiful stretches of writing ever composed.”
41
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §16.
42
 Cf. Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 215: “The psychology of action in question [sc. ‘the
psychology of action needed to ground the teleological, hierarchical conception of desire for
one’s own good’] is that brand of psychological egoism known among interpreters as ‘Socratic
intellectualism.’”
12 Chapter 1

dialogue.43 In accordance with basanistic pedagogy, we can reach what is

truly Platonic only by rejecting a series of ἐπιβάσεις and ὁρμαί (R. 511b5),
deliberately contrived by Plato himself to be provocatively anti-Platonic.
Consider in the context of Symposium another kind of ladder, this one
made up of Plato’s interpreters. In “The Individual as Object of Love in
Plato,” Vlastos wrote:

Not that Platonic eros is as ‘egocentric’ and ‘acquisitive’ as Nygren has claimed,
it is only too patently Ideocentric and creative. But while it gives no more quar-
ter to self-indulgence than would Pauline agape or Kantian good will, neither
does it repudiate the spiritualized egocentrism of Socratic philia [note 91]. That
first description of the aim of eros in Diotima’s speech—“that one should pos-
sess beauty for ever” [ἔστιν ἄρα συλλήβδην ὁ ἔρως τοῦ τὸ ἀγαθὸν αὐτῷ εἶναι
ἀεί]—is never amended in the sequel that would make egoistic eros a contradic-
tion or even an anomaly [note 92].44

As indicated by the bracketed Greek, Vlastos makes an error: Diotima refers

not to “beauty,” but rather to τὸ ἀγαθόν, and more specifically, to “the
good for oneself [αὐτῷ].” Vlastos quotes the passage accurately in note 92:
“Diotima never cuts loose from the original description of eros as desire for
one’s perpetual possession of the good (ἔστιν ἄρα συλλήβδην ὁ ἔρως τοῦ τὸ
ἀγαθὸν αὐτῷ εἶναι ἀεί, 206a11–12).”45 Meanwhile, Rowe is on the same
interpretive ladder as Vlastos,46 the difference being that he needs a detailed

43
 See William H. F. Altman, “Why Plato wrote Epinomis; Leonardo Tarán and the Thirteenth Book
of the Laws.” Polis 29, no. 1 (2012), 83–107, especially 85–86.
44
 Gregory Vlastos, “The Individual as Object of Love in Plato” in Vlastos, Platonic Studies, second
edition, 3–42 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 30.
45
 Vlastos, “Love in Plato,” 20n56.
46
 As is Anders Nygren, and in 20n56 (see previous note) where Vlastos quotes Diotima in Greek,
he points the reader back to a note attached to the following passage in Agape and Eros, translated
by Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1953), 180: “But the clearest proof of
the egocentric nature of Eros [sc. in Plato’s Symposium] is the intimate connection with eudæmo-
nia.” The attached note quotes 204e2–205a3—the passage that follows the (unmentioned) GB
Equation at 204e1–2—after which Nygren comments: “finality is thus reached only when love
is referred back to the egocentric quest for happiness that is common to all men” (180n1). Thus
Nygren is deploring the very same thing that Rowe is embracing—cf. Plato the Teacher, 210 (on
Prichard)—and both are ignoring the hypothetical and problematic character of the GB Equation,
admirably captured in Mary P. Nichols, Socrates on Friendship and Community: Reflections on
Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus, and Lysis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009),
64: “The beautiful cannot be reduced to the good. To love the good—which is to desire that the
good be ours and that thereby we be happy—is to love ourselves. But this does not exhaust the
experience of Love, as indicated by Socrates’ question about Love’s use. If Love merely led us to
our good [cf. Rowe, Plato, Symposium, 129 on Smp. 173a2–3] its use would be unquestionable.
Earlier in the evening Phaedrus had given examples of lovers who gave their lives for those whom
they loved, such as Alcestis for Admetus (179b–c). Whereas to love the good is to love ourselves,
to love the beautiful brings us outside of ourselves.” The point Nichols is making can only be seen
from the top of the ladder.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 13

commentary to prove what Vlastos accomplishes with a mischaracterization,

that is, that “Diotima never cuts loose” from “that first description of the aim
of eros in Diotima’s speech,” the one based on 206a1–2.47
But despite the fact that Vlastos is holding the ladder for Rowe, he is
nevertheless distinguishing Socrates from Plato, and he therefore remains
in contact with an older interpretive tradition for which it is only at 209e4,48
where Diotima begins her account of the “higher mysteries,” that Plato leaves
Socrates behind.49 While affirming that such a division can and must be made,50
Vlastos uses Socrates’ inability to answer a second question (206b5–6)—
the first that he cannot answer leads to the GB Equation (204d10–11)—as the
moment of transition: ἔρως is of giving birth in the Beautiful (206b7–8 and
206e5). The problem is that this clarified answer—Platonic but not Socratic
according to Vlastos—depends on Diotima’s explicit rejection of the pos-
sibility that eros is of the Beautiful (206e2–3). It is this negative prelude to
the supposedly positive answer that causes trouble: it is only by taking the
GB Equation as Platonic that we can reach the eudaemonist’s conclusion that
love is of “the good for oneself.” But if, as Diotima insists before offering
her “Platonic” answer, love is not of Beauty, then the hypothesis on which
that eudaemonist conclusion rests (i.e., the GB Equation) is contradicted in

47
 Vlastos, “Love in Plato,” 20n56, criticizes Nygren (see previous note) “for “taking no account of
the fact that what Diotima has said so far is not meant to be the whole story: as yet she has not
stated, has scarcely hinted at, that distinctive feature of Platonic eros which she proceeds forth-
with to explain as ‘birth in beauty.’” But while seeming at first to welcome “the radical change
of perspective” that results—cf. R. A. Markus, “The Dialectic of Eros in Plato’s Symposium” in
Gregory Vlastos (ed.), Plato: A Collection of Critical Essays, II: Ethics, Politics, and Philosophy
of Art and Religion, 132–143 (London: Macmillan, 1971), 138—Vlastos then tames this insight
by quoting 206a11–12 to show that “Diotima never cuts loose” from the eudaemonist egocentrism
that Nygren deplores, citing the Alcestis passage as proof (20n56): “Alcestis’ readiness to give her
life for Admetus, which Phaedrus had explained as due to the intensity of her love for her husband
(ὑπερβάλετο τῇ φιλίᾳ διὰ τὸν ἔρωτα, 179c1), Diotima explains as due rather to her desire to win
immortal fame for herself.” Cf. Nygren, Agape and Eros, 181: “If we still had any doubt about the
egocentric character of the love in question here, it certainly would be removed by such passages
of Plato as the following: ‘Do you think Alcestis would have died for Admetus, or Achilles fol-
lowed Patroclus to death, or that your own Codrus would have sacrificed himself to preserve his
kingdom for his sons, if they had not believed they would win thereby an immortal renown—as in
fact they have?’” In honor of Phaedrus (179b4–180b8), Plato expects us to answer this question in
the affirmative; see Ascent to the Beautiful, §16.
48
 See F. M. Cornford, “The Doctrine of Eros in Plato’s Symposium” in W. K. C. Guthrie (ed.), The
Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays, 68–80 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1967), 75: “I incline to agree with those scholars who have seen in this sentence [sc. 209e5–210a2,
translated by Cornford as: ‘Into these lesser mysteries of Eros, you, Socrates, may perhaps be initi-
ated; but I know not whether you will be capable of the perfect revelation—the goal to which they
lead’] Plato’s intention to mark the limit reached by the philosophy of his master.”
49
 Vlastos, “Love in Plato,” 21n58.
50
 Vlastos, “Love in Plato,” 23: “Here [sc. at 210e] we find ourselves in the thick of Plato’s ontology.”
14 Chapter 1

retrospect, just as it was rendered questionable in advance by σμικρόν at

201c1–2.51
Ironically flagged as a small matter when it is not, explicitly introduced to
make things easier for Socrates when there is no textual evidence to suggest
that the path he needs to follow should be easy, and plenty to prove that it
is not (203b1, 204d1–2, 206b3–7, 207c2–4, 210a1–4), it is the GB Equation
that creates the most important link to the Second Part of the Divided Line:
it is hypothesized at 204e1–2, and then jettisoned at 206e1–2, when Diotima
denies that love is of the Beautiful. Retrospectively applied to the substitution
made at 204e1–2, that denial vitiates the eudaemonist claim that love is of the
Good for oneself forever, stated just before the rug is pulled out from under
it, at 205e7–206a12. This is not a case of climbing the Divided Line from a
“Socratic” argument based on hypothesis to a “Platonic” one that prefigures
the dialectical method of the First Part of the Divided Line. Instead, the entire
argument, precisely because of its merely temporary use of a hypothesis that
is outgrown and then rejected, is implementing that method, long before it is
explained in Republic 6.
Considering that it culminates in a vision of “the divine Beauty itself”
(211e3), how could it be otherwise?52 The Good itself (αὐτὸ τὸ ἀγαθόν at

51
 By challenging Nygren’s claim that Platonic eros is “egocentric” with his more accurate neo­
logism that it is rather “ideocentric” (“Love in Plato,” 30), Vlastos therefore demonstrates—despite
pointing the path that Rowe will later follow—that he still has one foot in an older interpretive
world, and one that remains closer to Platonism; this explains his merely topographical dispute
with Cornford about where to draw the line. Regardless of the proposed location of that division,
Cornford, “Doctrine of Eros,” 75–76, makes an invaluable suggestion about it: “The line which
here divides the lesser from the greater mysteries corresponds to the division between the two
stages of education described in the Republic: the lower education in gymnastic and music in the
earlier books and the higher education of the philosopher in Republic VII.” A better analogy, how-
ever, is to the Divided Line in Republic 6 (cf. Cornford, “Doctrine of Eros,” 75–77): in the Line’s
highest part, the unquestioned hypotheses on which the Line’s second highest part depends, are
treated merely as “both springboards and incentives” (ἐπιβάσεις τε καὶ ὁρμαί) on the path to the
un-hypothetical; they are accepted on a tentative basis only, questioned throughout, and jettisoned
as necessary. Albeit involuntarily, Vlastos’s decision to divide the Diotima discourse at 206b7–8,
where she introduces the “birth in the Beautiful” account she repeats at 206e5, comes closer, in a
topographical sense, to validating Cornford’s insight about the parallel with the Line than Cornford
does himself.
52
 Cf. Rowe, Plato: Symposium, 179 (on 204e1–2): “What either S. or Diotima thinks about the
precise relationship between the good and the beautiful is never made clear, and after 205e–206a
(which sets up the good as the exclusive object of love and desire) and 206b ff. (which gives beauty
a special and subsidiary role in procreation, of whatever sort), it does not much matter to the argu-
ment.” What Rowe means is that the claim made about the (Penner-Prichard) Good at 206a1–2 is
from that point forward—anything said thereafter about the transcendent Beauty to the contrary
notwithstanding—“the hard and serious core” (178) of what he here calls “the argument.” See
especially Rowe’s “crude summary” of 204d1–209e4 (177–178), which prepares the ground for
subordinating the revelation of the Beautiful—where Diotima “is dealing in metaphor and paradox,
and also, towards the end, when she talks about human behavior as it is, in irony”—to the Good
as Happiness. A similar strategy is employed in Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, chapter 10, but
on a larger scale.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 15

R. 534c4) marks the τέλος of an even more important ascent than what we
find here in Symposium, completing the journey from the GoodE to the GoodT.
In this larger context, the eudaemonist phase of the Diotima discourse, even if
merely a stepping-stone or over-climbed ladder-rung within the limits of that
discourse itself, is something from which Plato “never cuts loose in a peda-
gogical sense. He deploys and preserves it not because it is true but because
it is pedagogically useful or rather necessary. As a result, the implementation
of the GB Equation at 204e1–2 marks the line of division between Ascent to
the Beautiful and Ascent to the Good, and from that point on, it is our job
to emancipate τὸ ἀγαθόν—having already witnessed the emancipation of τὸ
καλόν in Diotima’s discourse—from the eudaemonist limitation achieved by
attaching to it the dative: αὐτῷ in the canonical formula of 206a11–12, ἑαυτῷ
in the formula’s repetition (207a2), and αὐτοῖς in the passage that generates
the formula (206a6–7).53 In the ascent to the Platonist Good, there is all the
difference in the world between τὸ ἀγαθόν αὐτὸ and τὸ ἀγαθόν αὐτῷ, and it
is because of that difference, and specifically because we must overcome the
one in order to reach the other, that Plato can afford to say very little about
αὐτὸ τὸ ἀγαθόν; the crucial thing is that it is not the Good αὐτῷ, that is, “the
Good for me.”54

53
 It is by generating the eudaemonist formula in stages (205e7–206a12), successively adding to τὸ
ἀγαθόν (206a1) first εἶναι (206a6), then αὐτοῖς (206a7), and finally ἀεί εἶναι (206a9)—all by means
of a hammered use of προσθετέον (206a6, 206a8, and 206a10)—that Plato prepares us to realize, at
least by the time that we come to the Idea of the Good in Republic 6–7, that of the three additions,
ἀεί and εἶναι still apply (cf. ἀεὶ ὄν at 211b1–2), and it is only αὐτοῖς (or any other such dative) that
will by then have been subtracted.
54
 In fact, all that need be determined about the Idea of the Good is that it is not what the most radical
Socratists require it to be; cf. Christopher Rowe, “The Form of the Good and the Good in Plato’s
Republic” in Douglas Cairns and Fritz-Gregor Herrmann (eds.), Pursuing the Good: Ethics and
Metaphysics in Plato’s Republic, 124–153 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) on 145:
“Given these connections [Rowe is discussing R. 505d2–506a8 in the context of 503e–505a], there
can be no doubt at all that Socrates is still talking about the good as the useful and the beneficial
[sc. τὸ ὠφέλιμον]—and so a strictly human good.” The same ambiguity that haunts “the Good”
also necessarily infects τὸ ὠφέλιμον, and so common is the equation of the Good and the Benefi-
cial that one is tempted to call it “the Second GB Equation.” When we assume that τὸ ὠφέλιμον
must be “what is beneficial to me” it is readily equated with the GoodE, as in Penner, “The Good,
Advantage, Happiness,” 118: “At [R.] 505a2–3 (discussed in my 2006a: 204), where the Idea of
the Good is that, by using which, just things, and all other things, become useful and beneficial,
one surely cannot fail to notice that this is exactly what is said about the good, that is, the happi-
ness, that is the ultimate object of all desire at Meno 77a–78b with 87e5–89a7 and Euthydemus
278e–282d.” The passages Penner cites here will naturally be discussed below—Euthd. 278e–282d
beginning in §2, and Men. 77a–78b in §14, Men. 87e5–89a7 in §15—for now the important thing is
that ὠφέλιμον is hopelessly relative, and it is precisely this point that Plato uses Protagoras to teach
us from the start (Prt. 333e5–334b7). For the relativity of ὠφέλιμον, see E. Seymour Thompson,
The Meno of Plato, edited with Introduction, Notes, and Excurses (London: Macmillan, 1901),
104 (on ὠφελεῖν ἐκεῖνον).
16 Chapter 1

This emancipation will occur only in Republic 7,55 when Plato’s Guardians
are confronted with “the crisis of the Republic.” And there it will only be
those who have seen fit to return to the Cave in accordance with Justice in
the light of the GoodT who will have recognized that the kinds of “virtue” that
secure, in accordance with TEA, “the Good for me” are mere phantoms. This
is particularly and characteristically true when ἀρετή becomes merely the
means to Happiness, in accordance with “the Instrumentalization of Virtue”
(hereafter “IOV”); it is to these “phantoms” that Diotima has already referred
with the words εἴδωλα ἀρετῆς (212a4). Immediately repeating the word
εἴδωλον, she now attaches it to the verb ἐφάπτεσθαι which Plato emphasizes
by allowing her to hammer it:

‘Or do you not recognize,’ she said, ‘that it is under these conditions alone, as
he sees beauty with what has the power to see it, that he will succeed in bring-
ing to birth, not phantoms of virtue [εἴδωλα ἀρετῆς], because he is not grasping
a phantom [οὐκ εἰδώλου ἐφάπτεσθαι], but true virtue, because he is grasping
[ἐφάπτεσθαι] the truth; and then when he has given birth to and nurtured true
virtue, it belongs to him to be loved by the gods, and to him, if to any human
being, to be immortal?’56

Already analyzed in Ascent to the Beautiful, the culmination of Diotima’s

discourse should now be compared with the passage I call “the Battle Hymn
of the Republic,” and which serves as principal epigraph for both The Guard-
ians in Action and The Guardians on Trial, explaining as it does the primary
pedagogical purpose of the post-Republic dialogues:

Socrates: And is not this true of the good likewise: that the man who is unable
to define in his discourse, abstracting from all other things the Idea of the Good
[ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα], and who cannot, as if in battle, through all refutations
emerging, not eager to refute by recourse to opinion but to being, proceeding
throughout in all of these with the discourse un-toppled—the man who lacks
this power, will you say, does not really know the good itself [αὐτὸ τὸ ἀγαθόν]
or any other good, but that if he joins himself [ἐφάπτεσθαι] in any way to some
image [εἴδωλον], he does so [ἐφάπτεσθαι] by reputation but not knowledge,
dreaming and dozing through his present life, and before he awakens here, he
will arrive at the house of Hades and fall asleep for ever?57

Standing first among the things from which we must abstract the Idea of
the Good—indeed the condition of the possibility of our having grasped the

55
 As the words ἡμῖν ὄφελος (R. 505a7) indicate, we are not yet ready to realize even in Republic 6
that the Idea of the Good, recognizable by its offspring (R. 506d1–e3), is not good (or beneficial)
merely in relation to us or to anything else.
56
 212a2–7 (translation Rowe).
57
 R. 534b8–d1.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 17

Good as “the Idea of the Good” and αὐτὸ τὸ ἀγαθόν in the first place, and thus
prior to the battles that remain58—is the so-called “ethical dative.” Accom-
panied by this “dative of interest,” the Good is merely “the human good,”
that is, “what is good for us,” and it is only by rejecting it—by replacing τὸ
ἀγαθόν αὐτῷ with αὐτὸ τὸ ἀγαθόν59—that we see ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα.
The eudaemonist phase of the Diotima discourse therefore plays a critical
and indispensable role not only in Symposium itself, but also in the post-
Symposium dialogues culminating in Republic. I have now sketched its
long-term implications and the ultimate justification for its final supersession
by the Idea of the Good. But between the culminating vision of Beauty that
replaces and supersedes the GoodE in Symposium,60 and the final triumph
of the post-dative Idea of the Good in Republic 7, there are the dialogues
between them, wherein the triumph of Republic is prepared, and where our
commitment to the supersession already performed in Symposium is going
to be tested. To put it in more technical terms, between the visionary peaks
found in Symposium and Republic, the intervening dialogues contain both
proleptic and basanistic elements.
The great merit of following Rowe, then, is that the dialogues upon which
he most depends in order to validate claim that Vlastos merely sketches—that
is, that “Diotima never cuts loose from the original description of eros as
desire for one’s perpetual possession of the good”—are those that directly
follow Symposium in the ROPD: Lysis and Euthydemus.61 As a result, wher-
ever Rowe, now fully allied with Penner, will find support for his reading
of Symposium in Lysis and Euthydemus, I need only demonstrate that those

58
 Especially in Phlb., where—despite the likely story of its having been written by an old Plato—a
young and pre-Republic Socrates (see Guardians in Action, 344–345; cf. Phlb. 28c6–e2 and Phd.
96a5–98c2) tests the reader’s willingness to fight for the GoodT by revisiting the battlegrounds of
the pre-Republic dialogues. Equally unprepared to do so are Straussians and Owenites: cf. John
M. Cooper, “Plato’s Theory of Human Good in the Philebus.” Journal of Philosophy 74, no. 11
(November 1977), 714–730, and Joseph Cropsey, “On Pleasure and the Human Good: Plato’s
Philebus.” Interpretation 16, no. 2 (Winter 1988–1989), 167–192. For Cooper as Owenite, see
John M. Cooper, “Owen, Gwilym Ellis Lane (1922–82)” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
7.177–179 (London and New York, Routledge, 1998).
59
 I am grateful to Pedro Baratieri for having made this point with utmost clarity.
60
 For a recent challenge to a eudaimonist reading of Plato—i.e., “according to the orthodox interpre-
tation that I wish to challenge, Plato is a ‘eudaimonist’” (235)—see Richard Kraut, “Eudaimonism
and Platonic erōs” in Pierre Destrée and Zina Giannopolou (eds.), Plato’s Symposium: A Critical
Guide, 235–252 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017); as one might expect from
his approach to the Return (see Plato the Teacher, 204–207) Kraut’s is “a project of reconciliation”
(251) as on 236: “What misleads scholars who adopt the eudaimonist reading is Plato’s conviction
that if we respond as we should to what is superior to ourselves [i.e., the GoodT], we will achieve
eudaimonia, and so our response requires no self-sacrifice.” Cf. Andrea Wilson Nightingale,
Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 131–138, especially 137n75. See also 83–89 on visionary
theoria in Smp.
61
 See especially Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 305–307 (“Epilogue: The Lysis and the
Symposium”).
18 Chapter 1

connections are real—even if the reading of Symposium on which they are

based is ultimately unsatisfactory, and even though the support Lysis and
Euthydemus provide for that reading is brittle and deliberately inadequate—
and yet sufficient to justify the ROPD as reconstructed here. To take a con-
crete case, Penner and Rowe must argue for a eudaemonist interpretation
of “the First Friend” in Lysis, but such an interpretation is scarcely unprob-
lematic, and in any case depends on Euthydemus (see §3). But thanks first
to Rowe, and now to Penner and Rowe, that interpretation has recently also
become entangled with Symposium, and some exposition and criticism of this
promising development will conclude this section.
To deal first with the most positive features of the Penner-Rowe linkage
between Symposium and Lysis, a willingness to read the latter in the light
of the former—or even to read either dialogue in the other’s light—requires
considerable flexibility with regard to Order of Composition. The traditional
argument against interpreting the First Friend as either Diotima’s Beauty or
the Idea of the Good is based on chronology: Plato had not yet reached his
“middle period views” at the time he wrote the “early” and “Socratic” Lysis.
First broaching the subject in a 2000 paper,62 Rowe repeatedly cites Kahn:63
although the latter’s argument for reading Lysis as proleptic is enmeshed with
both Order of Composition and a Platonist reading of the Diotima discourse,64
Rowe can find other uses for the hermeneutic possibilities Kahn’s approach
opens up. By taking an agnostic position on Order of Composition as it relates
to the two dialogues, Rowe—who is determined to find the GoodE in both—
distinguishes them primarily on a rhetorical basis, reserving for Symposium,
especially the revelation of the higher mysteries, words like “curious” and
“fancier, more showy.”65 While this is hardly beautiful, it will eventually lead
him, once teamed with Penner, to more radical suggestions.66 On the other

62
 Christopher Rowe, “The Lysis and the Symposium: aporia and euporia?” in T. M. Robinson and
Luc Brisson (eds.), Plato: Euthydemus, Lysis, Charmides: Proceedings of the V Symposium Pla-
tonicum: Selected Papers, 204–216 (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2000). Note the important admis-
sion about the GB Equation on 208n19: “It is not made clear in either the Lysis context or that in
the Symposium what exactly the relationship is between the good and the beautiful.” With respect
to the rest of this footnote, it is not the Beautiful but the Good that “drops out as a distinct object
of eros in the Symposium.”
63
 Rowe, “Lysis and Symposium,” 206n11: “(unless the chronological posteriority of Symposium to
Lysis is to be taken as definitively established, which I am inclined to doubt, cf. text below, and
the general implications of Kahn’s ‘proleptic’ thesis).” Cf. 204n4, 206, 210n23, and 213n33. See
also Rowe, “Just How Socratic.”
64
 See Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 281–291 (“A Proleptic Reading of the Lysis”); cf.
Altman, “Reading Order,” section 3.
65
 Rowe, “Lysis and Symposium,” 210; cf. 211n25: “Might the Lysis itself not be intended, per-
haps, as a kind of control on the extravagances of the Symposium?” Cf. the attempt to tame Smp.
209e5–212a7 at Rowe, Plato, Symposium, especially “representing the climax and end-point of
what precedes it” (192) and “in relation to the passage’s context” (193).
66
 See Rowe, “Lysis and Symposium,” 215n36.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 19

hand, Penner and Rowe will explain the greater argumentative complexity
(and “relative philosophical density”) of Lysis by identifying it as “a school
text.”67
This is really a momentous development. Unable to find in Lysis any clear-
cut identification of the First Friend with either Happiness or the wisdom that
secures it for us,68 Penner and Rowe are nevertheless determined to overcome
its well-earned reputation as an aporetic dialogue.69 As a result, they read it
correctly in the decisive respect: it is a solvable puzzle with which the student
must struggle.70 And given the numerous parallels they are able to discover
between Symposium and Lysis, anyone who can see how one of them could
have been used in the Academy as a school text can also imagine how the
other might have been used that way there as well.
There are, of course, many such parallels, and it is worth mentioning that
several of them figured prominently in the great debate about Lysis between
Max Pohlenz and Hans von Arnim that began on the eve of the First World
War.71 When Socrates introduces “the neither good nor bad” in Lysis (Ly.
216c2–3) in order to break the antinomy (Ly. 216b8–9) that arises from the
impossibility of either the good being friends with their opposites, or the good
being friends with the good (Ly. 215b3–9),72 both Pohlenz and von Arnim

67
 Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 74n9: “The Lysis just is a complex text, no doubt intended for
close reading and study; perhaps it was even—among other things?—some kind of school text (i.e.
within the Academy.” See also 305.
68
 The most significant text-imminent obstacle to “Systematic Socratism” (see §2) is that IOV
depends on TEA, i.e., on the final desirability of Happiness as the GoodE, but the best textual
evidence for TEA—the model protreptic Socrates offers the brothers in Euthydemus, beginning
with the axiom that all men wish to εὖ πράττειν (Euthd. 278e3)—includes the claim that wisdom
is the only good (Euthd. 281e3–5). Hence the need for the wiggle room provided by this either/or.
69
 Cf. Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, i (book description), and Julia Annas, “Plato and Aristotle on
Friendship and Altruism.” Mind 86 (n.s.), no. 344 (October 1977), 532–554, on 539 (“the Lysis is
an aporetic dialogue”) and 532 (first word).
70
 Although their proposed solution places too much emphasis on “struggle” than on the rather more
student-centered elements in the dialogue that also make it “fun” (see §4), Penner and Rowe’s
“school text” hypothesis, even when applied to a single dialogue, is most welcome. Cf. “pedagogi-
cal puzzle” in Howard J. Curzer, “Plato’s Rejection of the Instrumental Account of Friendship in
Lysis.” Polis 31, no. 2 (2014), 352–368, on 368; so also Benjamin A. Rider, “A Socratic Seduction:
Philosophical Protreptic in Plato’s Lysis.” Apeiron 44, no. 1 (2011), 40–66, on 60, and Altman,
“Reading Order,” 31.
71
 Beginning with Max Pohlenz, Aus Platos Werdezeit: philosophische Untersuchungen (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1913) and Hans v. Arnim, Platos Jugenddialoge und die Entstehungszeit des Phaidros
(Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1914), the Auseinandersetzung heated up during the War
with Pohlenz’s “Review” of von Arnim’s book in Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen 5 (May 1916),
241–272. Penner and Rowe notice the debate in Plato’s Lysis, 92n56.
72
 It was Plato’s attitude to this argument that created the principal scholarly battleground while
young men were dying in the hundreds of thousands at Verdun; the 1916 review (see previous
note) was answered by Hans von Arnim, “Platos Lysis.” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 71
(1916), 364–387, and then followed by Max Pohlenz, “Nochmals Platos Lysis” in Nachrichten von
der Königliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, 560–588 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1918).
Note the anticipation of the War in Pohlenz, Platos Werdezeit, 383: “ja das Leben aufgeopfert.”
20 Chapter 1

agreed that the description of φιλοσοφία, described as occupying a middle

ground in between wisdom and ignorance (204a1–b2; cf. Ly. 218a2–6), joins
the two dialogues.73 And Pohlenz, whose more comprehensive case for join-
ing them embraces the speeches of both Aristophanes and Socrates,74 uses the
latter to explain, over von Arnim’s objection,75 why the presence of the bad is
in some sense the cause of our love for the Good and the Beautiful.76 Despite
their differences, both Pohlenz and von Arnim accepted the transcendent Idea
of the Good as the bedrock of Platonism, and interpreted Lysis accordingly,
making use of Symposium when they found it convenient to do so. Ending
this section with a discussion of three other parallels that Rowe found it con-
venient to omit—naturally, he selects for discussion only those that advance
the eudaemonist reading of both dialogues—will strengthen the claim that
Lysis follows Symposium in the ROPD.
The first comes early in Lysis, but must remain a mainstay of Penner
and Rowe’s reading until the end: only by becoming wise will Lysis prove
himself to be useful to his parents, and only insofar as he is useful will they
love him (Ly. 210c1–d1). Penner and Rowe are not humorless, so they will
never simply affirm as Socratic the farcical conclusion that the father of
Lysis doesn’t love him,77 but they need the argument to have “some deeper
philosophical point” to make their post-Kantian case at the end.78 Indeed it
is the role of wisdom that explains why Penner and Rowe welcome a cer-
tain wiggle room in interpreting the First Friend: the wisdom for which his
parents would love Lysis proves to be what is ultimately lovable, not him.
The relevant omission—apart, that is from several texts in Lysis itself—is
that Diotima spends a considerable amount of time explaining why parents
love their own (207a7–c1), and since these parents include beasts, it cannot
be explained by a prudent decision for regarding as lovable only that which
secures and maximizes our own happiness.79 In other words, any student
reading Lysis after Symposium—and Rowe usefully suggests that regardless

73
 Cf. Pohlenz, Platos Werdezeit, 367–371, and von Arnim, Platos Jugenddialoge, 51–53.
74
 See Pohlenz, Platos Werdezeit, 368 and 382.
75
 See von Arnim, “Platos Lysis,” 369–371 and 382.
76
 Beginning with the 1916 review (252–254), then developed in Pohlenz, “Nochmals,” 563–567.
77
 See Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 25–31; intent on finding “some deeper philosophical point”
(26) and cautioning against a rush to judgment (27), Penner and Rowe fail to juxtapose it with the
desperate paternal search for wine at the end of the dialogue (Ly. 219d5–220a1).
78
 See Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 289; the section in which this sentence is found is entitled:
“The Vlastosian, Kantian Requirement that Love be for the Good of Others Independently of One’s
Own Good.”
79
 Hence there is a certain irony in the use of “selfish brutes” at Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis,
290: “To say the parents love their children, we have maintained above, is to say that a high-level
premiss in their system speaks of the parents’ own happiness being wrapped up in all the details of
the children’s possibilities and their happiness. So the happiness these parents aim at is a happiness
they achieve because their children’s happiness is assured. So we say we are not making the parents
selfish brutes [cf. τὰ θηρία at 207a8 and 207b7].”
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 21

of Order of Composition, the Socrates of Lysis has already learned whatever

he knows in Symposium80—will know that Socrates’ self-interested and
wisdom-dependent account of parental love is not a very reliable foundation
on which to build.
The second is more complex, but clusters around the introduction of
“neither good nor bad” (hereafter “NGNB”) at Lysis 216c2–3. After being
forced by the ἀντιλογικοί (Ly. 216a7) to abandon the view that one opposite
is φίλον to its opposite, a view predicated on the validity of the one thing/
one opposite principle first encountered in Protagoras (Prt. 332c8–9; cf.
Alc2. 139a7–c1), Socrates suggests that the NGNB could become a φίλον
of the good—the slippery word in Greek here being used in the active sense
of “loving” (see §3)—and when asked how this can be, Socrates admits he
does not know, explaining the dizziness-engendering ἀπορία in which he
now finds himself by the fact that it is τὸ καλόν that is φίλον (Ly. 216c6–7),
now in its passive sense as “beloved.” After describing the Beautiful as “soft
[μαλακός], smooth, and slippery,” Socrates promptly invokes the GB Equa-
tion (“the good is beautiful” at Ly. 216d2) before “speaking as a prophet”
(ἀπομαντευόμενος at Ly. 216d3, then hammered with μαντευόμαι at Ly.
216d5) about how the NGNB is the active φίλον “of the beautiful and the
good.”81 The Beautiful thereafter disappears from sight (Ly. 216d5–217a2),
replaced by the (apparently less slippery) Good.
Since the very first thing Diotima teaches Socrates is that just because
Love is neither good nor beautiful it is not necessarily either base or bad
(201e6–202b5), her teaching has already been made conspicuous by its
absence before the ἀντιλογικοί arrive on the scene (Ly. 216a6–b4), that is, we
have already been challenged to remember her objection to the one thing/one
opposite principle before the appearance of the NGNB. Next, both immedi-
ately before and after offering the telltale alternative in its pure and echoed
form (cf. Smp. 201e6–202b5 and Ly. 216d3–4), Socrates hammers the pro-
phetic words in order to remind us that Diotima is from Mantinaea.82 And as if
that were not sufficient to remind us who offered an alternative to the fallacy-
spawning either/or, two other allusions to Symposium precede and confirm
it: Socrates’ use of τὸ καλόν to explain his dizziness should have reminded
us of Diotima even before Socrates describes himself as ἀπομαντευόμενος,
while the GB Equation that follows not only echoes the critical moment in
her speech, but also confirms the crucial claim that the Good-based account is
simply a (eudaemonist) shortcut that once again avoids the lithe slipperiness
of τὸ καλόν, and thus explains its sudden disappearance thereafter.

80
 See Rowe, “Lysis and Symposium,” 213 followed by 213n32.
81
 All translations in this sentence are from Penner and Rowe, Plato, Lysis, 99–100.
82
 Cf. R. G. Bury, The Symposium of Plato, Edited with Introduction, Critical Notes and Commen-
tary (Cambridge, UK: W. Heffer, 1909), 94 (on Μαντινικῆς Διοτίμας at 201d2).
22 Chapter 1

Bookended by two pregnant silences that only the reader can break, the
passage between Lysis 215e3 and 217a2 is the most important piece of evi-
dence for my suggestion that it is our ability to remember τὸ καλόν, the true
and culminating subject of Diotima’s discourse, that is being tested in the
basanistic Lysis. How any given reader will ultimately interpret or flesh out
the First Friend has therefore already been indicated if not determined by
how he or she responds to this far less mysterious passage, filled as it is with
backwards-pointing and student-friendly allusions. Since Lysis is the first
dialogue considered in Ascent to the Good, it would be natural to interpret
the First Friend as anticipating the Idea of the Good,83 but in the context of
Reading Order, and thanks to the gravitational pull exerted by Symposium,
it is necessary to find Diotima’s influence there first.84 So here is as good a
place as any to remind the reader of the interplay of proleptic, visionary, and
basanistic elements in Plato’s dialogues: basanistic with respect to the vision-
ary moment in Symposium, Lysis is at the same time proleptic with respect
to Republic. And starting from the poisoned son—no matter how ignorant
and therefore “useless” to his loving father—and from thence ascending to
the spiritual analogue of health, even if that is only the GoodE, we are being
reminded that we have just climbed a similar ladder all the way to the top, and
are therefore being asked to recollect “the great sea of Beauty”85 we glimpsed
from the mountaintop (210d4).
Interestingly, the only connection to Symposium noted by Penner and
Rowe in their commentary on this passage is to Agathon’s speech, begin-
ning with the poetic prominence of μαλακός in the description of τὸ καλόν.86
On the critical moment in the passage they comment: “the neither good
nor bad comes in from nowhere: not from Lysis, not from Menexenus, nor
from the poets. So it comes from the gods (it’s a prophecy).”87 They do note
that the Beautiful in “the beautiful and good” is quickly “dropped in the
very next formulation of the formula,” and this leads them to pose the right
question: “Why, then, does Plato bother to have Socrates make it in the first
place?”88 Their answer—ironic considering that it is always a question of our
happiness—is that “the good as object of love, here in Lysis, is sufficiently

83
 See Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Socratic Ignorance and Platonic Knowledge in the Dialogues of Plato
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), chapter 6.
84
 See Rowe, “Lysis and Symposium,” 215.
85
 On this phrase, see Francisco L. Lisi, “Symposion 210d4: τὸ πολὺ πέλαγος τοῦ καλοῦ” in Mauro
Tulli and Michael Erler (eds.), Plato in Symposium: Selected Papers from the Tenth Symposium
Platonicum, 285–290 (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2016).
86
 See Penner and Rowe, Plato, Lysis, 104n19, citing “195d–196d.” Cf. Smp. 195d6–196a1.
87
 Penner and Rowe, Plato, Lysis, 102.
88
 Penner and Rowe, Plato, Lysis, 102, likewise source for the two other quoted passages, with
emphasis as in the original. On this question, see also 99n3, beginning with “Socrates seems just
to want to get the beautiful in somewhere.”
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 23

generous to absorb the fine and admirable [sc. τὸ καλόν] (there is at any rate
nothing selfish about it).”89 Despite their silence on Symposium, they naturally
uphold the GB Equation without the requisite hesitation,90 but then usefully
tie the unity of Beauty and the Good to the erotic setting of Lysis;91 this con-
nection will receive further attention in §4. As a whole, their comments on
the passage aim at establishing a deflationary answer to its opening question:
“Why then does he [sc. Socrates] speak of ‘prophecy’?”92
Finally, there is Diotima’s attack on Aristophanes centered on τὸ οἰκεῖον
(205e5–206a1), a connection that loomed large in the Pohlenz-von Arnim
debate. Penner and Rowe do not mention this link to Symposium in the
context of the reappearance of τὸ οἰκεῖον at the end of Lysis (Ly. 221e3)
because it would further undermine an already tenuous argument. Diotima
had distinguished the Good from τὸ οἰκεῖον, excluding serious consid-
eration of the latter unless redefined as the Good: “For it is not, I think,
what’s of ourselves [τὸ ἑαυτῶν] in which we delight, unless, that is, some-
one calls the Good ‘οἰκεῖον’ and ‘of himself.’”93 Naturally Penner and
Rowe would have been perfectly happy to follow Diotima’s suggestion,
made at the stage of her argument where the evidence for a eudaemonist
reading is at its strongest: our own happiness would seem to be paradig-
matically “what’s of ourselves,” thus making the Good synonymous with
τὸ οἰκεῖον.94 The reason that they don’t make this point is that it is Aristo-
phanes’ myth of primordial wholeness, not Diotima’s potentially external-
izing revision, to which Socrates alludes in Lysis: τὸ οἰκεῖον is what was
ours originally but which has been taken away from us (at Ly. 221e2–3),
and thus our desire is for that which we have lost. The attempt to identify
this kind of Good with either Happiness or the wisdom that obtains it—
neither of which can be construed as οἰκεῖον in the Aristophanic sense that
Socrates is now using—deserves some critical attention.95

89
 Penner and Rowe, Plato, Lysis, 104n17; here it is said that καλός “may stand not just for what is
beautiful, but also for what is fine, noble, or admirable.”
90
 Penner and Rowe, Plato, Lysis, 103: “the context as a whole plainly implies that he is actually
proposing to identify the good and the beautiful.”
91
 Penner and Rowe, Plato, Lysis, 104: “If Hippothales loves Lysis, then—so far as the argument
goes—Hippothales must be neither good nor bad, and Lysis must somehow be good for Hippo-
thales.” In fact, the Argument of the Action (see §4) turns on the fact that he is not.
92
 Penner and Rowe, Plato, Lysis, 101.
93
 205e5–7.
94
 Cf. Rowe, “Lysis and Symposium,” 213: “There is, then, a way in which the philon is identical
with what is akin to us, i.e., insofar as it is (exclusively) the good that is akin—itself a key idea of
Diotima’s [the attached note cites 205e–206a].”
95
 Beginning with the critical comments on Rowe, “Lysis and Symposium,” in Penner and Rowe,
Plato, Lysis, 158n2. See also Lorraine Smith Pangle “Friendship and Human Neediness in Plato’s
Lysis.” Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001), 305–323.
24 Chapter 1

To begin with, Penner and Rowe are fully aware of the problem: since
their Socrates identifies the Good with objects like wisdom and happiness
that we have “always lacked” (emphasis mine), they must (reluctantly)
admit that “a retort” could be made accusing “Socrates of straightforward
equivocation.”96 Even after invoking several specious examples of things
that we’ve never had that are nevertheless originally ours,97 they admit that
their readers “might still have a sense of unease”98 which they attempt to allay
with a destabilizing mix of common sense and their ongoing interpretive
practices:

But that would again be—by now, the point surely makes itself—to forget that
Socrates is working within a specific context; and the specific context is by itself
more than sufficient to exclude the ‘obvious’ variety of belonging and taking
away [note 5]. After all, what Socrates and the boys are seeking is what is uni-
versally true of ‘the friend,’ and no one would claim that we are always and only
‘friends of,’ desire, what we once possessed.99

The problem is that this is what Socrates has just claimed that τὸ οἰκεῖον is,
and therefore some further attempt is made to equate “what belongs to us”
with nothing more than “what we are lacking” despite the fact that Socrates
means by this “what has been taken away from us.”100
But the heavy lifting they need falls to the earlier appearance of the word
οἰκειότερον.101 In the course of proving that the parents of Lysis don’t love
him because he isn’t wise and therefore useless (Ly. 210b7–d4)—an argu-
ment already weakened by other suppressed parallels with Symposium (see
above)—Socrates says that if Lysis lacks the knowledge that would benefit
the rest of us,102 not only his father and mother, but “whatever is even more
intimate [οἰκειότερον] than these” (Ly. 210c2) would more readily follow the
directives of others, even if they were “alien [ἀλλότριον].” The interpretive
ingenuity required here from Penner and Rowe arises from the attempt, obvi-
ously originating with Rowe, to show the continuity between Lysis and Sym-
posium. Operating somewhere between their own sophistry and an amiable if

96
 Penner and Rowe, Plato, Lysis, 159.
97
 Penner and Rowe, Plato, Lysis, 159: “there is hardly anything recherché about the idea that things
can belong to someone, and be taken away from him, without their ever actually having been in
his possession.”
98
 Penner and Rowe, Plato, Lysis, 159.
99
 Penner and Rowe, Plato, Lysis, 159 (emphasis mine). Note 5 makes the interesting claim that “if
Socrates’ proposals in fact appear indefensible outside the context of his argument, to that extent
Plato has failed to preserve the dramatic plausibility that he has seemed to achieve elsewhere.”
100
 See Penner and Rowe, Plato, Lysis, 159, especially “it must be so.”
101
 Cf. the kind of continuity argument Rowe applied to the Diotima discourse.
102
 Note that only by having the kind of knowledge that benefits others can a person obtain what
Penner and Rowe construe as the knowledge that benefits oneself.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 25

misguided determination to absolve their Socrates of it,103 Penner and Rowe

are determined to make the argument of Lysis “work.”104
Apart from the end to which the Symposium-Lysis continuity-claim is
merely the means, this attempt is nothing but salutary, but in the context of its
eudaemonist and purely-self-interested end, it proves to be “a bridge too far.”
It is only because of the continuity thesis that the allusion to Aristophanes at
the climax of Lysis becomes inconvenient: when Symposium is considered
on its own, the Aristophanic conception of τὸ οἰκεῖον can readily be placed
at the service of a eudaemonist and self-interested conception of the Diotima
discourse.105 The reason Rowe must make the ostentatiously aporetic Lysis
“work” is because he can conceive of it doing so only by making it advance
the same eudaemonist and self-interested thesis he finds in the Diotima dis-
course; as a result, any obstacles to finding it in one dialogue further compli-
cate the attempt to find it in the other. Instead, it is the synergy between them
that summons the student to explain the ἀπορία of the one as arising from its
failure to consider the other-directed love so beautifully hymned at the height
of the ascent in the other.
And it is the climax of that ascent that Penner and Rowe must reduce to
the status of merely rhetorical “color.”106 Having usefully identified Lysis
as a “school text,” they fail to realize that all of Plato’s λόγοι arise from
his disinterested love of the Beautiful.107 By repeatedly drawing attention to
the intimate connection between love and pedagogy, Diotima’s discourse is
nevertheless only the first time that we will find Plato revealing himself in
Ascent to the Good (see §9). It is not for his benefit that Plato, like Xenophon
before him, has brought us up to a mountain ridge from which we can at last
catch sight of the sea.108 And it is also not for his benefit that he will follow

103
 Cf. Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, xi: “In particular, so the modern story [sc. about Lysis] goes,
it misrepresents him [sc. Socrates] by making him into a kind of sophist, the sort that uses any
means down to and including mere trickery in order to defeat his opponents (in this case a pair of
teenagers; a particularly pointless and silly exercise, then).”
104
 See Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 29.
105
 As in Frisbee C. C. Sheffield, Plato’s Symposium: The Ethics of Desire (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2006), 76–83 and 110, where Beauty, as inspiration, has thus been made (merely)
instrumental to our Happiness.
106
 Penner and Rowe, Plato, Lysis, 303: “the key idea in the Symposium, of erōs as desire for ‘pro-
creation in the beautiful’ (206c ff.), is in essence a colorful elaboration of Socrates’ conclusion
about the genuine lover at Lysis 222a6–7, albeit a brilliant—brilliantly colored—and suggestive
elaboration. That is, it adds nothing of philosophical substance.”
107
 Cf. Anthony Hooper, “The Memory of Virtue: Achieving Immortality in Plato’s Symposium.”
Classical Quarterly 63, no. 2 (December 2013), 543–557, on 547–548 and 556–557, ending with
(last words): “One could therefore argue that Plato, more than almost any other figure in the his-
tory of Western thought, has a right to claim that he has achieved the human immortality Socrates
describes in the Symposium.”
108
 Unfortunately this parallel is not mentioned in Jacob Howland, “Xenophon’s Philosophic Odys-
sey: On the Anabasis and Plato’s Republic.” American Political Science Review 94, no. 4 (Decem-
ber 2000), 875–889.
26 Chapter 1

up the vision of Symposium with the test of Lysis: if we don’t recognize that
Plato has proved himself to be our dearest friend by making it possible for us
to give birth in the Beautiful—as we do when we make transcendent Beauty
as radiant for our students as Diotima has made it radiant for us109—and that
we are therefore bound to him in mutual love for the sake of what is greater
than both of us, then we have failed to reach that mountaintop, and remain
submerged in quite a different sea. For this is their third and most important
omission of Symposium: Lysis is a school text because Plato is a teacher, and
it was not for the sake of his wisdom or happiness that he wrote his dialogues
but for ours.

§2. SYSTEMATIC SOCRATISM

One of the best features of Terry Irwin’s Plato’s Ethics (1995) is that he
begins its fourth chapter (“Socrates: From Happiness to Virtue”) with a brief
section entitled “The Importance of Euthydemus,” and he promptly uses that
dialogue to explain the chapter’s title: “the Euthydemus proceeds from gen-
eral claims about happiness, whereas the other dialogues proceed from parti­
cular beliefs about the virtues and virtuous action.”110 Although he has already
substantiated this claim in the previous chapter (“Socrates’ Arguments about
the Virtues”), by far and away the most controversial element in Irwin’s
account of Socratic virtue—the claim that Socrates regarded the virtues as
instrumental (i.e., IOV), thus creating the famous dialogue with Vlastos about
Plato’s Moral Theory (1977)111—is reserved for the fifth chapter. In other
words, Irwin introduces and then defends his positive answer to the question
“Is Virtue Instrumental to Happiness?” in the chapter after the one that begins
with “The Importance of Euthydemus.” Indeed, considering that Irwin’s is a
“systematic Socratism,” how could he not have? Working carefully within
the limits imposed by the Order of Composition paradigm, Irwin cannot use
Symposium to ground the necessarily eudaemonist basis for IOV, as Rowe
does (see §1), and even when he reaches Symposium in chapter 18—after
seven chapters on Republic—he will scarcely mention the eudaemonist argu-
ment in the Diotima discourse, primarily because he needs the most Platonic

109
 Or even when, “as if in battle” (R. 534c1), we distinguish the Idea of the Good in all its transcen-
dent radiance from a darkling attempt like Rowe’s to align it with mere self-interest. But dark
though that attempt is, I have tried to show that it is dialectically necessary and therefore salutary,
for only in battle can we become Plato’s Guardians.
110
 Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 52.
111
 Beginning with Gregory Vlastos, “The Virtuous and the Happy: Review of Terence Irwin, Plato’s
Moral Theory.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 3,961 (February 24, 1978), 230–231.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 27

aspects of that discourse to patch up the gaping hole between the psychic
justice of the Shorter Way and the Guardian’s return to the Cave.112
Written after his debate with Vlastos, and in response to the master’s own
Socrates (1991), Irwin’s Plato’s Ethics is arguably the currently canonical
statement of the Socratist position, and is in any case best understood as
intermediate between Vlastos and the more radical defense of IOV champi-
oned by Penner and then implemented by Penner and Rowe in their book on
Lysis.113 Before returning to three chapters on Socrates already mentioned,
an overview of its contents is useful: just as chapters 3–5 are introduced by
an introduction to Socrates called “Socrates’ Method,”114 a chapter called
“The Theory of Forms” introduces the chapters on Republic. Transitional
between the four chapters that name Socrates as their principal subject, and
the eight chapters beginning with “The Theory of Forms,” are four others: one
on Protagoras, two on Gorgias, and the fourth on Meno.115 Of these chap-
ters, next to nothing will be said in this section except that just as “The Pro-
tagoras” (chapter 6) follows “Difficulties for Socrates” (chapter 5) primarily
because Irwin will resolve the most important of those difficulties by taking
the hedonism of Protagoras as Socratic,116 so also does “The Implications
of Gorgias” (chapter 8) follow “The Argument of the Gorgias” (chapter 7)
because he must address the conflicting views about hedonism expressed
by Socrates in Gorgias and Protagoras.117 My focus here will be on three
“Socrates” chapters, with “From Happiness to Virtue” intermediate between
“Arguments about the Virtues” and “Difficulties for Socrates.”
The second thing I want to emphasize about this approach to systematizing
Socrates—the first is “The Importance of Euthydemus” for that systematiza-
tion in the fourth chapter—is that Irwin splits his treatment of Charmides,

112
 A move anticipated in Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, on which see Plato the Teacher, 226–227; cf.
Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 308–316.
113
 For an early response to IOV in Ly., see Glenn Lesses, “Plato’s Lysis and Irwin’s Socrates.”
International Studies in Philosophy 18, no. 3 (1986), 33–43; more recently, see Curzer, “Plato’s
Rejection.” Without affirming that IOV is upheld in Ly., my ongoing claim is that Plato anticipates
that there will be some who are inclined to find it there, and that, without endorsing it, he makes
that position plausible in preparation for Euthd. Cf. the opening paragraph of Don Adams, “The
Lysis Puzzles.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 9, no. 1 (January 1992), 3–17.
114
 The first chapter of Irwin, Plato’s Ethics is naturally introductory, and is called “Plato, Socrates,
and the Dialogues.” Especially important in the context of this book’s Introduction are sections
§3 (“Aristotle and the Dialogues,” note in particular “since he was in a position” on 5) and §5
(“Aristotle and Socrates”), particularly on “Aristotle’s suggestion” on 9; this sentence makes it
easy to see why systematic Socratism must resist the restoration of Alc. Cf. Denyer, Plato, Alcibi-
ades, 22, climaxing with: “if the standard chronology is correct, then the Alcibiades is, in part or
in whole, bogus.”
115
 Thrasyllus’ Sixth Tetralogy consists (in this order) of Euthd., Prt., Grg., and Men.
116
 Cf. C. C. W. Taylor, “Review of Plato’s Moral Theory: The Early and Middle Dialogues by Ter-
ence Irwin.” Mind 88, no. 352 (October 1979), 597–599, on 598.
117
 This subject—along with the relationship between Prt. and the other dialogues of the Sixth Tetral-
ogy of Thrasyllus (see previous note)—will be revisited in §11 below.
28 Chapter 1

Laches, and Lysis between the two flanking chapters. Although the opening
of the third mentions Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito—and the latter in par-
ticular is pressed into the unlikely service of showing that Socratic justice
aims at the good of the agent118—the weight of its argument as a whole falls
on Laches and Charmides. Even at this stage, Irwin cannot afford to dispense
with Euthydemus,119 and Lysis puts in a cameo appearance to strengthen his
Crito-backed claim that “Socrates takes just action to be both good, all things
considered, and good for the just agent.”120 But since his primary goal in the
chapter is to establish the unity of virtue (UV), the seven sections (out of
sixteen) at its center concern Charmides and Laches, and the impasse reached
in the first of these—that the definition of courage reached there defines
virtue as a whole, but not courage specifically—is crucial for establishing
UV (chapter 3), on which depends the case for IOV (chapter 5) via the eudae-
monist Euthydemus (chapter 4).
The interwoven complexity of this three-stage argument can perhaps best
be explained by the fact that Irwin’s chapter on Protagoras is found only in
chapter 6. Although Laches, Charmides, and Euthydemus had supporting
roles, it was Plato’s Protagoras that played the principal part in deriving the
IOV from UV in an historical sense, giving rise to what Vlastos called “PTI”
(see Introduction). But unlike Taylor in particular, whose Penner-inspired
account of virtue is found in a commentary on Protagoras, Irwin is deter-
mined to use it only as support, and to build his case on less controversial
dialogues. And this explains why Laches, Charmides, and Lysis are discussed
not only in chapter 3 but in chapter 5 as well, where Lysis becomes especially
important—thanks to identifying the First Friend with Happiness121—for
establishing IOV. But Laches and Charmides are likewise crucial at this
stage, particularly for construing UV-virtue as a τέχνη—understood as
“the knowledge of good and bad” (hereafter “KGB”)—in accordance with
CA (“the Craft Analogy”), and whose characteristic product is the agent’s
Good or Happiness, that is, the GoodE.122
Vlastos was astute enough to identify Penner as the original inspiration
behind the kind of systematization that would eventually result in Irwin’s

118
 Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 47.
119
 Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, §21.
120
 Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 47. Cf. Alfonso Gómez-Lobo, The Foundations of Socratic Ethics (India-
napolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 68, where “the moral flavor” of his Crito-based principle P12 (i.e.,
“the good life is the noble and just life”) must immediately be walked back for the sake of “the
paradoxical Socratic identification of the moral and the non-moral good.”
121
 See Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, §46.
122
 See Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, §47. But note also the relevance of §48 (“Aristotle on Virtue and Craft”)
to the charge of circularity in the Introduction at 70: “If Socrates appears to accept the implica-
tions, as Aristotle conceives them, of treating virtue as a craft, that is a good reason for believing
that Socrates treats virtue as a craft.”
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 29

Plato’s Ethics; what he did not live long enough to experience was the flood
of brilliant articles that Penner would go on to write.123 With or without
acronyms, it is Penner, not Irwin, who makes the most compelling case for
a unitary explanation of human motivation which inevitably and exclusively
aims at the agent’s own Happiness, a case that combines UV, IOV, CA,
and KGB with “the Socratic Paradox” (SP) in so ruthlessly powerful a form
that Penner’s chief interpretive problem is to find some explanation for why
Plato, upon whose testimony the case depends, could ever have abandoned
the Socratist position124—as it were by swapping Socrates in Protagoras
for Plato in Republic—that Penner regards as not only coherent but true.125
One cannot read Penner without realizing that he is himself the Socratist he
finds in Plato’s Socratic dialogues,126 and it is small wonder that primarily
in Naomi Reshotko, George Rudebusch, and Anthony Chu, he has inspired
and nurtured students who fly under the Pennerite banner.127 But as already
indicated in §1, his most important convert or collaborator is Rowe, who puts
a classicist’s erudition at the service of a philosopher’s scalpel, and who is
therefore prepared to reveal the essential Socratism of even the most Platonic
passage in Symposium.
Irwin may lack some of Penner’s incisive brilliance perhaps because he
too, like Vlastos before him, still has one foot in an older, and comparatively
more Platonic world. Just as Vlastos is still in dialogue with Cornford and
Markus, Irwin is still in dialogue with Vlastos; one gets the sense that Penner,
Rowe, and finally Penner and Rowe, have entered a brave new world where
Platonism is either ignored or reinterpreted on a strictly eudaemonist basis
without recourse to the Ideas except insofar as they can be reconfigured as
the GoodE,128 that is, as Happiness and/or the knowledge that maximizes
it. But even if an abandonment of the Socratic prohibition against harming

123
 For bibliography, see “Terry Penner: Brief Vita” (current only to June 2014) at https​://si​tes.g​oogle​
.com/​site/​terry​penne​rphil​osoph​y/bri​ef-vi​ta (accessed October 5, 2017).
124
 See Christopher Rowe, “Comments on Penner” in Julia Annas and Christopher Rowe (eds.), New
Perspectives on Plato: Ancient and Modern, 213–225 (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic
Studies, 2002), 221; cf. the “Conclusion” of Terry Penner, “Socrates” in Christopher Rowe and
Malcolm Schofield (eds.), in association with Simon Harrison and Melissa Lane, The Cambridge
History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, 164–189 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), on 189.
125
 Cf. Terry Penner, “Plato and Davidson: Parts of the Soul and Weakness of Will” in David Copp
(ed.), Canadian Philosophers, Supplementary Volume 16 (1990) of the Canadian Journal of
Philosophy (Twentieth Anniversary Edition), 35–74, on 47 (“a correct philosophical view of the
phenomenon of akrasia.”)
126
 Playfully evident in Terry Penner, “Gerasimos” in Georgios Anagnostopulos (ed.), Socratic,
Platonic and Aristotelian Studies: Essays in Honor of Gerasimos Santas, 103–124 (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2011).
127
 Cf. “the Penner camp” and “Penner and his followers” in Reshotko, “Socratic Eudaemonism,”
349n27.
128
 See especially Penner, “The Forms.”
30 Chapter 1

others never becomes its τέλος,129 there is already enough evidence for
my suggestion in §1 that there is an interpretive ladder, corresponding to
Diotima’s, whereon some noteworthy scholars are travelling, as it were, in
the opposite direction, that is, away from the transcendent Beauty with which
her own ascent ends. The most important thing about Irwin’s intermediate
position on that ladder is that his Socratism is expressed not through articles,
but in two thorough and comprehensive books, both of which importantly
depend on analysis of Lysis, Euthydemus, Laches, and Charmides, that is, the
dialogues that follow Symposium in the ROPD.
This is not to say that Irwin can offer anything other than the most
general kind of support for my reconstruction when it comes to specifics:
although the evidence is mixed, he seems rather more inclined to elucidate
Charmides with Laches than the reverse,130 and the importance he attaches
to Euthydemus suggests at least its logical priority to the other three. In any
case, Irwin is entirely unconcerned with ordering the dialogues by means
of the pedagogical, dramatic, or thematic connections between them. Since
the only sentence in “the Importance of Euthydemus” that begins with the
words “the Euthydemus” continues with “proceeds from general claims
about happiness,” it is easy to see that it is by no means Euthydemus as a
whole to which he attaches importance, and indeed this holds for the Soc-
ratist approach to this fallacy-filled dialogue generally (see §3). It is rather
to its protreptic passages that Irwin and the rest attach importance, and
especially to the first of them (Euthd. 278e3–282d3)—hereafter “the First
Protreptic”—which does indeed take its start “from general claims about
happiness,” albeit by using a particularly slippery stand-in for the word
εὐδαιμονία, that is, εὖ πράττειν.131
But if Diotima’s discourse is read as likewise proceeding from never
retracted “general claims about happiness,” and if account is then taken of even
the most obvious dramatic and thematic connections between the dialogues,
it is easy to see that the erotic framing story in Lysis—that is, the proper way
for Hippothales to speak to his beloved—makes the dialogue on friendship
an obvious intermediary between Symposium and Euthydemus (see §4),

129
 See Naomi Reshotko, Socratic Virtue: Making the Best of the Neither-Good-Nor-Bad (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 71–72; the reception of her work gives some indication
that the last stage in this process will be proving the Socratic arguments for not harming others to
be inadequately grounded in a purely self-regarding virtue; cf. Rachel Singpurwalla, “Review of
N. Reshotko, Socratic Virtue.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 128 (2008), 276–277, on 277: “But—as
R. herself admits—there may be cases where we do benefit from harming others.”
130
 See Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 44; on the other hand, consider the sequence of sections §26–§29.
131
 Beginning with the question: “Why is Socrates made to argue fallaciously and the fallacy shown
up?” (235), the discussion of hedonism in Protagoras in I. M. Crombie, An Examination of Plato’s
Doctrines, two volumes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 1.235–36, is of considerable
value.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 31

especially when the First Friend is identified with τὸ ἀγαθόν αὐτῷ of the
first and the εὐδαιμονία or εὖ πράττειν of the second. But this is where the
huge difference between the respective positions of Irwin and Rowe on the
interpretive ladder becomes crucial: while the latter can find support in Sym-
posium for the eudaemonist nexus on which to build his post-Vlastos defense
of a Pennerite position, Irwin himself makes such a move impossible, and not
merely because he upholds the Order of Composition paradigm that Rowe
is willing to question.132 In other words, it is not only because Irwin makes
Symposium a middle, and therefore post-Socratic dialogue, that he can offer
no support for connecting it with Lysis, Laches, and Charmides by means of
the kind of dramatic, pedagogical, and thematic connections that interest me.
But perhaps I ought to say only that he offers no direct support. As indi-
cated above, Irwin discusses Symposium only after Republic in Plato’s Eth-
ics; in his earlier Plato’s Moral Theory, his approach had been somewhat
different. Although he was already using Symposium to offer an “expressiv-
ist” explanation of how the Return to the Cave remains consistent with the
happiness of the Guardians,133 his discussion of it appears in a pre-Republic
chapter entitled: “The Middle Dialogues: Criticisms of Socratic Ethics.”
In sections 12–14 of that chapter, particularly in the last of them (“the Sig-
nificance of the Symposium”), Irwin builds on the post-Socratist implications
of the Theory of Forms in Phaedo, and Recollection in Meno,134 to show the
incompatibility of “Socratic ethics” with what he calls “the ascent-theory” in
Symposium. Treating the GB Equation with appropriate caution,135 he disjoins
the Beautiful (or “admirable”) from the Good in what would have been a
Golden Sentence had he added “for us” at the end of it:

He [sc. Plato] considered desire for the beautiful or admirable rather than desire
for the good, because we are inclined to regard something as admirable and
worthwhile even if it contributes to no further good.136

Although the way Irwin uses Hippias Major to elucidate the relationship
between the Beautiful and the Good in Symposium is both noteworthy and
illuminating,137 it is the way he contrasts “the ascent-theory” in the latter with
Lysis that begins to suggest what I mean by the “indirect support” he offers
to the ROPD.

132
 Especially in Christopher Rowe, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).
133
 See Plato the Teacher, 227n171.
134
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 171.
135
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 165.
136
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 170; cf. Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, §25.
137
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 165–166.
32 Chapter 1

If he [sc. Plato] agreed with Socrates that beautiful things are all subordinate
goods instrumental to the final good [i.e., by using the First Friend to justify
IOV], he could easily explain how we can move from one [stage of the ascent]
to another; we would simply discover that this is more efficient than that as a
means to the same final good. Such an account would be free of any strange
talk about ascent; it would be the Lysis’s account of rational desire. Plato rejects
this solution.138

Although Irwin explains the contrast between Lysis and Symposium on the
developmental basis that Lysis belongs to an earlier and Socratic phase of
Plato’s Development, I have now suggested another way to explain that con-
trast based on basanistic pedagogy. If Lysis immediately follows Symposium
in the ROPD, the conflict between them is instructive, and forces the reader
to make a choice.139 While Penner and Rowe have shown that the student can
indeed find support in Symposium for making the wrong interpretive choice
in Lysis, Irwin shows that the opposite choice is rather Platonic than Socratic.
And if Irwin is right that the ascent-theory undermines CA and IOV, and if
I am right that this takes place before the student encounters the best evidence
not only for these doctrines, but also for KGB in Laches and Charmides—and
thus the best evidence, apart from Protagoras, for UV, and likewise for greet-
ing the return of TEA in Euthydemus with suspicion—that is what I mean by
claiming that Irwin has supplied indirect evidence for the ROPD.
Naturally I am not denying that there would still be problems with (1) find-
ing IOV in Lysis, (2) regarding TEA as entirely unproblematic (and Socratic)
in Euthydemus, or (3) finding an ironclad defense of UV and CA based on
KGB in Laches and Charmides, even if the student had not already read Sym-
posium. To begin with, the Socratists tend to read Plato’s dialogues in a way
that many others, and practically all non-Anglophone scholars, find odd if not
downright repellant and wrong-headed, generally by detaching “the hard and
serious core” from the dramatic settings, characters, and enlivening details
over which Plato has so clearly labored. In other words, sentences like Irwin’s
“Euthydemus proceeds from general claims about happiness, whereas the
other dialogues proceed from particular beliefs about the virtues and virtuous
action” can easily be challenged on the basis of even the most cursory atten-
tion to any given dialogue’s dramatic circumstances, or to “the Argument of
the Action” (see § 4). But quite apart from this more natural way of reading,
it certainly becomes less clear that Plato wants his readers to explain away or

138
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 170; cf. 172.
139
 Cf. Hermias (fifth century, A.D.) in P. Couvreur (ed.), Hermiae Alexandrini in Platonis Phaedrum
Scholia (Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1901), 9, lines 19–21: “it is necessary to mention that Plato is
accustomed to deploy [ποιεῖσθαι] an investigation of opposed speeches for the discovery [εὕρησις]
and testing [βάσανος] of the truth.”
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 33

otherwise resolve problems connected with CA, UV, KGB, IOV, and TEA if
they have already been exposed to a “Platonist” Symposium before reading
the dialogues most often used to reveal a coherently “Socratist” commitment
during his earlier period.
And it is not only Symposium that might stand in this prior position: all of
the dialogues considered in Ascent to the Beautiful would do so as well. Con-
sider Irwin’s discussion of Lesser Hippias in Plato’s Ethics. If reading Lysis,
Euthydemus, Laches, and Charmides in the light of Symposium requires
a battle of rival paradigms, challenging as it does nearly two centuries of
the Order of Composition’s hegemony, the same is not true of this minor
but unquestionably “Socratic” dialogue. In the “Is Virtue a Craft?” section
of chapter 5 (“Difficulties for Socrates”), Irwin must finesse the problems
created for K and CA by Socrates’ claim that only the master of a τέχνη has
the capacity to speak falsely about its subject matter in a consistent manner—
and thus “that the good person would be the one who willingly makes errors
and does shameful and unjust actions”140—not only by placing the usual
emphasis on “if there is such a person” as an existential counterfactual,141 but
also by showing in his own terms why no such person could exist:

If the end promoted by the proper use of the supreme craft is an end that every-
one wants, the logical possibility of misuse will never in fact be realized. If there
is some craft whose misuse is logically possible but psychologically impossible
(given actual human nature and its motives) Socrates may still be willing to
identify such a craft with virtue.142

Yes he may, but then again it is unclear that Irwin’s Socrates is really the
relevant agent here. The point is that one of the most provocative passages in
Hippias Minor poses problems for Irwin’s Socrates, and in coming to “his”
aid, Irwin invokes Euthydemus: since the “supreme craft” is what “promotes
the agent’s happiness,” and since “everyone pursues happiness as the ultimate
end,” then no one will be psychologically able to misuse such a craft;143 for
this reason, the logical possibility of virtue’s misuse qua craft is trumped by
the psychological impossibility of willingly pursuing an end one knows to be
incompatible with one’s happiness.144 On this reading “the point of Hippias
Minor is not to cast doubt on the identification of virtues with crafts, but to

140
 Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 69.
141
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §11.
142
 Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 69.
143
 See also Terry Penner, “Socratic Ethics and the Socratic Psychology of Action: A Philosophi-
cal Framework” in Donald R. Morrison (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Socrates, 260–292
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 273–276.
144
 Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 69–70.
34 Chapter 1

show that we must accept psychological eudaemonism if we are to identify

virtues with crafts.”145 Leaving aside the brittle assumptions about Plato and
his dialogues that make such a sentence possible, Irwin’s reading of Hippias
Minor depends on a prior reading of Euthydemus. While the importance of
Euthydemus to Plato is yet to be considered, it is clearly of critical importance
to Irwin, and indeed to any systematic account of Socratism.146
And therefore it comes as no surprise that by the time Penner and Rowe
come to the eleventh chapter of their collaborative book (“A re-reading
of the Lysis”), Euthydemus must likewise play a major part. Penner and
Rowe have already expressed their sense of the Good before quoting
Socrates’ claim in the First Protreptic that “wisdom is the only good
thing” (Euthd. 281e3–5) in that chapter’s eighth sub-section (“On what
is Good itself or desired for its own sake”),147 and an analysis of “how
this passage as a whole” supports this sense climaxes with the claim:
“wisdom is the only thing good in itself as a means to happiness.”148 It is
presumably because both recognize that this (apparent) self-contradic-
tion—as they put it: “how can something be good in itself as a means
to happiness?”—“is quite a nasty shock for the modern reader”149 (but
not, they seem to think, for an ancient one!), the critical question is then
revisited in the chapter’s eleventh sub-section, after the link between
Euthydemus and Lysis has been demonstrated: “If the ‘First Friend’ is
knowledge or wisdom does that rule out its being happiness?”150 After
all, if the passage introducing the First Friend makes anything clear,
surely it is that the end—whatever the regress-ending First Friend turns
out to be—is different from the means. In other words, if “wisdom is
the only good thing,” then how can it be the means to Happiness?151

145
 Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 70.
146
 See Julia Annas, “Virtue as the Use of Other Goods.” Apeiron 26, no. 3/4, Virtue, Love and Form:
Essays in Memory of Gregory Vlastos (September/December 1993), 53–66, on 53 (first words).
147
 See Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 261–263; as the last part of sentence beginning with “as we
see it” on 263 indicates, Penner and Rowe are both revisiting and marginalizing the battleground
once fought over by Vlastos and Irwin.
148
 Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 267.
149
 Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 267.
150
 Contrast Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 275–278; especially 277: “For knowledge always leads
to maximum available happiness.” My nephew Richard Roberts suggested the following definition
of horror: the irreconcilability of knowledge and happiness.
151
 Penner and Rowe grapple with this problem, putting to work a distinction introduced beforehand
between complete happiness (i.e., what is generally called “Happiness’) and “the maximum hap-
piness available to one, given one’s circumstances, or . . . the luck of the draw” (Plato’s Lysis,
276–277; the ellipsis points the reader back to 265n59, where the pair prepare to sidestep the fal-
lacious implications of the identification of wisdom with εὐτυχία in the First Protreptic at Euthd.
279d6–7), on which see §3 below. Since this maximum happiness is always the aim of particular
actions under particular circumstances, “the best means available and the best end available must
always go together” (277).
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 35

Penner and Rowe’s solution therefore configures the First Friend as a

“package.”152
As the next two sections of this chapter will show—when at long last
the discussion returns to what Plato actually wrote in the way that he wrote
it—there are a number of good reasons why Euthydemus is hardly the most
stable foundation upon which to build any kind of philosophical system,
“Socratic” or otherwise. For the present, it is enough to focus on the rather
obvious difficulty that leads to Penner and Rowe’s “package.” Socrates can
only reach his desired protreptic conclusion that wisdom is the only good
(and must therefore be pursued by young Cleinias) by showing that wisdom
alone secures the only good that all men pursue, that is, Happiness. But what
exactly is that? If the Idea of the Good is under-determined in Republic, Hap-
piness remains just as under-determined in Euthydemus. Qualified neither
by modern neologism (e.g., “presently available maximal happiness”) nor a
Protagoras-inspired account such as “preponderance of pleasure,” Socratists
are left with a first principle that—despite its great advantage in being a this-
worldly and commonsense alternative to a Platonic Idea—has been rendered
problematic at its literary point of introduction, whether that occurs in Sym-
posium, Lysis, or Euthydemus.
To coin a modern neologism of my own, I will call this problem “the
Santas Circle,” citing as definitive the following passage from Gerasimos X.
Santas:

If wisdom is the only self-sufficient good, and happiness is a good (indeed

the good), as Socrates certainly holds, it follows either that happiness is not a
self-sufficient good, which seems paradoxical; or that wisdom and happiness are
identical, which also seems paradoxical.153

It is this circle that causes Penner and Rowe to wrap both knowledge and
“presently available maximum happiness” into their “package,” and which

152
 Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 277: “the ‘first friend’ in any particular case is the best package
presently available” (277, cf. “the agent’s MAXHAP” in Penner, “Socratic Ethics,” 172). They
then proceed to unpack this “First Friend” qua “package” in two presumably identical ways: it
is interchangeably (1) “presently available maximal happiness {viz. the happiness you get via
wisdom}” and (2) “wisdom {viz. the wisdom that leads to presently available happiness}.” This
solution has the advantage of avoiding talk of means and ends (277–278), a curious desideratum
for interpreters of Lysis, but one that allows them to fulfill Macbeth’s famous wish (Macbeth I.
7. 1–4). Cf. Dancy, “Penner and Rowe on Lysis,” 337: “I am puzzled about each one of these
identities [sc. ‘we are to identify the Form of the Good with one’s own happiness, and both with
knowledge’] and also about how they are supposed to emerge from the Lysis.”
153
 Gerasimos Santas, Goodness and Justice: Plato, Aristotle, and the Moderns (Malden, MA: Black-
well, 2001), 37. Cf. “the circularity problem” in Georgios Anagnostopulos, “Introduction” in
Anagnostopulos (ed.), Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian Studies: Essays in Honor of Gerasimos
Santas, xxiii–xxix (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), xxvii.
36 Chapter 1

had earlier led Vlastos to distinguish between “the final unconditional good”
(happiness) and virtue as “the supreme non-final unconditional good, both
necessary and sufficient for our happiness.”154 Socratists never sound less like
Socrates than when they are attempting to resolve the puzzles Plato placed in
the path of a systematic Socratism.
The question of Plato’s awareness of these puzzles is obviously crucial,
and it is therefore significant that the chapter that introduces the Santas Circle
(“The Socratic Good of Knowledge”) ends with a section called “Was Plato
Aware of These Socratic Problems?” Citing Republic 6, Santas appropriately
affirms that he was.155 But the fact that the affirmative answer is to be found
only considerably later in the ROPD—that is, only on the verge of what I am
calling “the ascent to the Good”—suggests that it was Plato’s intention to
puzzle his readers with “these Socratic Problems,” albeit only temporarily.
It is therefore interesting that Santas points to an earlier way to escape the
viciousness of the Circle: “if we say that the good or happiness is identical
with pleasure, we can solve all our problems and fill all the gaps in Socratic
ethics without circularity.”156 In other words, if we take as Socratic the hedo-
nism Socrates espouses in Protagoras, we can avoid entirely the tangled
relationship between Happiness and Knowledge (as in Penner and Rowe) or
between Happiness and Virtue (as in Vlastos): (a) “happiness is pleasure,” (b)
wisdom is “knowledge of the sources and means to pleasure,” and (c) “a life
of the greatest possible pleasures and the least possible pains is the complete
good.”157 In response, Santas naturally points out that the GP Equation is
expressly denied in Gorgias.158
An even more significant instance of revisiting Protagoras can be found
in C. C. W. Taylor’s Socrates.159 It was thanks to his 1976 commentary
on Protagoras that Taylor earned the middle spot in Vlastos’s “PTI,” and
in The Greeks on Pleasure (1982), coauthored with J. C. B. Gosling,160 he
did his best to minimize the incompatibility of Gorgias and Protagoras.
What makes his “very short introduction” to Socrates so important, then, is
that while his treatment of Euthydemus is even more incisive than that of

154
 Vlastos, Socrates, 230–231.
155
 Santas, Goodness and Justice, 51–53.
156
 Santas, Goodness and Justice, 52.
157
 Santas, Goodness and Justice, 52.
158
 Santas, Goodness and Justice, 52–53.
159
 Originally published as C. C. W. Taylor, Socrates (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998), I will cite C. C. W. Taylor, Socrates: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
160
 J. C. B. Gosling, and C. C. W. Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1982).
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 37

Santas,161 and even though he too points out that Protagoras offers “a way
out of the impasse,”162 he is notably diffident about the role the latter plays
in Plato’s thought. In a small number of luminously clear pages,163 Taylor
undermines a central pillar of systematic Socratism, that is, what Irwin calls
“the importance of Euthydemus.” Ruthless in exposing this dialogue’s “inco-
herence” (at least with respect to Plato), he points to it as the probable point of
transition from Plato’s Socratic to his Platonic phase.164 As a true (i.e., Aris-
totle-inspired) Socratist, Taylor places the culminating moment of Socrates’
transformation—that is, from Socratist to Platonist—not in Republic 6–7, but
in the tripartite soul of Republic 4, where the distinctively Socratic denial of
ἀκρασία in Protagoras is superseded.165
It will be seen that, for all the brevity and apparent simplicity of its exposi-
tion, Taylor’s position remains a remarkably subtle one, leaving some space
between the lines for Penner’s repeated insinuations that Plato replaced a true
doctrine with a false one when he abandoned Socratism. More interesting are
the differences between (1) Irwin, who relies so heavily on “the importance
of Euthydemus,” (2) Penner and Rowe, who focus on Lysis when read in
the light of Symposium and Euthydemus, and (3) Santas and Taylor, whose
critical analysis of circularity and incoherence in Euthydemus tends to drive
defenders of “Systematic Socratism” back to a deadpan reading of Plato’s
even more puzzling Protagoras.166 It is therefore important to understand why
this return to Protagoras is an intrinsic and inescapable feature of Socratism
before seeing why it was always Plato’s intent to force the reader to make
that return again and again,167 a return made inevitable since the ROPD begins
with Protagoras and not Alcibiades Major.
This is not the time to review the hypothesis proposed in Ascent to the
Beautiful that Protagoras was first performed for neophytes as a play before
becoming “a school text” they would study carefully; it will be further
defended in §11. In the present context, it is enough to point out that reference

161
 Taylor, Socrates, 69–70, climaxing with: “Socrates [‘Plato’ would be better here] leaves the
puzzle unresolved [as well he might, since it is unresolvable], and it may well be that at that point
[note the customary failure to consider the dialogues from a pedagogical perspective] did not see
his way out of the puzzle.” Cf. C. C. W. Taylor, “Review of The Foundations of Socratic Ethics
by Alfonso Gómez-Lobo and The Socratic Movement by Paul A. van der Waerdt.” Philosophical
Quarterly 47, no. 187 (April 1997), 257–260, on 259.
162
 Taylor, Socrates, 71: “it [sc. Prt.] represents a way out of the impasse which blocks the original
form of the Socratic theory, though not a way which Plato was himself to adopt.”
163
 See Taylor, Socrates, 66–71.
164
 Taylor, Socrates, 70.
165
 Taylor, Socrates, 70.
166
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §4.
167
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, Epilogue, and §11 below.
38 Chapter 1

has already been made in §1 to the conflict created between the end of Pro-
tagoras and the discussion of incurring wounds and death for the sake of your
friends during wartime in Alcibiades Major. This means that when Socrates
claims that it is not in human nature to wish to advance into things that we
think are bad (Prt. 358c6–d2),168 Plato is knowingly concealing the truth from
the start: the paradigmatically beautiful action is neither pleasant nor “good
for us,”169 and that is why ascent to the post-eudaemonist GoodT necessarily
follows the prior (and easier) ascent to the Beautiful. If life is good—and
it is certainly difficult to imagine Happiness in its absence (but see Mx.
247a4–6)—then there is no prudential or self-interested basis for Alcibi-
ades to prefer death to cowardice (Alc. 115d7), and it is this preference that
inspires Socrates to offer him speeches born in the Beautiful, later described
as such in Symposium.
The more important matter in a pedagogical and philosophical sense is
the relationship between the Beautiful and the Good. In §1, making use
of Rowe for illuminating the salutary effects of dialectical friction (cf. R.
434e4–435a4),170 I briefly reviewed the process of how the GB Equation is
surpassed—at least how the Beautiful is severed from the GoodE—during
the final ascent in the Diotima discourse. But thanks to the final argument in
Protagoras, this is only one of three such “Equations,” none of which proves
that a man who knows the truth is incapable, whether pedagogically or psy-
chologically, of voluntary deception or false speaking. Following directly
from the combination of the GB with the GP Equations, there is also the
Equation of the Beautiful and the Pleasant (hereafter “the BP Equation”); it
completes the trifecta with an obviously fallacious third—at least for those
who know that χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά—and is challenged early (Hp. Ma. 299a1–6).
As for the GP Equation, it will be flatly contradicted in Gorgias (see §11).
My general point is that the student gradually becomes less and less sure that
Socrates could not have made a deliberately erroneous argument in Protago-
ras (cf. Hp. Mi. 367a2–5), and thus comes closer to seeing that any attempt to
use that argument to resolve the impasse in Euthydemus is no better grounded
than Irwin’s attempt, described above, to resolve the impasse in Lesser Hip-
pias with Euthydemus.

168
 Cf. Gerasimos Santas, “The Socratic Paradoxes.” Philosophical Review 73, no. 2 (April 1964),
147–164, on 157n22. A noteworthy aspect of this important article is its connection (164n27 and
161–162) to Sachs, “A Fallacy.” But see also Gerasimos Santas, “Penner, Plato, and Sachs on
Justice and Happiness” in Naomi Reshotko (ed.), Desire, Identity, and Existence: Essays in Honor
of T. M. Penner, 95–107 (Kelowna: Academic Printing and Publishing, 2003).
169
 Even if we fail to remember our mothers, teachers, nurses, and firemen, consider the even more
imperious need we have to forget just how little we really know about ourselves—this, of course,
is the central concern of Alc.—in order to be satisfied with “the good for us.”
170
 On “the Firesticks,” see Plato the Teacher, chapter 5.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 39

But the history of Socratism explains why a deadpan reading of Protagoras

is ultimately inescapable for its proponents. While this process begins with
Aristotle (see Introduction), its modern resurgence began with Vlastos who
affirmed in his 1956 Introduction to Protagoras that SP was fully Socratic
while at the same time pronouncing it misguided.171 By rejecting John
Gould’s attempt to renegotiate a more plausible conception of K,172 Vlastos
paved the way for Santas,173 whose 1964 article “The Socratic Paradoxes,”
made a “prudential” version of it—that is, that no one will fail to do what
they know is good for them174—logically prior to its “moral” counterpart, the
crucial premise of which Santas seemed prepared to jettison.175 Santas admit-
ted that the distinction between “prudential” and “moral” versions, useful
for elucidating Gorgias and Meno, was not as applicable to Protagoras,176
and his 1966 article on ἀκρασία in that dialogue,177 or rather his 1969 article
on Laches,178 offered Penner a tempting target in his 1973 “The Unity of
Virtue.”179 It was this influential piece that earned Penner the place of honor
in PTI, whose distinguishing mark, in contrast to Vlastos,180 is that SP in
Protagoras is both Socratic and plausible, while in the papers of Penner,
“Socrates’ total theory”181 is not only plausible and thoroughly prudential,182
but also true.
It is important to understand the relationship between UV and SP, and in
keeping with these historical remarks, a good place to begin is to understand

171
 Gregory Vlastos, “Introduction” in Plato, Protagoras; Benjamin Jowett’s translation, extensively
revised by Martin Ostwald; edited, with an Introduction by Gregory Vlastos, vii–lxvi (Indianapo-
lis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), xliii–lxv.
172
 See Gregory Vlastos, “Socratic Knowledge and Platonic ‘Pessimism.’” Philosophical Review 66,
no. 2 (April 1957), 226–238, on John Gould, The Development of Plato’s Ethics (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1955), especially 3 (introducing K, SP, and UV), chapter 1 (on K),
52–55 (on SP), and 65 (on UV); noteworthy is Gould’s reliance on Alc.; see 44n1, 48, and 59–60.
See also Plato the Teacher, 14n41.
173
 Santas, “Socratic Paradoxes,” 148n8.
174
 Santas, “Socratic Paradoxes,” 149–157.
175
 Santas, “Socratic Paradoxes,” 164.
176
 Santas is fully aware of the difficulties that the first iteration of SP in Prt. creates for his well-
know distinction between moral and prudential versions of the paradox; see “Socratic Paradoxes,”
150n10.
177
 Gerasimos Santas, “Plato’s Protagoras and Explanations of Weakness.” Philosophical Review 75,
no. 1 (January 1966), 3–33.
178
 Gerasimos Santas, “Socrates at Work on Virtue and Knowledge in Plato’s Laches.” Review of
Metaphysics 22, no. 3 (March 1969), 433–460.
179
 Penner, “Unity of Virtue,” 62n35.
180
 For his assessment of Vlastos, see Terry Penner, “Socrates and the Early Dialogues” in Richard
Kraut (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato, 121–169 (Cambridge UK: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1992), on 147n1.
181
 See the last word of Terry Penner, “Socrates on Virtue and Motivation” in E. N. Lee, A. P. D.
Mourelatos, and Richard Rorty (eds.), Exegesis and Argument: Essays for Gregory Vlastos, in
Phronesis, supplementary volume 1, 133–151.
182
 See Penner, “Historical Socrates” generally, and especially 207n14.
40 Chapter 1

why Penner followed his discussion of Protagoras in “The Unity of Virtue”

with an account of virtue as KGB in Laches and Charmides.183 Once again,
Santas laid the foundation for this move, taking the views of Critias and
Nicias as straightforwardly Socratic.184 Whether or not Happiness is defined
in accordance with hedonism, TEA occupies the place of honor here, and
thus KGB is that alone which assures our possession of the GoodE, and since
KGB is what Virtue is, we have accepted K, UV, and IOV. Irwin had already
joined battle with Vlastos (and his moderate followers) over IOV, and the
more radical Penner was now groomed for a ready-to-be-anthologized debate
between what might be called “KNV” and “KSV,”185 with the stronger view
now canonically tied to UV. All that remained, then, was to use the “pruden-
tial” version of SP, already illuminated by Santas, to show that no one, as a
matter of fact, ever aims at anything that they know or even think to be bad
for themselves, and this for the exact same reason that everyone always aims
at their own knowledge-gained Happiness as the First Friend.
It is therefore nothing “moral” that distinguishes the virtuous from the
base,186 but only knowledge that separates “virtue” from ignorance about how
one might best achieve the GoodE for oneself in any given situation. Finally,
there are no countervailing and necessarily irrational desires, wishes, or moti-
vations—as per the tripartite soul of Republic 4—that would or even could
ever cause us to aim for anything else, and when they appear to do so, Plato
will have left Socratism behind,187 and done so erroneously. This, or some-
thing like it, is what I take “Pennerism” to be, while identifying not simply
Penner but Penner and Rowe as its principal proponents. It will be noted that
this summary contains some fudging, especially with respect to the Santas
Circle in Euthydemus and Taylor’s incoherence claim about that dialogue.188
It also deserves note that in Penner’s “Unity of Virtue,” he accurately pointed
out that Euthydemus—which makes Wisdom the only Good, but which

183
 Penner, “Unity of Virtue,” section 4.
184
 See Santas, “Socrates at Work,” 449n10.
185
 These stand for “knowledge is sufficient for virtue” and “knowledge is necessary for virtue” in
Gail Fine, “Introduction” to Fine (ed.), Plato 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion and the Soul, 1–33
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 5–14.
186
 Cf. Penner, “Socrates,” 180 (on Prt.): “Socrates wrests from Simonides’ poem several morals . . .
and, in addition, two intellectualist morals that are apparently quite unintended by Simonides.
These are that the only way to become a worse person is to become less knowledgeable, and that
no one errs willingly {at getting what is good for them}.” For the bracketed words, cf. Penner,
“Historical Socrates,” 206n9 (on Hp.Mi.).
187
 Penner, “Plato’s Ethics,” 158n15: “Most treatments of the Republic seem anxious to avoid making
it egoistic in its goals—even Irwin (1977, 1995 [sc. in Plato’s Moral Theory and Plato’s Ethics]),
who follows Penner (1973b [sc. in “Unity of Virtue”]) in making at least Socratic ethics egoistic.”
The return of Plato and “middle” in Penner’s title therefore indicates the presence of Socratism
in its most radical form.
188
 Cf. Penner, “Platonic Justice,” 51n14 on “desired for its own sake as a means to happiness.”
Prichard appears here; cf. 50n10; see also Penner, “Plato’s Ethics,” 159–160.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 41

specifically names Courage and other virtues as good only if used properly,
that is, in accordance with Wisdom—was inconsistent with UV.189 But the
real problem is deeper, arising from dependence on the Order of Composi-
tion paradigm, and manifested here in the distinction between the Socrates of
Plato’s early “Socratic” dialogue as opposed to the Socrates of his “middle
period,” and thus from a misunderstanding of the pedagogical purpose of
Plato’s dialogues that the Reading Order alternative is designed to redress.190
But it is thanks to the dialectical flexibility this alternate paradigm creates
that the interpretive value of Pennerism does not disappear simply because
it arises from a misunderstanding of Plato or how his dialogues should be
read.191 Neither is Pennerism to be discredited because of its gleeful rejection
of “moralism,”192 nor a deflationary approach to the Ideas.193 My purpose is
instead to show it is usefully false, and that it occupies an important place
in Platonic pedagogy. The deliberately false is not simply to be rejected; it
must be understood and its educational purpose made plain. Since I regard
Plato the Teacher as the master of basanistic pedagogy, and since his use of it
begins with the student’s initial encounter with Protagoras, I am very com-
fortable with a vision—no matter how ultimately misleading or inconsistent
with Platonism it may be and in fact is—that combines reliance on a deadpan
approach to that problematic dialogue with a way of reading Symposium,
Lysis, Euthydemus, Laches, and Charmides that not only makes arranging
them in that order plausible, but also creates in the process an almost but not
quite fully consistent account of KGB-virtue that specifically depends on a
Good that is different in the decisive respect from the Idea of the Good.
Since this point is crucial to my argument, some further clarification and
contextualization of my interpretive position is in order. The key ideas are tri-
angulation and the pedagogical value of deliberate falsehood, that is, basanis-
tic pedagogy. In the case of both pre- and post-Republic dialogues, arguments
can and have been made to show that Plato had previously embraced and
also came later to embrace views that were inconsistent with those found in
Republic itself: these positions have been identified respectively as Socratism

189
 See Penner, “Unity of Virtue,” 42–43, especially 42n10. Cf. Smp. 209a3–4.
190
 Cf. C. C. W. Taylor, “The Origins of Our Present Paradigms” in Julia Annas and Christopher
Rowe (eds.), New Perspectives on Plato: Ancient and Modern, 73–84 (Washington, DC: Center
for Hellenic Studies, 2002), especially on “the evidence of Aristotle” (83).
191
 Cf. Kraut, “Eudaimonism and Platonic erōs,” 236: “The eudaimonist reading would not have
become so widely accepted were it totally without textual support.”
192
 Cf. Reshotko, Socratic Virtue, x: “I have found that most previous treatments of Socrates (and
especially the book-length ones) read a post-Kantian notion of morality back into his ethical
theory. My awareness of this is due to the teaching and scholarship of Terry Penner. He has always
made it clear that this sort of ‘moralism’ is foreign to Socratic ethics. Penner has provided the
foundation upon which I build my own view.”
193
 See Penner, “Plato’s Ethics,” 157–158; cf. Rowe, “Form of the Good,” 151.
42 Chapter 1

and revisionism. Although my overall position is unitarian and Republic-

centered, and even though I reject the hegemony of the Order of Composi-
tion paradigm that underpins both revisionism and Socratism, the alternative
paradigm of Reading Order that I do embrace, once joined to the hypothesis
of basanistic pedagogy, makes both positions plausible components of a truly
dialectical curriculum, one in which the student can only reach the truth by
rejecting what is false.
With revisionism thus easily configured as a post-Republic test, Socratism
functions analogously as a pre-Republic springboard: it is seductive enough
to make the opposite of what can only be found on the Longer Way plausible,
but incoherent and self-contradictory enough to prepare Plato’s students to
discover for themselves the necessary conceptual leap required at “the crisis
of the Republic.” To put it in an even more Republic-dependent way, it is
the friction between eudaemonist Socratism and the noble necessity of the
Guardian’s self-sacrificing return to the Cave that causes Justice to flash forth
from the Firesticks.194
And the greater the friction, the brighter becomes the resulting flame. In the
case of the post-Republic dialogues, that friction has been supplied by G.
E. L. Owen, who—following his teacher Gilbert Ryle—taught his students
to regard “the late Plato” as an improvement on the Plato of (traditional)
Platonism. In contrast to Owenite revisionism, unitarians like Kahn have
traditionally looked for continuity between Republic 7 on the one hand and
the views of Timaeus, the Eleatic, and the Athenian strangers on the other; in
my own case, a more dialectical unitarianism instead celebrates their irrec-
oncilability, configuring that contrast as a test that requires Plato’s students
to fight, “as if in battle” (R. 534c1), for the Idea of the Good. I will show
have “the Socratic dialogues” have prepared them for this struggle, thanks in
particular to the all-important question of the Good: in battle with Socratism,
it is first the GoodE that the student needs to overcome in order to become a
Guardian. Although both revisionism and Socratism originate in the Order of
Composition paradigm, they therefore also play an indispensable role in the
Reading Order alternative, and indeed the more radical they are, the better
they can fulfill Plato’s pedagogical purpose.195
When it attempts to find the GoodE in Symposium and Republic 7, Socra-
tism in its most radical or Pennerite form proves to be no less hostile to the
GoodT than Owenite revisionism, and shares with it not only an interesting
indirect connection,196 but also—since Penner identifies his teachers as Ryle

194
 See Plato the Teacher, §21.
195
 For “the paradox of revisionism,” see Guardians on Trial, 231.
196
 John Cook Wilson (1849–1915), an important influence on Prichard—see Plato the Teacher,
210n65; also 319n76—was Gilbert Ryle’s teacher (see Guardians on Trial, 449n381); Cook
Wilson will return in §15.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 43

and Owen197—a revealing direct connection as well.198 While keeping in mind

their shared intellectual pedigree, Socratism differs from revisionism not only
because its primary concern is the pre-Republic or “early Socratic” dialogues,
but because its principal battleground is “Plato’s Moral Psychology,” and this
battleground creates a dilemma. Although the tripartite soul of the Shorter
Way is—thanks to Aristotle—paradigmatically incompatible with “the
philosophy of Socrates,” it is on that same Shorter Way that a eudaemonist
reading of Republic depends. Since this dilemma is central to the architecture
of Ascent to the Good, I will conclude this section with a discussion of three
interrelated aspects of what I have called “Systematic Socratism”: (1) its
dependence on Protagoras, (2) its origins in Aristotle’s testimony, and (3) its
principal error from the perspective of Platonic pedagogy.
With respect to “(1),” the claim is historical. Not only was Protago-
ras the primary subject of Penner’s breakthrough 1973 article, but the
more important context had long since been provided by Vlastos, whose
1956 “Introduction” to Protagoras is the point of origin for all forms of
post-Vlastos Socratism.199 Perhaps because SP had been introduced in
the context of an ostentatiously fallacious exegesis of Simonides, more
likely because of the more general problems associated with reading
Protagoras as a deadpan endorsement of hedonism, this crucial but also
crucially problematic dialogue tends to lose its primary place—the place
it deserves in an historical sense—in the systematic accounts of Socratism
that followed. Since this section began with Irwin, his is the relevant case:
although he endorses the hedonist reading of Protagoras in both Plato’s
Moral Theory and Plato’s Ethics,200 he considers it in the latter only after
Euthydemus, Charmides, and Laches have already done the heavy lifting
for UV and IOV via TEA.
Even more important than the role of Vlastos in making Socratism possible
by reviving concern with Protagoras is (2) its origins in Aristotle, but thanks
to the importance of Protagoras in Aristotle’s account of Socrates, the two
cannot be easily separated except in an historical sense. While there is no
need to restate here points already made in the Introduction, it is necessary
to consider more carefully the relationship between Socratism and Aristotle,
a subject to which Rowe has devoted considerable attention.201 Although his
Protagoras-dependent Socrates naturally embraces K, UV, and SP, Aristotle

197
 Penner, “The Forms,” 226n10.
198
 Cf. the references to Prichard in Penner, “The Forms,” 196 and 228n12.
199
 Hence the understatement in Taylor, “Review of Gómez-Lobo,” 258: “While every age constructs
its own image of Socrates, the past decade has been particularly rich in Socratic studies, mainly
through the influence of that most Socratic of scholars, Gregory Vlastos.” Gómez-Lobo’s book is
dedicated “to the memory of Gregory Vlastos” (vii).
200
 See Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 103 and Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, §60.
201
 In addition to Rowe, “Just How Socratic” (see Introduction), see Rowe “Comments on Penner,”
216–220 (“Aristotle’s Evidence”).
44 Chapter 1

himself famously rejects all three, and is therefore hostile to Penner’s ver-
sion of Socratism. Rowe must walk gingerly here: without affirming the
accuracy of Aristotle’s description of Socrates—how could it be accurate if
Aristotle thought that Socrates was wrong?202—he cannot question Aristotle’s
testimony too radically,203 because this would undermine the division upon
which all systematic Socratism necessarily depends. Rowe must reject this
use of “necessarily,” not only because he is determined to extend the reach
of Socratism to Symposium and Republic, but also because his Aristotle must
not fully understand Socrates; had he done so, he too would have been a Soc-
ratist. What Rowe downplays and even conceals is that without Aristotle’s
division between what Socrates says in Protagoras and what Socrates says in
Republic, a Socratist Socrates would not exist.204
Gone are the days when any respectable scholar can rely uncritically on the
historical accuracy or perspicacity of Aristotle’s comments on his predeces-
sors, and Vlastos represents the high-water mark for what seems more and
more like an uncritical reliance on Aristotle—to the exclusion, say, of Xeno-
phon205—in making the case that the historical Socrates is “SocratesE.”206
But a nuanced defense of Aristotle’s testimony emphasizes the surprising
consistency of Aristotle’s claims with the evidence of stylometry: as a mat-
ter of empirical fact, it is suggested,207 Aristotle’s division between Socrates
and Plato is confirmed even if Aristotle had no other evidence for the views
of Socrates than Plato’s Socratic dialogues. First of all, there is a circular
argument here: the hypothesis that the descriptor “Plato’s Socratic dialogues”
does not include every dialogue of Plato in which Socrates appears depends
on Aristotle’s testimony. And thus the defense of that hypothesis must always
return to the claim that Aristotle knew more about Socrates than he learned
from the dialogues, and that he made his division between Plato and Socrates
in accordance with that knowledge.
Although I have emphasized and will continue to emphasize the clash
between Order of Composition and Reading Order, the fact remains that
there is considerable overlap between the two paradigms with respect to the
typology of early, middle, and late dialogues. My claim is that the reader,
let us say in the present case the seventeen-year-old Aristotle, first encoun-
tered Socrates in Protagoras, and that he had already followed his antics in
shorter dialogues like Lesser Hippias, Laches, and Lysis, before reaching

202
 Cf. Rowe, “Comments on Penner,” 219–220.
203
 See Rowe, “Comments on Penner,” 217.
204
 See Rowe, “Comments on Penner,” 217, especially “it seems questionable how useful Aristotle is
for Penner’s purposes” and “different from the one Plato adopted, or came to adopt.”
205
 See Vlastos, Socrates, 99–106.
206
 Cf. Rowe, “Comments on Penner,” 220: “Vlastos’s Socrates is, in large part, Aristotle’s.”
207
 Cf. Smith, “Aristotle on Socrates,” 620.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 45

Republic. My further claim is that Plato, who obviously concealed himself

by writing dialogues, would have undermined the pedagogical efficacy of
that concealment by saying to his students things like: “this is what the real
Socrates believed, but I believe something else,” or: “it is in Republic that a
character still called ‘Socrates’ will begin voicing my own opinions while
in Protagoras, ‘Socrates’ is voicing his own.” It simply doesn’t matter how
many years Aristotle stayed in the Academy because Plato’s dialogues prove
that Plato was a hard man with whom to become intimate, especially for a fel-
low like Aristotle, who showed so little natural inclination toward Platonism
that he would later become famous for rejecting it.
For what it’s worth, then, I would point to Aristotle as the paradigmatic
example of the student who was seduced by the Socratism of the pre-Republic
dialogues, and who—when confronted by the multi-book Republic in par-
ticular, which was so ostentatiously different, despite book 1, from the shorter
dialogues that preceded it—not only refused to make the Platonic leap to the
fully separate Idea of the Good that would leave the eudaemonist Good behind,
but also laid the foundations for illegitimately separating Plato’s Socrates from
Plato the Teacher. As a result, and without ever saying that Socrates was simply
right—for only Aristotle himself could possibly be that—Aristotle could plau-
sibly claim that he had embraced the best of both Plato and Socrates without
having fully understood either one. Apart from the transcendent Idea of the
Good, what Aristotle principally failed to understand was Plato’s pedagogical
methods, and here too there is some circularity: only the student who embraces
Platonism can possibly understand them. For such a student, the division
between Socrates in Protagoras and Plato in Republic is strictly artificial, and
the art in question is Platonic pedagogy as implemented in the ROPD.
Finally, it is the combination of “(1)” and “(2)” that leads to (3): Socratism
locates the line of division between Socrates and Plato in Republic 4, and
more particularly in the tripartition of the soul.208 And because “Plato’s Moral
Psychology” is made the battleground—and not the Idea of the Good—the
historical origin of “Systematic Socratism” can be found in Magna Moralia,
whether or not that treatise was written by Aristotle himself:

by making the virtues forms of knowledge, he [sc. Socrates] does away with the
irrational part of the soul. And in doing this, he does away with both passion
and moral character. This is why he does not treat the virtues correctly. But
afterwards Plato divided the soul correctly into its rational and non-rational parts
and assigned to each its appropriate virtues.209

208
 Cf. Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 306.
209
 On Magna Moralia 1.1. (1182a15–28), see Vlastos, Socrates, 95–96 (I am using his translation)
and Richard Kraut, “Introduction to the Study of Plato” in Kraut (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to Plato, 1–50 (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 34n15.
46 Chapter 1

Read together with Nicomachean Ethics 1145b23–27—which was unques-

tionably written by Aristotle, and written about Protagoras—this passage
illustrates, by contrast, an important aspect of what makes Pennerism the
most radical form of Socratism: Penner is reversing the value judgment found
in Magna Moralia with the claim that Plato erred by introducing a non-ratio-
nal part of the soul that did not always aim for, desire, and wish to secure the
GoodE. As a result, “(1),” “(2),” and “(3)” are combined in Penner’s Golden
Footnote: “‘Socrates’ I shall here use for the Socrates of the Protagoras;
‘Plato’ refers to the Socrates of the Republic.”210
When Penner wrote these words in 1971, he was referring to the Shorter
Way in Plato’s Republic: unlike revisionism, Socratism—guided by Pro-
tagoras, Aristotle, and Vlastos—locates the battleground in “Plato’s Moral
Pyschology,” not in “the Theory of (transcendent) Ideas.” The inadequate
response to Penner’s Golden Footnote is that he is simply wrong: if the line
were to be drawn accurately, it would divide Socrates qua eudaemonist from
Plato the Platonist, and that means that it would not be drawn between Pro-
tagoras and Republic 4, but rather between Republic 4 and Republic 6–7,
that is, between the Shorter and the Longer Ways. In other words, it would
be drawn only secondarily in the domain of “Plato’s Moral Psychology” or
“Socrates’ theory of action,” and would find its real basis in the the GoodT.
Since the metaphor in play is dividing lines, it makes sense to recall here the
Divided Line, and use it to illustrate Penner’s error.
The key to my reading of Plato’s Republic is that just as the First (and
highest) Part of the Divided Line corresponds to the Longer Way, so too does
the Second Part correspond to the Shorter.211 The ramifications of this view
are many, and some of them are spelled out in Plato the Teacher, but the
relevant point for now is that the Shorter Way does not depend on the Idea of
the Good and is therefore irremediably flawed: it has not worked its way up to
the un-hypothetical Good through dialectic but has rather combined the use of
Images with unexplored and possibly erroneous Hypotheses in order to arrive
at conclusions that inevitably fall short of the truth.212 Despite the interpre-
tive concerns of “Systematic Socratism,” then, the Shorter Way’s inadequacy
does not arise solely from the tripartite soul and the resulting anti-Socratist

210
 Penner, “Thought and Desire in Plato,” 96n1. Challenging the distinction while remaining Penn­
erite in inspiration is Gabriela Roxana Carone, “Akrasia in the Republic: Does Plato Change His
Mind?” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 20 (2001), 107–148.
211
 See Plato the Teacher, chapter 3.
212
 Cf. R. 510b4–8; on the use of Hypotheses in the Shorter Way, see Plato the Plato, §12; for the
use of Images, see §13.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 47

rehabilitation of ἀκρασία, but even more importantly from its failure to attend
to the GoodT, that is, from its exclusive dependence on the GoodE.
In Plato the Teacher, I explained how the Divided Line anatomizes on a
theoretical level the methodological limitations of the Shorter Way; in Ascent
to the Good, I intend to show that the practical limitations of “Systematic
Socratism” are on dramatic display in the dialogues leading up to Republic
in the ROPD. But it is easy to see why Penner, following Aristotle, directs
his fire at the Shorter Way’s moral psychology: Socrates not only restores
ἀκρασία by means of tripartition, but undermines UV with separate and dis-
tinct accounts of the four virtues; along with SP, even K will take a beating
as a result. Since all this is clearly antithetical to the Socratism that Penner
has been tirelessly promoting over the years on the basis of the pre-Republic
dialogues, the “Socrates” who reverses himself on these points in Republic 4
must now be Plato.
The problem is that Penner, whose “Palmerstonian Platonism” (see Intro-
duction) has deep roots in modern concerns that have nothing whatsoever to
do with Plato, has mistaken the embattled point d’appui. The true line of divi-
sion is between a eudaemonist conception of the Good for me that remains
fully in force along the Shorter Way, and the Idea of the Good that puts a
higher premium on Justice than on the agent’s own Happiness: only the first
of them motivates a return to the Cave that is simultaneously self-sacrificing,
Platonic, and Socratic. And it is because the decisions that lead to Socrates’
trial and death instantiate the results of Justice as described in the Longer
Way (i.e., in the Allegory of the Cave and the subsequent discussion of it
climaxing at R. 520e1–521a4) that what he says and does in Crito is likewise
self-sacrificing, Platonic, and Socratic.
In short, what makes the philosopher’s return to the Cave central to Plato’s
pedagogical project is that it cannot be explained on the basis of the GoodE.
It is only at “the crisis of the Republic” that Plato challenges his best read-
ers to become Guardians by overcoming a TEA-based self-interest, whether
based on Socratist principles as in Protagoras, or on principles antitheti-
cal to Socratism in Republic 4 except in the decisive respect. That decisive
respect—that is, the gap between the Longer Way based on the GoodT and
the Shorter Way based on the GoodE—is both acknowledged and usefully
minimized in another of Penner’s Golden Footnotes, considerably longer this
time, found in his 2006 “Plato’s Ethics.” As indicated by the return of “Plato”
in the title, Penner—now in active collaboration with Rowe—has made the
turn toward the most radical form of Socratism, and the footnote in question
therefore argues for a eudaemonist reading of Republic as a whole, broadly
affirming the views of David Sachs:
48 Chapter 1

Thus we are, after all, stuck with the problem of defending Plato against the
charge of changing the subject from justice as we all know it to something like
psychological well-adjustment [n20].213

As indicated in Plato the Teacher, Sachs’s “A Fallacy in Plato’s Republic”

(1963) marked a crucial step forward in understanding the dialectical process
by which Plato leads the reader to “the crisis of the Republic,” and in order to
reach that crisis, one must not minimize the gap between what he called “the
vulgar conception of justice” and “the Platonic conception.”214 Those, like
Irwin, who argued against Sachs, attempted to show that the Return (i.e., to
the Cave) and thus “other-regarding” justice could be justified on the basis of
the latter;215 they shared with him the error of confusing “the Platonic concep-
tion” with the Shorter while ignoring the Longer Way. By 2006, Penner is
doing the opposite. Determined to foreclose attempts to find anything “other-
regarding” in Plato’s Republic, he can easily subordinate the Longer to the
Shorter Way:

It must be granted that Plato has Socrates tell us at [R.] IV, 435c-d that this psy-
chological well-adjustment account of justice is not accurate, and that a longer,
fuller road must be taken to get that account; and that at VI, 504d-506a, he spells
out what is lacking in this account. What is lacking is something greater than
justice: the Form of the Good, from which justice and all other things become
‘useful and beneficial’ to us [note that Penner must supplement R. 505a4 with
‘to us,’ borrowing it from 505a7]. Proponents of the ‘strongly transcendent’
reading of the Forms noted above [Penner refers to 158n14] may be tempted
here to say that Plato is turning away from the psychological well-adjustment
account of justice to some much more unworldly Forms of Justice and the
Good.216

While acknowledging the textual basis for the division between the Longer
and Shorter Ways, Penner makes it seem like there is a legitimately Platonic

213
 Penner, “Plato’s Ethics,”162. Note 20 (the rest of which will be quoted in the text in what follows)
begins: “See Sachs (1963) with Penner (2005 [sc. Penner, “Platonic Justice”]).
214
 Sachs, “A Fallacy,” 142. On Sachs, see Plato the Teacher, 217–218; on the gap, see 233–236.
215
 See Plato the Teacher, §19.
216
 Penner, “Plato’s Ethics,” 162n20 (continued). The “proponents of the ‘strongly transcendent’
reading” Penner lists at 158n14 are: “Annas (1981), Cooper (1977), Irwin (1977, 1995), Santas
(2001), and White (1979).” On Annas, Introduction, see Plato the Teacher, 227–228 and §16
below. On Nicholas P. White, A Companion to Plato’s Republic (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1979),
see respectively, 223–225; note as well that White is the ablest critic of the eudaemonist reading
of Plato; see Nicholas White, Individual and Conflict in Greek Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2002), chapter 2. On John M. Cooper, “The Psychology of Justice in Plato.” American Philosophi-
cal Quarterly 14, no. 2 (April 1977), 151–157, see Plato the Teacher, 225n158. Cf. Penner, “The
Forms,” 228n13 for fuller comments on Cooper, White, and Annas.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 49

alternative to what he calls “the ‘strongly transcendent’ reading of the

Forms.” First championed by Aristotle, there is, of course, such an alterna-
tive, but as Aristotle’s critique of the Idea of the Good shows,217 it cannot be
regarded as Platonic.
But the interesting thing here is that the attempt to extend the reach of
eudaemonist Socratism even into the sacred precincts of Idea-based Pla-
tonism in Republic 6–7 leads Penner to create an alliance of convenience with
the account of justice based on the tripartite soul,218 that is, with Socratism’s
first and paradigmatic enemy:

But on the reading followed here, it is only being said that for the psychological
well-adjustment in which justice consists to be true justice, one needs to add,
to any justice we derive from Book IV, knowledge of the real nature of the
Good.219

By this, of course, Penner means the GoodE, and thus the stage is set for
replacing the GoodT with it, a move he will justify on the basis of the First
Protreptic in Euthydemus (see §3) and its echo in Meno (see §15), slippery
ground as the sequel will prove:

This says that the just person’s Reason must seek with knowledge, the real good
of the whole individual. Just so, Euthd. 280b3–281b4, and Meno 87e5–88d3 say
that for courage (on some characterization) to be a good, it must be used with
wisdom—the knowledge of the good.220

Penner’s “the knowledge of the good” functions as a convenient gloss

designed to square the Santas Circle. In Euthydemus, wisdom is the good,
whereas at R. 505c2–3 “knowledge of the good” is the phrase Socrates uses to
prove that knowledge is not the Good. Naturally all this, and Meno included,
will be considered in context and in more detail below. But the main point
of Penner’s note must be emphasized. Without denying the existence of the
Longer Way, he must subordinate it to “the psychological well-adjustment”
of the Shorter, all in pursuit of the GoodE:

217
 Cf. Cooper, “Psychology of Justice,” 157: “Aristotle was right, I think, to insist most emphatically
that there is no such thing as a good-itself and that even if there were one, one ought not to direct
one’s practical thinking to it as ultimate end.”
218
 Cf. Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 306: “It is this, we hold, that represents the chief fault-line,
as it were, in the Platonic corpus (or in the part of it that we are currently considering): there are
dialogues that operate with a Lysis-like (or Symposium-like) psychology, and there are dialogues
that operate with a Republic-type psychology.”
219
 Penner, “Plato’s Ethics,” 162n20.
220
 Penner, “Plato’s Ethics,” 162n20.
50 Chapter 1

The point in the Republic is thus simply that justice more fully characterized
remains psychological well-adjustment—but a well-adjustment directed by the
full knowledge of the real nature of the good [i.e., the GoodE] that is to be gained
from knowledge of the Form of the Good.221

Either as redundantly identical to the GoodE or as merely instrumental to its

attainment, the GoodT has disappeared in Penner’s Second Golden Footnote,
and Plato along with it.
In a dialectical sense, then, this brings us to the heart of Plato’s Republic,
the τέλος of the process under consideration in Ascent to the Good. Thanks
to the demands of Glaucon and Adeimantus, Socrates must justify justice on
a eudaemonist basis, and along the Shorter Way—in both Republic 4 and 9—
this is exactly what he does. But it turns out that the only way to defeat Thra-
symachus is to acknowledge the truth of his sneer that justice is “another’s
good,” and thus for the philosopher-turned-Guardian to act upon that truth by
returning to the Cave.222 As a result, Penner postpones consideration of the
Return ad calendas graecas in the final footnote of “Plato’s Ethics”:

I realize that this lecture leaves hanging many explananda: for example, the
qualitative preponderance of political—and utterly non-Socratic—material [sc.
in R.]: will it all be adequately accounted for by the change in Plato’s psychol-
ogy of action? Another example: the guardians’ motives for returning to the
cave, and the like. I shall try to deal with each such difficulty as it shows up, or,
at any rate, as I become able to do so clearly and convincingly.223

The proof that Prichard, Sachs, and Penner—who accurately point out that
justice as defined and defended in Republic 4 aims at nothing higher than the
agent’s own good—are nevertheless wrong is Glaucon’s statement that the
Guardians will return to the Cave “because we are enjoining just things on
those who are just” (R. 520e1–2).
But the crucial first step on the Longer Way—which leaves the City behind,
and replaces its imaginary Guardians, who need to be compelled,224 with the
reader who needs only to persuade herself—is the visionary recognition that
the Good is outside of oneself, and is therefore not to be found in one’s own
Happiness. The Allegory of the Cave is the single most important passage in
Plato’s dialogues for the same reason that so many attempts have been made
to paper over the yawning chasm that divides justice on the Shorter Way from

221
 Penner, “Plato’s Ethics,” 162n20.
222
 See Plato the Teacher, 235–236.
223
 Cf. Penner, “The Good,” 123n36, the last footnote to the whole.
224
 And who therefore are not truly philosophers, as demonstrated by Roslyn Weiss, Philosophers in
the Republic: Plato’s Two Paradigms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 51

the Justice whose moral beauty alone compels philosophers to return volun-
tarily to the Cave where they will face hemlock, as Socrates did, and even
crucifixion (R. 361e4–362a2).225 With the deliberately provocative tenor of
this last remark, compare the use of “post-Kantians” and “post-Christians” in
the following passage:

won’t Socrates’ view resonate more with our own intuitions about virtue if it
turns out that he thinks that virtue is something that is desired for its own sake?
I have two replies to this objection. First, I believe that this objection imports
a moral sensibility that is foreign to, and unnecessary for, Socratic ethics. If
we analyzed why we instinctively feel that virtue—if it is to be virtue—must
be desired for its own sake, I believe that we would realize that our reasons
would not hold equally for Socrates. If we have such intuitions about virtue, it
is not because they are, somehow, natural and inborn. We are post-Kantians and
post-Christians and our intuitions have been shaped by these legacies. Socrates
was an egoist (see 63–65)—he believed that human behavior could not be moti-
vated by anything other than personal self-interest.226

Although Naomi Reshotko means that only those influenced by Kant and
Christianity could read “virtue is its own reward” back into Socrates, those
same terms could also denote the rejection, marginalization, or even extir­
pation of Kantian and Christian morality, i.e. the sense in which Reshotko’s
own position is paradigmatically “post-Kantian” and “post-Christian.” It is
for this reason that Pennerite Socratism is equally subject to a historicist cri-
tique like Reshotko’s, and indeed a better case can be made for the proposi-
tion that such a critique could only have emerged in the wake of the resolute
anti-Kantian and anti-(Judeo)-Christian animus of the mid-twentieth century
than that it would have been impossible for Plato to have anticipated Kant
and Christianity.227
The reason why Irwin shifts his Symposium chapter from a pre-Republic
position in Plato’s Moral Theory to a post-Republic position in Plato’s Ethics
is because, unlike Penner, he is confronting the paradigmatically Platonic—as
opposed to Socratic—problem of the Return. He therefore uses “giving birth
in beauty” to show that it promotes the happiness of the Guardians by allow-
ing them to express their love for Beauty in way that is also good for their
fellow citizens. But Plato is always a few steps ahead of Irwin, Penner, and
Rowe. The eudaemonist phase of Diotima’s discourse, superseded there by
the “great sea of beauty” and soon to be further problematized in Lysis and
Euthydemus, precedes Republic, and accomplishes our ascent to the Beautiful

225
 See Plato the Teacher, 104–105 and 281n77.
226
 Reshotko, Socratic Virtue, 129.
227
 On this, see Plato the Teacher, 212–213 and 280–285.
52 Chapter 1

before asking us to embark on the more arduous and necessarily dialectical

ascent to the Idea of the Good. Having located the Beautiful outside of “our
bodies our selves” (Smp. 211d8–e4)—and thus having learned what it is we
will achieve if beautiful things come into being for us (Smp. 211d8–212a7;
cf. 204d8–9)—Plato has offered us a vision of something so radiant, fine,
admirable, noble, and inspiring (Smp. 207d3–e1) that anyone touched by the
Beautiful will readily recognize what the First Friend is not, and will there-
fore know that Plato, ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ ἀφθόνῳ (Smp. 207d7), wrote his immortal
dialogues for us.
My claim is that the case for a systematically eudaemonist Socratism in
the dialogues Plato placed between Symposium and Republic is deliberately
flawed in any number of ways, two of which have already been identified by
Santas and Taylor in Euthydemus, the dialogue on which that case most obvi-
ously depends. At the root of those flaws is incoherence, and that incoherence
manifests itself in circularity, equivocation, self-contradiction, erroneous
equations, and generally in “Plato’s use of (deliberate) fallacy.” The most
perfect example, befitting its place at the end of the process, is the Shorter
Way of Republic 4. As Penner has helped us to see, the apogee of Plato’s
eudaemonist defense of justice is radically inconsistent with a K, UV, and SP.
The dependence of the Shorter Way on the tripartite soul, the restoration of
ἀκρασία, and the distinctiveness of the virtues is inconsistent with the most
systematic form of Socratism, and thus Plato the Teacher will teach us that
even the most systematic form of Socratism remains irreducibly incoherent.
For SP, UV, CA, K, KSV, IOV,228 and above all TEA are nothing more than
hypothetical constructions, already drowning in a great sea of Beauty thanks

228
 Due to their eudaemonist orientation, Socratists in general cannot escape the dilemma of IOV: is
virtue merely an instrumental means to happiness or, as Vlastos argued, is it constitutive of it?
The solution I propose rejects both horns of the dilemma although if one had to choose, Vlastos
remains closer to Plato than Irwin. If the ascent to the Good requires transcending TEA by locat-
ing the Good outside of either our virtue or our happiness, the dilemma dissolves. Only at the end
of the Longer Way can Justice be recognized as depending on the Idea of the Good: along the
Shorter, it is choice-worthy only insofar as it is conducive to our Happiness. Although Vlastos
accurately recognized that there was something profoundly anti-Platonic about IOV, and therefore
clung to “the Sovereignty of Virtue” enunciated in Apology of Socrates and Crito, it was Irwin
who pointed the way toward the restoration of Platonism by emphasizing “the importance of
Euthydemus.” Annas describes the situation well in Platonic Ethics, 40: “We are more at home
with arguments which press the claims of virtue as opposed to happiness. But the indications that
Plato is a eudaimonist are unmistakable. We must, then, try to see how Plato can see the Socrates
of the Apology as a seeker for happiness. The Euthydemus argument, short and outrageous as
it seems, is invaluable for showing us what is going on.” There is a good reason why we are
indeed “more at home” with such arguments, and that explains how it can be the case that once
εὐδαιμονία has become its only serious rival thanks to “the Euthydemus argument”—she means
the First Protreptic; see 35 and 35n20; see also Julia Annas, “Virtue and Eudaemonism.” Social
Philosophy and Policy 15, no. 1 (January 1998): 37–55, on 42–44—even the little that Plato
chooses to tell us about the Idea of the Good in Republic 6–7 is all that is necessary.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 53

to Diotima (Smp. 210d3) before being reduced to cave-bound shadows—and

thus mere phantoms of virtue (Smp. 212a4 cf. Phd. 69a6–9)—by the sun-like
brightness of the Idea of the Good.

§3. PLATO’S DELIBERATE USE OF

FALLACY IN LYSIS-EUTHYDEMUS

The debate between Hans von Arnim and Max Pohlenz (see §1) revolved
around the problem at this section’s center: should we join Pohlenz in tak-
ing Socrates at his word,229 or should we dismiss with von Arnim a deadpan
reading of a questionable argument as naïve?230 The argument in question
(Ly. 214e2–215c4) establishes Socrates’ claim that friendship is impossible
between good men, both on the grounds that the good are self-sufficient—
therefore having no need of anything (or anyone) else (Ly. 215a6–b7)—and
that if two people are alike (ὅμοιος),231 there is nothing one can do for the
other that the other can’t do for herself (Ly. 214e5–215a3; cf. 222b6–c1).
At a time when Germans of every age were losing friends at the Front, it
took some chutzpah for Pohlenz to take Socrates’ argument seriously, and
however fallacious or wrong-headed that argument is,232 it serves to propel
the reader forward to a Good233—leaving aside whether the First Friend is
Beauty, Knowledge, the GoodT, or the GoodE—well beyond the kind that
was embodied in “good men” (cf. Prt. 345c1). On the other hand, by cit-
ing Aristotle’s rejection of the argument’s conclusion as evidence of its
seriousness,234 he championed a deadpan literalism against von Arnim’s
perceptive claim that Plato had expected his readers to reject the argument

229
 See Pohlenz, “Review of Hans v. Arnim,” 254: “Plato die Leugnung der Freundschaft zwischen
den vollkommen Guten durchaus ernstmeint”). In fact, Pohlenz regarded the argument’s conclu-
sion as Plato’s correction of Phdr. (Aus Platos Werdezeit, 368). Embracing unitarianism (Platos
Jugenddialoge, iii), von Arnim can take the passage in Phdr. as proof that we should not take the
argument seriously (45).
230
 The phrase eine starke Naivität in von Arnim, Platos Jugenddialoge, 46, figures prominently
throughout the debate, as evidenced by Trugschluß in Pohlenz, “Nochmals Platos Lysis,” 588.
See David Bolotin, Plato’s Dialogue on Friendship: An Interpretation of the Lysis, with a New
Translation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 201–225, especially 205 (“key asser-
tion”) and 208–209.
231
 On ὅμοιος, see Michael von Bordt, Lysis, Platon; Übersetzung und Kommentar (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 168–171, with bibliography in n404, to which should be added
Maurice Herbert Cohen, “Plato’s Use of Ambiguity and Deliberate Fallacy: An Interpretation of
the Implicit Doctrines of the Charmides and Lysis” (doctoral dissertation, Columbia University,
1964) 216, 222–223, and (via “the most important paradox in the dialogue” on 216), 244–257.
232
 See Bordt, Lysis, 171–172.
233
 See David B. Robinson, “Plato’s Lysis: The Structural Problem.” Illinois Classical Studies 11, no.
1/2 (Spring/Fall 1986), 63–83, on 83.
234
 Cf. Pohlenz, “Review of Hans v. Arnim,” 253, and von Arnim, “Platos Lysis,” 374.
54 Chapter 1

as deliberately deceptive.235 As one of those Late Learners ridiculed by the

Eleatic Stranger—for I too insist that “[only] the Good is good” and that it is
“impossible for the Many to be One and the One to be Many (Sph. 251b8–
c2)236—I am more comfortable with Pohlenz’s conclusion that there are no
good men than with von Arnim’s more humane response, especially since
Socrates-Stesichorus has his own motives for upholding an erotic relationship
between such men in Phaedrus.237 But by applying suspicion to Stesichorus,
the Eleatic Stranger, and Socrates himself, I am also upholding von Arnim’s
hermeneutic method against Pohlenz,238 regardless of the flawed but amiable
end to which he put it.
The two post-Symposium dialogues, like the two that follow them, are
appropriately set in gymnasia.239 From a pedagogical perspective,240 their
purpose is to prepare Plato’s students to identify deception and defuse fal-
lacy through a rigorous training-course in mental gymnastics.241 Since the
course is rigorous, substantially more difficult than anything his students have
encountered apart from Protagoras and Hippias Minor, Plato lightens the
load by enlivening the presentation, and that in three ways.242 To begin with,
there is the familiar gymnasium setting, pre-ordained by Socrates’ departure
for the Lyceum at the end of Symposium (Smp. 223d10). Then there is an even
more tangible connection to that dialogue: the omnipresence of erotic love.
Quite apart from the question of friendship between Lysis and Menexenus,
the latter already familiar to us from Menexenus,243 the love of Hippothales
for Lysis ensures that the connection of Lysis to Symposium is unmistakable

235
 See von Arnim, Platos Jugenddialoge, 47: “Er [sc. Plato] will zeigen, wie man ein eristisches
παίγνιον so ausgestalten kann, daß es den Leser und Hörer selbst zur Lösung [cf. Lysis] der
Aporien stachelt und ihm selbst den Weg dazu zeigt.” See also 53 (where vorläufig anticipates
“proleptic”), 62–63 (where this crucial point is developed), and 64 (where he links “eine doppelte
Umdeutung” in Chrm. to Ly.).
236
 See Guardians on Trial, §2.
237
 See Guardians in Action, §9.
238
 See Pohlenz, “Nochmals Platos Lysis,” 588, on “die Methode der Interpretation.”
239
 See Charles H. Kahn, “Plato’s Methodology in the Laches.” Revue internationale de philososo-
phie 40, no. 1 (1986), 7–21 on 13.
240
 See A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work, sixth edition (London: Methuen, 1946 [first
published in 1926]), 89–90. So also Holger Thesleff, Studies in Platonic Chronology (1982) in
Platonic Patterns: A Collection of Studies by Holger Thesleff, 143–382 (Las Vegas, NV: Par-
menides, 2009), 296: “The ambiguities and obvious fallacies of the logic in Lysis, which have
often intrigued commentators and contributed to the theory of spuriousness (note Guthrie IV
143–154), are probably explicable as intentional didactic exercises rather than as lack of maturity
on the part of the author.”
241
 Cf. R. S. W. Hawtrey, A Commentary on Plato’s Euthydemus (Philadelphia, PA: American
Philosophical Society, 1981), 20–22, starting with “the main purpose of the eristic sections, then,
is gymnastic.” Cf. Michael Erler, Platon, Euthydemos: Übersetzung und Kommentar (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 103–105.
242
 On triads, see Robert C. Hoerber, “Plato’s Lysis.” Phronesis 4, no. 1 (1959), 15–28.
243
 Pohlenz, Aus Platos Werdezeit, 370n1 (cf. 369n2) appropriately acknowledges the link between
Ly. and Mx.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 55

while the presence of Ctesippus in both Lysis and Euthydemus is not only a
link between the two but further serves—thanks to the love of Ctesippus for
Cleinias—to join both to Symposium.244 Finally, the presence of young men in
both Lysis and Euthydemus, and here I am referring primarily to the youngest
of these—Menexenus, Lysis, and Cleinias—gives Plato’s students recogniz-
able replicas of themselves with whom to identify and then to outgrow.245
Section 4 will focus on how the arguments in Lysis and Euthydemus are
not only enlivened but also elucidated by their erotic setting, and how the
dramatic circumstances of each, as is always the case in Plato, help his read-
ers—and here again we should call to mind the likes of Menexenus, Lysis,
and Cleinias—to grasp more easily the abstract lessons that emerge from the
text. But since the first two sections of this chapter have strayed so far from
Plato’s texts themselves, it seemed appropriate at the beginning of this one to
remind the reader that Plato provides clear indications of the ROPD primar-
ily by means of dramatic devices, especially continuities of setting, theme,
and character; it is upon these, and not on the role these dialogues play in
defining and systematizing “the philosophy of Socrates” that this reconstruc-
tion depends. It was therefore necessary to emphasize that Plato has joined
Euthydemus to Lysis—and both of them to Symposium, through both the
Lyceum (cf. Ly. 203a1, and Euthd. 271a1) and ἔρως—before elucidating
the rather more abstract pedagogical connection between them: they provide
advanced gymnastic training in the identification of deliberate fallacy.246
In that sense, this section might be considered transitional between the first
two—which floated unsatisfactorily above the texts themselves in pursuit of
some useful dialectical friction provided by the secondary literature—and
the fourth, where the interplay of Hippothales and Lysis, Ctesippus and
Hippothales, Lysis and Menexenus, Ctesippus and Cleinias, Charmides
and Critias as well as Crito and Socrates, will finally anchor the chapter
in the proper berth of Plato’s dramatic artistry, itself inseparable from his
pedagogy and the interests of those he was teaching. Part of what makes the
Vlastosian approach to Plato so unsatisfactory—whether implemented by
Vlastos or those who followed and debated with him—is that it separates the

244
 Cf. Pohlenz, Aus Platos Werdezeit, 369, and von Arnim, Platos Jugenddialoge, 59.
245
 See Francisco J. Gonzalez, “How to Read a Platonic Prologue: Lysis 203a–207d,” in Ann N.
Michelini (ed.), Plato as Author: The Rhetoric of Philosophy, 22–36 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 37, on
the mixture of boys and young men in the dialogue; note also his comment on the erotic element
in Grg. (34–35). For discussion of Gonzalez’s earlier work on Ly., see Altman, “Reading Order,”
29–31.
246
 G. Klosko, “Criteria of Fallacy and Sophistry for Use in the Analysis of Platonic Dialogues.”
Classical Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1983), 363–374, and Roslyn Weiss, “When Winning Is Everything:
Socratic Elenchus and Euthydemian Eristic” in T. M. Robinson and Luc Brisson (eds.), Plato:
Euthydemus, Lysis, Charmides. Proceedings of the V Symposium Platonicum: Selected Papers,
68–75 (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2000).
56 Chapter 1

inseparable, that is, it disembodies the abstract arguments from the dramatic
settings in which Plato has embedded them. And thus, while the purpose of
this section is to join Lysis and Euthydemus by means of “Plato’s deliberate
use of fallacy,” this abstract theme cannot be legitimately separated from the
dramatic element, and it is the illegitimacy of doing so that begins to illustrate
the extent of the damage done to Plato by the Vlastosians.
In Ascent to the Beautiful, I showed that Menexenus precedes Symposium in
the ROPD because identifying the historical inaccuracies in Aspasia’s speech—
climaxing with the great anachronism247 (Mx. 245c2–6)—required the student
to have a detailed knowledge of Athenian history sufficient for identifying the
tragic element in Symposium.248 We have therefore already entered what I will
call “the gymnastic phase of Plato’s use of fallacy” before reaching Lysis and
Euthydemus if we are willing to use some umbrella term to join the use of delib-
erate logical fallacy in the latter with the equally deliberate historical falsehood
in the former. But Menexenus also has the dramatic function of introducing us to
Menexenus, said to have learned eristic from his cousin Ctesippus in Lysis (Ly.
211c4–5), while we see Ctesippus himself learning eristic in Euthydemus. And it
would perhaps be sufficient to justify a discussion of Plato’s deliberate use of
fallacy in Lysis and Euthydemus that the term ἐριστικός is found in both (Ly.
211b8 and Euthd. 272b10).249 But since the use of that term in Lysis is applied
to the character Menexenus, we are also being invited to recall the dialogue
Menexenus while reading Lysis.250
This is not the only sense in which Menexenus should be considered tran-
sitional between the pre- and post-Symposium dialogues. With the former
dominated by the Alcibiades and Hippias dyads, there can be no question that
these dialogues, along with Ion, are well named: since they are one-on-one
conversations with Socrates,251 there is no other character in them who could
conceivably deserve the eponymous position. This creates a striking contrast
with the post-Symposium dialogues, and in the case of Laches and Charmi-
des in particular, one of the striking aspects of the Socratist reading of those
dialogues is the privileged place that must be given to Nicias and Critias,252
after whom both dialogues could have been named but were not. We must
also ask: why isn’t Euthydemus named after both eristics, or after Cleinias,

247
 See Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 4.313: “This is the shock.”
248
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §13.
249
 For the significance of its reappearance in Men. 80e2, see §5.
250
 For the relationship between Mx., Smp., and Ly., see Altman, “Reading Order” and A. W. Night-
ingale, “The Folly of Praise: Plato’s Critique of Encomiastic Discourse in the Lysis and Sympo-
sium.” Classical Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1993), 112–130 on 112.
251
 A third character, Eudicus is present and speaks twice in Hp. Mi.; his father (rightly) believed that
just as Homer’s Iliad was more beautiful (κάλλιον; i.e., more καλόν) than the Odyssey, so too is
Achilles κάλλιον than Odysseus (Hp. Mi.; 363b1–4).
252
 Santas, “Socrates at Work,” 449n10.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 57

Ctesippus, or even Crito? And if we can contemplate a dual naming for it

like Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, why didn’t Plato call his dialogue about
friendship Lysis and Menexenus?253
What makes Menexenus transitional in this sense, then, is that it might
just as easily, and indeed more easily, have been named Aspasia; unlike Ion,
which immediately precedes it, the naming of Menexenus raises a problem.
My claim is that the problem is solvable: Plato named the dialogue Menex-
enus because the character Menexenus knows that the dialogue should not
be named Aspasia: he sees through the fiction that she, not Socrates, is the
speechmaker responsible for this Funeral Oration.254 By introducing him not
simply as a bright young man intent on a political career, but as an astute
challenger to Socratic misdirection (Mx. 249d3–e2), Plato ensures that when
we meet Menexenus again in Lysis, we will know that he’s no fool, and
should therefore watch him with great care. When Socrates tells Lysis that he
is wary of him (Ly. 211b7–c9), and that he is not only δεινός (Ly. 211c4–5)255
but also, thanks to his cousin, ἐριστικός—a new word for Plato’s students,
and one clearly connected to “Plato’s Use of Fallacy”256—this only serves to
heighten the interest with which we will regard him.
About Plato’s use of Menexenus, there is a great deal that might be said,
but since the last word on the subject will only be spoken in Phaedo—
where both Menexenus and Ctesippus, but neither Lysis nor Hippothales
will be present—let it suffice for the present to point out that Menexenus,
Lysis, and Euthydemus are arranged in reverse order with respect to “fictive
chronology.”257 By this I mean that the dramatic date of Euthydemus, where

253
 The suggestion that Plato is not responsible for naming his dialogues—for which the best evidence
(cf. Ep. 363a7 and Plt. 284b7) is the kind of skepticism that passes itself off as sober scientific
caution—recalls Dumaine’s response to Berowne: “proceeded well, to stop all good proceeding.”
Cf. Guardians in Action, 123n459.
254
 In anticipation of “the Frontiersman” of Euthd. 305c6–d2.
255
 Consider the role of Prodicus in explaining the ambiguity of this word (Prt. 340e8–341b5) as well
as his role in distinguishing the Frontiersmen (Euthd. 305c6–7; see previous note). It is in rela-
tion not only to equivocation in a single word like δεινός but also to the three Equations (see 38
above)—since equating two different terms is antithetical to the art Prodicus has taught Socrates
(Prt. 341a4; cf. Cra. 384b2–c1), an art which Prodicus himself applies to “to take pleasure in”
(Prt. 337c1–4)—that the repeated references to him in the dialogues are to be understood. For
further discussion, see David D. Corey, The Sophists in Plato’s Dialogues (Albany: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 2015), chapter 4, especially 82–90 (“The Art of Distinction-Making”).
256
 The title of this section is intended to honor Rosamond Kent Sprague, Plato’s Use of Fallacy: A
Study of the Euthydemus and Some Other Dialogues (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1962), begin-
ning with its opening word on xi: “There is no doubt that there are many fallacious arguments in
Plato’s dialogues. This book is an attempt to try out the hypothesis that Plato was fully conscious
of the fallacious character of at least an important number of these arguments, and that he some-
times made deliberate use of fallacy as an indirect means of setting forth certain of his fundamental
philosophical views.”
257
 See Charles L. Griswold, Jr. “E Pluribus Unum? On the Platonic ‘Corpus.’” Ancient Philosophy
19 (1999), 361–397, on 387–390.
58 Chapter 1

we watch Ctesippus learning the art of ἐριστική, must precede that of Lysis
where Menexenus is already said to have been his cousin’s pupil in that art
(μαθητῆς at Ly. 211c5). Moreover, the youngster that Menexenus clearly is
in Lysis makes that dialogue prior to Menexenus in a dramatic sense, since
in the latter he is now old enough to be on the verge of a political career
(Mx. 234a4–b4). While there is clearly an interpretive paradigm that would
marginalize Menexenus on the basis of his interest in speeches, politics, and
rhetoric, that paradigm is necessarily antithetical to one that places the philo­
sopher’s Return at the center of Plato’s educational project. And quite apart
from the curriculum’s center, the goal of Hippocrates in Protagoras suggests
from the outset that it was the promise of becoming δεινός (Prt. 312d5–7) that
Plato’s potential pupils found at least initially attractive.
The moment Socrates identifies Menexenus as ἐριστικός in Lysis, we have
already entered the world of Euthydemus, and Plato makes this unmistakable
because Ctesippus, his instructor in ἐριστική, appears in both. But it is no less
important that we must enter the dialogue Plato dedicated to ἐριστική—and
thus the least controversial proof-text for “Plato’s Use of Fallacy”258—through
the gateway of his Lysis: if we do not, we can easily fall prey to the traditional
view that the purpose of Euthydemus is to distinguish the brothers’ fallacious
eristic from the purely benign alternative of Socratic dialectic.259 One purpose
of this section is to show that in the dialogue with Menexenus in Lysis, it is
not the boy who proves to be ἐριστικός, but Socrates himself.260 This does not
mean, of course, that Socrates has entirely avoided fallacious arguments in
the opening conversation with Lysis; anyone who considers the parent-child
relationship in the light of Symposium will have already detected that (see
§1). But the training we receive about equivocation in the first dialogue with
Menexenus, beginning with a primer on the difference between the active and
passive sense of the verb φιλεῖν,261 is promptly tested by the dizzying alterna-
tion of “loving” and “beloved” in Socrates’ use of φίλος (Ly. 212a8–213c9).
It is likewise no accident that it is in the second dialogue with Menexenus
that Socrates introduces the fallacy-puncturing ἀντιλογικοί before either the
telltale allusion to Symposium (Ly. 216d3–4) or the terminally equivocal τὸ
φίλον (Ly. 216c2).

258
 As indicated by the subtitle of Sprague, Plato’s Use of Fallacy.
259
 As in the first sentence of Harold Tarrant, “Plato’s Euthydemus and the Two Faces of Socrates.”
Prudentia 27 (1995), 4–17. Note the improvement on Edwin Hamilton Gifford, The Euthydemus
of Plato: With Revised Text, Introduction, Notes, and Indices (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 12.
The great service of Vlastos in making this book and many others available through Arno Press in
the “Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle” series deserves mention.
260
 Cf. Bordt, Lysis, 149 on “der Witz des Gespräches [sc. 211d6–213e4].”
261
 A useful starting point for explaining my approach is David Glidden, “The Language of Love:
Lysis 212a8–213c9.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1980), 276–290, on 276–277 (this pas-
sage will be quoted at the beginning of §4).
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 59

It is therefore very much a two-way street: if guided by the ROPD, we

read Euthydemus having already been prepped in eristic by Lysis, but even
when we are reading the dialogues in any random order, the links between the
two—ἔρως, the Lyceum (cf. Ly. 203a1 and Euthd. 271a1), Thrasyllus,262 and
of course Ctesippus—ensure that it will take some doing to put asunder what
Plato has so obviously joined together. Naturally, this can be done: the Order
of Composition paradigm can disjoin them in a developmental sense, the
eristic elements in Lysis can be denied or marginalized (as they are by Penner
and Rowe), only the brothers can be convicted of eristic in Euthydemus, and
dramatic details like the presence of Ctesippus in both can be overlooked, nor
is this list intended to be exhaustive. But once we see the connections, and
realize that the only obvious evidence that Plato has given us that Menexenus
is ἐριστικός is that Socrates says he is, we can be just as sure that Lysis should
be read in the light of Euthydemus as that Euthydemus should be read in the
light of Lysis. The ROPD fleshes out how this connection works in practice:
we are being exposed first to the practice and then to the theory of ἐριστική.263
Consider how Menexenus would have answered Socrates at Lysis 212b2
if he knew as much about eristic as Socrates teaches Cleinias at Euthydemus
277e3–a7. Here’s the relevant question with context:

“I don’ t even know in what way one person [ἕτερος] becomes a friend [φίλος]
of another [ἑτέρου]. But these are the very things I want to ask you about,
because you’re experienced in them. So tell me: when someone loves [φιλεῖν] a
person, which of the two [πότερος ποτέρου] is it that becomes a friend [φίλος]—
the one who loves [ὁ φιλῶν], of the one who is loved [ὁ φιλούμενος] or the one
who is loved [ὁ φιλούμενος] of the one who loves [ὁ φιλῶν]? Or does it make
no difference?” “It seems to me,” he said, “that it makes no difference.”264

Even if Menexenus had received only the one drachma course “concerning
the correctness of names” from Prodicus (Euthd. 277e4; cf. Cra. 384b2–
c1) he would have said: “It makes a great deal of difference, Socrates: if
by ‘φίλος’ you mean ‘the one that loves,’ it is ὁ φιλῶν who becomes the
φίλος, but if by ‘φίλος’ you mean ‘dear,’ as in ‘the one beloved,’ then it is ὁ
φιλούμενος who does so. So let’s skip the eristic, my dear Socrates: if you are
serious about the question, let’s talk about what makes two people φίλοι, not
πότερος ποτέρου becomes the φίλος.” In this light, one might almost think

262
 As the last dialogue in the Fifth, Ly. is next to Euthd., the first of the Sixth Tetralogy, in the edi-
tion of Thrasyllus.
263
 On Phdr. 261d6–e4 and Prm. 129d8–e1, see Guardians in Action, §7.
264
 Ly. 212b1–5; translation from Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 42.
60 Chapter 1

that the student should read Lysis only after the course in eristics Plato offers
us in Euthydemus.265
In Euthydemus, of course, the first and most important trick question is
about the one who learns (Euthd. 275d3–4), and after Cleinias is skewered
regardless of which of the two alternatives he takes, that is, whether he learns
because he is ignorant or because he is wise,266 Socrates gives him the needed
instruction on equivocation: “the same word is applied to opposite sorts of
men.”267 In Lysis, by contrast, Socrates is doing the skewering, and therefore
withholds the needed instruction when he asks:

“What do you mean?” I said. “Do both, then, become friends [φίλοι] of each
other, if only the one loves the other [ὁ ἕτερος τὸν ἕτερον φιλῇ]?” “It seems so
to me,” he said.268

Anyone who asks or is asked why Menexenus responds in this ridiculous

manner—for everyone knows that it is mutual love that creates φίλοι—has
already learned a great deal about both equivocation and eristic. Apart from
the fact he has understood Socrates to be asking a sensible question about
friends rather setting an eristic trap, the only justification for Menexenus to
answer in this way is that ὁ φιλῶν, simply by loving ὁ φιλούμενος, has made
both of them φίλοι. But given the two opposite senses of the word φίλος, the
plural φίλοι can be justified only on a strictly verbal basis, and this is not the
basis on which the supposedly eristic Menexenus responds to the actually
eristic Socrates: since φίλοι are necessarily φίλοι to each other, it doesn’t
matter which of the two is said to love.
This is only the first step in a long journey, and the fact that Euthydemus
is more advanced than Lysis can be demonstrated by the potential but as yet
unexploited equivocation that frames this exchange: the double meaning
of the word ἕτερος. There are three examples of this in the passage: ἕτερος
ἑτέρου (Ly. 212b6), πότερος ποτέρου (Ly. 212a8), and the one just quoted (ὁ
ἕτερος τὸν ἕτερον φιλῇ). Despite the fact that both “the one” and “the other”

265
 Cf. Glidden, “Language of Love,” 282: “As I understand the work of the dialogue, its task is to
provide a solution, or lysis, to the elenchus of Menexenus.” Preferable to his claim (277) that the
argument’s conclusion “becomes uninteresting once the alleged semantic ambiguity is cleared up”
is that Plato is trying to make us aware of, interested in, and immune to “semantic ambiguity.”
266
 See Thomas H. Chance, Plato’s Euthydemus: Analysis of What Is and Is Not Philosophy (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1992), 27 and 47–52, especially 49: “In this passage Socrates
first gives credit to Prodicus for stating a general principle of sophistry, that one is obligated to
learn about correctness in words; and we need not suspect that he is being completely ironical; if
Kleinias were to possess the power to disentangle near synonyms, he might not have fallen into
these verbal traps.”
267
 Euthd. 278a6–7 (R. K. Sprague translation).
268
 Ly. 212b3–5 (Penner and Rowe modified).
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 61

are denominated by the same word ἕτερος, they are necessarily different from
each other. To say, strictly on the basis of the shared word ἕτερος, that the
two are equally ἕτεροι and thus are the same, involves the same fallacy that
underwrites the fraudulently plural φίλοι. And it is this fallacy, prepared in
Lysis only a page after Menexenus has been identified as ἐριστικός at 211b8,
that Socrates uses in Euthydemus, where his attempt to show that beautiful
things (τὰ καλά), though different from τὸ καλόν are nevertheless καλά by
the presence of “something beautiful [κάλλος τι]” (Euthd. 301a4). When he
is then asked how one thing (τὸ ἕτερον) can become ἕτερον by the presence
of something else (ἕτερον), Socrates responds that “not even a child would
doubt that τὸ ἕτερον is ἕτερον,” thus collapsing “the one/the other” into ver-
bal identity.
This passage connects the mid-point of the pre-Republic dialogues with the
mid-point of their post-Republic sisters (see Preface). In Symposium, we have
learned that τὸ καλόν is different from τὰ καλά, and thus that there is some
justification for Euthydemus’ claim that a beautiful thing (καλὸν πρᾶγμα)
is not truly καλόν because only αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν (Smp. 211d2) is that.269
The ἕτερον/ἕτερον doublet appears in Euthydemus because Euthydemus is
trying to drive a wedge between two things that Socrates claims are in some
sense the same: if τὰ καλά are different from τὸ καλόν, then they are not
καλόν. This is the opposite of what happens in Sophist,270 where the Eleatic
Stranger replaces an absolute “what is not,” via “what is not x,” with “what
is different” (i.e., from x): while being different from “the same” (τὸ ταὐτόν),
τὸ ἕτερον participates in τὸ ταὐτόν to the extent that it is the same as itself.
Since Euthydemus is engaged in the opposite (and more transparently falla-
cious) process of deriving an absolute “what is not” from “what is different,”
he relies on the colloquial sense of the ἕτερον/ἕτερον doublet where the two
are necessarily different, thus allowing Socrates to object on a strictly verbal
basis that τὸ ἕτερον is necessarily ἕτερον.271
By invoking Sophist here, my purpose is to show why Plato joined Lysis to
Euthydemus. Even though I have used Menexenus to illustrate the existence
of this connection—and the presence of Ctesippus in both dialogues to prove
it—both are what Shakespeare called “ciphers to this great accompt.” It is
never primarily a question of whether, for example, Menexenus or Ctesip-
pus is an eristic or even whether or not Socrates uses deliberately fallacious

269
 Cf. Ly. 220b4 (without γε at Ly. 220e3) for “that, indeed, (which is) in fact philon [τό γε τῷ ὄντι
φίλον].”
270
 See Guardians on Trial, §2.
271
 See George Klosko, “Plato and the Morality of Fallacy.” American Journal of Philology 108, no.
4 (Winter 1987), 612–626, on 623–624.
62 Chapter 1

arguments;272 the most important character where Plato’s dialogues are

concerned is always the reader. We have been exposed to fallacy since first
encountering Protagoras (cf. Prt. 349b5–6) but now we are being taught
to identify and analyze the use and abuse of words; Plato is teaching us,
through Prodicus, Menexenus, Socrates, and the eristic brothers, what we
will need to know when we reach Parmenides and meet the Eleatic Stranger.
No small part of the reason that Plato alerts us to fallacy through equations
like the Beautiful and the Good is that Prodicus has been teaching us from
the start that even the same word can have importantly different meanings;
equating two such words is therefore asking for trouble. “Plato’s deliberate
use of fallacy,” like everything in his dialogues, therefore has a pedagogical
purpose, and thanks to his use of basanistic pedagogy, teaching it is an ongo-
ing process, and constitutes an integral and indeed architectonic part of the
curriculum as defined by the ROPD.
But it is no accident that Rosamond Kent Sprague’s groundbreaking work
was called Plato’s Use of Fallacy: A Study of the Euthydemus and Some
Other Dialogues (1962). Despite the fact that the inspiration for this book
came from her teacher A. L. Peck’s discovery that in Sophist the Eleatic
Stranger uses one of the same fallacies that the brothers use in Euthydemus,273
she judiciously chose to concentrate her fire on the latter: she was well aware
of the fact that there would be resistance even in the most obvious case.274
How could a great philosopher have deliberately made statements or offered
arguments that he knew to be deceptive and false? It would be more chari-
table to assume that he never uses fallacy,275 or even to deny him the knowl-
edge of it, as Richard Robinson did,276 than to suggest that he made use of it

272
 Which is not to deny the salutary effect of detecting fallacious and ad hominem arguments in
Plato’s dialogues; see Henry Teloh, Socratic Education in Plato’s Early Dialogues (Notre Dame,
IN: Notre Dame Press, 1986).
273
 See A. L. Peck, “Plato and the ΜΕΓΙΣΤΑ ΓΕΝΗ of the Sophist: A Reinterpretation.” Classical
Quarterly 2, no. 1/2 (January–April 1952), 32–56, on 46: “The illegitimate step is taken in stage
2 [sc. Sph. 254d14–e3], where the qualifying part of the two predicates [sc. the italicized words
in ‘is other than the remaining two,’ ‘is the same as itself’] is quietly dropped. This is, of course,
a regular eristic trick, well known to us from other dialogues of Plato. It is exactly parallel to the
trick used by Dionysodorus in the Euthydemus, where he ‘proves’ that Ctesippus is the son of a
dog (298d–e) and that Cleinias’ friends wish for his destruction (283d).” Cf. Sprague, Plato’s Use
of Fallacy, xiv.
274
 And resistance there was; see David B. Robinson, “Review of Plato’s Use of Fallacy: A Study of
the Euthydemus and Some Other Dialogues by R. K. Sprague.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 84
(1964), 189–190.
275
 See Crombie, Examination, 23–27, especially on 26: “we shall naturally try, whenever we find a
passage the reasoning of which is apparently sophistical, to find an interpretation of it which ren-
ders it valid or [note that charity will now become condescension] at least to reconstruct the valid
train of thought the presence of which in Plato’s mind allowed the fallacy to pass undetected.”
276
 Cf. Richard Robinson, “Plato’s Consciousness of Fallacy.” Mind 51, no. 202 (April 1942),
97–114; on 103.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 63

deliberately.277 And then there is the problem of “fallacy” itself: “When we

search for names or definitions of the generic notion of fallacy, we are led
to the conclusion that Plato has no word or phrase that means ‘fallacy’ as
distinct from other forms of intellectual shortcoming.”278
Robinson’s observation deserves a prompt response. The noun that comes
closest to capturing what I mean by “fallacy” is ἀπάτη (“deception”) as
used in Phaedrus (Phdr. 261e6). Its relevant origin is Parmenides’ adjective
ἀπατηλός,279 where the discourse so described is deliberately deceptive.280
And my further claim is that Plato’s use of ἀπάτη is pedagogical, and there-
fore that Robinson is correct: he seems not to have had any independent
interest in “fallacy” as that thing the missing noun would designate. It is
rather some of Plato’s verbs that come closer to what I am claiming he does
repeatedly in the dialogues, especially when they are joined to “voluntarily”
(ἑκών), as both “to deceive” (ἐξαπατᾶν) and “to speak falsely” (ψεύδεσθαι)
are in Lesser Hippias. In place, then of “fallacious” or “bad arguments”
(cf. Ascent to the Beautiful, §4), I propose the deliberate use of “deception
[ἀπάτη]” (Phdr. 261e6), as in ἐξαπατᾶν, in support of ψεύδεσθαι as the single
most convenient umbrella term.281
But the point is too important to leave it at that: there are also two verbs
that don’t depend on ἑκών: “to make trial of” (ἀποπειρᾶσθαι) and “to test”
(βασανίζειν). The former is particularly important because it is introduced
at the beginning of Protagoras (Prt. 311b1). Along with the noun βάσανος,
the latter is, of course, the point of origin for the neologism “basanistic peda-
gogy,” which I take to be the voluntary and deliberate use (i.e., it is ἑκών) of
ἀπάτη—the use of which Plato expects his students “to bring to light” (Phdr.
261e4)—and which occurs when to ψεύδεσθαι is not intended to ἐξαπατᾶν
but to ἀποπειρᾶσθαι or to βασανίζειν, and paradigmatically constitutes a
βάσανος of what is true (as at Grg. 486d2–e7) or of the student’s ability to

277
 See Rosamond Kent Sprague, “Logic and Literary Form in Plato.” The Personalist 48, no. 4
(October 1967), 560–572, on 571: “I have tried to say that the deliberate use of fallacy seems to
have been an essential element in the Socratic elenchus, so that the detection of a fallacy at one
particular point in a dialogue is not of much value without an analysis of the role which that fal-
lacy has to play in the development of the whole argument in which it appears.” Note this article’s
concluding remarks on Lysis.
278
 Robinson, “Plato’s Consciousness of Fallacy,” 103.
279
 Embarrassingly missing from the Index verborum of Guardians in Action, where it appears on 36,
43–45, 47–48, 119, 147–149, 152–153, 169, 175, 192, and 210n37.
280
 See Guardians in Action, §2.
281
 Not only, as per LSJ, “lie, speak false, play false” as at Euthd. 283e7–284b2, but also “say that
which is untrue, whether intentionally or not” (cf. Smp. 214e11–215a1). Cf. Ernst Heitsch, Platon
und die Anfänge seines dialektischen Philosophierens (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2004), 25: “Die griechische Sprache unterscheidet nicht zwischen Irrtum und Lüge, falsch und
betrügerisch (ψεῦδος, ψευδής). Das scheint uns heute fast unverständlich.” For theoretical back-
ground, see Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, foreword by Pierre Vidal-
Naquet, translated by Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1996).
64 Chapter 1

preserve what they have been taught (as at R. 413e1). It is otherwise unnamed
not only because it is pervasive, but also because discussing it prematurely and
openly would defeat its purpose, which is to test for spiritual gold in the read-
er’s soul. Its pedagogical justification is provided in Letters (Ep. 344a2–c1),
a complex passage that describes the rigors involved while making the utterly
simple point that the true and the false must be learned together.
It is therefore not so much “Plato’s Deliberate Use of Fallacy” that I intend
to illustrate by means of the famous First Protreptic, but his use of basanistic
pedagogy. There are three distinct moments in the process of proving that
it exists in any given passage: deception must be shown to exist in the pas-
sage under discussion, the student’s capacity to detect that deception must
be shown to be possible on the basis of the dialogue they are reading or the
dialogues they have already read, and the pedagogical purpose of the decep-
tion must be justified in relation to the dialogues that will follow. In terms of
the latter, the notion that the only ἀγαθόν is σοφία is of utmost siginificance:
it is propaedeutic to the Idea of the Good precisely because it denies its spe-
cial power. But even though the central claim that σοφία is the only ἀγαθόν
is itself false, it prepares the student to understand why Socrates will point
out in Republic that what he calls in Euthydemus φρόνησίς τε καὶ σοφία can-
not be τὸ ἀγαθόν because it would need to be a φρόνησίς of the Good (R.
505b5–11). And this, of course, is the moment where all attempts to square
the Santas Circle must collapse (see §2).
Finally, it is important to realize just how destructive interpretive “charity”
proves itself to be in response to this kind of pedagogy.282 If Aristotle had
not mentioned Hippias Minor, for instance—so crucial for its discussion of
voluntary and thus deliberate deception—its deletion from the canon would
certainly have been construed as charitable to Plato, much as the excision of
Theages and Cleitophon has been made to seem. Already practiced exten-
sively in the pre-Symposium dialogues, particularly in the Hippias dyad, the
use of deliberate falsehood, fallacious arguments, and unreliable narrators
will continue to inform Plato’s pedagogy throughout the ROPD. But Plato’s
students nevertheless enter a new “gymnastic phase” in Lysis and Euthyde-
mus, the common purpose of which is to prepare them for the many tests to
which they will be exposed thereafter, not least of all in Sophist.283

282
 For an illuminating discussion of misplaced hermeneutic “charity,” see Joshua Landy, “Philosoph-
ical Training Grounds: Socratic Sophistry and Platonic Perfection in Symposium and Gorgias.”
Arion (third series) 15, no. 1 (Spring–Summer, 2007), 63–122.
283
 See Charles H. Kahn, “Some Puzzles in The Euthydemus” in T. M. Robinson and Luc Brisson
(eds.), Plato: Euthydemus, Lysis, Charmides. Proceedings of the V Symposium Platonicum:
Selected Papers, 88–97 (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2000), 91. Note Kahn’s use of “hermeneuti-
cally later, i.e., later in the order of reading” on 90.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 65

Paul Shorey’s comment on Lysis therefore deserves careful consideration:

“It reads precisely as if its philosophic purpose were to illustrate the mental
confusion that arises when necessary and relevant distinctions are overlooked
or not clearly brought out.”284 In the context of Euthydemus, where a series
of eristic follies are rendered both risible and transparent, Lysis reveals that
the serious purpose behind both dialogues is to illustrate and analyze the
discourse-disabling power of equivocation, most obvious in the case of the
now active, now passive senses of φίλος.285 But when followed by Euthyde-
mus, Shorey’s verdict would need to be amended: its philosophic purpose is
to prepare the reader—precisely by engendering “the mental confusion that
arises when necessary and relevant distinctions are overlooked or not clearly
brought out”—for the advanced training in eristic that follows, without
which they will be susceptible to its use and fall victim to its unscrupulous
practitioners.
In accordance with principle 2 in the Preface, any dialogue’s place in the
ROPD must be justified by showing its close connection to two others, that
is, its immediate neighbors. In practice, it turns out that this requirement
repeatedly leads to fresh perspectives, and this is especially true in the case
of dialogues like Lysis that have frequently provoked both consternation and
criticism. Read in isolation, Lysis will continue to inspire in many the reac-
tion of W. K. C. Guthrie: “it is not a success. Even Plato can nod.”286 But the
very nature of the Reading Order hypothesis ensures that no dialogue is read
in isolation and it can only justify its results by demonstrating how a dia-
logue “fits,” and does so snugly. In practice, this requires using its neighbors
to reveal every dialogue’s serious and worthwhile (pedagogical) purpose.
Although particularly useful for restoring excised dialogues to the canon, it
has the less controversial consequence of explaining a judgment like Sho-
rey’s, and reversing a verdict like Guthrie’s.
Between the Order of Composition paradigm that blocks any attempt
to demonstrate that Lysis follows Symposium,287 and an unwillingness to
countenance the possibility that Plato found a pedagogical purpose for the
deliberate use of fallacy, Lysis is easily misunderstood. The word “deliber-
ate” stands at the heart of the matter, not only in the context of “the deliberate

284
 Paul Shorey, What Plato Said (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1933), 115.
285
 See Robinson, “Plato’s Lysis”, 66–72, especially 69 (on Ly. 219b2–3) and 71 on “a very adroit
piece of logical manipulation of the ambiguity of the word φίλος, so adroit that it is certainly a
temptation to suspect that Plato here at least must have had his tongue in his cheek.” For relevant
bibliography, see Dancy, “Penner and Rowe on Lysis,” 329n12.
286
 Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 4.143.
287
 Hence Guthrie’s parenthesis in History of Greek Philosophy, 4.134: “Dittenberger even put it after
the Symposium (which is highly unlikely).” Naturally W. Dittenberger, “Sprachliche Kriterien für
die Chronologie der Platonischen Dialoge.” Hermes 16, no. 3 (1881), 321–345 did not justify this
placement on pedagogical grounds.
66 Chapter 1

use of fallacy,” but of Plato’s intentions in general. Since he is an author

who took great pains to conceal himself, it is easy to declare those intentions
opaque and impenetrable as a matter of principle. Against this self-justifying
obscurantism stand three indisputable truths: (1) Plato was a teacher, (2) his
dialogues are eminently teachable, and (3) they are connected to each other
in a number of very obvious ways. In the present case, the presence of Ctes­
ippus stands out as representative of the third, and instead of contributing
yet another scheme for linking or disjoining Lysis from or to other early or
transitional dialogues by means of categories Plato never mentioned, it makes
more sense to look for Plato’s intentions in a place where we can find them:
in the clues necessary for detecting or reconstructing the ROPD.
The claim that Plato’s use of fallacy in Lysis is deliberate gains sup-
port from the more basic claim that Plato deliberately placed Lysis before
Euthydemus in a dramatic sense. To echo Socrates’ words, “not even a child
could doubt” that the instruction in eristic that Menexenus is said to have
received in Lysis from his cousin Ctesippus links that dialogue to Euthyde-
mus. Unfortunately, however, those who have devoted their careers to
explaining the connections between Plato’s dialogues have long since forgot-
ten how to think like children, and have therefore neglected the possibility
that the reason these immortal dialogues are so hugely entertaining is that
Plato himself remembered how to make them so. Simply by asking questions
about the interconnected place of any given dialogue, we are already tracking
Plato’s intentions, and the moment we realize that those inter-connections
have something to teach us, we catch sight of Plato the Teacher. It was in cre-
ating an interconnected, progressive, and effective academic curriculum that
he made his intentions visible, and if we search for him in the right places,
there shall we always surely find him.
Nor is there any reason to reinvent the wheel where either Lysis or Euthyde-
mus is concerned. Following Sprague’s revitalization of the latter in Plato’s
Use of Fallacy, Maurice Cohen wrote a 1964 dissertation on “Plato’s Use of
Ambiguity and Deliberate Fallacy: An Interpretation of the Implicit Doctrines
of the Charmides and Lysis.”288 Although Sprague approached the ques-
tion of Socrates’ use of fallacy in Euthydemus with considerable caution,289
more recent studies of the dialogue have begun to address the issue more
boldly, and rightly conclude that the use of εὖ πράττειν in the crucial First

288
 Maurice Herbert Cohen, “Plato’s Use of Ambiguity and Deliberate Fallacy: An Interpretation of
the Implicit Doctrines of the Charmides and Lysis” (doctoral dissertation, Columbia University,
1964). Cohen relies on the pioneering work of William Bedell Stanford, Ambiguity in Greek
Literature: Studies in Theory and Practice. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939); see especcially 60.
289
 Somewhat lessened in Rosamond Kent Sprague, “Plato’s Sophistry.” Proceedings of the Aristote-
lian Society, supplementary volumes, 51 (1977), 45–61, on 59–61.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 67

Protreptic “is an instance of Socratic use of verbal ambiguity,”290 and show

that “Socrates, too, can juggle ambiguous terms and even equivocate if he
determines the situation warrants it.”291 As for Lysis, Cohen summarized his
findings in a 1962 article,292 and its last section cites numerous examples of
Socrates’ use of equivocation in addition to the crucial case of φίλον. Because
the latter is in fact the crucial case, David Norman Levin’s “Some Observa-
tions Concerning Plato’s Lysis” (1971)293 and David B. Robinson’s “Plato’s
Lysis: The Structural Problem” (1986) provide all the necessary evidence.294
As a result, my first interpretive task is therefore to show that just as Socrates
uses deliberately fallacious arguments in Lysis, he does so in Euthydemus as
well. And in order to connect Plato’s determination to exercise his students
in the use of deliberate fallacy in both dialogues with the previous section, it
is the First Protreptic—already identified as the eudaemonist foundation of
systematic Socratism in §2—that will be used to illustrate Socrates’ use of
fallacy in Euthydemus.295
The most compromising and therefore the most revealing moment in the
First Protreptic is the equation of σοφία and εὐτυχία: “Wisdom [ἡ σοφία]
evidently, I replied, is good fortune [εὐτυχία]: even a child could see that.”296
It is difficult to see how Plato could have made his intentions clearer: when
Socrates finally confesses to imitating the eristic methods of the brothers
later in the dialogue (301b1–c2), he will invoke—as already mentioned
above—this same imaginary child. In fact, the reader is being warned by
this easily recognizable use of over-exaggeration: even a child could see that
there is something wrong here. Since the First Protreptic is prefaced by a
primer in equivocation based on the verb μανθάνειν (Euthd. 277e3–278a5),
the wary reader will suspect that it is going to require its application to the

290
 Georgia Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi, Playful Philosophy and Serious Sophistry: A Reading of
Plato’s Euthydemus (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2014), 16. Although this important book will
be cited repeatedly in this section on specific questions, see the summary on 44–47 (including the
bibliographical 45n82) as well as the programmatic 41–42n78: “The underlying assumption of my
interpretation here, and indeed of the one I employ throughout my discussion of the Euthydemus,
is that Plato can put in the mouth of Socrates flawed arguments, to which it is not advisable to
apply the principle of charity.”
291
 Chance, Plato’s Euthydemus, 67; 65–72 as a whole deserves study.
292
 Maurice H. Cohen, “The Aporias in Plato’s Early Dialogues.” Journal of the History of Ideas 23,
no. 2 (April–June 1962), 163–174.
293
 David Norman Levin, “Some Observations Concerning Plato’s Lysis” in in J. P. Anton and G.
Kustas (eds.), Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy, volume 1, 236–258 (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1971); this article is particularly valuable.
294
 David B. Robinson, “Plato’s Lysis: The Structural Problem.” Illinois Classical Studies 11, no. 1/2
(Spring/Fall 1986), 63–83.
295
 Free from the exegetical imperatives of Socratism, Michel Narcy, Le philosophe et son double:
Un commentaire de l’Euthydème de Platon (Paris: J. Vrin, 1984) is a useful guide to the dialogue;
on the First Protreptic, see 106–115.
296
 Euthd. 279d6–7 (H. N. Fowler modified); on this equation, see Daniel C. Russell, Plato on Plea-
sure and the Good Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 30–31n45.
68 Chapter 1

word εὐτυχία297—which all men, including children, would take to be “good

luck” or a necessarily external “good fortune”298—to render it identical with
wisdom. But as already indicated by the central importance of the GB Equa-
tion in both Symposium and Lysis (see §1), Plato’s use of fallacy depends
just as much on creating a deceptive synonymy between different words as
on exploiting the semantic dissonance within a single word or phrase that
makes equivocation possible. The equation of wisdom and εὐτυχία combines
the two.299
In order to ensure that his readers have already taken careful note of the
eye-popping and fallacy-spawning equation of σοφία and εὐτυχία, Plato uses
his distinctive form of pedagogical irony in crafting what Socrates as narrator
says next: “He wondered [θαυμάζειν] at this—he is still so young and simple-
minded: then I, perceiving his wondering [θαυμάζειν], went on.”300 The cru-
cial point is that Plato’s ongoing use of basanistic pedagogy is designed to
keep the reader in a perpetual state of wonder: philosophy dies when wonder
ceases. As a teacher, then, he does what he can to provoke it. Here, by imply-
ing that if Cleinias were not young and simple-minded, (cf. Prm. 130e1), he
would not have wondered about Socrates’ ostentatiously fallacious equation,
Plato doubles down on the basanistic element: he not only tests the reader
with a deliberate falsehood but then goes on to state that it would be childish
and simpleminded to recognize it as such, and thus even to wonder about it.
Plato’s pedagogical irony is thus a doubly basanistic challenge: by suggest-
ing that only a child would wonder at what his Socrates has said, he dares
us to identify with our own inner child,301 and thus to endure and embrace

297
 Cf. Benjamin Rider, “Wisdom, Εὐτυχία, and Happiness in the Euthydemus.” Ancient Philosophy
32 (2012), 1–14, on 5.
298
 Consider Euthd. 279c1–8, the passage that introduces both σοφία and εὐτυχία (Fowler modified):
“‘Very well, I went on, and where in the chorus shall we station wisdom [ἡ σοφία]? Among the
goods [τὰ ἀγαθά], or how?’ ‘Among the goods [τὰ ἀγαθά].’ ‘Then take heed that we do not pass
over any of the goods [τὰ ἀγαθά] that may deserve mention.’ ‘I do not think we are leaving any
out,’ said Cleinias. Hereupon I recollected one and said: ‘Yes, by Heaven, we are on the verge
of omitting the greatest of the goods [τὸ μέγιστον τῶν ἀγαθῶν].’ ‘What is that?’ he asked. ‘Good
fortune [ἡ εὐτυχία], Cleinias: a thing which all men, even the worst fools, refer to as the greatest of
goods [τὴν εὐτυχίαν, ὦ Κλεινία: ὃ πάντες φασί, καὶ οἱ πάνυ φαῦλοι, μέγιστον τῶν ἀγαθῶν εἶναι].’
‘You are right, he said.’”
299
 As an illustration of the exegetical limitations of Anglophone Socratism in comparison with the
freedom of the French Resistance, cf. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, “Socrates on
Goods, Virtue, and Happiness.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 5 (1987), 1–27, on 21n29
with Narcy, Le philosophe et son double, 107–109. For a programmatic statement of “French
Resistance” to “la tradition anglophone,” see Pierre Aubenque, “Avant-propos” to Aubenque and
Michel Narcy (eds.), Études sur le Sophiste de Platon, 13–14 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1991).
300
 Euthd. 279d7–8 (Fowler modified); by translating the second use of θαυμάζειν as “surprise,”
Fowler withholds Plato’s hammered hint.
301
 See Benjamin D. Rider, “Socrates’ Philosophical Protreptic in Euthydemus 278c–282d.” Archiv
für Geschichte der Philosophie 94 (2012), 208–228, on 209.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 69

the merely provocative obloquy that will follow. Naturally only a few will
do so.302
Once we have admitted that Plato wants us to θαυμάζειν, we will also real-
ize that his Socrates will deliberately equivocate on the word εὐτυχία in the
First Protreptic for the same reason that he has already told Cleinias not to
θαυμάζειν—“don’t wonder [μὴ θαύμαζε]” (Euthd. 277d4)—about the broth-
ers’ use of equivocation. As another example of doubling the basanistic ele-
ment, consider the fact that in the primer that follows, Socrates suggests that
the relevant equivocation was on the verb “to learn,” and not on the paired
nouns: “the wise” and “the ignorant.”303 It is not only that the initial ques-
tion the brothers pose depends at least as much on the equivocal use of these
words; far more significant is the fact that passages in both Symposium and
Lysis have already prepared us to spot the relevant equivocation for ourselves.
Since it implicates the series Symposium-Lysis-Euthydemus, this point
requires emphasis. Despite the one thing/one opposite fallacy deployed by
Socrates in Protagoras to establish the UV-type equation of wisdom and
temperance (Prt. 332c8–9),304 Diotima has demonstrated that those who are
not wise are not altogether ignorant any more than those who are ignorant are
necessarily completely unwise. Indeed it is in this “between [μεταξύ]” that
philosophy, born of wonder, resides (cf. Smp. 202a2–10 and Ly. 218a2–b3).
By suggesting that the equivocation on μανθάνειν is the wonder-transcending
secret of the brothers’ trick question, Socrates’ primer on deception through
equivocation is itself deceptive.305 And in much the same way, the ostenta-
tious equivocation on εὐτυχία that follows tempts us to ignore the far more
significant equivocation on εὐπραγία that immediately follows:

Socrates: perceiving his wondering [θαυμάζειν], I continued: ‘Can you

be unaware, Cleinias, that for success [εὐπραγία] in flute-music it is the
flute-players who are the most fortunate [εὐτυχέστατοί].’ He agreed to this.306

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that εὐπραγία is the noun-form of
the paradigmatically equivocal εὖ πράττειν upon which the First Protreptic
as a whole revolves, it is important to realize that Plato’s students have met

302
 Cf. Samuel Scolnicov, “Plato’s Euthydemus: A Study on the Relations Between Logic and Educa-
tion.” Scripta classica Israelica 6 (1981–1982), 19–29, on 29: “An educational approach which
uses irony is bound to be limited to the few.”
303
 See Hawtrey, Commentary, 58–61, especially 59: “That Plato fails to point out ambiguities in
σοφός and ἀμαθής is no evidence in itself that he was unaware of them; he was educating, not
composing a handbook of fallacies.” Drawing strength from the fact that Euthd. follows Smp. and
Ly. in the ROPD, my approach splits this difference.
304
 Cf. Sprague, Plato’s Use of Fallacy, 28n15.
305
 Cf. Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi, Playful Philosophy, 18, 18n33, and 112–113.
306
 Euthd. 279d8–e2; cf. Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi, Playful Philosophy, 16.
70 Chapter 1

this word before. They heard it first in Protagoras (Prt. 345a3),307 and in
the midst of Socrates’ ostentatiously fallacious discourse on the poem of
Simonides. There the poet had said every man is (morally) good when he is
“doing well”—εὖ πράττειν at Prt. 344e7 corresponds here to the idiom of my
native land that answers the question: “How ya’ doin’?” with “I’m doin’ well
(or, less grammatically but more colloquially: “doin’ good”)”308—and (mor-
ally) bad when he is “faring poorly [κακῶς πράττειν],309 as in “being miser-
able” or “unhappy.”310 Socrates then gave this idiom the same kind of twist
we see here: making εὐπραγία synonymous with the kind of “good-doing”
(ἀγαθὴ πρᾶξις at Prt. 345a1) that—once identified with the relevant “learn-
ing” (μάθησις at Prt. 345a2 and 345a4)—makes a doctor “good” or, as here,
allows a flutist to be successful, i.e. to do (something) well.311 Here, then, is
the (dubious) point of origin for K, the bedrock of Socratism.312
But it is not only because of Protagoras that students will remember the
slippery word εὐπραγία: its immediate reappearance in Alcibiades Major is
far more memorable, placed in the midst of the crucial argument that links
coming to the aid of friends in battle (Alc. 116a6; cf. 115b1–2)—even if that
means incurring wounds and death (Alc. 115b2), aptly described as καλῶς
πράττειν at Alc. 116b2)313—first with “faring well” (thanks to the GB Equa-
tion; cf. Alc. 116c1–2 and 115a13) and then with being happy (Alc. 116b2–
b5). After Socrates obtains Alcibiades’ assent that those who εὖ πράττειν
are happy, and that thanks in some unspecified measure to the acquisition
of “goods” (Alc. 116b7), “faring well” is itself “good” (Alc. 116b11),
Plato emphasizes his own use of equivocation by then having Socrates ask

307
 See Hawtrey, Commentary, 80 (on 279e1 εὐπραγίαν). The earlier use of εὖ πράττειν at Prt. 333d7
will be considered in §11 below.
308
 With no implication either that I am doing good deeds (as in “doing good in the world”) or that
there is anything, like my job, that I am presently doing well.
309
 Cf. Thucydides 3.82.2 (quoted below).
310
 Note that κακῶς πράττειν will mean “doing [something] badly” at Prt. 345a8–b2, but slides into
something else at Euthd. 281b6–c3 (Lamb modified): “‘Shall we say that a man will profit more
by possessing much and doing much when he has no sense, than he will if he does and possesses
little? Consider it this way: would he not err less if he did less; and so, erring less, do less ill
[κακῶς πράττων]; and hence, faring ill [Lamb translates κακῶς πράττων as ‘doing ill, but this
misses the slide that leads to ἄθλιος, the opposite of ‘faring well’], be less miserable [ἄθλιος]?’
‘Certainly,’ he said.”
311
 For the meaning of εὐπραγία, see also Euthd. 281b2–4 (Lamb modified): “‘So that knowledge,
it would seem, supplies mankind not only with good luck [εὐτυχία] but with success [εὐπραγία;
Lamb translates it as ‘welfare’], in all that he either possesses or conducts.’” In fact, knowledge
allows us “to do [something] well” (see previous note).
312
 Cf. J. Adam and A. M. Adam (eds.), Platonis Protagoras; With Introduction, Notes and Appen-
dices (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1893), 165 (on τίς οὖν εἰς γράμματα κτλ.
at Prt. 345a1): “In order to read into Simonides the doctrine that virtue is knowledge and vice
ignorance, Socrates assigns to πράξας εὖ [participial form of εὖ πράττειν] in the poem the meaning
of acting well, rather than faring well.”
313
 Cf. Vergil, Aeneid, 9.399–401.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 71

Alcibiades—and this is the second appearance of the word in the Reading

Order—if εὐπραγία is καλόν (Alc. 116b13).
When this question is taken in a moral sense, and in its larger context (Alc.
115b1–116b2), the youngster is certainly correct to agree that it is: facing
danger for the sake of one’s friends is admirable, fine, noble, and beautiful,
and therefore the paradigmatic case of “doing well” in an active sense, that
is, of a subject-initiated ἀγαθὴ πρᾶξις as opposed to the external, passive, and
peacetime ἀγαθὰ πράγματα described by Thucydides.314 But in the immediate
context (Alc. 116b2–12), we are being prepared to spot the same equivocation
that will later resurface in Euthydemus. The kind of εὐπραγία that is synony-
mous with καλῶς πράττειν, especially since there is no hint that coming to the
aid of one’s friends in wartime has been successful, or that wounds and death
have been avoided in the attempt, is very different from the kind of εὐπραγία
that makes doctors good (at their job) or skilled flutists “the most fortunate,”
that is, the kind of K-based virtue that—by means of the equivocation insepa-
rable from εὖ πράττειν315—infallibly secures our good luck, success,316 and
personal welfare.317
Naturally Alcibiades Major has received more detailed consideration in
Ascent to the Beautiful (see its §5), especially since the passage in question
is not only connected to Protagoras, but because Socrates’ fallacious use of
εὖ πράττειν there, dependent as it is on the GB Equation, provides the initial
basis for distinguishing the dialogues that culminate in Symposium from those
considered in Ascent to the Good. For the present, it is enough to acknowl-
edge that Nicholas Smith is right: the restoration of Alcibiades Major most
certainly has consequences for the way we understand Plato’s dialogues as
a whole, and is thus potentially disruptive of the interpretive structures that
have been built on the assumption of its inauthenticity.318 But there is another

314
 Thucydides 3.82.2: “For in peace and good (external) circumstances [ἀγαθὰ πράγματα], both
states and citizens have better thoughts since they do not fall into unwished-for necessities; but
war, having snatched away the ease of the daily (routine), is a savage teacher, and assimilates the
desires of the many to their present conditions.”
315
 See Hawtrey, Commentary, 78 (on 278e3); in order to deny that Socrates exploits the ambiguity of
εὖ πράττειν in the First Protreptic—he doubles down on the claim on 90 (on 282a1f.)—Hawtrey
inadvertently shows how “the intellectualist scheme of Socrates” depends on it. This proves to be
a key point; see 172–73 and 350 below.
316
 After a promising start (“εὖ πράττειν is ambiguous” in his article’s abstract), Panos Dimas, “Hap-
piness in the Euthydemus.” Phronesis 47, no. 1 (2002), 1–27, attempts to dissolve the ambiguity
on 18 with the claim that “‘εὖ πράττειν’ or ‘εὐπραγία’ is no longer another term for ‘being happy,’
but [as ‘the deployment of the agent’s deliberative capacities’] the designator of the very constitu-
ent of happiness.” See also “successful deployment” on 4–5, and 20: “Socrates insists emphati-
cally that the knowledge of the wise agent brings success in all her action.”
317
 Cf. Terence Irwin, “Socrates the Epicurean?” in H. Benson (ed.), Essays on the Philosophy of
Socrates, 198–219 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 214.
318
 See Nicholas D. Smith, “Did Plato Write the Alcibiades I?” Apeiron 37, no. 2 (June 2004),
93–108, on 95–96.
72 Chapter 1

text,319 perhaps even more controversial, which is likewise relevant to the

equation of in the First Protreptic, especially since Xenophon’s εὐπραξία is
synonymous with Plato’s εὐπραγία (see LSJ):

When someone asked him [sc. Socrates] what seemed to him the best pursuit
[ἐπι­τήδευμα] for a man, he answered: ‘Doing well [εὐπραξία].’ Questioned
further, whether he thought good luck [ἡ εὐτυχία] a pursuit, he said: ‘On the
contrary, I think luck and doing are opposite poles. To hit on something right by
luck [ἐπιτυχεῖν] without search I call good luck [εὐτυχία], to do something well
[τι εὖ ποιεῖν] after study and practice I call doing well [εὐπραξία]; and those
who pursue this seem to me to do well [εὖ πράττειν].’320

At the very least, this passage from Memorabilia 3 proves that Socrates’
claim that even a child would know that σοφία and εὐτυχία are one and the
same is an example of deliberate deception; the question is, how much more
can we learn from it? If Plato had already read Xenophon and counted on his
readers having done the same,321 then he was making it easier for them to
recognize that Cleinias’ wonder was entirely appropriate; if Xenophon had
read Plato, he was proving that he, at least, had seen through the deception,
and understood the equivocation that allowed Plato’s Socrates to make oppo-
site things seem to be the same.322 For the present, it hardly matters which we
choose, because the only important question here is whether Plato’s Socrates
is being deliberately deceptive in the First Protreptic. What seems to be
missing in Xenophon is precisely what makes Plato’s outrageous equation
of σοφία and εὐτυχία reasonable in the end: the notion that εὐπραγία via εὖ
πράττειν guarantees success. What Xenophon calls εὐπραξία means simply
to do something well (τι εὖ ποιεῖν), but not only is it unclear that those who
do well will always succeed, it is questionable whether Xenophon’s Socrates
regards εὖ πράττειν as “to fare well” or “be happy” as the end for the sake of
which “the best men” do what they do well:

‘And the best men and dearest to the gods in agriculture,’ he added, ‘are those
who do the agricultural things well [οἱ τὰ γεωργικὰ εὖ πράττοντες]; in medi-
cine, the medical things; in politics, those [who do well] the political things [τὰ
πολιτικά]. He who does nothing well [ὁ μηδὲν εὖ πράττων] is neither useful in
any way nor dear to the gods.’323

319
 As noted in Rider, “Socrates’ Philosophical Protreptic,” 211n7.
320
 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.9.14–15.
321
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §2.
322
 Cf. “the anti-logical art [ἡ ἀντιλογική τέχνη]” in Phdr. 261d10–e2 and Ly. 216a7.
323
 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.9.14–15.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 73

The crucial point is that Xenophon’s use of εὖ πράττειν is consistently

active, and moreover consistently takes a direct object, like τὰ γεωργικά, τὰ
πολιτικά, τι, or even μηδὲν. There is also an active use that takes no direct
object, modeled on the use of καλῶς πράττειν in Alcibiades Major: one sim-
ply does well, as if answering the question “what” rather than “how are you
doing?” and getting the colloquial answer we might expect from a candid
philanthropist: “I’m doing good.” At the other extreme is the well-established
colloquial sense of εὖ πράττειν in Greek, often likened to its passive use, and
never taking a direct object: “to fare well,” easily equated with “to be happy”
(εὐδαιμονεῖν at Euthd. 280b6). What makes Socrates’ argument in the First
Protreptic deliberately deceptive is that there is also in play what I will liken
to “the middle voice” use of εὖ πράττειν: “to do well” for yourself, and thus
to succeed at whatever you are doing.324 It is as a direct result of the pivotal
importance of this “middle” use that σοφία must necessarily become unerr-
ing: only in this way can it guarantee success:

Socrates: So that wisdom [ἡ σοφία] everywhere causes men to be fortunate

[εὐτυχεῖν]: since evidently she could never err [ἁμαρτάνειν], but necessarily
does correctly and hits the mark [ὀρθῶς πράττειν καὶ τυγχάνειν]; otherwise she
could be no longer wisdom.325

It is easy to see that σοφία in this form sells itself to all and sundry:
Socrates’ protreptic is scarcely necessary. Clearly there is no necessity that
ὀρθῶς πράττειν implies doing anything rightly in a moral sense of the term,
and if we were assured that the acquisition of σοφία would guarantee that
we would never miss our mark (i.e., never ἁμαρτάνειν) and thus that we
would always hit our target (τυγχάνειν) no matter what it was we were doing,
everyone would be a lover of “wisdom” in this sense. Here, then, is where
the Socratist defense of SP enters: nobody misses the mark voluntarily when
aiming at his own good.326 But as the most radical of them have ably dem-
onstrated, there is no necessity that ὀρθῶς πράττειν implies doing anything
rightly in a moral sense of the term, and it is not for nothing that most of us

324
 See Scolnicov, “Plato’s Euthydemus,” 20 on “how to succeed at all costs.” For more attention to
Socrates and success, see Russell, Plato on Pleasure, 41–43, especially on 42: “Vlastos’s version
of the additive conception [sc. of happiness; see 32–42] inherits the same fatal problem as all the
others: it requires a gap between wisdom and success that Plato insists is not there.” Russell E.
Jones, “Wisdom and Happiness in Euthydemus 278–282.” Philosophers’ Imprint 13, no. 14 (July
2013), 1–20, uses “a narrative shortcoming” (6–7n15) to quench Russell’s light.
325
 Euthd. 280a6–8.
326
 Given Penner’s reliance on “useful [χρήσιμα] and beneficial” at R. 505a4—see “Plato’s Ethics,”
162n20—it is useful to keep in mind that χρήσιμον (like ὠφέλιμον when unaccompanied by a
dative) cannot be simply assumed to refer to what is useful for me. See LSJ on χρήσιμος: “of per-
sons, serviceable, useful, . . . esp., like χρηστός, a good and useful citizen,” as in Herodotus, 9.27.6.
74 Chapter 1

would associate the statement “I make my own luck” with criminals, and not
those whose business it is to risk their lives for the safety of others by making
themselves useful to something greater than themselves.
To say no more for the present about how this kind of σοφία could eas-
ily be abused if it actually existed, the more important point is that no such
“wisdom” exists, and the serious point behind the laughable identification of
σοφία with εὐτυχία is to make even a child realize that the complete elimina-
tion of the chance element in human affairs—technical skill notwithstand-
ing—is impossible. And it is in order to cast doubt on its existence that Plato
causes Socrates to question the possibility that wisdom of this kind could be
taught when the First Protreptic reaches its conclusion:

Socrates: ‘Yes, Cleinias,’ I went on, ‘if wisdom is teachable [ἡ σοφία διδακτόν],
and does not present itself to mankind of its own accord—for this is a question
that we have still to consider as not yet agreed on by you and me.’ ‘For my part,
Socrates, he said, I think it is teachable [διδακτόν].’ At this I was glad, and said:
‘Well spoken indeed [ἦ καλῶς λέγεις], my excellent friend [ὦ ἄριστε ἀνδρῶν]!
And you have done well [εὖ ποιεῖν] having relieved me of a long inquiry into
this very point, whether wisdom is teachable or not teachable [πότερον διδακτὸν
ἢ οὐ διδακτὸν ἡ σοφία]!’327

This passage does not simply illustrate Plato’s deliberate use of fallacy but
rather the deliberate deployment of self-multiplying fallacies.
To begin with, Cleinias has by no means spoken καλῶς, not only because
“beautiful things are difficult,” but more importantly because he so readily
accepts the possibility that this infallibly successful species of “wisdom”
exists,328 as it must do if it could be taught. It is only the reader who recog-
nizes that it does not exist who deserves Socrates’ ὦ ἄριστε ἀνδρῶν, while the
reader who overlooks the existential question rushes headlong into another
error. Since Protagoras has placed the open question of whether virtue
(ἀρετή) is διδακτόν at the center of the Academy’s concerns from the start,329
the incautious reader is being led to assume that the First Protreptic has
something to do with ἀρετή, a word that never appears in it.330 It is therefore

327
 Euthd. 282c1–8.
328
 See Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi, Playful Philosophy, 20n35.
329
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §1.
330
 As noted by Hawtrey, Commentary, 89 (on 281e3f.); on the (alleged) synonymy of ἐπιστήμη and
σοφία, see 59. In fact, this synonymy (via ἐπιστήμη) is crucial for sanitizing the First Protreptic,
and it is amusing that a commentator on Meno (see §15) would claim that “the shifting of the
subject of the question from ἀρετή to σοφία [sc. in Euthd.] is not important”; see Thompson, Meno
of Plato, l–li. More recently, see Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, Socratic Moral
Psychology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 117 and 220. Properly diffident
is Sprague, Plato’s Use of Fallacy, 11–12, but see Gregory Vlastos, “Happiness and Virtue in
Socrates’ Moral Theory.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 30 (1984), 181–213,
on 199, 211n86, and 212n94, followed by Dimas, “Happiness in the Euthydemus,” 2.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 75

a comedy of errors: by confounding σοφία with success, the possibility of

a wartime καλῶς πράττειν disappears; by assuming that this form of σοφία
exists, we fail to realize why Plato has raised the question of whether it is
διδακτόν and thus why Socrates praises Cleinias for thinking that it is when
it could not possibly be so. By raising this question rather than the existen-
tial one, we are led to imagine that this σοφία can be equated with the kind
of ἀρετή that Plato has been making our primary concern from the start.
How then should “the best of men” respond to Socrates’ peroration?

Socrates: ‘So now, since you think it is both teachable [διδακτόν] and the only
thing in the world that makes man happy and fortunate [καὶ μόνον τῶν ὄντων
εὐδαίμονα καὶ εὐτυχῆ ποιεῖν τὸν ἄνθρωπον], are you saying anything else than
that it is necessary to philosophize [φιλοσοφεῖν] and that you have it in mind
yourself to do so?’ ‘Why,’ said he, ‘I do say so, Socrates, with all my might.’331

What then has Socrates successfully compelled young Cleinias to embrace?

The youngster’s acknowledgement of a personal necessity to φιλοσοφεῖν
actually depends on three false assumptions: that wisdom is what makes men
happy because it infallibly makes them successful, that this kind of σοφία can
be taught, and that it can be counted among the things that exist (τὰ ὄντα).
The purpose of Euthydemus is not to illustrate the tricks the brothers use to
win arguments, but to teach us how to recognize Plato’s own tricks: as he will
write in the Seventh Letter, the true and the false must be learned together
(Ep. 344b1–3). But when we insist that Plato would never trick us, and deny
him the capacity and willingness to use fallacy deliberately for a pedagogical
purpose, we willingly lead ourselves into error, and it is easy to see how this
passage could be mistaken for supplying textual confirmation of TEA, K,
UV, and IOV. It cannot be an accident that so much of systematic Socratism
depends on a deadpan reading of the First Protreptic, and since we come to
the fallacy-filled Euthydemus only after listening to the inspired and inspiring
words of Diotima, and then hearing them echoed in Lysis (218a2–b2), it is
entirely “on us” if we still think that this is what it means to φιλοσοφεῖν. It is
therefore on our innate sense of what is right and wrong, true and false, good
or bad, that Plato counts on when his Socrates admits:

Socrates: We came to an agreement in the end—I don’t know how [οὐκ οἶδ᾽
ὅπως]—that in general [ἐν κεφαλαίῳ] such was how it is: when wisdom [σοφία]
is present, he with whom it is present has no need of good fortune [εὐτυχία] as
well;332

331
 Euthd. 282c8–d3 (Lamb modified).
332
 Euthd. 280b1–3.
76 Chapter 1

Why does Plato have Socrates admit that he does not know how they
reached agreement that the presence of σοφία eliminates any need for
εὐτυχία? Once his ongoing use of basanistic pedagogy is admitted—and in
this case, that means as soon as we acknowledge that Socrates too is impli-
cated in “Plato’s deliberate use of fallacy” in Euthydemus—the reason is
obvious: he is putting his readers on notice that there is no good reason to
accept so ridiculous a conclusion.333 It is no accident that the gymnastic phase
of our training in the use of fallacious arguments consists of two dialogues
narrated by Socrates: it is this form above all others that allows him to offer us
a hint like this sublime οὐκ οἶδ᾽ ὅπως. And once we recognize that acknowl-
edged fallacy has now entered the argument, that is, that Socrates does not
know how such an agreement could have been reached because Plato wants
us to recognize that there could be no adequate reason for having reached it,
we must also recognize that this acknowledgement applies not only to what
follows at the Protreptic’s conclusion but also what went before:

Socrates: and as we had agreed on this I began to inquire of him over again what
we should think, in this case, of our previous agreements. ‘For we agreed,’ said
I, ‘that if many goods [ἀγαθὰ πολλὰ] were present to us we should be happy and
prosper [εὐδαιμονεῖν ἂν καὶ εὖ πράττειν].’334

By adding εὐδαιμονεῖν to εὖ πράττειν only here, more than a page into

a protreptic argument that began with an interrogatory that defenders of
TEA must construe as the (axiomatic) Socratic axiom that all men wish to
εὖ πράττειν, Plato has managed to play a joke on every proponent of “sys-
tematic Socratism,” even when they are not candid enough to acknowledge,
with Irwin, “the importance of Euthydemus” (see §2). When construed ret-
rospectively, on the basis of what Socrates says here, we dutifully arrive at
the conclusion that his initial εὖ πράττειν means: “to fare well,” that is, “to
be happy.” But thanks to the intervening argument—necessary for establish-
ing the fallacious equation of σοφία and εὐτυχία—Socrates’ initial question
appears in a different light:

Socrates: ‘Do all of us human beings [πάντες ἄνθρωποι] wish to εὖ πράττειν?

Or is this question one of the absurdities I was afraid of just now? For I sup-
pose it is stupid merely to ask such things: for who among human beings [τίς
ἀνθρώπων] does not wish to εὖ πράττειν?’ ‘Nobody [οὐδείς] at all doesn’t,’
said Cleinias.335

333
 Cf. Russell, Plato on Pleasure, 30n44 and 42: “We need more of an argument to the effect that
the very exercise of wisdom is its own success than Plato offers in the Euthydemus—and, I think,
Plato knows it.”
334
 Euthd. 280b3–6.
335
 Euthd. 278e3–279a1.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 77

Just as we will encounter εὖ πράττειν again when it is glossed with εὐδαιμονεῖν,

so too will we encounter the views of “all men” once again, when Socrates tells
us that εὐτυχία is “a thing which all men, even the wholly base [καὶ οἱ πάνυ
φαῦλοι], refer to as the greatest of goods” (Euthd. 279c7–8). Why does Socrates
not explicitly include the morally bankrupt here, in his opening question?
Because if he did, we would know from the start that εὖ πράττειν does not mean:
“to do good” in a moral sense, or even “to do (a job) well” as in Xenophon. What
then does it mean, and why is it not glossed with εὐδαιμονεῖν at the start so as
to make it obvious that it is “to fare well”? The two questions hang together,
and together they show why the First Protreptic is deceptive from one end to the
other: the reason οἱ πάνυ φαῦλοι consider εὐτυχία (as good luck) to be the great-
est of goods will prove to be identical to the reason that all men, the wholly base
included, wish to succeed (εὖ πράττειν as εὐτυχεῖν) in whatever they are doing.
Since it would have been better for Orestes not to succeed in killing his mother
(Alc2. 144b11–c8), the middle sense of εὖ πράττειν is a thing that nobody would
wish for if success were bad for them, and that no decent person would regard
as desirable if it were incompatible with καλῶς πράττειν, as it frequently proves
itself to be.
If there is a world in which our happiness is inseparable from our doing the
things we do well, and where we only succeed when we are doing things that
are morally good, Plato may be said to have created it; therefore it is easy to
see why he lavished so much attention on the multivalent phrase εὖ πράττειν.
By grounding more comfortable answers on a fallacy, he challenges each of
his readers to ponder the meaning of εὖ πράττωμεν (“let us εὖ πράττειν” at R.
621d2–3), the exhortation with which he ended his Republic. Above all, we
are challenged to wonder whether we are being exhorted to do well so that
we can be happy, persuaded that doing well leads inevitably to our happiness,
or challenged to decide that doing well is ultimately far more important than
faring well. But when we encounter εὖ πράττειν at the beginning of the First
Protreptic, immediately after being instructed in the use of equivocation, and
before reading Charmides, Gorgias, and Republic—where the ambiguous
phrase repeatedly appears—we would be wise to confess that we find our-
selves in the dark, and that our only hope for finding any light requires us to
realize that we have no idea which of the meanings of εὖ πράττειν Socrates
is using here, and therefore that it is not only the eristic brothers who use
equivocation in Euthydemus.
But if we begin by acknowledging the darkness created by the ambiguity
of that initial εὖ πράττειν, and if we can free ourselves from the illusion that
whatever his Socrates may claim or rather imply by his questions is what
Plato thinks and intends us to embrace, we gradually come to realize that we
are in a considerably less moral universe than even the one in which virtue
becomes nothing more than an IOV-instrument to our own personal happi-
ness. Nor are we unprepared for the discovery—confirmed in the wake of
78 Chapter 1

conflating σοφία with εὐτυχία—that εὖ πράττειν has no moral dimension at

all, but unambiguously means “to succeed” before being amiably if decep-
tively glossed as “to be happy.” In fact, we have been carefully prepared to
discover this, not only in Alcibiades Major, where the ambiguous phrase
is exploited for the moral purpose of demonstrating to the youngster that
justice is advantageous (between Alc. 114e7 and 116d3), but even before
that in Protagoras, where Socrates is prevented from showing how being
temperate—temperance already having been identified with wisdom thanks
to the one thing/one opposite fallacy—is responsible for allowing the unjust
“to succeed” (εὖ πράττειν), and only on that basis not “to fare badly” (Prt.
332e4–333e1). For the present, the important point is that Plato leaves it to
us to decide for ourselves whether well-advised criminals are rightly said to
κακῶς πράττειν simply because they are unjust. It is therefore significant that
Plato has already prepared us in Protagoras to question whether εὖ πράττειν
means: “to succeed,” as it does here, or “to fare well” as it does in Simonides’
poem. While the subsequent reference to εὐπραγία points back to the latter,
it is the Interrupted Argument (Prt. 333d3–334a3) that must be in our minds
when we encounter εὖ πράττειν at the beginning of the First Protreptic.
But even more important is the fact that both this argument and the com-
pleted argument in Alcibiades Major, where εὖ πράττειν also plays a role,
concern justice. We would therefore be well advised to consider carefully
the part justice plays in the First Protreptic. It is mentioned there only once:

Socrates: ‘Which, then, of the good things [τὰ ἀγαθά] is still being left out
by us? What of being temperate [σώφρων], and just [δίκαιος], and brave
[ἀνδρεῖος]? By Zeus, Cleinias, do you think that should we posit these things as
goods [ὡς ἀγαθά] we shall posit them correctly [ὀρθῶς], or if not? For it may
be that someone [τις] will dispute it with us. How does it seem to you?’ ‘Good
things [ἀγαθά],’ he said.336

This passage marks the mid-point of the catalogue of τὰ ἀγαθά that begins
when Cleinias readily agrees that we will εὖ πράττειν “if there are to us many
good things” (Euthd. 279a2–3). Standard goods like wealth, health, being
beautiful, “and the other things adequately prepared for the body” (Euthd.
279b1–2) are quickly joined by less physical goods (Euthd. 279b2–3); the
addition of the three virtues mentioned here will then be followed by the addi-
tion of wisdom (Euthd. 279c1) and finally εὐτυχία, regarded by all as “the
greatest of τὰ ἀγαθά” (Euthd. 279c7–8). Why Socrates separates σοφία from
the other three virtues should by this point be obvious enough: understood
as infallible, it alone can secure success. But why does Plato cause Socrates

336
 Euthd. 279b4–c1.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 79

to hesitate over whether we should add being temperate, just, and brave is a
more interesting question: what kind of person would doubt that the virtues
are ἀγαθά?337 Who is this mysterious τις who forces us to merely posit that
these qualities are good things? The answer is surprising.
First of all, it is necessary to back up a few steps and recall that the alleged
purpose of the First Protreptic is to provide the brothers with a paradigm for
the kind of protreptic Socrates wishes them to offer Cleinias. And what kind
of protreptic is that?

Socrates: ‘Come now, is it the business of this same art to persuade such a man
that virtue is teachable [διδακτὸν ἡ ἀρετή] and that you are the men of whom
one may best learn it, or does this need some other art?’ ‘No, this same one
can do it, Socrates,’ said Dionysodorus. ‘Then you two, Dionysodorus,’ I said,
‘would be the best persons now on earth to incite one to philosophy and the
practice of virtue [φιλοσοφία καὶ ἀρετῆς ἐπιμέλεια]?’ ‘We think so, at least,
Socrates.’ ‘Well then, please defer the display of all the rest to some other occa-
sion, I said, and exhibit this one thing. You are to persuade this young fellow
here that he ought to philosophize and practice virtue [φιλοσοφεῖν καὶ ἀρετῆς
ἐπιμελεῖσθαι], and so you will oblige both me and all these present.’338

It will be noted that the word ἀρετή appears in this passage three times,
and that two of them make “the practice of virtue” or “practicing virtue”
the coequal objectives—along with “philosophy” and “philosophizing”—of
the desiderated protreptic. Having already noted that the word ἀρετή never
appears in the First Protreptic, and having cited the passage where Socrates
hesitates to add three of them before adding a fourth, what Socrates says
before beginning his protreptic paradigm likewise emphases the two coequal
objectives:

Socrates: ‘What you have next to do is to give us a display of exhorting this

youth as to how he should devote himself to wisdom and virtue [σοφία τε καὶ
ἀρετή]. But first I shall explain to you how I regard this matter and how I desire
to hear it dealt with. If I strike you as treating it in a crude and ridiculous manner,
do not laugh me to scorn; for in my eagerness to listen to your wisdom [σοφία]
I shall venture to improvise in your presence. So both you and your disciples
must restrain yourselves and listen without laughing; and you, son of Axiochus,
answer me this: Do we all human beings wish to prosper [εὖ πράττειν]?’339

337
 Note that the interrupted argument continues in Prt. 333d8–e1 (Lamb modified): “‘Now do you
say there are things that are good [ἀγαθά]?’ ‘I do.’ ‘Then, I asked, are those things good [ἀγαθά]
which are beneficial [ὠφέλιμα] to men?’” It is this second question that opens the door to derail-
ment; Plato forces the reader to determine the purpose of the first.
338
 Euthd. 274e3–275a7.
339
 Euthd. 278d1–e2 (Lamb).
80 Chapter 1

Can anyone think that Socrates offers an exhortation to “both wisdom and
virtue” (σοφία τε καὶ ἀρετή)? Only if wisdom is (the whole of) virtue can
we imagine that he has done so. Although there are many Socratists who
would be delighted to find K coordinated with UV and TEA in Euthydemus,
the First Protreptic is incompatible with UV:340 σοφία is ostentatiously sepa-
rated from three other virtues not only when they are introduced, but when it
comes to their correct use or abuse. Nor is it only before the First Protreptic
that Socrates mentions, as he does here for the third time, that the desiderated
exhortation has a dual purpose; he makes this point three more times after it
is finished:

Socrates: ‘If you do not wish to do that [sc. ‘demonstrate for us, doing by art
this same thing,’ i.e., that Socrates has just done in the First Protreptic], let your
display begin where I left off, and show the lad whether he ought to acquire
every kind of knowledge, or whether there is a single sort of it which one must
obtain if one is to be both happy and a good man [εὐδαιμονεῖν τε καὶ ἀγαθὸν
ἄνδρα εἶναι], and what it is. For as I was saying at the outset, it really is a matter
of great moment to us that this youth should become both wise and good [σοφός
τε καὶ ἀγαθὸς].’ These were my words, Crito; and I set about giving the closest
attention to what should follow, and observing in what fashion they would deal
with the question, and how they would start exhorting the youth to practice both
wisdom and virtue [σοφία τε καὶ ἀρετή].341

What makes the role of the other virtues in the First Protreptic so important
is that even if the success-insuring σοφία that Socrates makes the object of
philosophy actually exists, there is no guarantee that possessing it would
make those who had it virtuous.
By emphasizing the exclusive goodness of σοφία in the First Protreptic,
Socrates challenges us to discover that Plato can find other productive uses
for deliberate fallacy, and the most productive of these, as if by intention,
unmask the pretensions of Systematic Socratism. Since the best evidentiary
basis for TEA is embedded in the fallacy-filled Euthydemus, Socratists must
build on an unreliable foundation. It is, for example, chiefly because Socrates
fails to exhort Cleinias to σοφία τε καὶ ἀρετή—to both wisdom and virtue—
that they can find IOV in the First Protreptic, but since Socrates acknowledges

340
 As noted by Penner; see §2. Cf. Mary Margaret McCabe, “Out of the Labyrinth: Plato’s Attack
on Consequentialism” in Christopher Gill (ed.), Virtue, Norms and Objectivity: Issues in Ancient
and Modern Ethics, 189–214 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 200n44. Her comments
on “good luck” (196–198) and (Santas) circularity (202–205)—hence the “labyrinth” of her
title—deserve attention, the latter climaxing with: “The labyrinth argument, therefore, offers a
critique of the first Socratic episode [sc. the First Protreptic].” Cf. Rider, “Socrates’ Philosophical
Protreptic,” 217n22.
341
 Euthd. 282d8–283a4.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 81

the existence of other virtues while deriving their goodness only from σοφία,
the highroad to UV, first glimpsed in Protagoras, is blocked. And that’s not
all. The second use of εὖ πράττειν in Protagoras (Prt. 333d7; cf. 313a8) has
presented IOV in the most unflattering light: there it is the unjust who make
wisdom/temperance an instrument for achieving success. With IOV already
unmasked as potentially unjust, with UV now undermined, and with
TEA rewritten here to mean that “all men, even the completely base, wish
to succeed,” the ostentatiously fallacious equation of σοφία and εὐτυχία has
the ultimate purpose of casting doubt on K itself. As Protagoras has already
pointed out against UV, there are unjust men who are wise (Prt. 329e5–6);
here is how Socrates reaches this same specious conclusion:

Socrates: ‘In general [ἐν κεφαλαίῳ] then, Cleinias,’ I proceeded, ‘it seems that,
as regards the whole lot of things which at first we termed goods [σύμπαντα ἃ τὸ
πρῶτον ἔφαμεν ἀγαθὰ εἶναι], the discussion they demand is not on the question
of how they are in themselves and by nature goods [αὐτά γε καθ᾽ αὑτὰ πέφυκεν
ἀγαθὰ εἶναι], but rather, I conceive, as follows: if they are guided by ignorance
[ἀμαθία], they are greater evils [μείζω κακά] than their opposites, according as
they are more capable of ministering to their evil guide [ὑπηρετεῖν τῷ ἡγουμένῳ
κακῷ ὄντι]; whereas if both understanding and wisdom [φρόνησίς τε καὶ σοφία]
guide them, they are greater goods [μείζω ἀγαθά]; but in themselves neither sort
is of any worth [αὐτὰ δὲ καθ᾽αὑτὰ οὐδέτερα αὐτῶν οὐδενὸς ἄξια εἶναι].’ ‘I think
the case appears,’ he replied, ‘to be as you suggest.’342

First of all, the catalogue of τὰ ἀγαθά to which Socrates refers at the

outset included temperance, justice, and courage. And since this passage is
immediately followed by securing the boy’s assent that the only ἀγαθόν is
σοφία, and ἀμαθία the only κακόν (Euthd. 281e4–5), it is easy to see that
these virtues are not ἀγαθά. Socrates has already sketched his justification for
treating courage in this way (Euthd. 281c6–7), and has implied, albeit without
so much as a sketch, that he could show that being σώφρων (Euthd. 281c6)
is one of those “greater evils” when not guided by φρόνησίς τε καὶ σοφία.343
But being just (δίκαιος) is mentioned only once in the First Protreptic (Euthd.
279b5), and thus there is not even a sketch of how it could possibly be proved
to be bad; as a result, it is made conspicuous by its absence.

342
 Euthd. 281d2–e2.
343
 On Charles Badham’s deletion of σώφρων at 281c6, see Gifford, Euthydemus of Plato, 25 (on
ἀνδρεῖος ὤν), Chance, Plato’s Euthydemus, 70–73, and especially Hawtrey, Commentary, 87;
note the contrast there between “either that this is one of Plato’s provocative statements that are
intended to make the reader think” and “the easiest solution in the present passage [sc. ‘281c6f.’]
is simply to delete the offending words καὶ σώφρων.” “Making the reader think” is better, but even
more important than preserving the thought-provoking σώφρων is the fact that it is necessary in
order to make justice, the missing virtue from 279b5, conspicuous by its absence.
82 Chapter 1

Perhaps it is only after reading Gorgias and Republic that the student
realizes how central justice is to Plato’s concerns; even after reading Laches
and Charmides one might still imagine that a TEA-based UV version of
K is being upheld in Euthydemus (see §6). But even if only on the basis of
Protagoras, and even more so on the basis of Protagoras in concert with
Alcibiades Major—where the centrality of justice is made obvious from the
start (Alc. 109b3–6)—the student must wonder: how could being just ever be
bad?344 If we judge by the standard of the GoodT, the answer will be “never,”
but those who make “the good for me” the measure of all things will, depend-
ing on their honesty (Prt. 323b2–7), perhaps answer differently.345 In any
case, what makes the status of the other virtues in the First Protreptic so
important is that even if the success-insuring σοφία Socrates is praising actu-
ally exists, there is no guarantee that possessing it would make those who
had it virtuous.
It’s as elegant as it is simple. It is precisely “the importance of Euthydemus”
to TEA-based Socratism, especially in its IOV-validating form, that makes
it impossible for Socrates himself to have done what he wants the brothers to do:
he may have shown Cleinias how to be happy, but not how to be a good man.346
As he emphasizes after concluding the Protreptic (Euthd. 282d8–283a4), it is
not enough that the young man becomes σοφός,347 it is equally important that
he also becomes ἀγαθός, nor is it sufficient that he acquires σοφία, because he
must also attain ἀρετή. But by isolating σοφία from the other virtues, and mak-
ing it the necessary and sufficient cause of εὖ πράττειν—which although glossed
for rhetorical purposes as εὐδαιμονεῖν, must really mean “to be successful” if
the previous argument as a whole is to succeed—there is no room left over for
ἀρετή. We are not listening to a Vlastosian Socrates prove that only the virtuous

344
 Cf. Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi, Playful Philosophy, 25 and 30n54: “it seems difficult to explain how
justice or temperance can be guided by folly and therefore be put to wrong use, and the omission
of their opposites on the second list perhaps suggests that Plato is aware of the difficulty.” Cf. the
artful dodge, alleging “a counterfactual,” in Vlastos, Socrates, 228n92: “if (per impossible) cour-
age and temperance could be controlled by ignorance (as all of those non-moral qualities in the list
uncontroversially can be), then they too would be a blot on our happiness.”
345
 Cf. the praiseworthy honesty of Dionysodorus, who is unwilling to claim that Socrates knows
(ἐπίστασθαι) that good men are unjust at 296e4 (Euthydemus has been arguing since 293c4 that
Socrates “understands” all things). Dionysodorus’ blush (297a8) marks the overthrow of the
brothers as a team (297a5–8); admitting that Socrates knows “good men are not unjust” (296e7)
gives Socrates a second opportunity to repeat the paradigmatically unknowable proposition
(297a2); he hammers it at 297b4–5.
346
 See Naomi Reshotko, “Virtue as the Only Unconditional—But not Intrinsic—Good: Plato’s
Euthydemus 278e3–281e5.” Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001), 325–334, on 326n1. Note that her use
of post-textual distinctions to eliminate Santas circularity (331–332) involves a pair of post-textual
distinctions as well as the Pennerite credo on 333: “The Euthydemus shows that the maximal
amount of happiness available to the virtuous person is subject to the limitations that her particular
situation and resources place upon her.” Cf. Russell, Plato on Pleasure, 41n75.
347
 Plato has problematized the meaning of σοφός at Smp. 203a4–6; the Protreptic operates on the
level of the δέ, not the μέν. Cf. ἡ ἔντεχνος σοφία at Prt. 321d1.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 83

can be happy, nor is there any trace of an argument in the First Protreptic to the
effect that σοφία is ἀρετή—how could there be when ἀρετή isn’t mentioned—
but only the memorable claim that sets the Santas Circle spinning: that wisdom
alone is good.348

Socrates: ‘Now what result do we get from our statements? Is it not precisely
that, of all the other things, not one is either good or bad, but of these two,
wisdom is good and ignorance bad [ἡ μὲν σοφία ἀγαθόν, ἡ δὲ ἀμαθία κακόν]?’
He agreed.349

It is not only because an awareness of one’s own ἀμαθία is a characteristi-

cally Socratic “good,” at the very least propaedeutic to what Socrates regards
as σοφία,350 that this stunning conclusion is an example of deliberate fallacy.
From Socrates’ extravagant praise of the brothers’ σοφία at the beginning of
the dialogue (Euthd. 271c5–272d1), to his highly critical encomium of them
at the end (Euthd. 303c4–304b5), it is clear that Socrates is being deceptive,
but his own extravagant praise of σοφία in the First Protreptic has never-
theless repeatedly been taken at face value,351 and the role of εὖ πράττειν’s
ambiguity in that extravagant praise has been discounted.352 The brothers’
performance proves that one can be successful at making eristic arguments
without those arguments being good; the controversial claim is that the same
is true of the First Protreptic, which has proved to be highly successful at
persuading almost all of Plato’s readers that he regards Socrates’ arguments
there as good ones.353 It is easy to overlook the fact that bad arguments
become useful when they remind us of what is really good, as when the first
question the brothers put to Cleinias forces us to recollect what we should
have just learned from Symposium and Lysis: it is neither the wise nor the
ignorant who learn, but only the philosophers.

348
 Cf. Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 266: “Readers will not be so surprised, perhaps, when we
claim in section 11 that Socrates would also be prepared to affirm that wisdom is happiness.”
349
 Euthd. 281e2–5.
350
 Cf. Ap. 23b2–4 and Alc. 106d10–e3, 109e7.
351
 For a recent exception, see Rider, “Socrates’ Philosophical Protreptic,” especially 211–212. Cf.
Jones, “Wisdom and Happiness” and Gonzalez, Dialectic and Dialogue, 102–105.
352
 In addition to Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy 4, 275–276, see Sprague, Plato’s Use of
Fallacy, 10. Marginally better is David Roochnik, “The Serious Play of Plato’s Euthydemus.”
Interpretation 18, no. 2 (Winter 1990–1991), 211–232, on 218.
353
 The most notable and surprising exception is Irwin, “Socrates the Epicurean,” 204: “After finding
such serious flaws in this argument in the Euthydemus [sc. 279c9–281e5, analyzed on 203–205]
we might remind ourselves that the dialogue as a whole is concerned with eristic, and suggest that
even the protreptic passages are not free of the fallacious argument that is rife in the rest of the
dialogue.” This golden sentence is particularly striking in the context of its author’s dependence on
“Socrates’ Philosophical Protreptic” for Socrates’ eudaemonism in Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 52–53;
I have no explanation for this discrepancy, but see T. H. Irwin, “Socratic Puzzles: A Review of
Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy
10 (1992), 241–266, on 259–260.
84 Chapter 1

In the First Protreptic, the most obvious falsehood in the speech is that even
a child would know that wisdom is good luck (Euthd. 279d6–7),354 indeed
it is tempting to identify this as the Key Passage in the dialogue, not only
because the second time Socrates invokes a knowing child (Euthd. 301c1),
he is clearly employing the brothers’ eristic literalism, but also because the
most striking passage in the dialogue—when Crito objects that Cleinias could
not possibly have said, for example, that mathematicians turn over their find-
ings to the dialecticians (Euthd. 290b7–d8)—Socrates is presenting another
youngster as knowing something he could not possibly know. But the equation
of εὐτυχία as σοφία is not a single anomaly in the otherwise unobjectionable
argument that constitutes the First Protreptic. It is rather the key that unlocks
the fallacy at its heart: the deliberate equivocation that begins with that first
εὖ πράττειν.355 Wisdom in the guise of a non-existent infallibility, εὖ πράττειν
as happiness replaced by εὖ πράττειν as success, knowledge of what is best
(see Alc2. 145c2, 145e8–9, and 146e1; cf. 144d5) eclipsed by knowledge as
the only good, the lack of any exhortation to ἀρετή, the conspicuous absence
of any proof of the claim that justice could be bad in a speech that hints at the
possibility that unjust men could be construed as good, wise, and happy, all
are indications that Plato is using basanistic pedagogy in the First Protreptic.
The reason that he does so in Euthydemus is in one sense obvious: the
antics of the brothers give Socrates an excuse to explain equivocation to
Cleinias, and then Plato—to test whether his students have understood the
lesson—immediately places in Socrates’ mouth a speech that begins with εὖ
πράττειν, the first equivocation he has taught us to recognize. But that is only
the tip of the iceberg. Much like the Problem of the One and the Many in
the post-Republic dialogues,356 what I will call “the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy”357
makes it easy to find our way in their pre-Republic counterparts; since even
a child can understand either, both exemplify Plato’s pedagogical generosity.

354
 See Mark L. McPherran, “‘What Even a Child Would Know’: Socrates, Luck, and Providence at
Euthydemus 277d–282e.” Ancient Philosophy 25 (2005), 49–63, especially a noteworthy line of
defense on 55: “since Socrates criticizes the eristic brothers for their use of ambiguity to confuse
rather than educate young Cleinias (277d–278c), we may expect Socrates to respond here by dis-
playing a properly protreptic use of ambiguity.” Cf. Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi, Playful Philosophy,
15n27.
355
 In addition to Narcy, Le philosophe et son double, 107, and Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi, Playful
Philosophy, 45–46, see Rebecca Benson Cain, The Socratic Method: Plato’s Use of Philosophical
Drama (New York: Continuum, 2007), 17, 48–51, and especially 71–74 (including 120nn16–18).
356
 See Guardians in Action, §11.
357
 The classic account of “the convenient ambiguity” (335) is E. R. Dodds, Plato: Gorgias: A
Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 335–336,
reaching a climax with: “it is not easy to suppose that here [sc. Grg. 507c3–5] and in the passages
just quoted [sc. Alc. 116b, Chrm. 172a1, and R. 353e–354a] Plato was unaware of what he was
doing (cf. T. G. Tuckey, Plato’s Charmides, 74 ff.).” Cf. Crombie, Examination of Plato’s Doc-
trines, 1.236: “He [sc. Plato] frequently uses arguments which are fallacious if the double meaning
[sc. of εὖ πράττειν] is taken seriously, and I am sure he does it deliberately.”
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 85

In that context, the deeper reason that we encounter a deliberately deceptive

speech that revolves around the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy is because Euthydemus
directly follows Symposium and Lysis in the ROPD.
When we encounter the mysterious First Friend in Lysis immediately after
reading Symposium, some of us—and among these I am counting Plato’s
best students—will instantly be reminded of Beauty. But thanks to Diotima’s
GB Equation-based Eudaemonist Shortcut, others will be able to make a
case for identifying it as Happiness, and to these, the First Protreptic offers
remarkably equivocal support: on the positive side, it usefully confirms the
view that Happiness is what all of us seek, making it the single most impor-
tant proof-text of TEA in the dialogues.358 But it also asserts in no uncertain
terms that Wisdom is the only good, and since Socrates calls the First Friend
τὸ ἀγαθόν but otherwise says very little about it, those who seek a eudae-
monist solution to the puzzle of Lysis are forced to search for confirmation
in Euthydemus. My claim is that Plato has led them into a trap, and done so
deliberately.
In making this claim I am deeply influenced by Vlastos and the Anglo-
American Socratists who have followed, modified, or rejected his lead; after
all, I am supposing that Plato had a position very like theirs in mind when
he decided to follow Symposium with Lysis, and Lysis with Euthydemus.
Although I am not claiming that the path connecting the Eudaemonist Short-
cut to the Socratist reading of these dialogues is the one Plato expects his
best readers to follow, an awareness of his use of basanistic pedagogy not
only gives such readers a better understanding of Plato’s methods but also
a more sympathetic view of those who identify the First Friend as Wisdom-
Knowledge,359 Happiness,360 or even Pleasure (R. 505c6–9), despite the fact
that Socrates jeers the last of these possibilities with his version of “god
forbid” (εὐφήμει) at Republic 509a9. Above all, the placement of Lysis-
Euthydemus after Symposium in the ROPD suggests that Plato anticipated
that many of his readers would cling instead to the notion that whatever is
good must necessarily be the Good for me, and thus that Happiness is what
all of us want. It is these who find themselves lured into a quagmire thanks
to Euthydemus, a mighty ridiculous place to search for serious arguments.

358
 But see Russell, Plato on Pleasure, 36n62: “Nor, of course, does Euthydemus 279a ff. give any
support to the idea that happiness is the only final good.”
359
 See Robinson, “Plato’s Lysis,” 75n19.
360
 See A. W. Price, Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle, new impression (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1997), 8: “Socrates does not state explicitly what he takes the ‘first dear’ to be; no doubt it
is one’s own faring well [note the failure to give heed to the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy] or eudaimoniā.”
For his awareness of the Santas Circle, see the attached note (8n9): after citing the First Protreptic
and the corresponding passage in Men., “though they also indicate, despite [Lys.] 220b7–8 here,
that Plato tends to count as truly ‘good’ not eudaimoniā itself but what reliably yields or produces
it.” For Price’s Rowe-influenced reading of Smp. (256n9), see 254–255.
86 Chapter 1

But the puzzles of Lysis may be said to have compelled them to search for
them there. The abject failure to explain τὸ φίλον—if, that is, Diotima has not
already explained it—leaves its readers hungry for solutions and looking for
them in what comes next. Not least of all because of the presence of deliber-
ate fallacy in both Lysis and Euthydemus, I cannot persuade myself that Plato
didn’t anticipate and indeed create the temptation to find the First Friend in
the First Protreptic. It therefore seems best to illustrate “Plato’s deliberate
use of fallacy” in Lysis in a context that is relevant to this ostensibly positive
thematic connection, and more generally in a context that places it between
Symposium and Euthydemus in the ROPD. To this end, I will conclude this
section by considering the possibility that the First Friend in Lysis is the
σοφία of the First Protreptic in Euthydemus.361 As “the love of wisdom,”
φιλοσοφία would then be φίλον only for the sake of what is in fact dear (τὸ
τῷ ὄντι φίλον introduced at Ly. 220b4), which on our assumption would now
be σοφία itself.
If σοφία is the First Friend, we must ask: could φιλοσοφία itself possi-
bly be good?362 It must not be in the context of the (deliberately fallacious)
“thought-experiment”363 that Socrates introduces at Lysis 220c1–d7:

Socrates: ‘Is the nature of the good [τἀγαθόν] like this, and is it loved like this,
because of the bad [διὰ τὸ κακόν], by us who are between [μεταξύ] the bad
and the good, and does it have no use [χρεία; cf. Ly. 215b6], itself for the sake
of itself [αὐτὸ δ’ ἑαυτοῦ ἓνεκα]?’ ‘It seems,’ {Menexenus} said, ‘to be like
that.’”364

When philosophy is recognized as NGNB—for it is neither ignorance nor

wisdom—it is φίλον merely for the sake of wisdom, that is, of what is in fact
dear. This would render φιλοσοφία one of those φίλα in name only—“it’s
plainly just a word we’re using” (Ly. 220b1)—and would therefore justify
the (fallacious) claim that τὸ τῷ ὄντι φίλον “doesn’t resemble them at all”:

Socrates: ‘In that case we find that that friend of ours, the one to which we said
all the rest finally led—‘‘friends’ [scare quotes added] for the sake of another
friend’ was what we said they were—doesn’t resemble them at all [οὐδὲν δὲ
τούτοις ἔοικεν]. For these have the name ‘friends for the sake of a friend,’
whereas the true friend {‘the truly philon’ [τὸ τῷ ὄντι φίλον]} plainly has a

361
 As suggested by the structural parallel noted by Rosamond Kent Sprague, Plato’s Philosopher-
King: A Study of the Theoretical Background (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1976), 54.
362
 Cf. Curzer, “Plato’s Rejection,” 365: “Perhaps the ‘first friend’ is not a person, but rather wisdom,
or one’s own eudaimonia, or the good, or some other non-person.”
363
 Gedankenexperiment in Bordt, Lysis, 216; cf. Curzer, “Plato’s Rejection,” 362–364.
364
 Ly. 220d4–7 (Penner and Rowe).
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 87

nature that’s wholly the opposite [πᾶν τοὐναντίον] of this; for it showed up as
plainly being a friend (philon) to us for the sake of something inimical (ech-
throu heneka [ἐχθροῦ ἕνεκα]), and if the inimical took itself off it’s no longer,
it seems, a friend to us.’ ‘It doesn’t seem so to me,’ he said, ‘as least if it’s put
as it is now.’365

Thanks to the medical analogy Socrates has already used to explain how
the NGNB is friend to medicine on account of disease (the example of διὰ τὸ
κακόν) for the sake of health (the example of ἕνεκα φίλου) Plato has made it
easy to spot the fallacy of substituting ἐχθροῦ ἓνεκα for διὰ τὸ ἐχθρόν when
it occurs in the next sentence.366 But the implications for philosophy are no
less fallacious: if σοφία is the First Friend, then it must be loved for the sake
of its enemy, that is, ignorance. While it is not clear that this is the case,
it serves to drive a deeper wedge between σοφία and φιλοσοφία, since the
latter is not inimical to ignorance but rather—thanks to its status as μεταξύ
(Smp. 204b4–5)—depends on it, and above all, on our awareness of our
own. On the other hand, does not σοφία depend on ignorance if it is the First
Friend, which cannot exist for the sake of τὸ φίλον, but only for the sake of
τὸ ἐχθρόν (Ly. 220e4–5), that is, ignorance now configured as τὸ κακόν? It is
therefore remarkable that in the midst of such puzzlement, ignorance is next
presented in a favorable light in the thought-experiment that follows:

Socrates: “By Zeus,” I said, “if the bad disappears [τὸ κακὸν ἀπόληται], will
there no longer even be any being hungry, or being thirsty, or anything else of
that sort? Or will there be hunger, if indeed there are human beings and the other
sorts of living creatures, but not hunger that is harmful? And so with thirst, and
the other sorts of desires—there will be these desires, but they won’t be bad,
given that the bad will have disappeared [τοῦ κακοῦ ἀπολωλότος]? Or is what-
ever there will be or will not be then [ποτ᾽ ἔσται τότε ἢ μὴ ἔσται] a ridiculous
thing to query [γελοῖον τὸ ἐρώτημα]? For who knows [τίς γὰρ οἶδεν]?”367

By admitting his well-advised ignorance here, Socrates demonstrates that

he is not working within the limiting parameters of a wisdom vs. ignorance
antithesis exploded in Symposium (Smp. 204a1–b5), hammered in Lysis (Ly.
218a2–b3), but exploited by the brothers (Euthd. 275d3–4): a complete set of
future conditions that would arise from the hypothetical elimination of any-
thing, for example, τὸ κακόν, is something neither he nor anyone else could

365
 Ly. 220d8–e6 (Penner and Rowe). Cf. Laszlo Versenyi, “Plato’s Lysis.” Phronesis 20, no. 3
(1975), 185–198, on 195.
366
 See Cohen, “Plato’s Use of Ambiguity,” 242: “this section [sc. 218c–220e] contains only one glar-
ing eristic fallacy, the substitution of ἕνεκα for δία in 220e.” Cf. 247–250 with Penner and Rowe,
Plato’s Lysis, 134 (especially 134n106) and Bordt, Lysis, 216n539.
367
 Ly. 220e6–221a5 (Penner and Rowe modified).
88 Chapter 1

know. If the First Friend is wisdom, the relevant bad to be eliminated is easily
construed as ignorance, but this only serves to make the paradox palpable:
we must own ourselves to be ignorant of the ramifications of the disappear-
ance of ignorance. And there is more. The wisdom vs. ignorance antithesis,
the basis of the brothers’ first eristic question in Euthydemus, receives its
apparently canonical expression in the First Protreptic (Euthd. 281e4–5)
despite the fact that it is itself antithetical to the account of philosophy as
inhabiting the μεταξύ between wisdom and ignorance in both Symposium
and Lysis. In Lysis, Socrates confirms that he is one of those who are “still
aware of not knowing the things they do not know [ἀλλ᾽ ἔτι ἡγούμενοι μὴ
εἰδέναι ἃ μὴ ἴσασιν]” (Ly. 218b1) by admitting his ignorance about the future
consequences of the hypothetical and counterfactual elimination of “the bad.”
Although Socrates’ thought-experiment had been predicated on the disap-
pearance of τὸ κακόν, its sequel therefore prompts us to ask: can we possibly
regard Socrates’ ἄγνοια about the future as something bad? The question
of what there would or would not be in the future, if something that exists
were somehow no longer to do so, is not simply something we just happen
not to know but something we could not possibly know—the implications of
this future-based impossibility will reappear in Laches (see §6)—and this is
obviously Socrates’ point in asking τίς γὰρ οἶδεν? Would this kind of ἄγνοια,
that is, ignorance of the future, disappear “if the bad disappears”? To the
extent that the thought-experiment reduces philosophy to a friend “in name
only” if σοφία is the First Friend, Socrates’ subsequent τίς γὰρ οἶδεν not only
undermines the thought-experiment’s value, but also tends to rehabilitate
philosophy as a truer friend than wisdom when the latter is construed as the
strict antithesis of ignorance, especially the kind of ignorance that will and
could never disappear. Since Socrates has already taken it for granted that
σοφία cannot easily be said: “to love us in return” (Ly. 212d7–8), the fact that
φιλο-σοφία is obviously φίλον in the active sense, with σοφία as its passive
object, shows why this passage constitutes the point of intersection between
Symposium, Lysis, and Euthydemus.
As indicated at the beginning of this section, it is widely acknowledged
that Socrates slips between the active and passive senses of φίλον throughout
Lysis, and that only the reader who recognizes this can make sense of its
various arguments. Furthermore, it is on the basis of this slippage that I have
claimed that an important common purpose of Lysis and Euthydemus is to
provide advanced gymnastic training in the use of equivocation. But based
on a deadpan reading of the First Protreptic, and leaving aside for a moment
the problem of the Santas Circle, the most radical Socratists have linked the
two in what appears to be a completely different manner by identifying the
First Friend in Lysis with the (maximum achievable under the circumstances)
happiness-securing σοφία praised by Socrates in Euthydemus. As brought out
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 89

by the thought-experiment in Lysis, this identification has potentially damag-

ing implications for φιλοσοφία, ostensibly the highly praised object of the
First Protreptic. Since φιλο-σοφία is necessarily φίλον in the active sense, and
if we can admit that the purpose of the First Protreptic is to make it φίλον in
the passive sense as well, we have finally come across a “friend” that is both
“dear” and “loving,” and thus deserves to be considered τὸ τῷ ὄντι φίλον.
There are three fallacies in play in Socrates’ thought-experiment: (1) the
underlying problem that the elimination of τὸ κακόν would also eliminate
what is between the good and the bad (μεταξύ at Ly. 220d6), (2) the substitu-
tion of ἐχθροῦ ἓνεκα for διὰ τὸ κακόν (Ly. 220d5; cf. 220b8), and (3) the fact
that the entire discussion of τὸ τῷ ὄντι φίλον, beginning with the introduction
of the First Friend at Ly. 219c5–d2, implicates only the passive sense of τὸ
φίλον. In other words, it is implicitly treated as the ultimate or primary “dear”
or “cherished,” that for the sake of which other φίλα are “dear.” But no effort
is made to show that it is likewise an active “friend,” as philosophy obviously
is with respect to σοφία. It is the recognition that τὸ φίλον cannot be only
the passively “dear” or the exclusively active “friend” but must rather unite
in one the two senses that make the uncritical use of the term inescapably
equivocal is what unifies Plato’s Lysis. As a result, the hypothesis that not
σοφία but rather φιλοσοφία is the πρῶτον φίλον not only unites those two
senses, but lays bare the other two fallacies in the thought-experiment: it is
between the good and the bad yet is lovable for its own sake.
And thus, although it is tempting to identify the πρῶτον φίλον with either
the Beautiful already revealed in Symposium or the Idea of the Good yet to
come in Republic,368 it is best to recognize why Plato placed Lysis between
them, and why φιλοσοφία opens the soul’s eye to both. Moreover, the
hypothesis that φιλοσοφία is the πρῶτον φίλον likewise explains why Lysis is
more specifically placed between Symposium and Euthydemus. If φιλοσοφία
is the First Friend, we have discovered the link between the First Protreptic
qua deceptive, and the unsatisfactory discussion of the equivocal τὸ φίλον
in Lysis: it is a uniquely unequivocal and singular “friend” that gives the lie
to the claim that ἀμαθία is the only bad, and σοφία the only good.369 It also
resolves the eristic trap the brothers set for Cleinias, for it is neither the wise
nor the ignorant who will learn:

‘Who then, Diotima,’ I said, ‘are those who philosophize [οἱ φιλοσοφοῦντες], if
it is neither the wise or the ignorant [εἰ μήτε οἱ σοφοὶ μήτε οἱ ἀμαθεῖς]?’ ‘That,’

368
 Cf. Djibril Samb, “La signification du ‘ΠΡΩΤΟΝ ΦΙΛΟΝ’ dans le Lysis: Essai d’interprétation
ontologique.” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 181, no. 4 (1991), 513–516.
369
 See Roslyn Weiss, Virtue in the Cave: Moral Inquiry in Plato’s Meno (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 183n31.
90 Chapter 1

she said, ‘is by now surely clear enough to a child [δῆλον δή, ἔφη, τοῦτό γε ἤδη
καὶ παιδί]: it’s those who are between [οἱ μεταξύ] these two groups, and Love
[ἔρως] will be among these.’370

In Lysis and Euthydemus, Plato will test whether or not this has really become
sufficiently clear to the relevant child; if it has, we will have come to recog-
nize the pedagogical purpose of the fallacious arguments and deliberately
constructed puzzles in both dialogues. With respect to the former, we will
know that when Socrates uses a similar expression twice in Euthydemus—
once when he claims that two things said to be ἕτερος are the same (Euthd.
301c1), the other when identifies εὐτυχία as σοφία (Euthd. 279d7)—Plato is
alerting us to his deliberate use of fallacy.
But the meaning of “philosophy” introduced in Symposium is, by contrast,
something that he very much wants us to grasp, and he therefore offers us
the puzzle of the πρῶτον φίλον only after reminding us of what it means to
φιλοσοφεῖν:

‘And consequently we may say that those who are already wise no longer love
wisdom, whether they be gods or men; nor again can those be lovers of wisdom
who are in such ignorance as to be bad: for no bad and stupid man philosophizes
[κακὸν γὰρ καὶ ἀμαθῆ οὐδένα φιλοσοφεῖν]. And now there remain those who,
while possessing this bad thing [τὸ κακὸν τοῦτο], ignorance [ἡ ἄγνοια], are not
yet made ignorant or stupid, but are still aware of not knowing the things they
do not know.371

This illuminating passage that not only constitutes an advance on the paral-
lel passage in Symposium but which also explains why Socrates will begin
to undo his thought-experiment with τίς γὰρ οἶδεν. Preceding a dialogue that
perpetuates the notion—already called into question by Alcibiades Minor
(see Alc2. 143a7–c7)—that ἄγνοια is simply bad and σοφία simply good,
Lysis follows another that introduces students to philosophy,372 and no less
importantly to themselves (qua philosophers) as οἱ μεταξύ. Two rival answers
to the mystery of the First Friend therefore point us in two opposite direc-
tions: one looks back to τὸ καλόν in Symposium, the other forward to σοφία
in Euthydemus. Thanks to φιλοσοφία, it should be clear even to a child which
of the two Plato wants us to choose.
But just in case it isn’t, consider two things that he writes about σοφία,
one in Symposium and another in Lysis. In the latter, Socrates points out
that although philosophers love wisdom, σοφία does not “love them back”

370
 Smp. 204a8–b2.
371
 Ly. 218a2–b1 (Lamb modified)
372
 On Alc2. See Ascent to the Beautiful, §7.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 91

(ἀντιφιλεῖν);373 in the former, Diotima ranks σοφία among “the most beautiful
things” in a passage that hammers home the point that Love is a philosopher:

‘Wisdom [ἡ σοφία] is actually one of the most beautiful things [τὰ κάλλιστα],
and Love [ἔρως] is love in relation to what is beautiful [ἔρως περὶ τὸ καλόν];
as a result, love is necessarily a philosopher [φιλόσοφος], and as a philosopher
[φιλόσοφος], is between a wise man and an ignorant one [μεταξὺ εἶναι σοφοῦ
καὶ ἀμαθοῦς].’374

By ranking σοφία among τὰ κάλλιστα in a passage that links philosophy to

love and love to τὸ καλόν, the Beautiful becomes the measure of wisdom’s
beauty: it is only in relation to τὸ καλόν that σοφία can be “one of the most
beautiful things.” And since ἔρως as ὁ φιλόσοφος does not have wisdom
alone or even τὸ καλόν as its object, but rather “bringing forth in τὸ καλόν,”
we begin to catch sight of a beloved that, unlike σοφία, loves us back: we
begin, in other words, to catch sight of Plato the Teacher.
Identifying philosophy as the First Friend has numerous advantages, begin-
ning with the fact that it unites the problems that arise in Lysis itself from the
equivocal sense of φίλον to the mystery of the πρῶτον φίλον: it is because the
latter alone is τὸ τῷ ὄντι φίλον that it can unite, as a single thing, the active
and passives senses of φίλον. Because this solution displaces without negat-
ing σοφία—for φιλοσοφία as μεταξύ obviously depends on both wisdom and
ἀμαθία/ἄγνοια—it points forward to three things that make the First Protrep-
tic inadequate: it praises φιλοσοφία only indirectly (Euthd. 282c8–d2) and
not in itself, it remains enmeshed in the σοφία/ἀμαθία binary, and it creates a
happiness/wisdom circularity that can only be resolved by equating both with
εὐτυχία as success, an equation that explains its concurrent failure to praise
ἀρετή. More importantly, this solution points back to φιλοσοφία as active and
productive ἔρως in Symposium, and furnishes Plato’s students with a prior
basis—a protreptic to both philosophy and virtue—upon which to reject as
equivocal and deliberately ambiguous the alternative version he will offer us
in Euthydemus.
Solely on the basis of Lysis, it is possible to see φιλοσοφία as both an active
“friend” (to σοφία) and as something passively “dear” to us, but it is only in
Symposium that we can discover the sense in which philosophy truly “loves

373
 Ly. 212d1–8 (Lamb modified): “‘So you see, we now hold a different view from what we held
before. At first we said that if one of them loved, both were friends: but now, if both do not love,
neither is a friend.’ ‘It looks like it,’ he said. ‘So there is no such thing as a friend for the lover
who is not loved in return [οὐκ ἄρα ἐστὶν φίλον τῷ φιλοῦντι οὐδὲν μὴ οὐκ ἀντιφιλοῦν].’ ‘Appar-
ently not.’ ‘And so we find no horse-lovers where the horses do not love in return, no quail-lovers,
dog-lovers, wine-lovers, or sport-lovers on such terms, nor any philosophers unless wisdom loves
them back [ἂν μὴ ἡ σοφία αὐτοὺς ἀντιφιλῇ].’”
374
 Smp. 204b2–5 (Rowe modified)
92 Chapter 1

us back,” and thus how our love for it is reciprocated. By making himself so
difficult to see—and that really means: thanks to his basanistic pedagogy—
Plato reserves himself for those who love him, but only those who do so will
know that he loves them just as much in return. Like all of the most perfect
mysteries, the solution to this one is difficult to see not because it is hidden
away in some hard-to-find piece of the text but because it is everywhere, right
before our eyes, and thus invisible. Repeatedly in the Diotima discourse, ἔρως
is said “to engender” (γεννᾶν) and “bring forth” (τίκτειν) in the lover “beau-
tiful speeches [λόγοι]” (Smp. 210a7–8), specifically “the kind of λόγοι that
will make youngsters better (Smp. 210c1–3), that is, eloquent speeches about
virtue (Smp. 209b8–c2 and 212a3–6; cf. 209e2).
We need to recognize, then, that Plato’s dialogues are themselves the
“many and beautiful speeches” he has brought forth for us, conceived in that
actively generous φιλοσοφία that his Diotima aptly calls ἄφθονος or “with-
out envy” (Smp. 210d4–6). The natural objection that Plato has never met us
and therefore could not recognize that we were καλοί and thus worthy of his
love—for ἔρως can only bring forth in the beautiful (Smp. 209a5–b4)—justi-
fies his use of basanistic pedagogy: he discriminates between his readers for
exactly this reason. Only to the καλοί will his speeches be καλοί, exhorting
us to follow the path from the Beautiful in Symposium to the Idea of the
Good in Republic, and there to discover Justice in self-sacrificing generos-
ity. The others, doubtless the majority (οἱ πολλοί), will be more inclined to
identify the πρῶτον φίλον in Lysis with Pleasure—which really is “dear” only
for the sake of its enemy, pain—or with Happiness conceived as our own suc-
cess, and thus with the kind of σοφία, scarcely ἄφθονος, that aims to secure
it in Euthydemus. In this way, all of Plato’s speeches, and in particular the
deliberately deceptive ones, are brought forth by his generous and generating
ἔρως for those of us who can see them for what they are.375 The friendship that
results from this reciprocal awareness will simultaneously distinguish him as
Plato the Teacher and us as his students, at once both loving and beloved.

§4. THE PLAY OF CHARACTER AND THE

ARGUMENT OF THE ACTION

In the last salvo he fired at von Arnim in 1917, Pohlenz offered in passing
a perfect description of the dialogue between Socrates and Menexenus at
Lysis 212a8–213e3: “a brief preliminary conversation [Vorgespräch] whose
only purpose is to bring before the eyes the ambiguity [Vieldeutigkeit] of the

375
 See Antoni Bosch-Veciana, “Plato’s Lysis: Aporia and Dialectic Logoi; Frienship ‘Realized’
Throughout the Dialogue.” Revista Catalana de Teologia 23, no. 1 (1998), 109–118, on 117.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 93

word φίλος.”376 Compare this assessment with David Glidden’s response to

the comment of Julia Annas—which reflects, as Glidden ably proves,377 the
scholarly consensus—that “it is easy for Socrates to get Menexenus into dif-
ficulties by pressing one of these senses [sc. of φίλος] when he [sc. Menex-
enus] was thinking of another:”378

What makes this scholarly consensus mistaken on its face is that the very
distinction between the active and passive senses of φίλος which is supposed
to befuddle Menexenus is spelled out in the argument itself—the distinction
between φιλοῦντες and φιλοῦμενοι. It is simply incredible that the elenchus
should succeed because of an ambiguity in the use of ‘φίλος’ between ‘friendly’
and ‘cherished’ when the argument leading to that elenchus maintains the dis-
tinction between loving (φιλοῦντες, φιλῶν, φιλεῖν) and being loved (φιλοῦμεν
ος, φιλεῖσθαι) with exacting care.379

What makes Pohlenz’s summary superior is that he does not specify whose
eyes he has in mind when he writes “to bring before the eyes” the Vieldeutig-
keit of φίλος, and this allows us in turn to distinguish what is true from what
is false in Glidden’s: Plato provides his readers with all the tools they need
to unravel for themselves the ambiguity with which Socrates befuddles the
supposedly eristic Menexenus.380 By depicting the latter as confused, Plato
is showing us exactly how Socrates has deliberately caused him to be so,
and thus Plato, through Socrates, is challenging us to acquire the art that the
befuddled Menexenus evidently lacks, that is, eristic.
Lysis comes to his friend’s aid: when Socrates asks Menexenus directly (ὦ
Μενέξενε at Ly. 213d1)—and ironically, because his grammar expects from
him a negative answer (hence ἆρα μή at Ly. 213d1) to a question that screams
out for an affirmative one (Ly. 213d1–2)—if they might possibly (surely not!)
be conducting the inquiry along the wrong lines, he answers in his friend’s
place, blushing as he does so (Ly. 213d3), and confirms that they are on the

376
 Pohlenz, “Nochmals Platos Lysis,” 561.
377
 See the bibliography in Glidden, “Language of Love,” 288n3; note the presence of von Arnim (and
absence of Pohlenz). At 288n4, Glidden draws attention to Wilhelm Eckert, Dialektischer Scherz
in den früheren Gesprächen Platons (Nürnberg: U. E. Sebald, 1911) indispensible for Cohen’s
“Plato’s Use of Ambiguity”; in particular see the quotation from Eckert, Dialektischer Scherz, 94.
I have been unable to confirm that the brilliant Eckert survived the First World War.
378
 Annas, “Plato and Aristotle,” 533.
379
 Glidden, “Language of Love,” 276–277 (transliteration replaced by Greek); the fact that Glidden
does not include φιλόν (as “cherished”) in the second parenthesis is revealing, arising from his
attempt to absolve Socrates of equivocation, a move that conceals Plato’s pedagogical purpose:
we can only realize that “there is no trace of semantic skullduggery in the argument” (277) by
recognizing that φιλόν as equivocal.
380
 Cf. von Arnim, Platos Jugenddialoge, 47; cf. Phdr. 261d10–e4 and Guardians in Action, §7.
94 Chapter 1

wrong track (Ly. 213d2).381 Since Menexenus has already confessed to his
befuddlement—he lacks the opposite of ἀπορία (Ly. 213c9)—why does Plato
allow Lysis, who has already been revealed as less assertive (Ly. 207a6–7),
less adventurous (Ly. 207a7–b2), and less trusted by his teachers than his
friend (Ly. 207d2–4), uncharacteristically, and for the first and last time in
dialogue, to interrupt the conversation by answering a question that is not
addressed to him? Why does he seem less befuddled than his friend and yet
more vehement? And if it is Socrates who is on the wrong track—as he surely
is—why should Lysis blush? But this question is put wrong; it would be more
accurate to ask: why does Plato allow Socrates to bring to our attention that
Lysis blushes?382 It must be for much the same reason that Plato allows us to
overhear Socrates speculating that Lysis blushes because he is paying such
close attention to what is being said that his interruption seems to be invol-
untary (Ly. 213d3–5).
And with this observation, and for what seems like the first time in this
book, we finally enter the magical world of Plato’s dialogues. Although a dis-
cussion of Plato’s deliberate use of fallacy is necessarily more playful—and
therefore closer to Plato himself—than the discussion of K, CA, and IOV in
the wake of Vlastos, it too remains what Plato’s dialogues never are: boring,
desiccated, and disembodied. Plato’s dialogues are alive with the Play of
Character,383 and when we analyze the arguments we violently extract from
them, we must necessarily ignore the far more important Argument of the
Action. It is the latter—in this case, for example, the background story of
Hippothales and his serio-comic love for the boy Lysis—that explains why
the latter blushes. He knows what the befuddled Menexenus does not: that
Socrates is describing, both perfectly and deliberately, a kind of friendship
that Lysis abhors and rejects.384 More specifically, Lysis knows that he is
passively “dear”—“φίλοςP” for passive—to Hippothales even though Hip-
pothales is ἔχθροςP, that is, passively hated by him. And by the same token,
he is ἔχθροςA, or actively hating, the hapless Hippothales who is nevertheless

381
 On this text, see the remarks of Stefano Martinelli Tempesta on 1.289–290 (ad loc.) in Franco
Trabattoni, Platone, Liside, two volumes (Milan: LED, 2003).
382
 For the narrative technique in Ly., see Anne-Marie Schultz, Plato’s Socrates as Narrator: A Philo-
sophical Muse (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2013), chapter 2; for a programmatic statement, see 32.
383
 Cf. Ruby Blondell, The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2002); for the other part of this section’s title, see 49: “the discursive content of
the works is often mirrored by their dramatic action.”
384
 Cf. Annas, “Plato and Aristotle,” 533: “if A is liked by B but hates B, then A will be philos to his
enemy, and this is ridiculous. The same happens if the true philos is the one who likes—for if A
likes B and B hates A, then A will still turn out to be philos to his enemy, and this is ridiculous.”
In the first case, “A” is Lysis; in the second, Hippothales. The reason Annas is wrong to conclude
from this that “it is obvious that these paradoxes are boring and trivial” is because both Socrates
and Lysis know who “A” really is, and this is why the latter blushes.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 95

φίλοςA to him.385 It isn’t friendship, but it exists, and Plato expects us to see it:
it is the Argument of the Action illuminated by the Play of Character.
Plato is a teacher and he wants to make learning fun. But he is also serious
about what he wants his students to learn, and he therefore makes it as easy as
he can for us to learn it. Since what he wants us to learn he requires us to learn
by ourselves, he will use every literary tool the School of Hellas had offered
him—and those tools were “many and beautiful [πολλὰ καὶ καλά]” (Smp.
209e2 and Ion 542a5)—and to forge out of them an entirely new art form.
For our sake, Plato is a poet, enlivening his dialogues with vividly drawn
characters. But those characters, including his Socrates, are every one of them
only means to a greater pedagogical end, and the most important dialogue is
never the one written in the text but the one that the playful indirection of
his beautifully constructed writings creates between his readers and himself.
The befuddlement of Menexenus, the astuteness of Ctesippus, the foolishness
of Hippothales may all contribute to illuminating for us the true character of
Lysis, but even the latter is strictly secondary to Plato’s purpose, which is the
common purpose of all great teachers: to entertain while they instruct.
The silence of Lysis at 222a4 is parallel to his blush at Ly. 213d3, but this
time, Socrates makes a statement specifically addressed to both boys, and
only Menexenus affirms it. The silence of Lysis therefore divides the friends.
Why does Plato cause this to happen? It is not because he has an indepen-
dent philosophical interest in depicting accurately the difference between
Lysis and Menexenus: the Play of Character never has so inconsequential a
purpose. He causes it to happen because he wants us to wonder about why
it happens, and the moment we begin to do so, we find ourselves searching
for Plato’s motives, and not simply those of his character Lysis. As artfully
constructed as is the Play of Character in Plato’s dialogues, it is always neces-
sary for the interpreter to look through the surface to its creator’s intentions.
Since Plato has named the dialogue Lysis, and since he has persuaded
most of us that Socrates, in the aftermath of the boy’s noteworthy blush, is
pleased with that youngster’s φιλοσοφία in particular (Ly. 213d6–7), we are
apt to identify it as “a wise silence.” But is it? We search the context, as Plato
expects us to do; first we find that the two previous replies are duals (Ly.
221e5 and 221e7), thus indicating the mutual agreement of the boys, and the
statement that splits them is addressed to both (ὦ παῖδες at 222a1). Looking

385
 For the use of these subscripts, see Mary Margaret MacKenzie [now McCabe], “Impasse and
Explanation: From the Lysis to the Phaedo.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 70, no. 1
(1988), 15–45 on 26–27. Once disambiguated by her φίλοςA and φίλοςP, it is true that “the sys-
tematic ambiguity of φίλος, between befriender and the befriended, is not exploited by Plato, but
carefully observed” (26), and this is an old move; see Paul Shorey, “The Alleged Fallacy in Plato
Lysis 220 E.” Classical Philology 25, no. 4 (October 1930), 380–383, on 380–381. The point is
that Plato is teaching us that we need to disambiguate them.
96 Chapter 1

at what follows, we find a different story: the first is affirmed by Menexenus

alone (Ly. 222a6)—thus constituting a second silence for Lysis—while Plato
allows Socrates to describe the reaction of both boys as well as Hippothales
to the second (Ly. 222b1–2). By juxtaposing the pleasure of the latter with the
barely wrung nods of assent from the pair, Plato reminds us of the Argument
of the Action.
Hippothales is pleased because he sees himself as the genuine and
unfeigned lover who must necessarily be loved in return by his boyfriend;
we can be quite certain that his delight is as premature and misplaced as
it is revealing. What it reveals is the reason for the silences of Lysis:386 he
feels himself being trapped, by Socrates—and not without reason, since it is
Hippothales who has the best claim to being the object of Socrates’ instruc-
tion and sympathy in this dialogue, named for his beloved—into becoming
the boyfriend of Hippothales. Menexenus, apparently as unfamiliar with
Symposium as I am claiming that Plato’s readers are not—although his inter-
est in speeches that Socrates claims to have learned from a woman is well-
documented (Mx. 236c5–10)—finds the Aristophanes model of the οἴκειον
compelling (cf. Smp. 192b5–c2 and Ly. 221e3–222a4) without, however,
being any too eager as yet to become any lover’s boyfriend. As we examine
the responses of these characters, we need not be compelled to take any of
them as our model or to pronounce any of their responses wise. For it is not
in the Play of Character that we discover Plato the Teacher, but rather from
it, always guided by the mysteries and puzzles with which he has enkindled
our wonder about it. A truly wise silence would follow the realization that it
is Plato who is our genuine and not pretended lover, and that it is our natural
kinship with him that makes it necessary for us to return his love (see §3).
And this suggests that the intrepid, eristic, and responsibly pious Menex-
enus (Ly. 207d1–4 will be considered below)—already familiar to us for his
later interest in politics in his own eponymous dialogue—is more worthy of
love than the handsome Lysis; a valuable object lesson for Plato’s young
men, that is, those for whom he enlivened his teaching with plays, characters,
and puzzles. Socrates is teaching Hippothales the same lesson that Diotima
teaches Socrates: it is not this particular boy that you love. But since Plato
has written Lysis in such a manner that we will only find a place for τὸ τῷ
ὂντι καλόν in it if we, remembering Symposium, bring it along with us, the
Argument of the Action is here necessarily more down to earth: this par-
ticular boy that you love, Hippothales, not only despises you (Ly. 207b6–7),

386
 See Otto Apelt (trans. and ed.), Platon, Sämtliche Dialoge, in Verbindung mit Kurt Hildebrandt,
Constantin Ritter, und Gustav Schneider herausgegeben und mit Einleitungen, Literaturübersich-
ten, Anmerkungen, und Registern versehen von Otto Apelt, seven volumes (Leipzig: Felix Meiner,
1922–1923), 3.122.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 97

but is as unworthy of your love as he has been spoiled by your poetry

(Ly. 205d5–206a4). For Lysis, philosophy is strictly personal, and what
he hears—as evidenced equally by his silence and his blushing interrup-
tion—is all about him (cf. Ly. 205e1). The critical moment is when he flirts
with Socrates not only φιλικῶς but παιδικῶς “in secret from Menexenus,”
(Ly. 211a2–4), thereby demonstrating ad oculos—and in particular before
the eyes of the desperate Hippothales—that for the sake of humbling his
“friend” (Ly. 211c3) he is willing to act the part of on older man’s coquettish
boy-toy. Under the assumption that his good looks will entitle him to it, he
begins giving Socrates orders instead of doing the recommended job himself
(Ly. 211c7–9).
In offering this revisionist and self-consciously iconoclastic interpreta-
tion of the Lysis-Menexenus dyad,387 my primary focus is not on Plato’s
characters “themselves” but rather on his readers. My principal claim is that
what he writes about them is written exclusively for us.388 There is no doubt
that Plato invites us to regard Menexenus as the eristic and Lysis as the
more philosophical; the opposed assessment can only emerge from a prior
awareness that Plato likes to play literary tricks on us—just as he tests us
with deliberate ambiguities and fallacies—and that all is not as it seems. It is
therefore unnecessary to establish my interpretation as the unequivocal truth
about Lysis’ character, as if that were a matter of independent importance.
The only important point is that Plato has provided sufficient countervailing
indications to make such a revision possible, and thus providing evidence that
he is deliberately offering us yet another kind of puzzle in his Lysis. In short,
the possibility of a new perspective on Plato’s Lysis indicates that it is not
only in the dialogue’s written arguments, but also in the Argument of the
Action that we find Plato using deliberate ambiguity. The crucial text follows
Lysis’ blush, but I will begin with it for context:

‘Is it perhaps, Menexenus,’ I said, ‘that we weren’t inquiring in the right way
at all [see below for a more accurate translation]?’ ‘I think so, Socrates,’ said
Lysis, and blushed as he said it; for it seemed to me that the words escaped

387
 Especially in contrast to Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 63.
388
 See Rider, “A Socratic Seduction,” 60: “it is important to remember that, ultimately, the dia-
logue’s puzzles are meant not for Lysis (who may or may not be able to comprehend them), but
for Plato’s readers.” This statement is all the more impressive in the light of 41 (“Socrates wants”),
58 (“how good a start”), and 58n34: “it is worth asking, from a pedagogical point of view, why
does Socrates think it appropriate to ‘bamboozle’ Lysis at all? How does it help Lysis to become
better?” For other valuable aspects of this article, see 44 (“So what kind of boy is Lysis?”), the
attention to μεταξύ on 57, the criticism of Penner and Rowe on the valorization of Lysis (see
previous note) on 64n42, and above all the footnote (60–61n39) linking Ly. to Euthd; after citing
Sprague, he writes: “Despite the differences, however, the tone and purpose of the arguments are
strikingly similar. In both cases, the questioner asks rapid-fire questions, hardly allowing time to
think, thereby forcing the answerer into an embarrassing conclusion.”
98 Chapter 1

without his wanting them to, because of the intensity with which he was paying
attention to what was being said, and it was clear that it was the same, too, all
the while he was listening. So, because I wished to give Menexenus a breather,
and also felt delight at the other’s [ἐκείνου] love for wisdom, I changed things
round, turning the discussion in Lysis’ direction [πρὸς τὸν Λύσιν]. I said: ‘Lysis,
what you’re saying seems true to me, that if we were investigating in the right
way, we’d never be lost in the way we are now. But let’s not go along this way
any longer—for the investigation appears to me one of a difficult sort, like a
difficult road [χαλεπή τις ὁδὸς]—but where we made the turning, that’s where
it seems to me we should go, {sc. this time?} investigating the things the poets
tell us; for these we regard as being as it were fathers of wisdom, and leaders
{sc. in that respect}.’389

It should not be too difficult to see how the changing of the guard
becomes ambiguous once a revisionist assessment comes into play:
Menexenus has been doing something difficult and therefore needs a rest;
moreover, once he takes over from Lysis at 216a3, the latter’s only inde-
pendent contribution to the conversation will be his silence at the end.
As for Lysis, Socrates suggests an easier pathway forward, through the
poets; the reference to their paternal authority links what is to come with
the phase of the dialogue that climaxes with Socrates’ preposterous claim
that the boy’s own father does not love him. In addition to the disparaging
remarks about following the poets he has already offered us in Protago-
ras (Prt. 347b8–348a9), and the general prejudice against what is easier
(χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά) that he emphasizes at the end of Hippias Major, Plato is
also preparing us for the Longer Way in his Republic; in any case, there is
considerable circumstantial evidence that it is Menexenus, not Lysis, that
this transition actually valorizes.
In fact, the only countervailing evidence depends on construing ἐκείνου as
Lysis at 213d7, and this is the natural thing to do: ἐκείνου refers to the more
remote figure in the discourse, and since Menexenus has just been named, it
is unlikely to be him if there is someone else mentioned earlier in play, that
is, Lysis is “the former” and Menexenus “the latter.” Unlikely it may well be,
but is it impossible? Consider an unambiguous restatement of the relevant
passage, exchanging—with the relevant case changes—ἐκείνου with πρὸς
τὸν Λύσιν:

So, because I wished to give Menexenus a breather, and also felt delight at
Lysis’ [τοῦ Λύσιδος] love for wisdom, I changed things round, turning the dis-
cussion in the other’s direction [πρὸς ἐκείνον].390

389
 Ly. 213d1–214a2 (Penner and Rowe).
390
 Ly. 213d6–e1.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 99

While it is not unlikely that a nineteenth century German editor would have
proposed emending “the text” (as revised here) on the grounds that it would
have been irregular for Plato to have written ἐκείνον when the context makes
it plain that he must have been referring to the nearer Lysis, my guess is that
the scholarly consensus would have been to leave it be, construing ἐκείνον
as Lysis—that is, “turning the discussion in that person’s direction”—despite
the fact that Menexenus would now be the more remote figure.
As for the actual text—“because I wished to give Menexenus a breather,
and also felt delight at that person’s love for wisdom” (Ly. 213d6–7)—what
Socrates says must remain ambiguous until he says: “Lysis, what you’re
saying seems true to me, that if we were investigating in the right way, we’d
never be lost in the way we are now” (Ly. 213e1–3). What is more, this is
a very generous paraphrase of Lysis’s involuntary ejaculation, especially
since the meaning of his actual response is not entirely clear: “Surely it
cannot be [ἆρα μή] that we were conducting this investigation the totally
wrong way?”391 “It does not seem so to me,” is all the boy actually says, after
which Socrates adds: “and at the same time as having said it, he blushed”
(Ly. 213d1–3). As a result, ambiguity in Lysis is not confined to the argu-
ments but rather extends to the dialogue’s dramatic circumstances as well.
When Socrates asks which of the two boys is more beautiful, they both
laugh (Ly. 207c5–6). Why? Menexenus, to whom alone Socrates addresses
his opening question, has already confirmed for the two of them that they dis-
pute which of them is older (Ly. 207b8–c2), and that they quarrel as to which
is nobler (Ly. 207c3–4). The question of good looks is the first that receives
a joint answer, although a non-verbal one, and it’s the first thing the friends
do together. But do they do it for the same reason? Plato gives us no reason
to think the two are equally good looking: Socrates has already told us that
Lysis was plainly conspicuous in this regard (Ly. 206e9–207a3) and for all
we know, Menexenus may have been notoriously ugly.392 Like his blush and
his silence, Lysis’ laughter here could mean several things, and only one of
them is: “Yes, Socrates, silly boys that we are, we compete about that too.”
It is also possible that he laughs because he knows that he is better looking
and so does his friend, and thus that any competition between them on that
score would be laughable. Whichever it is, after jointly confirming, verbally
this time, that they are friends (Ly. 207c8–9)—and thus have all things in
common (Ly. 207c10–12)393—Plato gives us a taste of his magic:

391
 For ἆρα μή (cf. Latin num) see Herbert Weir Smyth, Greek Grammar, revised by Gordon M.
Messing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 598 (§2651). I am grateful to Ruth
Scodel for expert help in translating this sentence.
392
 As suggested by Bolotin, Plato’s Dialogue on Friendship, 81.
393
 Cf. Gonzalez, “How to Read,” 20–21.
100 Chapter 1

‘I was setting about asking them, after that, which of the two of them was juster
and wiser [δικαιότερος καὶ σοφώτερος]. Then, as I was in the middle [μεταξύ]
of doing this, someone [τις] came up and got Menexenus [ὁ Μενέξενος] to
go off with him, because—he said—the trainer was calling for him; I got the
impression he was in the middle of sacrificing. So that one [ἐκεῖνος] went off;’394

Here we can all agree that Menexenus is ἐκεῖνος, but why must we do
so? Without context, and solely on the grammatical basis of the more distant
reference,395 it could be only the unnamed τις who went off, not the just-named
Menexenus. Of course if Menexenus refused to go after being summoned, espe-
cially for such a solemn purpose, that would say something about his character.
But then again, does it not say something about both of their characters that the
trainer is calling for Menexenus and not for Lysis? Plato ensures that Socrates
can get no answer to the question that he doesn’t even get the chance to put
to the boys but it is not clear that we are in the same boat. By depicting the
arrival of the unnamed τις at exactly this moment, Plato gives us the chance to
discover his own answer to the question his Socrates doesn’t actually ask: in the
opinion of the trainer who has selected him for the privilege of completing the
sacrifice, Menexenus is both δικαιότερος and σοφώτερος than his better looking
friend and contemporary. The best evidence that Plato shares the trainer’s view
is that it explains what is otherwise inexplicable: why he wrote this passage
precisely as he did. We should not allow our own indifference to Greek reli-
gious practice to disfigure Plato’s artistry, and between the trainer’s choice and
Socrates’ ἐκεῖνος (Ly. 207d4), he has given us two more reasons based on the
Argument of the Action for doubting that it is the philosophy of Lysis (ἐκείνου
ἡ φιλοσοφία at Ly. 213d7) that best explains his laughter, his blush, his silence,
and the reluctant nod that reunites him with Menexenus at the end:

‘Very well. What naturally belongs to us [τὸ φύσει οἰκεῖον], then—it’s become
evident to us that it’s necessary for us to love it [φιλεῖν].’ ‘It seems so,’ he said.
‘It’s necessary, in that case, for the genuine lover [ἐραστής], one who’s not
pretended, to be loved [φιλεῖσθαι] by his darling [παιδικά].’At that Lysis and
Menexenus barely somehow nodded assent, but there was no mistaking Hip-
pothales’ pleasure, which made him go all sorts of colors.396

Thanks to the use of φιλεῖν in the first statement, Menexenus still assumes
the subject is his friendship with Lysis; the latter refuses to confirm Socrrates’
statement for the same reason he was silent a moment before. As the ἐραστής,

394
 Ly. 207d1–4. In emphasizing that the religious rites in question are in celebration of Hermes (Ly.
206d1 and 223b1–2), Gonzalez, “How to Read,” 36–43, suggests another connection between
Ly. and Smp., which is set around the time the Herms were desecrated (Thucydides, 6.27–28.1).
395
 See Smyth, Greek Grammar, 309 (§1257 and §1261).
396
 Ly. 222a4–b2 (Penner and Rowe).
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 101

Hippothales is overjoyed: after all, he wants Socrates to teach him how to

become dear to his παιδικά (προσφιλής at Ly. 206b9–c3) and here Socrates
is apparently advancing his cause. Menexenus, by contrast, is finally brought
up short by the second statement, disabused of any innocent construction by
this direct talk about what a παιδικά owes to his ἐραστής. Finally, as wary
ἐρώμενος to a despised ἐραστής, the reluctance of Lysis to nod is perfectly
understandable, but the nod itself is a mystery. Perhaps he nods because he
sees that Menexenus is struggling at last, and thus sees a way to end his own
isolation, perhaps he simply defers to the authority of Socrates, perhaps he
will end up becoming Hippothales’ παιδικά after all; that’s clearly what the
ἐραστής makes of his nod. One thing is certain: we will never hear of either
Hippothales or Lysis again, while Menexenus will join his cousin in Socrates’
jail cell (Phd. 59b9). As for the serious purpose behind this trivial mystery,
it is best understood in relation to the place of Lysis in the ROPD, snugly fit
between Symposium and Euthydemus.
One can read through a considerable body of Socratist literature without
ever coming across the obvious observation that the relationship between
Cleinias and Ctesippus in Euthydemus is parallel to the one between Lysis
and Hippothales in Lysis. And despite the practically exclusive emphasis
of the Socratists on the First Protreptic—an overemphasis reminiscent of
Tübingen’s ad nauseam reliance on the Schriftkritik in Phaedrus397—there is
one passage in it that I’ve never seen quoted, and that’s particularly remark-
able because it is sandwiched between the clearest statement of TEA in the
dialogue—often cited because it is completely and uniquely uninfected by the
equivocal εὖ πράττειν—and the discussion of the teachability of wisdom that
establishes the connection between what Vlastos called its “doublet” in Meno
and the First Protreptic (see §5). Here then is what I will call “the Vanishing
Passage” that links Euthydemus to the mystery of Lysis’ reluctant nod, a pas-
sage E. H. Gifford saw fit to translate in his 1905 commentary:

‘And when a man thinks that this [sc. σοφία] is what he ought to receive much
rather than money from his father, and from his guardians and friends, especially
those who profess to love him [sc. οἱ ἐρασταί], whether strangers or citizens, and
entreats and beseeches them to impart wisdom,—for this purpose, Cleinias, there
is no cause for shame [οὐδὲν αἰσχρόν] or blame in serving or slaving [ὑπηρετεῖν
καὶ δουλεύειν] either for a lover [ἐραστής] or for any man, and being willing to
perform any honorable service from the desire to become wise.’398

397
 Cf. Thomas Alexander Szlezák, “Sokrates’ Spott über Geheimhaltung: Zum Bild des φιλόσοφος
in Platons Euthydemos.” Antike und Abendland 26, no. 1 (1980), 75–89, especially 81n10, and
his “Die Handlung der Dialoge Charmides und Euthydemos” in T. M. Robinson and Luc Bris-
son (eds.), Plato: Euthydemus, Lysis, Charmides. Proceedings of the V Symposium Platonicum:
Selected Papers, 337–348 (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2000), on 339–342. He uses the same ploy
in interpreting Chrm., see 344–345, especially 345n14, a masterpiece of special pleading.
398
 Euthd. 282a7–b6 (Gifford).
102 Chapter 1

Gifford also notes that in his 1784 commentary on Euthydemus and

Gorgias,399 Martin Joseph Routh had already cited the speech of Pausanias in
Symposium as parallel.400
Sorting out where Plato can be found in all of this will take some doing, but
the fact that Socrates in the First Protreptic of Euthydemus echoes Pausanias
in Symposium on the necessity of sexually gratifying a worthy ἐραστής does
not prove that Plato agrees with either of them. Indeed the reluctance of the
two boys in Lysis to acknowledge such an obligation suggests that we have
here encountered a genuine problem, or rather a problem that Plato knows
that his students will find interesting and therefore potentially instructive.
What these connections prove is that Plato uses the perennial problem of
teenage sexuality—“should I have sex with my lover?”—to connect Sym-
posium with the two dialogues that follow it in the ROPD. But lest we miss
the forest for the trees, the crucial point is that in this eminently practical
dimension of ἔρως, we discover another reason to place supposedly “earlier”
dialogues like Lysis and Euthydemus after Symposium.401
Unlike Lysis and Menexenus, who chafe at a much milder claim in Lysis,
Cleinias has no compunction about affirming the point Socrates makes in the
Vanishing Passage, which is followed directly with this:

‘Or does it not seem to you [sc. Cleinias],’ I [sc. Socrates] said, ‘to be so
[οὕτως]?’ ‘Very much so [πάνυ μὲν οὖν], you seem to be speaking well to me
[εὖ μοι δοκεῖς λέγειν],’ was his reply. ‘If indeed it is the case [εἰ ἔστι γε], dear
Cleinias,’ said I, ‘that wisdom is teachable [ἡ σοφία διδακτόν].’402

Socrates makes the overly prompt acquiescence of Cleinias contingent on the

logically prior proposition that ἡ σοφία—and I take that to mean the kind of
success-guaranteeing wisdom Socrates has been praising as the true object of
philosophy in the First Protreptic—is teachable, something that it can only
be, of course, if it exists.

399
 Gifford, Euthydemus of Plato, 26 (on 282a7).
400
 Martinus Josephus Routh (ed.), Platonis Euthydemus et Gorgias; recensuit, vertit, notasque
suas adjecit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1784), 324 (on 29, line 11 [i.e., Euthd. 282b3): “Apud
Athenienses, teste Platone in Convivio, lege permittebatur, ut quolibet honesto officio amicus et
adamatus, fine optimo proposito, alter alterius animum sibi conciliaret.” After mentioning Smp.
182a1–3, he quotes Smp. 184c4–7, here in Fowler’s translation: “‘It is our settled tradition that
when a man freely devotes his service to another in the belief that his friend will make him better
in point of wisdom, it may be, or in any of the other parts of virtue, this willing bondage also is no
sort of baseness [οὐκ αἰσχρά; cf. οὐδὲν αἰσχρόν in the Vanishing Passage] or flattery.’”
401
 Cf. Bury, Symposium of Plato (1909), on 196c[4–8] in the speech of Agathon, the boyfriend of
Pausanias (78): “The argument is vitiated both by the ambiguity in the use of Eros (as affection
and as person) and by the ambiguity in κρατεῖ ἡδονῶν, which in the minor premise is equivalent
to ἐστὶν ἡ κρατίστη ἤδονή. For similar fallacies, see Euthyd. 276dff.” “Being overcome by plea-
sures” likewise unites Prt. 352d4–353a6 to Clt. 407d6.
402
 Euthd. 282b6–c2.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 103

In context, then, in is clear why the Vanishing Passage must vanish: since
everyone desires happiness (Euthd. 282a1–2), and since happiness depends on
using things and using them correctly (Euthd. 282a2–4), and that it is knowl-
edge (ἐπιστήμη) that provides this correctness and εὐτυχία (Euthd. 282a4–5),
it is necessary for every man to provision himself with it by any means (ἐκ
παντὸς τρόπου) so as to become most wise (Euthd. 282a5–6). And since the
Vanishing Passage begins here, that includes the necessity of regarding noth-
ing as shameful (αἰσχρόν) in the pursuit of σοφία (Euthd. 282b3), even if that
means serving and becoming a slave to an ἐραστής (Euthd. 282b4–5), and
moreover to the kind of ἐραστής Pausanias takes himself to be in Symposium
(cf. Prt. 315d7–e3).
Although we can persuade ourselves to take some comfort from the
claim that the wisdom-seeking ἐρώμενος will (only) be wishing to serve
his ἐραστής in whatever services are beautiful (Euthd. 282b5–6), the ham-
mered emphasis on ὑπηρετεῖν (Euthd. 282b4–6) necessarily drives us back
to the speech of Pausanias (Smp. 184d5), where such comfort is unmasked
as chimerical: it is no shame for a boy to be deceived by a bad ἐραστής who
promised to make him virtuous (Smp. 184b6–c7). And Plato ensures that we
will immediately recognize that Cleinias is the kind of unwary youth who
could easily be deceived by the bad ἐραστής Pausanias describes—in order
to valorize himself, it should be added403—by the fact that he has no doubts
whatsoever that σοφία in this form can be taught (Euthd. 282c4–5). Socrates
expresses delight with the boy (Euthd. 282c5–7; cf. Hp. Ma. 303c8–d1) for
having spared him the task of determining “whether teachable or not teach-
able this wisdom may be” (Euthd. 282c7–8). This feigned delight extends the
use of deliberate deception—or rather the need for Plato’s students to acquire
the means to detect it—to the Play of Character.
In §3, I claimed that Plato prepares us in Protagoras and Alcibiades Major
to recognize Socrates’ use of fallacy in the First Protreptic, starting with the
Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy. By combining this advance preparation with Socrates’
use of the equivocal φίλος throughout Lysis, the dialogue we have just read,
and the eristic tricks already used by the brothers in the one we are presently
reading, it becomes plausible that Plato does not want us to read the First
Protreptic as the Socratists do, but rather he intends us to read it cautiously,
just as if we had already been warned.404 In this section, I am making a

403
 As is the case with Meno the Thessalian (see §14), it is a mistake to think that Plato is more sym-
pathetic to Pausanias than Xenophon; cf. Rowe, Plato, Symposium, 134 (on Smp. 176a4).
404
 Cf. Euthd. 278d5–e3 (Lamb): “If I strike you as treating it in a crude and ridiculous manner, do
not laugh me to scorn; for in my eagerness to listen to your wisdom I shall venture to improvise
in your presence. So both you and your disciples must restrain yourselves and listen without
laughing; and you, son of Axiochus, answer me this: Do all we human beings wish to prosper
[εὖ πράττειν]?’” Cf. Ly. 219b5–6 (epigraph).
104 Chapter 1

parallel claim: beginning with Protagoras and Alcibiades Major, reaching

an ostentatious climax in Symposium,405 and then reappearing more subtly in
the dialogues that follow it,406 Plato has exploited our interest in the sexual
dimension of the ἐραστής-παιδικά relationship, whetted that interest and
refined it, and this advance preparation, combining the speeches of Pausanias
and Alcibiades in Symposium with the reluctant nods of the boys at the end
of Lysis, indicates that we should read the Vanishing Passage at the end of
the First Protreptic as critically as we have already been prepared to read its
beginning.
Plato joins Protagoras and Symposium as the first and last acts of a self-
contained drama, revolving around any reader’s—and especially every ado-
lescent reader’s—natural curiosity about whether Socrates is having, has had,
or will have sex with Alcibiades. The opening tableaux of Protagoras casts
Socrates as the typical ἐραστής and Alcibiades as his chosen παιδικά (Prt.
309a1–b5), and the conversations between them that follow in the Alcibiades
dyad—the first suggesting that the young man might well be better off as a
slave (Alc. 135c10–d1; cf. Alc2. 150e6)—create an unmistakable dramatic
tension that is only relieved by Alcibiades’ drunken tale in Symposium: from
the best-qualified source, we learn that Socrates, the self-proclaimed expert in
τὰ ἐρωτικά, had no more interest in having sex with the most beautiful young
man Athens would ever produce than would “his father or elder brother”
(Smp. 219d1–2).
It is the revelation that what we still call “Platonic love” is and indeed
must be asexual that explains the silence with which Lysis, on the verge
of potentially becoming the παιδικά of Hippothales, responds to Socrates’
suggestion that the ἐραστής who loves him must be naturally akin to him
(Ly. 221e7–222a3), as well as the reluctant nods with which both boys greet
the proposition that the (genuine and not feigned) ἐραστής must be loved
(φιλεῖσθαι) by his παιδικά (Ly. 222a6–b1). My claim is that the synonymy of
desire, sexual passion, and love (ἐπιθυμεῖν, ἐρᾶν, and φιλεῖν at Ly. 222a1) is
deliberately deceptive:

“‘The two of you, in that case, if you’re friends to each other, in some way
naturally belong {are phusei oikeioi} the one to the other.’ ‘No doubt about it,’
they said together. ‘And if, then, any one person [τις] desires any other,’ I said,
‘you boys, or feels passion [ἐρᾶν] for him, he wouldn’t ever desire [ἐπιθυμεῖν],
or feel passion [ἐρᾶν], or love [φιλεῖν], if he didn’t actually in some way belong

405
 See Elizabeth S. Belfiore, Socrates’ Daimonic Art: Love for Wisdom in Four Platonic Dialogues
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012); two of the dialogues in question are Alc.
and Smp.
406
 See Jill Gordon, Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2012).
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 105

{were not oikeios} to the one he is feeling passion for [ὁ ἐρώμενος], either in
relation to the soul or in relation to some characteristic of the soul, or ways or
form [εἶδος].’ ‘Absolutely so,’ said Menexenus; but Lysis said nothing.”407

It is the synonymy of ἐρᾶν and φιλεῖν that splits the boys; Menexenus agrees
because he knows that even if not with respect to εἶδος, Lysis and he are
φύσει οἰκεῖοι; he assumes until 222a6–7 (quoted above) that the conversation
is about them.
As for Lysis, although the cause of his earlier silence must remain mys-
terious, the sequel indicates that since he knows himself to be the object of
Hippothales’ passion as ὁ ἐρώμενος, he is quicker to grasp that an unwel-
come obligation is being laid on him. It is thanks to the Argument of the
Action, then, that first Lysis—who has a very personal reason to be suspi-
cious—and then Menexenus come to see that behind the verb φιλεῖσθαι is an
alleged obligation “to gratify” an ἐραστής (χαρίζεσθαι at Smp. 182a3, 184b6,
and 184d2–5; cf. Phdr. 265a2–3), and that means to have sex with him.408
By causing Socrates to restate this obligation—already transcended thanks to
Alcibiades in Symposium and instantiated in Lysis’ silence in Lysis—in the
Vanishing Passage of Euthydemus, Plato’s purpose is to unmask the enco-
mium of wisdom as εὐτυχία in the First Protreptic as a reductio ad cinaedum
(cf. Grg. 494e4).
Now this is a strong claim, and clearly not a very attractive one: it appears
to cast Socrates in an unpleasant light. To reiterate the main point of this sec-
tion first: the Play of Character in Plato’s dialogues is merely a means to the
end of the reader’s education, and in Lysis-Euthydemus, Plato is training us in
a highly systematic manner to recognize the use of false speaking (ψεύδεσθαι
at Hp. Mi. 367a2–5), equivocation (Euthd. 277e3–278a7), and deliberate
deception (ἀπάτη at Phdr. 261e5). To be more specific, if we think it’s only
the ridiculous brothers using these tricks, we haven’t learned very much.
In that context, my ongoing claim is that the First Protreptic is not intended
to express the views of either Plato or his Socrates. But it may well be
intended to express what those views would need to be for those who prefer
the Eudaemonist Shortcut to the final ascent to the Beautiful in Symposium.
In the context of Platonic love, the fact that Socrates in Euthydemus is recom-
mending becoming the sexual boy-toy of anyone who professes to be able to
make us become wise proves nothing about what the character Socrates or
the author Plato actually thinks. The fact that both the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy
and the Vanishing Passage are aspects of the First Protreptic that Socratists
prefer not to discuss proves that they have found in it something that it is not.

407
 Ly. 221e5–222a4 (Penner and Rowe).
408
 See Guardians in Action, §9.
106 Chapter 1

But the main point of this chapter as a whole is more important and
indeed dispositive: Plato intends us to read Lysis and Euthydemus only
after reading Symposium. Since we already know that Socrates refused to
make the adorable Alcibiades his sexual boy-toy when offered the oppor-
tunity, nay when well-nigh begged to do so (Smp. 219b3–c2), we can find
in Euthydemus itself an alternative explanation for the penultimate section
of the First Protreptic, especially since, as Routh realized, its language
recalls—and was intended to recall—the speech of Pausanias. In addi-
tion, then, to Pausanias’ deceptive defense of the ἐραστής,409 and Socrates’
refusal to make Alcibiades his παιδικά, Symposium alone offers us at least
three more good reasons to regard the First Protreptic with suspicion: (1) its
relationship to and dependence on the Eudaemonist Shortcut, (2) its failure
to represent philosophy as the μεταξύ between ignorance and wisdom and
indeed its dependence on an antithetical conception of it based on σοφία as
the only good, and (3) its failure to mention virtue. Even Pausanias defends
service to the ἐραστής, no matter how deceptive, solely for the sake of
ἀρετή throughout his speech.
Like every other speaker in Symposium with the exception of Aristophanes,
Pausanias appears in Protagoras, and the passage in which he is mentioned
shows that Plato has been preparing us from the start for the Argument of the
Action that joins Lysis to Euthydemus and both of them to Symposium:

and seated next to him [sc. Prodicus] on the nearby couches were both Pausa-
nias, he from Cerameis, and with Pausanias a young thing still adolescent [νέον
τι ἔτι μειράκιον], so as to be, I would say, ‘both beautiful and good’ in physique
[καλόν τε κἀγαθὸν τὴν φύσιν] but clearly very beautiful in appearance [τὴν δ’
ἰδέαν πάνυ καλός]. I seemed to have heard that his name was Agathon, and
I would not be surprised [οὐκ ἂν θαυμάζοιμι] if he happens to be Pausanias’
boyfriend [παιδικά].410

Apart from Socrates’ diffidence about young Agathon’s quality,411 the most
surprising thing in this passage is Socrates’ diffidence about his own ability
to determine the erotic connection between Pausanias and Agathon. This

409
 Cf. Denyer (ed.), Plato, Protagoras, 84 (on 315d7): “a brilliant speech in defense of sexual double
standards.”
410
 Prt. 315d6–e3.
411
 Cf. Denyer, Plato, Protagoras, 84 (on 315e1 τὴν δ’ ἰδέαν πάνυ καλός): “certainly handsome
whether good or not.” We clearly are expected to have this passage in mind when Socrates says of
Lysis (Ly. 206e9–207a3; Lamb): “Among these was Lysis: he stood among the boys and youths
with a garland on his head, a distinguished figure, deserving not merely the name of well-favored
[τὸ καλός], but also of well-made and well-bred [καλός τε κἀγαθός].” Since Socrates has not yet
spoken to him, the parallel with Prt. 315d9–e1, filtered through Agathon’s reappearance in Smp.,
makes us wonder what καλός τε κἀγαθός means here, and Plato keeps us wondering: cf. Euthd.
271b4–5 (Crito on Cleinias) and Euthd. 273a8 (Socrates on Ctesippus).
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 107

becomes less surprising, however, in the context of the ROPD: it is in Sym-

posium that Plato allows Socrates to tell us for the first time that he is an
expert in τὰ ἐρωτικά (Smp. 177d7–e3), and it is only in Lysis, its sequel, that
he allows him to embellish the fact as follows:

And I said: ‘Ah, Hippothales, son of Hieronymus, this you no longer must say,
whether you love [ἐρᾶν] or not. For I know not only that you love [ἐρᾶν] but
also that you are already far advanced already in love [ὁ ἔρως]; for I myself,
though nondescript and useless [ἄχρηστος] in the other things, this has some-
how [πως] been given to me by a god: to be able to recognize speedily [ταχὺ
γνῶναι] both a lover and his beloved [ἐρῶν τε καὶ ἐρώμενος].’ And having heard
this, he blushed still much more.412

Since so much of Lysis turns on the active/passive equivocation intrinsic to

φίλος, it is revealing that Socrates explains his god-given ability in terms of
an ability to recognize not only the active ἐρῶν but also the passive ἐρώμενος.
And for those of us who love Socrates for saying this, it is a delight to realize
that Plato has given us the chance to prove that Socrates was wrong to argue
that we cannot love what is ἄχρηστος for that is also what the hapless Hip-
pothales is presently doing. Penner and Rowe, who must show that the argu-
ment with Lysis about parental love (Ly. 210c5–d2) represents Socrates’ own
serious views413—hence the need to valorize him at the expense of Menex-
enus414—must therefore find reasons for not taking seriously his attribution of
his gift to a god.415 Consistent with an approach to Diotima’s discourse that
takes the Eudaemonist Shortcut as the highest rung of her ladder (see §1),
their reading of Lysis ends up conferring upon themselves the same ability to
identify a lover that Socrates claims to have been granted “somehow [πως]”
(i.e., by divine dispensation) with no need for a god, thanks to their knowl-
edge of what all men love.

412
 Ly. 204b5–c3.
413
 Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 31: “If, then, we’re to be loved, understood as being allowed
to do what we want, by anyone, we must acquire knowledge. So the same will hold for Lysis in
relation to his parents: until he becomes wise, they won’t love him [cf. 33n51: ‘they don’t love the
child’s present state of unwisdom’ and 33: ‘loving someone is wanting them to be wise, because
benefit, happiness, depends on it’]—at least on this understanding of love.”
414
 Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 272: “He [sc. the silent Lysis] has an inkling, in a way that
Menexenus does not, that what is good has to do with knowledge; and as for knowledge, he must
be prepared to seek it wherever he can find it—including from the genuine lover (rather than just
from his friend Menexenus).” This conclusion confirms the importance of the Vanishing Passage
in the First Protreptic.
415
 Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 4–5n7 deserves careful study. With their deflationary approach
stated (“all that Socrates will be doing here”), the passage is then used to cast similar doubt on
what Socrates says at 216d3–5, another allusion to Diotima in Smp. (see §1). Finally, with the god-
based references to Dio-tima in Ly. having been purged, the meaning of the dialogue is equated
with the problematic consequence (cf. Smp. 205a5–b4) of the Eudaemonist Shortcut.
108 Chapter 1

Instead, Socrates’ increased certainty about who loves and who is loved
makes good sense if Symposium follows Protagoras in the ROPD just as
Lysis follows Symposium, especially since it would be natural to think that
the thought-process described in the Diotima discourse must have had some-
thing to do with the gift he claims to have received. And since Euthydemus
depicts another ἐρῶν/ἐρώμενος pair in Ctesippus and Cleinias, it must gradu-
ally become obvious that Plato has connected these dialogues around the
theme of ἔρως for a reason. But the most interesting connection between the
Protagoras passage and the one just quoted from Lysis is so obvious that it
is almost difficult to spot: both dialogues are narrated by Socrates himself,416
and in both passages we learn things about lovers that we could not possibly
learn if they were not so narrated.
As a result, the moment that Anne-Marie Schultz’s concern with Plato’s
Socrates as Narrator is raised in the context of ἔρως, it becomes obvious
that the Argument of the Action in all of the pre-Republic dialogues narrated
by Socrates has a markedly erotic dimension: Protagoras, Erastai, Lysis,
Euthydemus, and Charmides. It is with the latter dialogue that I would answer
the argument just mentioned that Penner and Rowe use to cast doubt on the
seriousness of Socrates’ claim that his gift of discerning lovers is god-given.
Although it may be obvious who is the ἐρῶν and who the ἐρώμενος in Lysis
and Euthydemus, the same is not true of Charmides. One thing is certain: if
I can make a plausible case for recognizing Critias and Charmides as a pair
of (secret and highly dysfunctional) lovers (Chrm. 162b10–d6 will be con-
sidered below), it will only be because of the editorial observations that Plato
allows Socrates to make while narrating the dialogue. A more tantalizing
possibility is that if this case can be made, then Plato will have found a way
to pass along Socrates’ gift to his readers.
But first the obvious point needs emphasis: the blushes of Hippocrates (Prt.
312a2), of the musical ἐραστής (Am. 134b4), of Hippothales (Ly. 204b5 and
204c3), of Lysis (Ly. 213d3), of Cleinias (Euthd. 275d6), of Dionysodorus
(Euthyd. 297a8), of Charmides (Chrm. 158c5), and of Thrasymachus (R.
350d3) are only visible to us as a result of Plato’s narrative strategy.417 While
as many of these blushes arise from the shame of being refuted or exposed
(as in the cases of Hippocrates, Dionysodorus, and Thrasymachus) as occur
in an overtly erotic context (in Erastai and Lysis), the remaining third—those
of Lysis, Cleinias, and Charmides—are produced by beautiful young men,
and thus occur in implicitly erotic contexts. Consider Socrates’ comment

416
 Properly emphasized in Schultz, Plato’s Socrates as Narrator; with chapter 2 (on Ly.), cf. chapter
5 (“Evaluating Eristic in the Euthydemus”). Her chapter 3 is devoted to Chrm.
417
 Cf. Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 74–76.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 109

on Charmides’ blush: “‘Having reddened up at this, Charmides first of all

[πρῶτον] seemed even more beautiful—for even [καί] his modesty [τὸ αἰσ
χυντηλός] became his years—and following that [ἔπειτα], he answered in a
scarcely lowbred manner.”418 Only the narration of Socrates allows Plato to
privilege (by means of πρῶτον and ἔπειτα) the youth’s beauty over his words,
while it is the prior and fulsome praise of his physique (Chrm. 154b10–d6)—
climaxing with Socrates’ own reaction to it (Chrm. 155c7–e3) but initiated
by Critias (Chrm. 154a3–6)—that explains the καί.419
And it is through the magic of Socratic narration that Plato finds a way to
tell us indirectly that Critias, who has unique access to the youngster as his
cousin and guardian (ἐπιτρόπος at Chrm. 155a6)420—and thus with unques-
tionable authority to ward off mature rivals (Chrm. 155a4–7)—is in love with
Charmides at the same time that he tells us that Socrates isn’t:

‘Now I [μέν], my good friend, am no measurer: I am a mere ‘white line’ in

measuring beautiful people [οἱ καλοί], for almost everyone [σχεδὸν πάντες] who
has just grown up appears beautiful to me—and yet, for all that, even then that
boy [ἐκεῖνος] appeared to me a marvel of both stature and beauty—but everyone
else [οἱ δὲ δὴ ἄλλοι πάντες] seemed to me to be in love [ἐρᾶν] with him, such
was their astonishment and confusion when he came in, and many other lovers
[πολλοὶ ἄλλοι ἐρασταί] were following in his train.’421

While Critias has no trouble distinguishing his cousin Charmides among οἱ

καλοί (Chrm. 154a3), Socrates—who has climbed Diotima’s ladder beyond
both οἱ καλοί and τὰ καλά to τὸ καλόν—regards (almost) all youngsters as
beautiful, and this first πάντες allows Plato to set him apart from all the oth-
ers; in the second part of the μέν/δέ construction, Socrates makes it clear that
it is not just the πολλοὶ ἄλλοι ἐρασταί who are actually following the boy
around, but also (almost) all the others—a second πάντες that excludes him,
but includes Critias—to whom the verb ἐρᾶν applies.

418
 Chrm. 158c5–7.
419
 When asked by Socrates “if any among the these [sc. the youth] distinguish themselves by wis-
dom, beauty, or both” (Chrm. 153d4–5), Critias ignores two of the three possibilities, focusing
only on οἰ καλοί (Chrm. 154a3). Cf. James M. Redfield, “Socrates’ Thracian Incantation” in
Francesca Prescendi et Youri Volokhine (eds.), Dans le laboratoire de l’historien des religions:
mélanges offerts à Philippe Borgeaud, 358–374 (Genève: Labor et fides, 2011), on 360.
420
 Note that guardians (ἐπιτρόποι) are included in the Vanishing Passage (Euthd. 282b1). Since Cri-
tias is also Charmides’ cousin (ἀνεψιός here and at Chrm. 154b2), it is interesting that Ctesippus,
identified as the ἀνεψιός of Menexenus (Ly. 206d3–4), reappears in Euthd. as the lover of Cleinias,
thus allaying any (adolescent) suspicions about the intentions of this cousin that may have arisen
at Ly. 207b1–2 and 211c4–5. Given the suspicions that have arisen about Charmides’ morning
headaches at Chrm. 155b3–6—see Drew Hyland, The Virtue of Philosophy: An Interpretation of
Plato’s Charmides (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 41–42—it is interesting that Perdiccas
plies his ἀνεψιός Alexander with strong drink before killing him (Grg. 471b1–6).
421
 Chrm. 154b8–c5 (Lamb modified).
110 Chapter 1

While Socrates obviously possesses the self-control that allows him to

resist the temptation of Charmides’ beauty (Chrm. 155d3–e3), Plato’s nar-
rative technique is particularly effective in revealing not only the fact that
Critias lacks it,422 but also the complexity of the relationship between him and
his ward. Consider first only the dialogue’s spoken words, which are compat-
ible with an impersonal dispute, as when Socrates undertakes to defend the
poet Simonides against the charge of self-contradiction brought by Protagoras
(Prt. 339c7–d9):

Charmides: I do not know, by Zeus, not I, but all the same nothing prevents the
possibility that not even he who said it knew in the least what he meant. Critias:
Do you really suppose, Charmides, that if you do not know what can have been
the meaning of the man who said that temperance was doing one’s own business
[τὰ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν], that man did not know either?423

It is because of what we learn in between these two speeches that this passage
becomes the masterpiece of Plato’s Socratic narration: it is the moment of
truth in the midst of lies. But it is also more than that.
Socrates’ narration will allow us to recognize Critias’ desire to impress
Charmides, his outrage at having been betrayed by him,424 and the agony of
knowing that he can only make himself look competent by admitting he is
a liar. Unlike the previous behind-the-scenes dialogue between Critias and
Charmides that Socrates had up to now merely suspected had taken place, the
complex emotions in play during the silent dialogue that Plato makes audible
for us between these speeches confirm his suspicions and more. Supported
by the lush profusion of ὑπό-compounds in Soctates’ narration,425 my claim
is that this emotional complex is not fully intelligible without recognizing the
secretly sexual sub-text that connects the temporarily thwarted domination
of Critias to Charmides’ surly and self-assured subservience, both shining
darkly forth amidst an amazing mixture of intrigue, indirection, and insight:

And as he said this he gave a sly laugh [ὑπογελᾶν] and glanced sidelong
[ἀποβλέπειν] at Critias. Now Critias for some time had been plainly burning
with agony [ἀγωνιᾶν] to distinguish himself [φιλοτίμως ἔχειν] in the eyes of
both Charmides and the company, and having with difficulty restrained him-
self heretofore [μόγις δ᾽ ἑαυτὸν ἐν τῷ πρόσθεν κατέχων], at that moment was

422
 Cf. Thesleff, Studies in Platonic Chronology, 298.
423
 Chrm. 162b9–d6 in direct dialogue, i.e., with Socrates’ narration deleted. Cf. Schultz, Plato’s
Socrates as Narrator, 1 (on Tht.).
424
 Defended in John Beversluis, Cross-Examining Socrates: A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato’s
Early Dialogues (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 142.
425
 As noted by Martin McAvoy, “Carnal Knowledge in the Charmides.” Apeiron 29, no. 4 (Decem-
ber 1996), 63–103, 66n7.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 111

becoming unable to do so. For it seems to me now that what I had previously
suspected [ὑπολαμβάνειν] to be above all true: that Charmides had heard this
answer about temperance from Critias. And so Charmides, for his part [μέν],
not wishing himself to undertake an account of the answer, was stirring up
[ὑποκινεῖν] that one himself, and was showing that he had been refuted; but the
other [ὁ δέ] was not accepting it, but seemed to me to be angered with him, just
as a poet is with an actor [ὑποκριτής] who mishandles his poems [τὰ ἑαυτοῦ
ποιήματα]. As a result, having fixed his gaze upon [ἐμβλέπειν] him, he said426

From the Socrates whose unmentioned third glance was sharp enough to
perceive the understory that explained how the ἀποβλέπειν of Charmides
was met by the ἐμβλέπειν of Critias, we can learn more than the Socratists
who have restated his arguments in the propositional calculus have led us to
expect. As for Charmides, although the historical and political significance
of Critias and his cousin is certainly far more important than the nature
of their relationship (see §7), the fact that this passage confirms Socrates’
suspicion that Critias had lied and that Charmides was his ὑποκριτής may
well be all that is required for grasping that significance in personal terms.
But in the context of Lysis and Euthydemus, and of reading all three of these
ἔρως-infused and Socrates-narrated dialogues after Symposium—itself the
culmination of a sexual drama that begins with Protagoras (309a1–2)—it
is incumbent on the student of Reading Order to provide a philosophically
satisfying explanation for Plato’s obvious interest in Socrates’ expertise in
love affairs.
To begin with, there are at least seven pairs of lovers in the Platonic dia-
logues, and the most important of these by far are Socrates and Alcibiades:
it is with them that Plato teaches us that Platonic love is public, educational,
and asexual. Likewise tracing its pedigree back to Protagoras, and likewise
finding its culmination in Symposium, is the public, educational, but sexual
relationship between Pausanias and Agathon. Next comes the highly public
but probably futile love of Hippothales for Lysis; thanks to the Argument of
the Action, Socrates’ interest is here invested for the first time in the lover’s
education. I am going to claim that the same is true in Euthydemus, and that
the public, educational, and soon to be consummated relationship between
Ctesippus and Cleinias constitutes what is probably best understood as
Plato’s version of a happily mutual sexual relationship.
From this central highpoint, each of the three remaining relationships has
a clandestine element that makes them ripe for consideration and deconstruc-
tion by more suspicious, observant, and therefore more advanced students.
So secret, indeed, is the sexual relationship between Critias and Charmides

426
 Chrm. 162b10–d4. For the words spoken after and before, see above.
112 Chapter 1

that most everyone would or rather will deny its existence despite numerous
clues both inside the dialogue itself and in the context of its near neighbors in
the ROPD. As for the two imaginary lovers in Phaedrus, the one who argues
that the boy should sexually gratify the lover who doesn’t love—represented
by the speech of Lysias and the first speech of Socrates—and the other named
“Stesichorus” who argues the opposite (cf. Phdr. 265a2–3), the complex
secrecies involved in both have been considered elsewhere. This, then, is the
principal evidence of Plato’s ongoing interest in τὰ ἐρωτικά, an interest that
unites pre- and post-Republic dialogues.427
Any satisfactory explanation of that interest must begin with the fact that
Plato was a man teaching boys. Since it is difficult to know how innovative
the Academy really was, it is possible that its most easily recognizable social
precedent was the kind of relationship Plato describes through Pausanias
and Agathon; one might even be tempted to explain the asexual alternative
embodied (or rather ensouled) in Socrates and Alcibiades as a teacher’s act
of prudent self-defense. What seems a more obvious explanation is that
sex is a topic that adolescents find interesting, and that Plato the Teacher
exploits that interest to the fullest.428 Since scores of others have discussed
how Plato re-channels ἔρως for a pedagogical end, it is therefore this simpler
explanation that must be emphasized, explaining why Protagoras begins
as it does, why several ἔρως-infused dialogues follow the paradigmatically
erotic Symposium,429 why Polemarchus leads the revolt against Socrates at
the beginning of Republic 5,430 why Phaedrus is used to introduce the more
difficult dialogues that follow it,431 and even why Plato named his unyielding
proponent of pleasure “Phil-ebus,” the lover of ephebes.432 Faced with adoles-
cents whose memories of being the likes of Lysis and Cleinias remain fresh,
it was pedagogically productive to turn their attention to young men like
Hippothales and Ctesippus before preparing them to emulate Polemarchus
and Glaucon.
Although the Socratist reliance on the First Protreptic has deflected Anglo-
phone attention from it almost entirely, the interpretive crux in Euthydemus
is the significance of Socrates’ observation—after confessing that he is a

427
 Considering that Republic is the last Socrates-narrated dialogue, that Socrates goes down to the
Piraeus with Glaucon, and that the latter is identified as erotic (R. 474d1–475a4), there is some-
thing to be said for including it, but I will leave saying it to others.
428
 See Gilbert Ryle, Plato’s Progress (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 41–42.
429
 See Florian G. Stickler, Neudurchgang durch Platons Frühdialog Lysis: Von semantischen Syste-
men, Affektionen hin zur sokratischen Pädagogik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010),
101–119.
430
 See Plato the Teacher, §7.
431
 See Guardians in Action, 190.
432
 Cf. “Mr. Loveboy” in J. C. B. Gosling, Philebus; Plato. Translated with Notes and Commentary
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), x.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 113

lesser man than Hercules (Euthd. 297c1)—that if his Iolaus came to his aid,
he would probably do more harm than good (Euthd. 297d1–2).433 With the
obvious exception of the ostentatiously problematic Protagoras, it has been
pretty easy to distinguish the good guy from the bad in the Play of Characters
we have encountered in the dialogues culminating with Symposium: Socrates
is the hero, and both the impetuous Alcibiades and the polymathic Hippias
clearly have much to learn.
In the post-Symposium dialogues, Plato begins a more difficult process
slowly by forcing us to choose between Lysis and Menexenus but the
structure of the decision-making is set when we reject the obvious choice.
Although it will only come into its own when we meet Timaeus and the two
Strangers, the hermeneutic necessity of identifying bad guys will reach its
pre-Republic apogee in our assessment of the two generals in Laches, our atti-
tude toward the future tyrants in Charmides, and especially in our response
to Callicles. But it reaches its first significant crisis in Euthydemus, and Plato
distills this crisis into two opposite responses to the dialogue’s interpretive
crux: if Ctesippus is a bad guy for mastering eristics, then he is the Iolaus
who proves Socrates right; if he is a good guy for doing so, then he cannot
be Iolaus.434
In unraveling this puzzle in the Play of Character, a first giant step is
taken when we recognize that where eristic is concerned, Euthydemus
repeatedly exposes simple binaries as deceptive, with the most deceptive
of these being the oft-repeated claim that the purpose of Euthydemus is
to distinguish the brothers’ bad use of eristic from Socrates’ good use
of dialectic. Requiring as it does a deadpan reading of the First Protrep-
tic—and that means playing down the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy, palliating the
σοφία-εὐτυχία equation, and simply ignoring the Vanishing Passage—the
traditional view forces the interpreter to become a sophist for the sake of
vindicating Socrates, or rather someone resembling him. Culminating with
the real Socrates’ final forked-tongued and two-faced encomium (Euthd.
303c4–304b5), paradoxical to the core since he is really insulting the broth-
ers and their art, Euthydemus is a Corybantic initiation for rites that will
not be consummated until Sophist.435 It is in the light of that paradoxical
encomium that we need to revisit not only his exaggerated praise for the

433
 For more on this, including additional bibliography, see my “Leo Strauss and the Euthydemus.”
Classical Journal 102 (2007), 355–379, especially 371–376.
434
 See “Leo Strauss and the Euthydemus,” 374, for the claim that those who affirm the Ctesippus-
Iolaus identity will argue that Ctesippus (therefore) does more harm than good.
435
 For emphasis on the Corybantic element, see Carl Levenson, Socrates among the Corybantes:
Being, Reality, and the Gods (Woodstock, CT: Spring, 1999). More generally, see Aristide Tess­
itore, “Plato’s Lysis: An Introduction to Philosophic Friendship.” Southern Journal of Philosophy
28, no. 1 (1990), 115–132, on 126.
114 Chapter 1

brothers early in the dialogue, his mendacious narrative detected by Crito,

but also his own exhortation to the practice of “wisdom and virtue” (Euthd.
278d2–3). Like his emphasis on speech-writing (Euthd. 289c6–8) and
generalship (Euthd. 290b1–2) that brings the Second Protreptic to its diz-
zying peak (Euthd. 290b3–e2), Socrates’ emphasis on σοφία in the First is
oriented to the brothers.436 In short, we are being taught to withstand eristic
and the simple binaries that it exploits, and as our role model, Socrates’
“Iolaus” proves his capacity to do just that.
The next step in resolving the interpretive crux is to recognize that Ctesip-
pus proves Socrates wrong: as Iolaus (Euthd. 303a6), he comes to the hero’s
aid (cf. Euthd. 303a5 and 297c7–8) and overcomes the Hydra after Hercules
has flipped the Crab.437 Overcoming Euthydemus in a three-falls match in
mental gymnastics, he earns the delighted laughter of his beloved Cleinias,
swelling as a result to ten times his normal size (Euthd. 300d6–7). And prov-
ing Socrates wrong is what Plato’s Euthydemus requires all of us to do, not
just by detecting “Socratic irony” in his encomium of the brothers, but also
the scarcely undetectable equivocations, suppressions, and unjust implica-
tions that vitiate his First Protreptic. Perhaps if Plato had called the dialogue
Dionysodorus,438 more interpreters would have linked the latter’s beautiful
refusal—antithetical to his brother’s amoral purpose—that an all-knowing
Socrates could know that good men are unjust (Euthd. 297a1–8) to the tacit
implication of the First Protreptic: that when guided by σοφία as the only
good, injustice harms us less than justice does when practiced by fools. It is
rather by using an unjust man’s weapon against him justly that Ctesippus
does more good than harm (Euthd. 297d1–2), proving Socrates wrong in the
process.
The last piece of the puzzle is that in proving him wrong, Ctesippus does
exactly what Socrates expects him to do. Socrates’ false prediction is a peda-
gogical challenge in disguise and thus a beautifully crafted synecdoche for
basanistic pedagogy as a whole. The Argument of the Action in Euthydemus,
well deserving the invocation of the Muses with which the narration begins
(Euthd. 275c7–d2), depicts the teaching of virtue: “a lesser man than Her-
cules” challenges a new Iolaus to overcome, not simply the Hydra and the
Crab,439 but more importantly the youthful hubris that mars his natural gifts

436
 As noted by Ann N. Michelini, “Socrates Plays the Buffoon: Cautionary Protreptic in
Euthydemus.”American Journal of Philology 121, no. 4 (2000), 509–535, on 525.
437
 On this and the next sentence, see “Leo Strauss and the Euthydemus,” 373–374.
438
 Cf. Tessitore, “Plato’s Lysis,” 115.
439
 For the use of comic images and characterizations in Euthd., see Eva Lidauer, Platons sprachliche
Bilder—Die Funktionen von Metaphern, Sprichwörtern, Redensarten und Zitaten in Dialogen
Platons (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2016), 125–230.
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 115

(Euthd. 273a7–b1). Ctesippus must and does demonstrate self-control under

the watchful eye of his beloved while proving that he too has learned “to fight
in armor.” So Socrates lies: he fully expects Ctesippus to rise to his challenge
and disprove his deliberate falsehood by doing the right thing. And this, of
course, is exactly what Plato wants us to do while reading Lysis, Euthydemus
and the dialogues that follow them. When Socrates ridicules “the democratic
man” famous Athens had given to the world in Republic 8, he expects the
democrats for whom he wrote—living “in the other city” poised on the brink
of tyranny—to prove him wrong as well: we do not need to be irredeemably
lazy, scatter-brained shape-shifters, giving equal time to all our pleasures,
philosophizing one day and puking the next.440
Thanks to his exasperated ridicule of Hippothales in Lysis, Ctesippus
initiates the literary transition between Socrates as guide to the ἐρώμενος as
typified by Alcibiades, and Socrates as preceptor to the more mature ἐραστής
that creates the Argument of the Action in the two dialogues that follow Sym-
posium in the ROPD.441 This transition takes place because once philosophy
has been revealed as ἔρως in Diotima’s discourse, Plato’s advanced student
must necessarily become lovers, a process that reaches its apogee in Gorgias,
where Socrates explains his kinship with Callicles on the grounds that both
are ἐρασταί (Grg. 481d1–5). The fact that Cleinias is the kinsman of Alcibi-
ades (Euthd. 275a9–b2), he whose voice we will never hear again (cf. Grg.
481d3–4), marks this transition, and Plato clearly abets the natural illusion
that Socrates is still educating the youngster, and not his lover, especially in
the First Protreptic. In fact, Plato gives us no unequivocally good reason for
thinking that Ctesippus has made a particularly wise choice of beloved: Clei-
nias readily embraces the slavish role of ἐρώμενος as described by Pausanias,
and lazily takes the teachability of wisdom for granted. With the old “educa-
tion of the ἐρώμενος” paradigm inextricably bound to a deadpan reading of
the First Protreptic, traditional interpreters must therefore scramble to find
evidence that Socrates has educated Cleinias (see §17); in the process, they
have missed the starring role of Ctesippus in the Play of Character.
The best evidence that Cleinias has been educated creates the most memo-
rable moment in Euthydemus, and indeed one of the most striking moments
in the dialogues as a whole: the amazing interruption of Socrates by his friend
Crito (Euthd. 290e1–2).442 Before examining that interruption, however, it is

440
 See Plato the Teacher, §30.
441
 Cf. Catherine H. Zuckert, Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), 493–499n22.
442
 Particularly valuable on this interlude is Michelini, “Socrates Plays the Buffoon,” on 526 includ-
ing 526n75.
116 Chapter 1

fitting to give Crito his due as Socrates’ closest and dearest friend,443 intro-
duced to the reader for the first time in the dialogue that follows Lysis, tradi-
tionally understood as “Plato’s Theory of Friendship.” As I have tried to point
out, Lysis is actually something quite different from that: thanks to Socrates’
emphasis on the singular τὸ φίλον—as opposed to the necessary plural φίλοι
without both of whom friendship is impossible and the proverbial κοίνα τὰ
τῶν φίλων (Ly. 207c10) unintelligible—the dialogue is better understood as a
lesson in equivocation, a proleptic preparation for Republic, and a basanistic
test of what the student has learned from Symposium. On the other hand, it
cannot be an accident that Lysis is the only dialogue, including Phaedo, that
mentions hemlock (κώνειον at Ly. 219e2), that two of its characters will reap-
pear in the jail cell (Phd. 59b9), and that it immediately precedes the dialogue
where we meet Crito (Euthd. 271a1–5), a man for whom κοίνα τὰ τῶν φίλων
were not merely words (cf. Ly. 207c10 and Ap. 38b7–10).
All philosophers who lack a less philosophical friend who nevertheless has
a concern not only for what’s most important in their own lives but who is
continuously cautioning them to be more attentive to the way other people
perceive them, and who is, moreover, ready, willing, and able to help them
as best they can, any philosopher who lacks such a friend is best recognized
as having no friends at all. When Crito cautions Socrates about the effect he
is having on others (Euthd. 305a8–b3), he simply does what a philosopher’s
best friend must always do. When he shares his concerns with Socrates about
Critoboulus (Euthd. 306d2–307a2),444 he touches on the subject likewise
dearest to Plato’s heart (cf. Thg. 122b2–6), and when he interrupts Socrates,
he teaches all of Plato’s students how to get the greatest possible benefit from
his dialogues. Ctesippus proves Socrates wrong by his actions but Crito is the
only one of Plato’s characters who not only detects that Socrates is not tell-
ing him the truth (cf. Mx. 249d12–e2) but who vocally refuses to allow him
to continue doing so. Basanistic pedagogy requires the active participation of
the student, who must imitate Crito, and cry “foul.”445
Although Crito himself fails to realize it, his interruption also marks the
moment of transition, prepared in Lysis and now completed in Euthydemus,

443
 Michelini, “Socrates Plays the Buffoon,” 528: “The narratee, Crito, shows considerable aptitude
in interpreting Socratic irony when he breaks into Socrates’ narration at 290el–2; and, given
Socrates’ untrustworthiness as a narrator, Crito provides some access to a corrective viewpoint.”
See also Hayden W. Ausland, “On Reading Plato Mimetically.” American Journal of Philology
118 (1997), 371–416, on 387; Shinro Kato, “The Crito-Socrates Scenes in the Euthydemus” in
T. M. Robinson and Luc Brisson (eds.), Plato: Euthydemus, Lysis, Charmides. Proceedings of
the V Symposium Platonicum: Selected Papers, 123–132 (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2000), and
Schultz, Plato’s Socrates as Narrator, 121–124.
444
 Note that Crito confesses to being unable to offer his son a protreptic to philosophy (Euthd.
307a1–2) after hearing Socrates offer one.
445
 Cf. Field, Plato and His Contemporaries, 42, on “how easy it is to slip.”
 Lysis-Euthydemus: Mental Gymnastics and ἔρως 117

from the pedagogical priority of the ἐρώμενος to that of the ἐραστής in both
Lysis and Euthydemus. While Crito is correct that Cleinias could not pos-
sibly have said what Socrates has just reported that he said, he is wrong to
reject Socrates’ self-correction that it was Ctesippus who had spoken with
such insight. In retrospect, it becomes possible to see what has happened:
in the ultimately fruitless search—inaugurated in the Second Protreptic
and continued in Charmides—for what Sprague has called “the second-
order art,”446 Socrates suggests two arts already mastered by the brothers,
and rather than allowing the compliant Cleinias to rubber-stamp either of
those suggestions, Ctesippus intervenes to forestall his beloved from giving
comfort to their enemies. Since Ctesippus’ antipathy to the brothers is a
given, the relevant question is whether he will demonstrate the cool-headed
intelligence necessary to make that opposition helpful; Socrates creates the
opportunity for him to do so, first by suggesting that speech-writing is the
required art.
“‘I myself don’t think so [οὐκ οἶμαι ἐγώ],’ said Cleinias, interrupting”
(Euthd. 289c8–9). With Socrates about to be revealed as an unreliable nar-
rator thanks to what I will call “Crito’s Interruption” at 290e1–6, followed
immediately by a quick retraction that presents for Crito’s approval the pos-
sibility that it was Ctesippus (Euthd. 290a7–8), the false speaking implicates
only the name “Cleinias,” a pliant youngster who has never before failed to
confirm any of Socrates’ suggestions let alone interrupted him. The content of
the interruptor’s objection to speech-writing as the master art (Euthd. 289d2–
7)—the distinction between making something and knowing how to use it
well or badly that will receive its classic expression in Thamus’ response to
Theuth (Phdr. 274e7–9)—verbally echoes the subsequent and parallel rejec-
tion of generalship as the master art (Euthd. 290c9–d8) that prompts Crito’s
Interruption. But the objection to generalship is more interesting, requiring
mental gymnastics from the reader who is determined to discover the truth:
after three typically compliant replies from the real Cleinias (Euthd. 290a6–
10), Socrates’ suggestion of generalship at 290b1–2 provokes the prompt
objection: “It does not seem so to me [ἔμοιγε]” (Euthd. 290b3), and this time,
the narrator doesn’t name the speaker.
What happens next has attracted more scholarly attention than the logically
prior narrative unreliability that makes it possible. With a calm assurance that
anticipates Socrates describing rhetoric in Gorgias and the Eleatic Stranger
hunting the sophist in Sophist, Socrates’ amazing interlocutor makes a speech
(Euthd. 290b7–c6) that presupposes a familiarity with the Divided Line in
Republic 6, thereby creating a crisis for those determined to find the place

446
 See Rosamond Kent Sprague, Plato’s Philosopher-King, 48–56.
118 Chapter 1

of Euthydemus in the Order of Composition.447 Leaving further discussion of

this crucial passage for §5, it suffices for the present to record what follows
it: ‘So be it,’ I said, ‘O most beautiful and wisest [σοφώτατε] Cleinias; is this
really so?’ ‘Absolutely [πάνυ μὲν οὖν]!’ (Euthd. 290c7–9). Only separated
from Crito’s Interruption by his rejection of generalship as the master art, the
boy’s (alleged) speech, the self-assurance of his πάνυ μὲν οὖν, and Socrates’
uncharacteristically appropriate use of σοφώτατε—which elsewhere would
be recognizably ironic—offer active readers sufficient provocation to inter-
rupt even before Plato confirms through Crito that this is exactly what he
wanted them to do. And it was already what he wanted us to do when we were
reading the First Protreptic.
In summary, Plato makes learning fun; this is the principal purpose behind
the Play of Character with which he enlivens his dialogues. Although the
final confirmation that we should respond to Menexenus, Ctesippus, and
Crito along the lines I have suggested is withheld until we meet all three of
them again in Phaedo, each exists only as a means to our own education and
that of our children, an explicit concern for which will now join the end of
Euthydemus (Euthd. 306b6–c4) to the beginning of Laches (La. 179a1–b6).
As for the Argument of the Action, it will reach its paradigmatic expression
in the matched set of Laches and Charmides, where we will learn more about
courage from what Socrates has already done at Delium than from what he
will say to the sons of Aristides and Thucydides in Athens, and where his
self-control teaches us more about temperance than does Critias’ shameless,
deceptive, and degenerate lack of it.448 Although the final exchange between
Critias and Charmides (Chrm. 176a6–c4), even without any Socratic com-
ment, offers support for a sexualized reading of the dialogue, further defense
of such a reading—like further defense of my claim that Ctesippus is the
Mystery Interlocutor—is strictly tangential to this section’s larger purpose,
which has simply been to show how attentiveness to the Play of Character
amidst the Argument of the Action advances the purpose that led Plato to cre-
ate the Academy and to make his dialogues its eternal curriculum: to teach us
virtue by making it both possible and fun to discover it for ourselves.

447
 For a brilliant analysis of this passage, culminating with comment on the reader’s role in Euthd.,
see Narcy, Le philosophe et son double, 151–157.
448
 See Gonzalez, Dialectic and Dialogue, chapter 2 (19–61), especially 36–38 and 58–59.
 Chapter 2

Laches and Charmides

Fighting for Athens

§5. BETWEEN EUTHYDEMUS AND MENO

Combining the literary feel of a Socratic dialogue with a logical impact that
reaches all the way to Sophist, Euthydemus will remain a problem as long as
the Order of Composition paradigm continues to determine how we should
read the works of Plato. As a proponent of the Reading Order alternative,
I am hoping that the words “and no longer” may someday be appended to
this semi-prophetic use of “for as long as,” and thus that the chronological
problem of Euthydemus will ultimately become the Waterloo of the Order
of Composition paradigm itself.1 My hope rests on the fact that the prob-
lem, coeval with the nineteenth-century paradigm thanks to the connec-
tions between Euthydemus and both Republic and Meno—the latter will be
emphasized in this section—would inevitably take on a radically new form in
the twenty-first century thanks to the importance that Gilbert Ryle, Michael

1
 
This opening depends on Mary Margaret McCabe’s long-awaited commentary on Euthd.; in
the meantime, see McCabe, “Out of the Labyrinth,” 206n58 and 212 (“whether the Euthydemus
anticipates the Republic or corrects it or is merely ignorant of it, there is no form of the good
here”), “Silencing the Sophists: the Drama of the Euthydemus” in J. J. Cleary and G. M. Gurtler
(eds.), Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 14 (1999), 139–168,
“Indifference Readings: Plato and the Stoa on Socratic Ethics” in T. P. Wiseman (ed.), Classics in
Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 363–398,
“Developing the Good Itself by Itself: Critical Strategies in Plato’s Euthydemus.” Plato: Electronic
Journal of the International Plato Society 2 (2002), and “Protean Socrates: Mythical Figures in the
Euthydemus” in Paulina Remes and Juha Sihvola (eds.), Ancient Philosophy of the Self (Dordrecht
and London: Springer, 2008), 109–123.

119
120 Chapter 2

Frede, and G. E. L. Owen attached to Sophist in the twentieth,2 as Mary

­Margaret McCabe has suggested that it will:

First, there is plenty in the Euthydemus that has affinities with other dialogues
commonly designated “late,” especially the Theaetetus and the Sophist, as well
as the Parmenides. Although I do not wish to engage in the battle about devel-
opmentalism here, at least it seems reasonable to suppose that the Euthydemus
was written (or at least supposed to be read) after the Meno.3

However welcome this mention of Reading Order may otherwise be, the impor-
tant point is that for those who regard the Eleatic Stranger’s solution to the
problem of false speaking and his discovery of the incomplete sense of “to be”
as proof of “Plato’s Progress,” the gravitational pull of Sophist must someday
encourage its champions to reconfigure Euthydemus as a “late dialogue.”
Since it teaches us to interrupt the smooth flow of authoritative narrative,
even when the speaker is Socrates, and to join Crito in crying “foul” when the
bounds of truth are overstepped (Euthd. 290e1–2), Euthydemus clearly prepares
Plato’s students for what they will encounter in the post-Republic dialogues,
especially when they meet the Eleatic Stranger. This section’s purpose, how-
ever, is to show that the six dialogues beginning with Euthydemus and ending
with Meno constitute a unit whose collective and purpose is to prepare students
for Republic.4 Naturally it will be on the basis of its proleptic position with
regard to Republic that I will in due course explain the mysterious interlocutor’s
allusion to the Divided Line in Euthydemus. But the connections between it and
Meno are of an entirely different order, and it is because they are so numerous,
unmistakable, and significant that it is necessary to begin this section with the
three most important reasons why it is Laches, not Meno, that directly follows
Euthydemus in the ROPD.
There are three Platonic dialogues in which Socrates talks with fathers
about the education of their sons: with Crito in Euthydemus,5 Melesias and

2
 See Richard S. Bluck, Plato’s Sophist: A Commentary, edited by Gordon C. Neal (Manchester,
UK: University Press, 1975), 12–21, for the divide between Bluck and I. M. Crombie (on the
one hand) and Frede and Owen on the other. Cf. G. E. L. Owen, “Plato on Not-Being” (1970)
in Owen, Logic, Science, and Dialectic: Collected Papers in Greek Philosophy. Martha C ­ raven
Nussbaum (ed.), 104–137 (London: Duckworth and Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1986), on 135n76.
3
  Mary Margaret McCabe, “Escaping One’s Own Notice Knowing: Meno’s Paradox Again.”
­Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 109 (2009), 233–256, on 246.
4
 As with Mx. which precedes it, Smp. exerts an irresistible gravitational pull on Ly., and despite
the latter’s many connections with Euthd.—including the eristic Menexenus, Ctesippus, and the
Lyceum—it could be understood as either transitional or as belonging to another constellation. Cf.
Harold Tarrant, “Plato’s Euthydemus and a Platonist Educational Program.” Dionysius 21 (2003),
7–22.
5
 As noted in Zuckert, Plato’s Philosophers, 492.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 121

Lysimachus in Laches,6 and Demodocus in Theages.7 All three belong to

the six-dialogue series in the ROPD that is this section’s subject: Euthyde-
mus, Laches, Charmides, Gorgias, Theages, and Meno. Once having laid
out the case for reading Laches after Euthydemus, I will explain the many
connections between Euthydemus and Meno—the beginning and end of the
series—by means of ring-composition rather than serial order. Bolstering
the case for Plato’s use of this compositional technique is that in addition
to joining the extreme members of the six-dialogue series, it does the same
to the intermediate pair, Laches and Theages. In addition to the shared
father-son theme, the story Socrates tells about Aristides and Thucydides
in Theages (Thg. 130a4–e4)—the sons about whom Lysimachus and
Melesias are so concerned in Laches—makes it the earlier dialogue’s
sequel. But Theages can only stand in this symmetrical relationship to
Laches if Laches follows Euthydemus, and the final conversation with
Crito in the earlier dialogue creates an elegant transition to the conversa-
tion with the two fathers with which Laches begins.
Next there is the forthright speech of Laches (La. 188c4–189b7) where he
seeks to explain: “why I might seem to be a lover of discourse [φιλόλογος] and
at the same time a hater of discourse [μισόλογος]” (La. 188c5–6). Displaying a
good if also one-sided sense for music that anticipates Socrates’ comments on
the Dorian mode (La. 188d6–8; cf. R. 399a1–b3)—and thanks to three references
to Damon the musician (La. 180d1, 197d1–4, and 200b5; cf. Alc. 118c6 and R.
400b1),8 this is clearly important for understanding the dialogue in itself as well
as in connection to Republic—Laches deplores the lack of harmony between
a man’s words and his deeds (La. 188d8–e4). With respect to the Argument
of the Action, Plato thus provides Laches with the opportunity for recognizing
Socrates as uniquely “musical [μουσικός]” (La. 188d3) for having achieved this
kind of harmony since he has given “proof of virtue [πεῖρα ἀρετῆς]” (La. 189b5)
in the crucial case of war (La. 181a7–b4), thus confirming what Alcibiades has
already told us about Socrates the soldier in Symposium (Smp. 219d3–221c1).
But Laches’ description of the kind of man he admires also gives Plato the
chance to illustrate by contrast the kind of man who makes him μισόλογος:

Laches: For when I hear a man speaking about virtue [περὶ ἀρετῆς] or about some
kind of wisdom [περὶ τινος σοφίας], one who is truly a man and worthy of the

6
 On the centrality of education in La., see Erazim V. Kohák, “The Road to Wisdom: Lessons on Educa-
tion from Plato’s Laches.” Classical Journal 56, no. 3 (December 1960), 123–132, and more recently
Eduardo Salcedo Ortíz, “La educación de la valentía. El Laques de Platón como modelo de práctica
educativa.” Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofía de la Educación 3, no. 6 (2016), 217–236.
7
 Despite the presence of his sons, the conversation with Cephalus is not about their education.
8
 See R. W. Wallace, Reconstructing Damon. Music, Wisdom Teaching, and Politics in Perikles’
Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), xix–xxiv.
122 Chapter 2

speeches he is speaking, I am exceedingly delighted; examining both the speaker

and his speech together since they are appropriate to one another and harmonizing.9

It is not only because the discussion depicted in Euthydemus begins with the
brothers’ claim to possess, and then to demonstrate and to teach the kind of σοφία
(Euthd. 274a6–11) that allows them to transmit ἀρετή (Euthd. 273d8–9) that the
words of Laches apply to them, but because the discussion as a whole is enough
to transform even a φιλόλογος into a μισόλογος. Having reached the dizzying
literary heights in Symposium, Plato’s students are then confronted with the puz-
zling Lysis and then the exasperating and ridiculous antics of Euthydemus and
Dionysodorus; no matter how important the skills acquired in that process may
be, a feeling of disappointment would be a (good?) student’s natural response.
By allowing Socrates’ former general and comrade to express his discontent with
inharmonious speeches about ἀρετή and σοφία,10 Plato reassures us that relief is
on the way, embodied in the fresh start provided by his harmonious Laches.
And such relief is particularly important because the simpler Laches allows
Plato’s students to regain their footing before reading the more complicated
Charmides.11 These two dialogues are linked in many obvious ways, and the
best indication that Plato intended his readers to read them together is the fact
that so many have done so. German scholars in particular have been drawing
attention to the parallels between Charmides and Laches for the last hundred
years,12 but there is ample published support in English for the pairing,13

9
 La. 188c6–d2 (Lamb modified).
10
 Cf. Michelini, “Socrates Plays the Buffoon,” 515: “The well-respected Socrates of Laches, praised
by high-born gentlemen and famous generals, is virtually the inversion of the antic Socrates of
Euthydemus.”
11
 See my “Laches before Charmides: Fictive Chronology and Platonic Pedagogy.” Plato: The elec-
tronic Journal of the International Plato Society 10 (2010), 1–28.
12
 See Hermann Mutschmann, “Zu Platons Charmides.” Hermes 46 (1911), 473–478, on 474 (“fast
wie Zwillinge”); Theodor Gomperz, Griechische Denker, three volumes, third edition (Leipzig:
Veit, 1912), 250; Pohlenz, Aus Platos Werdezeit, 56; and Paul Natorp, Platons Ideenlehre (Berlin:
Reuther & Reichard, 1914), 20 (“Zwillingsbrüder”). The most detailed and sensitive treatment
of these parallels is Reinhard Dieterle, “Platons Laches und Charmides; Untersuchungen zur
elenktisch-aporetischen Struktur der platonischen Frühdialoge.” (Doctoral dissertation; Freiburg,
1966). See Altman, “Laches before Charmides,” 8n29 for more detail.
13
 In addition to Rosamond Kent Sprague, Plato: Laches and Charmides; Translated with an Intro-
duction and Notes (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), see the two articles on “Socrates at
Work” including Gerasimos Santas, “Socrates at Work on Virtue and Knowledge in Plato’s Char-
mides” in E. N. Lee, A. P. D. Mourelatos, and Richard M. Rorty (eds.), Exegesis and Argument:
Studies in Greek Philosophy Presented to Gregory Vlastos (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1973), 105–132;
Gonzalez, Dialectic and Dialogue, 19–62 (“Dialectic at Work in the Laches and the Charmides”),
and Francisco J. Gonzalez, “Self-Knowledge, Practical Knowledge, and Insight: Plato’s Dialec-
tic and Dialogue Form” in Gonzalez (ed.), The Third Way; New Directions in Platonic Studies,
155–188 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 163–173; also Walter T. Schmid, On Manly
Courage: A Study of Plato’s Laches (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1992), especially 1, 25, 70, and Plato’s Charmides and the Socratic Ideal of Rationality
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 148 and 178n22.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 123

and Thrasyllus places the two side by side in his Fifth Tetralogy. The most
obvious connections between Laches and Charmides are their length, their
thought-provoking titles,14 their concern with a single virtue, and their reli-
ance on the reader’s knowledge of Athenian history (see §7).15 As for the
order of these twins, the most natural and therefore compelling reason for
reading Laches first is that it is easier,16 and therefore consistent with a sound
pedagogical practice evidently recognized as such by of one of history’s
greatest teachers.17
As an introduction to a series of dialogues, including Charmides, built
around the consideration of a single virtue, the sturdy and amiable Laches—
first use of direct dramatic presentation in the ROPD since Menexenus,18
and thus reminiscent of the elementary Alcibiades and Hippias dialogues—
separates Lysis and Euthydemus from another dialogue that combines the
deliberate use of fallacy,19 Socratic narration, and a sexual subtext of consid-
erable subtlety (see §4). Alternating simpler with more complex dialogues is
characteristic of Plato’s pedagogical generosity, the paradigmatic case being
Euthyphro, placed between Theaetetus and Sophist-Statesman. The same
phenomenon reappears in the six dialogues under consideration here: placing
Theages between Gorgias and Meno likewise offers welcome relief while at
the same time introducing important concepts in a simple form. In the case
of Laches, the important concept in question is “the virtue-dialogue” itself,
and the pedagogical advantages of beginning this series with it have been
considered elsewhere.20
In addition to the pedagogical respite and self-critique that Laches pro-
vides, Plato’s need to step back from apparently useless eristic fireworks
by restoring in his students a sense of that they are really learning some-
thing useful from him leaves its mark in Euthydemus itself. Following

14
 Particularly embarrassing for the Socratist reading of the pair is Plato’s decision not to name the
dialogues Nicias and Critias; cf. Schmid, Plato’s Charmides, 138 on Critias, especially: “(Nicias
the representative of Sophistry in the Laches shows a similar ambivalence.)” The note attached to
the parenthesis cites Schmid, On Manly Courage, 151–158, 163, and 165.
15
 A less obvious example (or hint) is that Socrates quotes Odyssey 17.347 at the end of La. (201b2–3)
in order to encourage his interlocutors to pursue their inquiries into courage regardless of any
considerations of shame, then quotes it at Chrm. 161a4 as a dubious argumentum ad verecundiam
against Charmides; see Schmid, On Manly Courage, 208 (including 208n4) and Hyland, Virtue of
Philosophy, 69.
16
 Cf. Sprague, Laches and Charmides, vii.
17
 Cf. Crombie, Plato’s Doctrines, 1.214: “The turn of courage comes in the Laches, and it is
treated more intelligibly than self-restraint in the Charmides.” An easily overlooked aspect of the
increased difficulty of Chrm. is that it deals with worse men than La.; cf. R. 409a1–e3.
18
 Arguably connected as well by the intersection of speechwriting and generalship, especially since
Pericles was serving as general (Thucydides 2.59.3) when he delivered his famous Funeral Oration
(cf. Mx. 236b5).
19
 The third chapter in Cohen, “Plato’s Use of Ambiguity,” (84–187) deals with Chrm.
20
 Altman, “Laches before Charmides,” 17–25.
124 Chapter 2

many others, I identify the nameless critic described by Crito (Euthd.

304d4–306d1) as Isocrates,21 the most famous contemporary rival of Plato
the Teacher. Without entering into discussion of all the relevant evidence,
the opening paragraph of Isocrates’ Helen is sufficient to make the point:

There are some who think highly of themselves [μέγα φρονεῖν] if, having made
a strange and paradoxical hypothesis [ὑπόθεσις ἄτοπον καὶ παράδοξον], they
are able to speak plausibly [ἀνεκτῶς] about it: some of them have grown old
maintaining that it is not possible to speak falsehoods [ψευδῆ λέγειν]—neither
to contradict [ἀντιλέγειν] nor for two accounts about the same matters to say
opposite things—others maintaining that courage and wisdom and justice are
the same thing, and that we have none of these by nature [φύσει], but that there
is one knowledge [μία ἐπιστήμη] about all of them; still others waste their time
with captious arguments [ἔριδες] which have in no way benefited but have been
able to cause trouble for their associates [πλησιάζοντες].22

The fact that Plato indicates his familiarity with Isocrates’ critique in the
same dialogue that proves he considered such ἔριδες to be well worth the
attention of his πλησιάζοντες, may in part explain why a series of dialogues
devoted to individual virtues follows Euthydemus quite apart from the ques-
tion of whether or not Laches and Charmides, the first two in that series,
adequately uphold UV (see §6).
But connections of this kind—fathers and sons, ring-composition, self-
criticism through Laches, pedagogical generosity, Isocrates, and of course,
the gymnasium setting—can all be easily disputed, and where proof is con-
cerned, none of the foregoing constitute the three indisputable indications that
Plato intends us to read Laches after Euthydemus. He accomplishes this by
repeated references to “fighting in armor” in both dialogues. Thanks to the
triad of references to fighting in armor in Euthydemus—ἐν ὅπλοις μάχεσθαι
at Euthd. 271d4, 273c7, and 273e3–4—the opening words of Laches imme-
diately bring the brothers to mind: “You have seen the man fighting in armor
[ὁ ἀνήρ μαχομενον ἐν ὅπλοις is the participial form of μάχεσθαι ἐν ὅπλοις]”
(La. 178a1). Plato then promptly completes the trifecta—confirming our
suspicions once awakened by the dialogue’s opening words—with two more

21
 In addition to W. H. Thompson, The Phaedrus of Plato with English Notes and Dissertations
(London: Wittaker & Co., 1868), Appendix 2 (“On the Philosophy of Isocrates, and his Relation
to the Socratic Schools”), especially 179–182 (which long ago persuaded me; cf. Guthrie, History
of Greek Philosophy, 4.283: “never been presented better than by Thompson”), see Ernst Heitsch,
“Der Anonymos im Euthydem.” Hermes 128, no. 4 (2000), 392–404. It should not go unmentioned
that Isocrates was a rival schoolteacher.
22
 Isocrates, Helen 1 (LaRue Van Hook translation).
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 125

uses of the canonical ἐν ὅπλοις μάχεσθαι at La. 179e2 and 181c9, thereby
ensuring that no one can be sure that the parallel is adventitious.23
We may well doubt that such a connection is important, but not that it exists.
And unless our antagonism to “authorial intent” causes us not only to question
but to rule out Plato’s own commitment to “logographical necessity” (Phdr.
264b7)—the hermeneutic principle he invented, implemented throughout his
writings,24 and without which they cannot be meaningfully interpreted, nor the
ROPD reconstructed—we should also be prepared to realize that it is deliberate.
The meaningful question, then, is “what did he mean by it?” Throughout his
dialogues, Plato uses verbal repetition and echo—what I call “hammering”—to
draw the student’s attention to important points, and even if the only thing that
makes the two pairs of triads important is that they are intended to indicate Read-
ing Order, that is importance enough. This is exactly what I take them to do.
The hammered references to “fighting in armor” in both Euthydemus and Laches
are typical of the kind of easily detectible clues that Plato uses to signpost the
ROPD, much like the presence of Ctesippus in both Lysis and Euthydemus, or
the fact that Socrates, discovered en route to the Lyceum at the beginning of
Lysis, departs for it at the end of Symposium.
The twentieth century has witnessed increased attention to the dramatic
details with which Plato’s dialogues abound, and much insightful, innovative,
and indeed revolutionary commentary has been built on the hypothesis that such
details are important, illuminating, and intentional. Because explanation of those
details requires from the scholar the most minute attention to the text, thought-
ful discussion of them has generally been confined to treatments of individual
dialogues considered as the gem-like and beautifully constructed works of art
that all of them unquestionably are. Building on that work, I am exploring the
hypothesis that these details also have another purpose: to indicate connections
between the dialogues. With respect to intellectual history and the course of
Plato’s reception, my twenty-first-century attempt to revive the Reading Order
paradigm has therefore only been made possible by the increased attention to
dramatic details that began in the twentieth century. The salient difference is that
instead of considering such details only in the context of each individual work
when considered in isolation,25 my reconstruction of the ROPD considers them

23
 It should also be mentioned that Euthd. is the first dialogue where Plato, the erstwhile wrestler,
employs the three-falls imagery (see Altman, “Leo Strauss and the Euthydemus,” 373n84) that
reappears in R.; See Plato the Teacher, 142n75.
24
 See Charles L. Griswold, Jr. “Irony in the Platonic Dialogues.” Philosophy and Literature 26
(2002), 84–106, on 86: “The conversations portrayed by Plato in fact contain no element of chance.
That is, they exhibit what Socrates in the Phaedrus calls “logographic necessity’ (264b7); every
word and every action is planned in advance by the author. The appearance of spontaneity is only
an illusion.” The attached note (102n8) reads: “Leo Strauss, City and Man (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1964), 60.”
25
 Cf. “isolationism” in Plato the Teacher, xviii and 16–17.
126 Chapter 2

also as the indications Plato used to join one dialogue to another. And particu-
larly when a detail of this kind appears in the opening words of a dialogue, as
“fighting in armor” does in Laches, it now seems natural to wonder why Plato
began that way. An indication of his intention to follow Euthydemus with
Laches best explains why he does so.
But even under the hegemony of the nineteenth-century paradigm, clues of
this kind have often been used to indicate Order of Composition. In “the Date
of Composition” section of the Introduction to his commentary on Gorgias,
E. R. Dodds offers four arguments for its chronological priority to Meno of
which the first is: “the allusion at Meno 71c to a meeting between Socrates
and Gorgias looks like a reference back to the earlier dialogue.”26 Indeed it
does, and I claim that this is the detail’s primary purpose. Consider the even
more specific reference to Gorgias, naming Polus as well,27 in Theages:

Socrates: And moreover, if Theages here despises the instruction of our states-
men, and is looking for some other persons who profess to be able to educate
young people, we have here Prodicus of Ceos, Gorgias of Leontini, Polus of
Acragas, and many more, who are so wise that they go to our cities and persuade
the noblest and wealthiest of our young men—who have the choice of learning
from any citizen they choose, free of charge—they persuade them to abandon
that instruction and learn from them, depositing much money [ἀργύριον] as their
fee [μισθόν], and to feel gratitude [χάρις as thanks] in addition.28

Having already made us think of the future tyrants in Charmides and of

Polus’ admiration for tyrants in Gorgias by means of a delicious neologism
earlier in Theages,29 Plato also manages to include in this passage another
reference to the latter thanks to the close proximity of ἀργύριον, μισθόν, and
χάρις.30 It will not surprise a student of Reading Order that a passage crucial
for linking Theages to Gorgias also anticipates the position Anytus will
defend in Meno (Men. 92a7–b4). If, as I have suggested elsewhere,31 Plato
was tinkering with the ROPD until the end, the fewer passages he needed to
change the easier for him.
Although discussion of the authenticity of Theages will be found in §13, all of
my arguments for restoring it to the canon depend on showing how it fits into the

26
 Dodds, Plato: Gorgias, 23.
27
 Polus is also mentioned in Phdr. 267b10.
28
 Thg. 127e8–128a7 (Lamb modified).
29
 τυραννοδιδάσκαλος at Thg. 124e11–125a2.
30
 Grg. 520c4–d2 (Zeyl modified): “Socrates: For somebody who had another benefit conferred on
him, one who, for example, has been turned into a fast runner by a physical trainer, could perhaps
deprive the man of gratitude [χάρις as a gratuity] if the trainer offered it to him without stipulat-
ing a fee [μισθόν] and taking the money [ἀργύριον] as close as possible to the time he imparts the
speed. For I don’t suppose that it’s by slowness that people act unjustly, but by injustice, right?”
31
 Altman, “Reading Order,” 39–40.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 127

ROPD and how it illuminates its more important neighbors; by doing this, I will
at least have shown that the notion of Reading Order was in its author’s mind.
But some preliminary discussion of Theages is necessary in a chapter devoted to
Laches and Charmides because, like them, it is concerned with a single virtue,
σοφία, that is, with becoming wise (Thg. 121c8–d1; cf. 123b2). Recognition of
this link is ancient: the Fifth Tetralogy of Thrasyllus contains Theages, Char-
mides, Laches, and Lysis, all considered—albeit arranged in reverse order—in
Ascent to the Good. Like Thrasyllus, I also preserve the connection of Euthyphro
with the other dialogues depicting the trial and death of Socrates, breaking with
him only in following Plato’s clear indication that it directly follows Theaete-
tus, and is therefore followed by Sophist-Statesman. With four short dialogues
devoted to four of the five virtues we encounter in Protagoras (Prt. 349b1–2), a
dialogue on justice becomes conspicuous by its absence if, that is, we are willing
to entertain the hypothesis that Theages is genuine.
This section depends on that hypothesis, and there is no point in concealing
the fact that the ramifications of entertaining it extend far beyond anything
found in Theages itself. It is true, of course, that a dialogue on wisdom that
emphasizes Socrates’ Divine Sign and his (irrational) obedience to it offers
no comfort to the Socratists who are eager—not least of all on the basis of
Laches and Charmides—to uphold K, KGB, CA, and UV. But although this
observation may help to explain why nobody should expect Theages to be
restored to the canon anytime soon, the bare existence of a dialogue on σοφία
not only has implications for the way Laches and Charmides should be read
but even more importantly has the unlikely effect of unmasking Gorgias,
whose priority to Theages and Meno has already been suggested, as Plato’s
“virtue-dialogue” devoted to justice. If I can show that this is the case, then
the four dialogues between Euthydemus and Meno are devoted respectively
to courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom, the four virtues discussed along
the Shorter Way in Republic.
As already mentioned, the discussion of the four virtues based on the tripar-
tition of the soul in Republic 4 is not only incompatible with the intellectualist
reading of “Plato’s Socratic dialogues” but is ground-zero for that ultimately
Aristotelian incompatibility claim. Laches and Charmides are important for
the Socratists because they can easily be read—whether accurately is another
question (see §6)—as upholding the division between Socratism and Pla-
tonism as conceived by the Socratists. If Gorgias, thanks to a hypothetically
restored Theages, is thereby linked thematically to Laches and Charmides as
virtue-dialogues, that would connect all four to the discussion of the same
four virtues in Republic, where they are by no means considered in accor-
dance with what UV or even K would lead us to expect. After all, Gorgias
creates enough headaches for serious Socratists quite apart from whether or
not it is a virtue-dialogue. The reference to arriving too late for a battle at the
128 Chapter 2

beginning of Gorgias (Grg. 447a1–4) proves ironic given its content; with
respect to later scholarship as well, it is unquestionably a battleground.
The fact that Gorgias is not only the longest of the four, but the longest
dialogue the student encounters before Republic, suggests that even had Plato
not written his masterpiece—which could, of course, be construed as the
virtue-dialogue devoted to justice—the towering and anomalous role of that
particular virtue would already be clear to anyone who acknowledges that
the primary subject of Gorgias is not rhetoric but justice.32 To begin with,
rhetoric is that which allows the unjust to escape paying the penalty their
injustice deserves (δίκην μὴ διδόναι at Grg. 479c1–4). In chapter 3, I will also
argue that without rhetoric, what Plato regards as true Justice is impossible.
For now, it is enough to mention that the most striking thing in the dialogue
is Socrates’ famous claim that suffering injustice is preferable to doing it; a
moment’s impartial consideration is sufficient to realize that making a claim
of this sort plausible—for it is scarcely obvious how it can be upheld on a
eudaemonist basis—will require the use of rhetoric, even when it masquer-
ades as Socratic dialectic, as Socratic rhetoric by no means consistently does
in the speech-filled Gorgias. In holding, then, that the primary subject of
Gorgias is justice, I am by no means denying that it is also and inevitably
concerned with rhetoric from beginning to end.
As it will be again in Laches, courage has already been distinguished from
a foolish confidence in both Protagoras and Euthydemus, thereby supporting
the notion that the whole of virtue must be knowledge; the same argument will
appear in Meno. The only counter-indication in “the early dialogues”—that
courage is καλόν, that is, a noble, admirable, and beautiful willingness to incur
wounds and death while coming to the aid of one’s friends (Alc. 115b1–6)—
vanishes from view with the excision of Alcibiades Major. But Aristotle
comes to its aid: “In like manner those who praise or censure a man do not
consider whether his acts have been expedient or harmful [συμφέροντα ἢ
βλαβερά], but often make it a ground of actual praise that he has neglected his
own interest [τὸ αὑτῷ λυσιτελοῦν] to do what was honorable [ὅ τι καλόν].”33

32
 Cf. Devin Stauffer, “Socrates and Callicles: A Reading of Plato’s Gorgias.” Review of Politics 64,
no. 4 (Autumn 2002), 627–657, on 629: “Socrates’ quarrel with Callicles begins as a quarrel about
justice—the claim, namely, that injustice, especially when it goes unpunished, is the greatest of all
evils, not for the sufferer or victim of it, but for the one who does it.”
33
 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.3 (1358b38–1359a3; translation by W. Rhys Roberts). For the importance
of ὅ τι καλόν (translated throughout as “fine”) in Aristotle’s Ethics, see David Charles, “Aristotle
on Virtue and Happiness” in Christopher Bobonich (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient
Ethics, 105–123 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 116–122. Although he cites
a passage from Rhetoric on 119, he does not refer to this one, but consider the paragraph on 121
that begins: “What does the virtuous’ grasp on fineness consist in? There is no reason to assimilate
Aristotle’s ethical theory to those in which the fineness of actions resides solely in their beneficial
consequences.” Let this stand in relation to the Introduction as a palinode.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 129

The reason that Aristotle makes this observation in his Rhetoric is probably
also the basis for Plato’s decision to consider justice in the context of rhetoric
in Gorgias; we need to be persuaded and inspired to do what’s right when
doing it causes us trouble (cf. πράγματα ἔχειν at R. 347d8), and certainly
when it leads to our death. And it should be prima facie obvious that if justice
must be considered in the context of rhetoric, it is unlikely to be the same
thing as the other virtues. After all, the systematic Socratist will claim that
thanks to the intersection of K, CA, and TEA, UV-virtue invariably aims at
what is most expedient and advantageous to the agent, that is, the GoodE.
In the series of six dialogues beginning with Euthydemus, the first that alludes
to the trial and death of Socrates is Gorgias (see §12); allusions to it then reap-
pear in both Meno (thanks to Anytus) and Theages.34 The reason for this shift
is that justice inevitably implicates our relationship to others, and the conse-
quence of Socrates’ willingness to practice Justice—and thus to live and die in
accordance with the claim that it is preferable to suffer injustice than to commit
it—will be his trial and death. Plato shows us that Socrates is fully conscious of
this result in Gorgias, and even if the doctor defending himself before a jury of
children lacks the kind of rhetoric that would secure an acquittal, Socrates him-
self possesses in abundance—as we can see from the image itself—the kind of
rhetoric necessary for showing anybody that the doctor is just, the pastry-cook
is a criminal, and the children represent a jury of fools. While no one would
care to deny that Socrates is also courageous and temperate—and indeed I have
already claimed that his modeling of these virtues in Laches and Charmides
reveals more about them than anything said by Nicias, Critias, or even Socrates
himself—it is his justice that Plato emphasizes: even if Gorgias is not the virtue-
dialogue devoted to justice, Republic is.
Among the pre-Republic dialogues, Symposium dominates by its central
position; Gorgias stands out among them by its size and thus by brute force.
But with respect to the series of dialogues between Symposium and Repub-
lic, Gorgias dominates both by size and position, and therefore the chapter
devoted to it in this study is both central and long. Naturally Republic will
surpass both Gorgias and Symposium in size, and will confer on both a
kind of centrality that depends entirely on its own; if it were not the well-
constructed τέλος of all the dialogues that precede it, Republic could harm-
lessly be described as a synthesis of Symposium and Gorgias, where the
musical peak reached by “the Ascent to the Beautiful” is combined with the
gymnastic training required to master “fighting in armor.” Such observations
are, however, nothing more “than previews of coming attractions,” and in
that spirit, it is worth noting that the argument for reading Gorgias as Plato’s

34
 See my “Reading Order and Authenticity: The Place of Theages and Cleitophon in Platonic Peda-
gogy.” Plato: The Electronic Journal of the International Plato Society 11 (2011), 1–50, on 39.
130 Chapter 2

(first) virtue-dialogue on justice will be found in §8, while the justification for
reading it directly after Charmides will not be completed until §9.
The reason that a chapter devoted to Laches and Charmides is beginning
with the hypothesis that Theages, along with Gorgias, is a genuine virtue-
dialogue, is that the interpretive imperative of the Socratist approach has
concealed the intimate relationship of both with Plato’s Republic. When
understood as the first half of a four-part series of virtue-dialogues fol-
lowed by Gorgias and Theages, and culminating in the four virtues around
which the Shorter Way in Republic revolves, Laches and Charmides take
on a new look. After all, the principal advantage of using Reading Order
as a hermeneutic device is that it opens up new interpretive vistas for every
dialogue, each illuminated by its connection to those that precede and fol-
low it. The most obvious connection between the two, for example—apart,
that is, from the fact that they are both virtue-dialogues—is that they
ostentatiously revolve around well-known historical actors, and demand
from the reader a detailed knowledge of Athenian history. This knowledge
is also presupposed in Gorgias, Theages, and Meno but even more impor-
tantly in Republic itself, regarded as the τέλος of the series in this respect
as in many others.
Having already suggested at the end of §4 that Socrates’ display of cour-
age and temperance in Laches and Charmides constitutes the Argument of
the Action in both dialogues, §7 will pursue the Play of Character against
the backdrop of Athenian History. It should go without saying that neither
of these interpretive moves is characteristic of the Socratist reading of the
pair; indeed one might reasonably conclude that my purpose is to end-run
that reading by ignoring it. This is not the case. As already indicated, I am
claiming that identifying the Good with happiness—that is, as that which is
good for us or the GoodE—and even configuring virtue as merely a means
to that end, is a necessary component of the ascent to the GoodT despite its
inadequacy. It is, in fact, the harbinger of the Shorter Way, already pre-
figured with an easier Eudaemonist Shortcut by Diotima, and soon enough
to be assigned both a name and an appropriate methodology in Republic
4 and 6.
In §6, therefore, emphasis will fall directly on the shared element in Laches
and Charmides that best supports the Socratist reading of both: the unity of
virtue (UV) as knowledge of good and bad (KGB). Although an examina-
tion of the relevant passages in the context of §7 must destabilize a reading
that finds little or no serious philosophical content in the Play of Character
or in topical allusions to Athenian History, the salient shortcomings of the
Socratist reading will be deduced principally from the relevant arguments
themselves, although the fact that Plato is Plato means that no such distinction
is ultimately either desirable or even possible. But just as arguments cannot
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 131

be “disentangled” or “disencumbered” from the dramatic form in which Plato

incorporates them—and this, of course, is the ongoing claim of the present
study as a whole—so too can no dialogue be fully understood without refer-
ence to its neighbors. With respect to assessing the importance that Plato
attaches to KGB as described in both Laches and Charmides, I will claim that
Euthydemus, Gorgias, Theages, and Meno all address this issue as well, and
do so on the same critical basis.
Since both Euthydemus and Meno are on this list, and since the primary
purpose of this section is to show that the connections between them are bet-
ter explained by regarding one as the beginning and the other as the end of
ring-composed series of six—rather than by placing them next to each other
in serial order—some light will soon enough be shed on the proleptic claim
with which the last paragraph ends. But before turning to the two extreme
members of the series, it was first necessary to suggest how, albeit in a purely
preliminary manner, the four dialogues between them could plausibly be
regarded as a series. With clear indications of the principal hypotheses upon
which regarding them as such depends, the claim that Laches, Charmides,
Gorgias and Theages are a series of virtue-dialogues oriented to the same
four virtues discussed and defined in Republic 4, will now be subsumed under
a discussion of the connections between Euthydemus and Meno with which
this section shall end.
Having already indicated at the start of this section the motives that
might cause a future scholar to place Euthydemus in compositional prox-
imity to Sophist, it is now time to turn to the long-standing controversy
about whether Euthydemus follows or precedes Meno in Order of Compo-
sition. To begin with, those who would link Euthydemus to Sophist will
also be more inclined to place it after Meno,35 as McCabe does. There’s
not much point in mincing words here: reading Euthydemus as a critique
of Meno—and particularly as proof that Plato abandoned the Theory of
Recollection by making a joke out of something resembling it in Euthyde-
mus—should be regarded as Owen-inspired opposition to Platonism in the
guise of objective scholarship. To put it simply, if Plato wrote Euthydemus
after Meno, then it can do to Recollection what Parmenides allegedly does
the Theory of Forms. No serious Plato scholar can any longer uncritically
accept the notion that establishing Order of Composition is a purely object­
ive business, particularly when it reaches the conclusion that Euthydemus
is a later work than Meno: it is merely the most compelling means of argu-
ing that Plato himself abandoned Platonism.

35
 For an example of how easily a question about Order of Composition is answered with tools more
appropriate to Reading Order, see Marion Soreth, “Zur Relativen Chronologie von Menon und
Euthydem.” Hermes 83, no. 3 (1955), 377–379.
132 Chapter 2

My project, however, has nothing whatsoever to do with the order in which

Plato wrote his dialogues: I am concerned exclusively with the order in which he
indicates that he intended them to be read. My claim throughout is that he indi-
cates Reading Order by means of detectible connections between his dialogues,
and since there are numerous connections between Euthydemus and Meno, my
task is to determine whether those connections are sufficient to establish serial
connection. In chapter 1, I examined the connections between Euthydemus and
Lysis, beginning with the appearance of Ctesippus and his (allegedly) eristic
cousin Menexenus, and showed that there were numerous pedagogical, struc-
tural, thematic links between them. And in this section, I have already pointed
out that the hammered references to “fighting in armor” in both Euthydemus and
Laches suggested Plato’s intention to join the two in serial order. The problem is
that not only are there are more connections between Euthydemus and Meno, but
in terms of philosophical significance they are incomparably more important.
As already indicated, my task is to explain these connections in reference
to the virtue-dialogues I place between them, and since considerable attention
was focused on the First Protreptic in §3, the best place to start with respect to
philosophical significance is what Vlastos called “its miniaturized doublet in
the Meno (87e-88e),”36 hereafter “the Meno Doublet.” Since this connection has
been noted by so many others, and since both passages are frequently quoted in
the Socratist literature, I will begin by noting a connection between the two that
has heretofore escaped notice: it is as unusual to find a Socratist acknowledging
that the First Protreptic is found in a dialogue rife with the use of ostentatiously
fallacious arguments as it is to find one acknowledging that its Meno Doublet,
so far from being presented as an authoritative account of “the philosophy of
Socrates,” is designed to illustrate the use of the hypothetical method (see §15).
In order to determine whether virtue can be taught, one might even argue that
Socrates begins by hypothesisizing K:37 if virtue is teachable (εἰ ἀρετὴ διδάκτον
at Men. 87b5–6), then virtue must be knowledge.
The parallel expression in the First Protreptic naturally does not mention
ἀρετή since ἀρετή is not mentioned in the First Protreptic. I have emphasized
this point because it is both extremely important and frequently ignored or
palliated by an ostentatiously doctrinal and utterly un-hypothetical reliance
on K. Since everyone knows that Socrates not only endorsed K but that
“Socratic Ethics” is based on that endorsement, and since Cleinias seems
to confirm Socrates’ implied equation of σοφία—which of course is men-
tioned throughout the First Protreptic—with both ἐπιστήμη and φρόνησις,

36
 Vlastos, “Happiness and Virtue,” 199; so also Vlastos, Socrates, 227, with “the doublet of this
passage in the M.” in 228n92. Cf. Hawtrey, Commentary, 89–90 (on 281e3f.) and indeed 89–92;
also Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi, Playful Philosophy, 24, 29n51, and 31–35.
37
 The controversial character of this claim will be aired in §15.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 133

and arguably νοῦς as well (Euthd. 281a6–c3), it must be the case that when
Socrates wonders if wisdom is teachable (εἰ ἡ σοφία διδάκτον at Euthd.
281c1–2), he is raising the same question about ἀρετή that appears in Meno.
Cleinias quickly confirms that it is, and Socrates expresses delight that the
boy has saved the trouble, sparing him from a large investigation (Euthd.
281c4–8). The sublime joke that arises from juxtaposing these two passages
is that the most troubling hypothesis on which the Meno Doublet depends—
“if indeed virtue is some kind of knowledge [εἰ δέ γ’ ἐστὶν ἐπιστήμη τις ἡ
ἀρετή]” (Men. 87c5–6)—is the same hypothesis that Socratists treat as an
Aristotle-endorsed certainty in order to claim that the purpose of the First
Protreptic is to persuade Cleinias to pursue an otherwise unnamed “virtue.”
In due course, the Meno Doublet (87b2–89e9) will receive the attention it
deserves; among the many parallels between it and the First Protreptic, I have
only selected at this stage the most fundamental and comical of them. But it is
worth emphasizing for the last time the highly equivocal relationship between
the First Protreptic and virtue. Even when it is read on the merely implied
basis that σοφία is ἀρετή, the problem of all the other virtues remains: the
fact that they become instruments to σοφία as opposed to being aspects of
it is why Euthydemus cannot be used to prove Socrates’ acceptance of UV.
He can make courage without wisdom harmful since it makes us do more
than we would do without it (Euthd. 281c6–7), he can mention temperance
as if he could do the same with it. But Socrates’ failure to mention justice in
this context, the virtue that Plato clearly thought was the most important even
if Republic, not Gorgias, is the virtue-dialogue he devoted to it, is significant
in itself, let alone that this omission implies that without σοφία, justice does
more harm than injustice does when used wisely. It is therefore easy to see
the potentially unjust consequences of taking as a given in Euthydemus what
Meno suggests is only a hypothesis.
Whether the hypothetical method in Meno is the same as that described in the
Divided Line will be considered elsewhere; that there is a resemblance between
them is obvious.38 In the present context, the relevant questions are (1) whether
or not the similarities between the First Protreptic and the Meno Doublet require
a student of Reading Order to connect the dialogues serially, and (2) whether
the differences between them shed any light on which is closer to Republic.
The hypothetical method and the substitution of ἀρετή for σοφία might be taken
to indicate not only the posterior position of Meno but also how a series of inter-
vening virtue-dialogues mediates the difference. But the question of whether

38
 See Hugh H. Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge: Dialectic in Plato’s Meno, Phaedo, and Republic
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For a useful review of this important book (see §15), see
Yale Weiss, “Review of Hugh H. Benson. Clitophon’s Challenge.” Philosophical Forum 47, no.
1 (Sping 2016), 25–29.
134 Chapter 2

virtue can be taught has been a central problem since Protagoras, and Meno is
not the only dialogue of the pair that displays proximity to the Divided Line.
The second of the three speeches made by the Mystery Interlocutor before
Crito’s Interruption in Euthydemus must now be considered.
The new insight in the speech placed between the Mystery Interlocutor’s
previous rejection of “the speechwriting art [ἡ λογοποιικὴ τέχνη]” (Euthd.
289c6–7) and the coming rejection of generalship as “the τέχνη that most of
all is the one which someone, having acquired it, would be happy” (Euthd.
290b1–2; cf. Alc2. 141e3–142b1) is that arts like generalship are merely
θηρευτική, that is, they merely “hunt” for things that already exist but give no
indication of how to use them. In contrast with ἡ λογοποιικὴ τέχνη—which
makes or produces the artifacts its practitioners do not themselves know
how to use properly (Euthd. 289d2–7)—the practitioners of “the strategic
art [ἡ στρατηγικὴ τέχνη]” not only resemble those who hunt for game and
fish and yet must turn over (παραδιδόναι) what they catch to cooks (Euthd.
290b7–10), but also a more amazing kind of hunter:

“and so it is too with the geometers [οἱ γεωμέτραι], astronomers, and calculators—
for these also are hunters [θηρευτικοί] in their way, for each of them are not making
[ποιεῖν] their figures [τὰ διαγράμματα] but are rather discovering [ἀν-ευρίσκειν]
things that (already) exist [τὰ ὄντα]; and so, not knowing how to use these things,
but to hunt them only, they turn over [παραδιδόναι] to the dialecticians [οἱ διαλε
κτικοί] the use of their discoveries [εὑρήματα], at least those of them who are not
completely mindless [ἀνόητοι].” “So be it,” I said, “O most beautiful and wisest
[σοφώτατε] Cleinias; is this really so?” “Absolutely [πάνυ μὲν οὖν]!”39

The justification for placing οἱ διαλεκτικοί—whom I regard as being men-

tioned here for the first time in dialogues—in a superior position with respect
to mathematicians (broadly construed) will be found only in Republic, and it
is fair to say that this statement is largely unintelligible without reference to
the Divided Line.
On the other hand, it is precisely the unintelligibility of this statement that
is essential to its dramatic purpose within Euthydemus itself: it not only needs
to sound but also to be highly intelligent, and must justify Crito’s certainty
that it is something that Cleinias could not possibly understand or discover
on his own.40 The best way for Plato to achieve this challenging dramatic
effect is to place in the boy’s mouth something that not even the reader can

39
 Euthd. 290b10–c9.
40
 Cf. M. M. McCabe, “Waving or Drowning? Socrates and the Sophists on Self-Knowledge in the
Euthydemus” in George Boys-Stones, Dimitri El Murr, and Christopher Gill (eds.), The Platonic
Art of Philosophy, 130–149 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 144:
“If Clinias has read the Republic, perhaps we should have done so, too.”
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 135

yet understand but which must sound at least potentially intelligible, as it will
ultimately prove to be.41 Among the numerous connections between Euthyde-
mus and Meno, the easiest to miss, and therefore also the funniest, is that
crucial passages in both dialogues revolve around the question of what a child
could know. In Euthydemus, this question appears first as a joke (“I would
have thought that even a child would know”) before becoming the fulcrum
for our Crito-mediated discovery that Plato’s use of deliberate false speaking
extends all the way up to Socrates’ narration and thus to the dialogue as a
whole; as the balance of this section will show, it will reappear. Meanwhile,
the most famous geometrical figure in the dialogues is used in Meno to show
how much a child can really be expected to know.
Although we do not encounter οἱ διαλεκτικοί by name in Meno, we neverthe-
less learn more there about how they operate in the first of three passages that
presuppose the reader’s familiarity with ἐριστική, and thus with Euthydemus.
Socrates has just provided Meno with a definition of shape (σχῆμα) as “that
which alone of existing things [τὰ ὄντα] always follows color.”42 In anticipation
of the dialogue’s most famous eristic moment (Men. 80e1–3), Meno attempts to
cause Socrates some trouble by asking how he would evaluate his definition in
the case of someone who claimed not to know what color is:

Socrates: It’s true, I’d respond, and if my questioner was one of the wise [οἱ
σοφοί] and both eristic [ἐριστικοί] and contentious, I should say to him: “I have
made my statement; if it is wrong, your business is to examine and refute it.” But
if, as is the case with you and me now, and we should wish as friends [φίλοι] to
converse [διαλέγεσθαι] with one another, it is necessary to answer somewhat more
mildly and more dialectically [διαλεκτικώτερον]. And what’s more dialectical
[διαλεκτικώτερον], I suppose, is not merely to answer what is true, but also to
make use of those points which the questioned person acknowledges he knows.43

In contrast to Socrates’ stated intent,44 the eristic Euthydemus is so far from

ascertaining “those points which the questioned person acknowledges he

41
 The fact that attempts to use this passage to create a late place for Euthd. in the Order of Composi-
tion must ignore its context—that is, the function it performs in the dialogue—should surprise no
one.
42
 Men. 75b10–11 (Grube translation)
43
 Men. 75c8–d7.
44
 Cf. Hawtrey, Commentary, 151 (on 295c4ff.): “A cross-reference may be intended (in whichever
direction [cf. 4–11, especially 6: ‘the probably insoluble problem of whether the Euthydemus is
earlier or later than the Meno’]) between this passage and Meno 75c–d, where Socrates says that
the eristic arguer will not be willing to explain his terms but will simply offer his statement for
his opponent to refute, while the ‘more dialectical’ way of discussing not only insists on a true
answer but restricts itself to terms on the meaning of which the participants are agreed.” Cf. 10:
“In conclusion, the two dialogues seem to me to have been written as a pair. Which of them is
earlier I am unable to say.”
136 Chapter 2

knows” that he explicitly eschews any interest in whether or not his interlocu-
tor understands the questions he asks in the same way he does while asking
them (Euthd. 295c4–7). More importantly, however, Plato’s hammered use
of διαλεκτικώτερον is specifically intended to remind the reader of those
mysterious διαλεκτικοί we first encounter in Euthydemus, since Socrates
promptly uses the discoveries of the geometers to make his answer to Meno
“more dialectical.”

Socrates: And this is the way in which I shall now try to argue with you. Tell
me, is there something you call an end? Such a thing, I mean, as a limit, or
extremity—I use all these terms in the same sense, though I daresay Prodicus
might quarrel with us. But you, I am sure, refer to a thing as terminated or
ended: something of that sort is what I mean—nothing complicated. Meno: Yes,
I do, and I think I grasp your meaning. Socrates: Well then, you call something
“plane” [ἐπίπεδον], and also another thing “solid” [στερεόν], as [they call]
these things in geometrical matters [ταῦτα τὰ ἐν ταῖς γεωμετρίαις]? Meno: I
do. Socrates: So now you are able to comprehend from all this what I mean by
figure [σχῆμα]. In every instance of figure [σχῆμα] I call that figure [σχῆμα] in
which the solid ends; and I may put that more succinctly by saying that figure
[σχῆμα] is “limit of solid.”45

In the same passage that begins with a reference to those among οἱ σοφοί
who are ἐριστικοί—a backward-pointing allusion to Euthydemus on my
account—Socrates proceeds to fill out the meaning of that dialogue’s most
forward-pointing allusion by illustrating how dialecticians can use the dis-
coveries made by the geometers. Bear in mind that although the Mystery
Interlocutor refers to astronomers and (numerical) calculators as well, Plato
has already linked τὰ διαγράμματα with geometers specifically in Hippias
Minor (Hp. Mi. 367d6–e7), and indeed the word διάγραμμα, so far from
being translatable with our “diagram,” must be more like what Socrates calls
a σχῆμα. Certainly his definition depends on geometry, and there is indeed a
great deal that a dialectician can learn about it from this passage: by defining
σχῆμα as the ἐπίπεδον of a solid, Plato not only anticipates the distinction
between geometry and stereometry in Republic 7—where arithmetic and
astronomy will reappear as well—but creates a thought-provoking contrast
with Socrates’ previous definition of σχῆμα based on color. Must a plane
figure ἐν ταῖς γεωμετρίαις necessarily be accompanied by color? Is there any
colored thing among τὰ ὄντα that is not necessarily also στερεόν?

45
 Men. 75d7–76a7 (Lamb); with the hammered use of σχῆμα, cf. the equal number of times that τὸ
χώριον appears in Men. 86e5–87a7; the repetition draws attention to Socrates’ failure to address
the question of color, as Meno promptly points out (Men. 76a9).
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 137

But let’s not miss the forest for the trees. The most important example of
how dialecticians use the discoveries made by geometers is the way Socrates
uses the square on the diagonal to explain Recollection in Meno. Indeed
the purpose of the “more dialectical” definition of σχῆμα earlier in the dia-
logue—when reconsidered, that is, in the context of the ROPD—is to help the
student remember the mysterious Euthydemus passage right before we meet
the most famous διάγραμμα in the dialogues.46 Geometers had discovered the
fact that the larger square constructed on the diagonal of another square has
an area (χώριον) twice as large as the original square’s; they didn’t create the
square, they discovered (by hunting for its properties) something about it (cf.
Euthd. 290b10–c3). Bearing in mind, then, that the term τὰ διαγράμματα can
refer to geometrical figures as well as the diagrams depicting them (LSJ),47
in Meno we observe the dialectician Socrates using a geometer’s discovery
about some of τὰ ὄντα for a higher purpose, thereby resolving the mystery
introduced in Euthydemus.48
Another link between Meno and Euthydemus, one that has gone unre-
marked, is their contrasting evaluation of the word “without work” or “work-
less” (ἀργός), hence lazy or idle. In the First Protreptic, Socrates illustrates
the detrimental effect of courage, unaccompanied by σοφία, by suggesting
that since it causes a brave man to do more than the coward does (the latter
will be more ἀργός at Euthd. 281c7) he will as a result “do (things) badly
less [ἧττον κακῶς πράττειν]” (Euthd. 281c2). Sliding next from the active to
the passive sense of εὖ πράττειν’s negative form—to which we are alerted
by the repetition of ἧττον κακῶς πράττειν—Socrates proves that by “faring
less badly,” the inactive person would be less wretched (Euthd. 281b8–c3).
In Meno, by contrast, being ἀργός and acting courageously reappear in
Socrates’ famous appraisal of Recollection:

And as for the other things supporting my λόγος, these I would not vigorously
dispute [πάνυ διισχυρίζεσθαι]; but that by believing it to be necessary to inves-
tigate the things one doesn’t know [ἃ μή τις οἶδεν] we would be better and more
manly [ἀνδρικώτεροι] and less ἄργοι than if we are believing that the things we
don’t know [ἐπιστάσθαι] are neither possible to discover nor necessary to inves-
tigate [ζητεῖν], concerning this I would fight vigorously [πάνυ διαμαχεῖσθαι], if
I should be able to, both with λόγος and with ἔργον.49

46
 And the only one for which “a diagram” is preserved in the ancient scholia; see William Chase
Greene (ed.), Scholia Platonica (Haverford, PA: American Philological Society, 1938), 171–173.
47
 And separably so for Aristotle; see Michel Narcy, “Aristote et la géométrie.” Les Études philos-
ophiques 1 (1978), 13–24; his brilliant comments on ἰδόντι (17) describe perfectly the effect of
Socrates’ diagram on the slaveboy.
48
 See Szlezák, “Sokrates’ Spott,” 82–84.
49
 Men. 86b6–c2.
138 Chapter 2

Confronted with our lack of ἐπιστήμη and an awareness of ἃ μή τις οἶδεν

(cf. Chrm. 170d1–3), Socrates is willing to shoulder the task (ἄργοι is
derived from the negation of ἔργον) of fighting vigorously for the λόγος that
persuades us to be neither ἄργοι nor cowardly. Nor, as Socrates’ prospec-
tive remarks on Recollection have already made even clearer—remarks that
begin with the kind of claim he will not dispute vigorously—is the resulting
contrast with Euthydemus merely accidental:

Socrates: For as all nature is akin, and the soul [ἡ ψυχή] has learned all things
[ἅπαντα], there is no reason why we should not, by remembering but one thing
only [ἓν μόνον]—an act which men call learning—discover everything else [τἆλλα
πάντα], if one is courageous [ἀνδρεῖος] and not faint in the search [participial form
of ζητεῖν]; since, it would seem, investigating [τὸ ζητεῖν] and learning are wholly
recollection. So we must not hearken to that captious argument [ὁ ἐριστικὸς λόγος]:
it would make us idle [ἄργοί], and is pleasing only to the indolent ear, whereas the
other makes us energetic [ἐργατικοί] and inquiring [ζητητικοί].50

Leaving for later the link to Euthydemus created by something resembling

the claim that the soul, in coming to know one thing, might proceed to learn
all of them (cf. Euthd. 293d5), the first point for now is that Socrates’ use of
ὁ ἐριστικὸς λόγος—indeed he has used the same word to describe Meno’s
objection from the start (Men. 80e2)—recalls the earlier dialogue. This means
that both the geometry-based demonstration of Recollection and the objection
posed by Meno to which it is a response allude to Euthydemus.
While it is comparatively uncontroversial to claim that the purpose of
Euthydemus is to teach us the nature of ἐριστικοὶ λόγοι, or that the very first of
the brothers’ sophisms would tend to make us ἄργοί if we believed that neither
the wise nor the ignorant are able to learn,51 the notion that the First Protreptic
is also an ἐριστικὸς λόγος would be highly controversial if anyone were even to
consider it. But it is not impossible to see that Socrates’ argument there encour-
ages the ἀνδρεῖοι to be ἄργοί unless they have a kind of ἐπιστήμη that, despite
the reassurance of Cleinias that it can taught, doesn’t even exist. And the fact
that there is a third allusion to Euthydemus in this passage should indicate that at
least some controversy about the second is appropriate.
It is generally agreed that both the ninth and tenth sophisms in Euthyde-
mus are connected to Recollection in Meno; the passage just quoted relates
to the ninth.52 The reference to knowing “one thing only” (ἓν μόνον) has

50
 Men. 81c9–e1 (Lamb modified).
51
 Cf. Hawtrey, Commentary, 66 (on 276d7): “The sophism seems therefore to have an affinity with
the eristic argument in Meno 80d-e (that one can search neither for what one knows, because one
knows it already, nor for what one does not know, because one will not recognize it when one
comes upon it) and to presuppose (as a final solution) the ἀνάμνησις theory in the Meno.”
52
 For the numbering used here, see Hawtrey, Commentary.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 139

prompted two German scholars to define the parameters of their nation’s

twentieth-century reception of Plato: Paul Friedländer discovers the serious
teaching behind the joke in the Idea of the Good “which confers both the
power of knowing to the thinker and the reality of being to the objects of
cognizance,”53 while Hans Joachim Krämer goes him one better by finding
the Prinzipienlehre in the word “one [ἕν]:”54 if we know τὸ ἕν—which for
Krämer is likewise Friedländer’s Idea of the Good55—we do in fact know all
things.56 Although both of them acknowledge the link to Meno,57 a character-
istic “quest for the essential”58 tends to obscure the serious point behind the
joke: Plato has linked Meno to Euthydemus. My claim is that this purpose is
sufficiently serious without dragging in either the Good or the One. But it is
not sufficient for my purpose simply to link these two dialogues, and it is the
tenth sophism that suggests why Laches, Charmides, Gorgias, and Theages
are interpolated between them.
As R. S. W. Hawtrey amiably suggests, the question “‘Why did Plato write
the Euthydemus?’ may be curtailed, in outrageously Euthydemian fashion, to
‘Why did Plato write?’”59 By building a global interpretation of his dialogues
around “Plato the Teacher,” I have answered that question in a manner that
might perhaps pass muster with Hawtrey, who wrote:

I have no space to argue my opinion on this subject [sc. ‘it seems to border
on impertinence to attempt to interpret the dialogues without considering the
purpose of their composition’] in detail, but I feel that few of Plato’s readers
will disagree with me if I say that Plato’s fundamental purpose is ethical—he
wants to make men good—and that his chosen means for reaching his aim is
by education.60

53
 Paul Friedländer, Plato, three volumes, translated by Hans Meyerhoff (New York: Bollingen,
1958–1964), 2.192.
54
 The Problem of the One and the Many—see Guardians in Action, §11—is implicit in Hawtrey,
Commentary 154 (on 296c1f.); with πάντα and ἅπαντα, cf. “both” and “each” in Paul Woodruff
(ed.), Plato, Hippias Major; Translated with Commentary and Essay (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1982), 79–84.
55
 See Krämer, Arete bei Platon und Aristoteles, especially 135–136.
56
 Krämer, Arete bei Platon und Aristoteles, 235n183: “Man vergleiche etwa, wie Platon im Euthy-
dem 295a–302e in dem Streitgespräch, das die Unfähigkeit der Scheinphilosophen entlarvt,
zugleich doppelbödig mit den wichtigen Gedanken der Präexistenz der Seele, der Anamnesis und
der παρουσία είδών spielt.” For criticism of Krämer, see Hermann Keulen, Untersuchungen zu
Platons Euthydemus (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1971), 49–56.
57
 For Krämer, see previous note; cf. Friedländer, Plato, 2.186 and 192.
58
 Friedländer, Plato, 1.8: “The more a person’s life is concerned with a quest for the essential, the
more likely he is perceive a symbolic meaning in what is happening before his eyes.”
59
 Hawtrey, Commentary, 16.
60
 Hawtrey, Commentary, 17; for additional attention to the educational value of Euthd., see Scol-
nicov, “Plato’s Euthydemus,” and more recently Samuel Scolnicov, Euthydemus: Ethics and
Language (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2013).
140 Chapter 2

In any case, the Introduction to his commentary on Euthydemus is filled with

good sense:

The main purpose of the eristic sections, then, is gymnastic; the student who is
led by them to understand the mechanics of fallacy (or at least certain types of
fallacy) will obviously be better equipped both for positive philosophical train-
ing and for the avoidance of being trapped either by false doctrines or by the
morbid condition, possibly even worse in its effects, of ‘misology.’61

Nowhere is Hawtrey’s assessment better illustrated than in the tenth soph-

ism (Euthd. 295b2–296d4),62 a masterpiece that couples gymnastic training
in fallacy with philosophical inoculation against it. The latter comes in the
form of five useful expressions, most of which Plato coins for the purpose.
The first is ἀντερωτᾶν (Euthd. 295b2), which basically means to answer a
question with a (clarifying) question, that is, “to ask in reply”; Euthydemus
demands to know if Socrates is not ashamed to do this. The second expres-
sion—unlike ἀντερωτᾶν, it appears elsewhere in the dialogues including
Protagoras (Prt. 344a4–5)—is to reply πρὸς ἔπος (Euthd. 295c6), that is,
to respond to the point of the questioner’s question.63 The verb διαστέλλειν
(Euthd. 295d1) is then used by Socrates to describe picking apart the words
of another: “to make distinctions in what he said.”64 Another coinage is
προσαποκρίνεσθαι (Euthd. 296a1), to answer (ἀποκρίνεσθαι) more than was
asked, that is, to make a clarifying addition—hence the addition of πρός—as
part of one’s answer. The fifth, like the previous one, is placed in the mouth
of Euthydemus; Socrates effectively resists his method of questioning by
embodying προσαποκρίνεσθαι in a clarifying παράφθεγμα (Euthd. 296b7)—
“qualification added” (LSJ)—as in adding a qualifying “the things that
I know” (Euthd. 296b5–6; cf. 296c8) to the end of “by the same thing I am
always (ἀεί) knowing” (Euthd. 296a5–7).
It is true that Euthydemus looks farther forward than Meno or even Repub-
lic: our awareness of this deceptive use of ἀεί,65 for example—which can
range from “every time” (I do a thing) to “always” and even “eternally”—will
be tested in Timaeus and Philebus.66 But what we learn about it in the tenth
sophism is more directly linked to the way Socrates has just used it in the
Eudaemonist Shortcut in Symposium: since we always are aiming at what

61
 Hawtrey, Commentary, 20.
62
 See Hawtrey, Commentary, 149–155.
63
 See Hawtrey, Commentary, 151 (on 295e6).
64
 See Hawtrey, Commentary, 152 (on 295d1); with this comment, cf. with “the bridge too far” temp-
tation mentioned at the beginning of this section.
65
 Cf. Smp. 205a7, 206a9, and 206e7–207a4.
66
 See Guardians in Action, 42–43 and 238.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 141

would make us happy (Smp. 205a1–7), we aim to be happy forever (Smp.

206a9–13). All such connections fall under the rubric of advanced gymnastic
training in fallacy: Euthydemus is worth our time because it alerts us to tech-
niques we will encounter often enough in what lies ahead as well as in what
we have already encountered, especially in Lysis. But as already indicated,
there are also more direct verbal connections, and it isn’t Meno alone, only
Meno primarily,67 that unmistakably echoes Euthydemus: the first of such
echoes with respect to Reading Order is in Charmides,68 although Hawtrey’s
remarks about “misology,” quoted above, offer some support for my earlier
suggestion about Laches, as the intermittent μισόλογος, and “the musical.”
The tenth sophism ends with what Hawtrey calls “an almost hymnic recita-
tion of ages”69 that uses the slippery ἀεί to derive a future of knowing from
the kind of distant past we will encounter again in Meno:

Then he [sc. Euthydemus] went on: “You may therefore add on now whatever
you please: for you admit that you know all things.” “It seems I do,” I replied,
“seeing that my “the things I know [ἃ ἐπίσταμαι]” has no force, I then know
everything.” “Now you have also admitted that you always know by that by
which you know [ἐπίστασθαι τούτῳ ᾧ ἐπίστασαι], whenever you know—or
however you like to put it. For you have admitted always to know and at the
same time all things [ἀεὶ ἐπίστασθαι καὶ ἅμα πάντα]. Hence it is clear that even
as a child you knew, both when you were being born and when you were being
conceived: and before you yourself came into being [πρὶν αὐτὸς γενέσθαι] or
heaven and earth existed, you knew all things, since you always know. Yes,
and I declare,” he said, “you yourself will always know all things, if it be my
pleasure.”70

But how much like Meno is this? Despite the fact that Socrates has been
at considerable pains to identify—by means of the kind of qualifying and
clarifying παραφθέγματα that Plato is teaching us how to use—this τούτῳ by
which he always knows the things that he knows with the soul (Euthd. 295e5),
Euthydemus has resisted, and this passage shows why. Socrates already knew

67
 See Jon Moline, “Meno’s Paradox?” Phronesis 14, no. 2 (1969), 153–161, on 159n20: “the para-
dox Socrates charges Meno with having ‘recalled’ resembles one which was in effect ‘banished’ at
Euthydemus 277b–278b.” Cf. McCabe, “Escaping One’s Own Notice,” 252: “the cross-references
between the two dialogues might encourage us to think that there is a critical relation between
them. After all, the Euthydemus seems to give us an exhaustive account of what it might be to call
an argument eristic (as Socrates complains of Meno’s version of the paradox at Meno 80e2). And
the shocking prospect of Socrates’ taking the easy route to knowledge in the Euthydemus reminds
us of his own complaint that the eristic argument encourages us to be lazy (Meno 81d6).” Naturally
McCabe is not inclined to see Men. as being critical of Euthd. (see 254) despite the evidence she
has ably presented here that it is.
68
 See Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, 4.276 and 281.
69
 Hawtrey, Commentary, 155.
70
 Euthd. 296c4–d4.
142 Chapter 2

all things not only before he was born—as in Meno, thanks to the pre-embod-
ied existence of the soul—but πρὶν αὐτὸς γενέσθαι, that is, before even the
pre-birth and pre-Socratic αὐτός, that has only now become “Socrates,” had
“itself” come into being. Hawtrey maintains that there is no content for this
τούτῳ by design: Euthydemus only needs “something by which” we always
know whenever we know, so that he can shift that “always” from the under-
determined means to the eternity of knowing. But we must ask: what else,
other than ἡ ψύχη, could this indefinite “by which [τούτῳ] we know” possibly
be? The obvious answer is that we know what we know when we know it by
means of knowledge: it is by ἐπιστήμη that we always know.
The scope of ἐπιστήμη as σοφία is rendered absurdly large in the First Pro-
treptic because it is shown to guarantee success and εὐτυχία through “doing
well” whatever it is that we do. Naturally it is only because of a specific
ἐπιστήμη that flute-players play their instruments well and thus εὖ πράττειν;
the σοφία that would ensure “doing well” across the board does not exist.
To say nothing of the indispensable role of actual “good luck,” this kind of
εὐτυχία-guaranteeing σοφία—a kind of knowledge that would always (ἀεί)
allow us to succeed—would require mastering all of the individual ἐπιστήμαι
(plural).
Although little has been said about the Second Protreptic—partly because
the άπορία in which it ends will reappear in Charmides, more importantly
because it is the First upon which the Socratists must rely—the search for a
higher level, “superordinate,” or second-order ἐπιστήμη that could preside
over the others and direct their right use, will fail, and fail spectacularly
thanks to what immediately precedes Crito’s Interruption. The Second Pro-
treptic therefore does little to alleviate any doubts that may have arisen about
the First; no less significantly, we reach a parallel absurdity even later in
Euthydemus thanks to the link between ἀεί and knowing in the tenth sophism.
This takes the form of another impossibly large extension of ἐπιστήμη:
now it must know the past, the present, and, most absurd of all, the future. It is
true that the most memorable passage in Meno will emerge from the bizarre
embryo of the tenth sophism in Euthydemus, but Recollection only looks back
to the past, and for a reminder of how little we know about it—even if all that
means for some is that Socrates makes us wonder whether or not he believes
in Recollection himself—Plato will make us wait. How little Socrates can
foresee the future effects of his company on others is the subject of Theages
(see §13), and the eschatological myth in Gorgias will illustrate how very
little of our own future we actually know (see §12). But the relationship of
ἐπιστήμη to past, present, and future—carried to absurd lengths thanks to the
shenanigans of Euthydemus—is a theme that connects Charmides to Laches,
and even without reference to Nicias’ disastrous reliance on soothsayers at
Syracuse (see §7). As I will show in the next section, “the knowledge of good
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 143

and bad,” celebrated by Socratists as the serious core of both dialogues, will
require an ἐπιστήμη of the future thanks to the fact that Laches is the first
stage of the journey between Euthydemus and Meno.

§6. SOCRATISM AND THE KNOWLEDGE

OF GOOD AND BAD

In the course of introducing Penner’s “The Unity of Virtue” in a volume she

prepared for Oxford Readings in Philosophy, Gail Fine writes: “Laches tells
us that virtue is knowledge of goods and evils.”71 She uses this dialogue in
particular to introduce two different approaches to UV: while Penner claims
that “the names of the virtues . . . refer to the same thing” (Fine calls this
“IV,” for “Identity of the Virtues”), Vlastos, whose Socrates “believes that the
names of the virtues are non-synonymous and refer to different things,” had
triggered the Problem of the One and the Many by naming his most famous
article on the subject “The Unity of the Virtues in the Protagoras.”72 Starting
with Vlastos and ending with Penner and Rowe via Irwin, this section will
begin by reviewing the Socratist approach to UV in both Laches and Char-
mides with special attention to the possibility that both dialogues teach us, as
Fine claims about Laches, “that virtue is knowledge of goods and evils.”73
And it would seem from the start that Vlastos is at a disadvantage in the con-
test: if two different dialogues about two different virtues both teach us KGB,
that is a strong argument for UV in the IV form of it embraced not only by
Penner but by all three scholars Vlastos called “PTI.”
But Vlastos requires no sympathy from us as a polemicist; at a disadvan-
tage or not, he never wavers in his firm response to PTI. What demands our

71
 Fine, “Introduction,” 8; the next sentence is worth quoting as well (emphasis in the original):
“Elsewhere it emerges that what Socrates really means is that virtue is knowledge of what is good
and evil for oneself.” Note the influence (7n22 and 9n31) of C. C. W. Taylor, “Platonic Ethics”
in Stephen Everson (ed.), Cambridge Companions to Ancient Thought, volume 4; Ethics, 49–76
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), which introduces its “broadly egoistic”
vocabulary with emphasis on “one’s own interest” on 49, and adds on 50: “by morality I under-
stand a socially regulated system of norms imposing restraints on the pursuit of self-interest.”
72
 Fine, “Introduction,” 7.
73
 Especially on the verge of turning to La., some comment must be made about the lack of attention
here to Daniel T. Devereux, whose “Courage and Wisdom in Plato’s Laches.” Journal of the His-
tory of Philosophy 15, no. 2 (April 1977), 129–141, “The Unity of the Virtues in Plato’s Protago-
ras and Laches.” Philosophical Review 101, no. 4 (October 1992), 765–789, “Socrates’ Kantian
Conception of Virtue.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 33, no. 3 (July 1995), 341–408, and
“The Relationship between Justice and Happiness in Plato’s Republic.” Proceedings of the Boston
Area Colloquium in Philosophy 20, no. 1 (2005), 265–305, place his conception of Plato far closer
to mine—he could never have written a line like Fine’s “Laches tells us that virtue is knowledge of
goods and evils”—than that of the more radical Socratists with whom I am in dialogue; indeed it is
precisely the greater distance that makes them more illuminating in a dialectical sense.
144 Chapter 2

sympathy while commanding our admiration, however, is that he allows

us to see him struggling. Fortunately, the final form of his views—and
thus the result of his struggles—is embodied in a posthumously published
article called “The Protagoras and the Laches,”74 and this is the text I will
discuss below. But it is worth mentioning that in addition to “The Unity of
the Virtues in Protagoras” in its original form (1971), he published not only
a revised version of it in Platonic Studies, but then revised that revision in
the collection’s second edition (1981).75 While the Appendix to that version
(“The Argument in Laches 197e ff.”) is superseded by the later piece I will be
considering, it nevertheless contains several noteworthy insights on matters
not touched upon there, especially about Nicias.76 Although Vlastos is famous
among his critics for detaching arguments from their dramatic context, these
remarks show that he is significantly more skillful in discussing the Play of
Character than many of the Socratists who followed in his wake.77
The basic move in “The Protagoras and the Laches” (hereafter “PAL”) is
vintage Vlastos: although he lacked the proper terminology, what Plato was
trying to say is that there is a distinction between “the wisdom required for
morally wise choice of ends and, on the other, for devising optimally effec-
tive means to morally unweighted ends.”78 In the light of subsequent PTI-
inspired developments, Vlastos’ application of the term “moral” to Socratism
is admirable, as is his attempt to preserve it by creating a distinction that
his most radical critics will collapse. Unfortunately, he misses two impor-
tant points. First of all, it is because Laches retains a clear sense of what is
καλόν—enabling him to distinguish from courage the “morally unweighted”
kinds of “wise endurance” Socrates uses to challenge the definition—that
constitutes the best text-imminent evidence (La. 193a3–b4), not the ana­
chronistic fact/value distinction to which Vlastos points.79 More importantly,
Vlastos does not grasp that Plato uses the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy to force those
of us who have glimpsed τὸ καλόν to distinguish for ourselves the difference
between “doing well” in a moral sense—by the unequivocal καλῶς πράττειν
when need be (Alc. 116b2)—and the active and middle senses, congenial to
CA and UV, of “(successfully) doing (things) well” that all too easily offers
radical Socratism a proudly and even belligerently non-moral end, especially

74
 See Myles Burnyeat, “Editor’s Preface” in Vlastos, Socratic Studies, ix–xi, on x.
75
 Vlastos, Platonic Studies, 221–265, 266–269, 418–423, and 427–445.
76
 See Vlastos, Platonic Studies, 268–269, beginning with: “That Plato should be at pains to discredit
Nicias as a spokesman for Socratic knowledge is only what we would expect.” Cf. Devereux,
“Courage and Wisdom,” 135.
77
 Cf. Julius Caesar, III. 2. 117: “I fear there will a worse come in his place.”
78
 Gregory Vlastos, “The Protagoras and the Laches” in Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 108–126, on 116.
79
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 110–111.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 145

when deceptively conflated with “faring well” or “being happy,” as it will be

again in Charmides.
PAL’s highpoint, especially in the context of the ROPD, is its thesis:
because Laches, thanks to Socrates’ leading questions as well as his sense
of what’s καλόν, rejects three examples of “courage” that validated a purely
technical conception of that virtue in Protagoras,80 Laches must have been
written later, and for a beautiful reason indeed:

I submit that the simplest explanation of this fact is an advance in moral insight
in Plato’s own understanding of the true intent of the Socratic conception of
courage as wisdom: when Plato has come to write the Laches he has seen clearly
what he had not yet seen when he wrote the Protagoras—that the wisdom which
accounts for the brave man’s courage has everything to do with moral insight,
and nothing to do with technical skill.81

As his rejection of two presumably non-“philosophical” hypotheses about

“Plato’s intent in composing his dialogues” indicates,82 Reading Order isn’t
on Vlastos radar screen, and since he gives an emphatically negative answer
to the question “Does Socrates Cheat?” in his magnum opus83—a rejection
of the condition of its possibility is the closest Vlastos comes to recognizing
Plato’s use of basanistic pedagogy84—he can only resolve the discrepancy
between Laches and Protagoras on the basis of Order of Composition.85

80
 On La. 193b5–c12 and Prt. 349e8–350a5, see Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 117: “Plato could hardly
have introduced the same three examples in the Laches [sc. ‘expert divers, skilled cavalrymen,
and skilled peltasts and bowmen (Pr. 350a)’] unless he were deliberately contrasting the position
he gives Socrates here with the one allowed him in the Protagoras.” Cf. David Lévystone, “Le
courage et les mots de la peur dans le Lachès et le Protagoras.” Phoenix 60, no. 3/4 (Fall–Winter,
2006), 346–363.
81
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 117. Cf. Jacqueline de Romilly, “Réflexions sur le courage chez
Thucydide et chez Platon.” Revue des Études Grecques 93, no. 442/444 (July–December 1980),
307–323, on 312.
82
 As described in Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 125–126, they are (1) Plato is a biographer, not a phi-
losopher, and (2) Kahn’s “‘proleptic’ hypothesis.” Instead of confronting the substance of the lat-
ter, he goes after Kahn’s chronological eccentricities, particularly with regard to Charles H. Kahn,
“Drama and Dialectic in Plato’s Gorgias.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1 (1983), 76–121,
dedicated to Vlastos (75n1); as a further sign of his dominance at the time, this inaugural issue
also included Gregory Vlastos, “The Socratic Elenchus.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1
(1983), 27–58, and “Afterthoughts on the Elenchus,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1
(1983), 71–74.
83
 See Vlastos, Socrates, 132–156; see also 275–280 on Hp. Mi. (discussed in Ascent to the Beauti-
ful, §11). Typical is 155n93: “We may agree with Klosko (1983: 363–374 [i.e., Klosko, “Criteria
of Fallacy and Sophistry”] that from his interlocutor’s point of view Socrates’ arguments are
‘extremely poor,’ but not that ‘Socrates could not help but be aware of this’ (373).”
84
 See Vlastos, Socrates, 156.
85
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 125: “we have no option but to regard the Laches as composed after
the Protagoras.” Note that my approach affirms this claim in substance—that is, La. deliberately
contradicts Prt. and therefore in some sense “comes after it”—while making no claims about any
change of mind thanks to a chronology-free version of Kahn’s “‘proleptic’ hypothesis.” See §11.
146 Chapter 2

But the fact that he privileges Laches over Protagoras demonstrates as

clearly as anything could two important facts about Vlastos: he continuously
struggled ἀνδρικῶς to understand more clearly the problems he found most
disturbing, and thanks to his vivid sense of what is moral, he always remained
closer in spirit to Plato than the Socratists who followed his lead and whose
more radical approach to “the philosophy of Socrates” he had made possible.
Beginning with his classic 1956 introduction to Protagoras, Vlastos struggled
with “this wide-ranging and sprawling dialogue,”86 characteristically holding
that even though both its hedonistic premise and the Socratic Paradox were
false,87 they nevertheless reflected accurately what Plato held to be true for
Socrates at the time that he asserted them.88 It is no accident that “T” in PTI is
the author of a commentary on Protagoras, and that all three regarded as not
only true of Socratism but even as constitutively true of it, the very things that
stuck in Vlastos’ craw. As Taylor suggests while acknowledging the Santas
Circle (see §2), the best way to render it non-vicious is to identify the good
and the bad in KGB with Pleasure and Pain.89
As already suggested, Vlastos struggled with the interpretation of Laches,90
and his final solution is to evaluate its two principal arguments as follows:
(1) he defends the first by showing that the non-moral objections to “wise
endurance” do not count against it, allowing a post-Protagoras account of
courage to stand when based on “moral wisdom,” and (2) he upholds as valid
what he calls “TAL”—“the Terminal Argument in the Laches”91 that Socrates
uses against courage as KGB—on its explicitly stated basis: that it contra-
dicts the argument’s earliest premise: “Courage is a part of virtue” (hereafter
“CPV”).92 As a matter of argumentative strategy, the two hang together: in
order to leave a “moral wisdom” version of “(1)” standing at the end, Vlastos
must show that “(2)” succeeds, and since he had never had much sympathy

86
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 116.
87
 Vlastos, “Introduction,” xliv: “The trouble with Socrates is not so much that he was wrong on this
point [i.e., SP] (and I, for one, unquestionably think he was) as that his method [cf. the text cited
in the following note, where Vlastos describes his method] did not provide him with the means
by which he would be likely to correct, or at least suspect, his own error.” More striking, perhaps,
is xl-xli: “For hedonism is not in keeping with the general temper or method of Socratic ethics.”
88
 See Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 125.
89
 Considerably better than inadvertent self-contradiction, however amiable, as in Daniel Devereux,
“Virtue and Happiness in Plato” in Christopher Bobonich (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Ancient Ethics, 53–71 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), on 17: “Virtuous
activity, insofar as it is constitutive of happiness, is desired for its own sake.” Cf. Taylor, “Platonic
Ethics,” 50n2: “virtue is at least partly [emphasis mine] constitutive of eudaimonia, and is intrinsi-
cally valuable qua [at least partly] constituent of eudaimonia.” See also his distillation of the First
Protreptic on 60n21: “success in life is a skilled activity.” What joins the two is εὖ πράττειν; more
on this important point below.
90
 See Burnyeat’s “Introduction” to Vlastos, Socratic Studies, x.
91
 See Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 117–124. For a continental response to the problematic, see Bernd
Manuwald, “Die Schlussaporie in Platons Laches.” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 143, no.
2 (2000), 179–191.
92
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 118.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 147

for a Protagoras-based (or IV) version of UV,93 the argumentative core of

PAL is directed against PTI, and in particular against their view that TAL’s
purpose is tacitly to uphold UV by making CPV the premise to be refuted:

This unusual interpretation of the logical structure of the argument [i.e., that
CPV is ‘the refutand’], first suggested casually by Santas, was then adopted in
all seriousness (without reference to Santas) and argued for in a paper by Penner
and, soon after, received influential support in Taylor’s commentary on the Pro-
tagoras and in Irwin’s Plato’s Moral Theory. In Penner, Taylor, and Irwin this
interpretation is predicated on the assumption that the doctrine of the “unity of
the virtues” in the Protagoras is an affirmation of their identity.94

So eager, in fact, is Vlastos to uphold the validity of TAL—his principal

concern is to show that the copula is consistently used to indicate identity95—
that he pays no critical attention to the fact that the argument presupposes
our ability to know the future,96 already implied as impossible thanks to the
refashioning of εὐτυχία in the First Protreptic and then marked as ridiculous
in the tenth sophism of Euthydemus (see §5). It is therefore without substan-
tive comment that he lists “courage is knowledge of future goods and evils”97
as the sixth stage of a logically valid argument without wondering whether
this kind of knowledge—as well as the knowledge of past and present (goods
and evils)98—is available to anyone. Despite their differences from Vlastos
on the validity of this argument and its purport, the more radical Socratists
will share his amnesia about the intrinsic epistemic opacity of the future
overlooked in TAL, and thus fail to see why a dialogue on courage—since
“fearful things are future evils; confidence-sustaining things are future
goods”99—is the perfect place to introduce KGB as intrinsically impossible.100

93
 See João Paulo de Oliviera Teixera, “O Laques e o Protágoras Segundo Vlastos.” Revista Classica
28, no. 2 (2015), 209–217, on 217.
94
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 121–122.
95
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 118–121.
96
 Cf. Chris Emlyn-Jones, Plato, Laches; Text, with Introduction, Commentary and Vocabulary
(London: Bristol Classical Press, 1996), 14 on (2).
97
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 118.
98
 The seventh stage of TAL in Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 118 is: “knowledge of future good and evil
is the same as knowledge of all good and evil, be it future, present, or past (198d–199a).” Chrm.
174a4–6 will be discussed later in this section.
99
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 118 (third stage); cf. Vlastos, Platonic Studies, 266.
100
 Vlastos once again demonstrates his moral excellence with the example he uses to explain how
“knowledge of future good and evil is the same as knowledge of all good and evil, be it future,
present, or past,” the seventh stage of TAL, in Socratic Studies, 121: “If a given proposition—say,
that death would be better than dereliction of duty in the battle tomorrow—constitutes knowledge
of good and evil, the truth of the proposition would be unaffected if ‘tomorrow’ were replaced by
‘today’ or by ‘yesterday’ or by an expression referring to any other occasion in the past.” With
the moral excellence of this example, cf. Santas, “Socrates at Work,” 443–444; we will meet it
again in Irwin.
148 Chapter 2

As suggested earlier, the weakness of Vlastos’ otherwise amiable attempt

to valorize “moral wisdom” in Laches against the craft-cleverness of Pro-
tagoras101 is that it forces him to ignore the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy in both
Euthydemus and Charmides, and thus he must see progress in both dialogues
because happiness (εὖ πράττειν as passive), unlike mere craft-efficiency (εὖ
πράττειν as active), must have a moral end.102 With respect to Charmides,
Vlastos achieves this result by sharply distinguishing KGB as an intrinsi-
cally moral wisdom from the lesson he insightfully extracts from Socrates’
dream, “an imaginary world,” felicitously identified by Michael Ferejohn as a
“thought-experiment.”103 He summarizes what follows magisterially, finding
in “crown” a beautiful translation for τέλος (Chrm. 173d6) while at the same
time suggesting the complexity of Critias’ response as a whole (173d6–7), a
problem I will revisit at the end of this section:

Blessed with such pervasive knowledge of the crafts and practical arts in that
sort of world, would it follow that we would be happy [cf. εὖ πράττειν at Chrm.
173d4 and d7]? This we have been unable to learn, Socrates insists (173a-d).
Critias, still resisting, replies, “But if you denigrate knowledge, you will not
easily find the crown of happiness [τὸ εὖ πράττειν] in anything else.” He has
missed the point (or is pretending to have missed it): Socrates had done nothing
to denigrate knowledge as such. What he had done was bring home the truth that
one sort of knowledge—technical mastery of the instrumentalities of life—can-
not be the sort of knowledge in terms of which temperance (or any other virtue)
may be defined, if it is agreed that virtue ensures our happiness.104

Unlike the more radical Socratists to whom it is now necessary to turn, Vlas-
tos does not compromise himself by finding in what Socrates says to Critias
at Charmides 174b11–c3 the kind of KGB he could defend as Socratic.
Particularly in Plato’s Moral Theory, Irwin provides evidence of the
benign and continuing influence of Vlastos. To take an instance relevant to
the Play of Character—insight about which is by no means Irwin’s strong
suit—he acknowledges on his own, while also citing Vlastos, the relevance
about what we learn from Thucydides about Nicias and those who profess to
know future goods and evils.105 A subtler but more revealing indication of his

101
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 116.
102
 See Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 116.
103
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 114 and 114n6; the reference is to Michael T. Ferejohn, “Socratic
Thought-Experiments and the Unity of Virtue Paradox.” Phronesis 29, no. 2 (1984), 105–122,
on 113; note also 121: “to call it [sc. Prt. 351–360] a ‘defense’ of UV, as Irwin does ([Plato’s
Moral Theory] 88), is vague, and to call it a ‘positive argument’ for UV, as Gosling and Taylor
do ([Greeks on Pleasure] 54), is too strong.” I must emphasize once a gain the greater dialectical
usefulness of the more or rather most radical Socratists.
104
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 114–115.
105
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 303n65.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 149

teacher’s continuing effect is paradoxically most visible when he is explain-

ing, against Vlastos, how UV can be used to explain the identity of courage,
justice, and temperance:

Does UV rule out all distinctions between the virtues? Socrates will hardly
agree that they are distinct branches of a science, as arithmetic and geometry
are branches of mathematics,106 since they do not have their own subject-matter
and principles. A brave man will act from wise confidence, because he owes it
to his fellow-citizens, and because he rejects any intemperate desire for safety;
the knowledge he needs could equally well be called courage, temperance or
justice.107

Illustrating UV with the example of safety-eschewing self-sacrifice for the

city’s good is not the kind of thing we should expect to find in Penner.
From the standpoint of Reading Order, Irwin’s most interesting insights
relate to his ongoing assumption, about which he is especially insistent in
Plato’s Ethics, that Laches follows Charmides, and in both books he consis-
tently discusses Charmides first. But in a footnote to Plato’s Moral Theory,
the evidence he uses to show that Plato’s thinking has developed between
Charmides and Laches—in accordance with the Order of Composition para-
digm—is the same evidence I would use to validate reversing those positions
with respect to the ROPD: the fuller treatment Irwin astutely emphasizes in
Laches is what makes possible, from a pedagogical perspective, the admit-
tedly truncated references to exactly the same issues in Charmides:

Here as elsewhere the Laches develops and defends positions assumed in the
Charmides: e.g., (1) the Laches develops the Charmides’ claim that concern for
virtue must refer to a state of the soul; Chrm. 157a-c, La. 185b-d; (2) the Laches
explains what the Charmides assumes, the kind of Socratic definition which is
preferable to a list of behavioral examples; (3) the Laches presses further the
Charmides’ suggestion that a virtue may be indistinguishable from knowledge
of good and evil.108

It is easy to see how these examples are more plausibly explained by the
alternative paradigm.
Although Irwin turns to Laches for the sake of UV, he wonders about the
lack of any non-cognitive elements in courage just as he did in the case of

106
 Cf. Vlastos, Platonic Studies, 418–423 (“Parts of Virtue”), especially 421 and the attached note
(421–22n6).
107
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 302n62; I have deleted “(a)” before “Socrates”; the quoted passage
is followed by “(b).”
108
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 302n59; I have expanded some abbreviations, modified others.
150 Chapter 2

temperance in the earlier section on Charmides.109 In Plato’s Moral Theory,

he ends the Laches section by acknowledging that defining courage as
KGB (he prefers to call it only “KG”) “would be absurd if it were meant to
analyze “the ordinary concept of virtue,” and then adds: “KG will not reveal
very much about brave actions or provide the paradigm Socrates needs in a
definition, unless some further account of the good is found.”110 This, unfor-
tunately, Irwin will discover only in the chapter on Protagoras that follows.111
While admitting in the Laches section’s crucial footnote that “Socrates does
not explicitly endorse UV,” he upholds Nicias’ definition as “Socratic,” while
also citing its use in Protagoras (Prt. 360d4–5);112 these become the key steps
in viewing TAL as indirectly upholding UV by tacitly refuting its CPV prem-
ise.113 Finding no problem with the proposition that “courage is knowledge
of future goods and evils,”114 Irwin justifies the argument’s next step with:
“someone who claims knowledge of future goods should be justified by gen-
eral principles about goods and evils without temporal restrictions.”115
Irwin’s account of Charmides depends heavily on the way he reads Chrm.
174b11–c3, which he summarizes in Plato’s Moral Theory as “1. Only
knowledge of good and evil always benefits us.”116 On this “first step” he goes
on to comment, citing the passage again:

The first step, like the previous discussion of self-knowledge, assumes the truth
of KSV [i.e., that “knowledge is sufficient for virtue”]; otherwise Socrates
would have no reason to believe that knowledge of the good could avoid misuse,
or that it would be sufficient for happiness (174b11–c3). Once KSV is assumed,
he can readily infer that temperance must be the superordinate science of good
and evil; something else would be required for temperance if it included some
distinctive affective [cf. non-cognitive] condition, but KSV rules that out.
Socrates offers no reason for doubt about the first three steps, and they allow no
escape. The argument works for any virtue, with Socrates’ usual assumptions
about virtue and happiness plus KSV, and commits him to UV.117

109
 Particularly in Plato’s Ethics, 39 and 40–41.
110
 All quotations in this sentence are in Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 89.
111
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 89–90.
112
 As Vlastos did in his pre-PAL account of TAL: see Platonic Studies, 267, where he adds to these
two its modified reappearance in the Shorter Way (R. 429c–430b). Note that at this stage, he
squares his acceptance of Nicias’ definition as Socratic with the CPV (“6” in this context) it is used
to overthrow as follows: “Socrates is not underwriting the argument which leads to 6, but has laid
it on only to test [N.B.] Nicias’ understanding of the definition.”
113
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 302n62; cf. Vlastos, Platonic Studies, 422–423.
114
 Cf. Michael T. Ferejohn, “Socratic Virtue as the Parts of Itself.” Philosophy and Phenomenologi-
cal Research 44, no. 3 (March 1984), 377–388, on 386–388.
115
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 89; the footnote attached to this last quotation (302n60) further natu-
ralizes the fundamental strangeness of an argument rests on knowledge of the future.
116
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 88.
117
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 88.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 151

Nor has his enthusiasm for 174b11–c3 dimmed in Plato’s Ethics, where he
uses it to justify what he calls “the extreme claim” that “the only science that
produces a good is the science of good and evil”:

Socrates seems to accept the extreme claim, since he assumes that the super­
ordinate science [sc. the same one we famously fail to discover in Euthd.] of
good and evil is sufficient for happiness (174b11–c3). He does not suggest that
any non-cognitive condition [cf. ‘temperance as self-control and self-restraint’
on 39] is necessary for happiness.118

At the risk of polluting the sunnily systematic Socratism of this section

with Plato’s own words, here is what he writes at Charmides 174b11–c3,
when Socrates responds to Critias’ suggestion that the ἐπιστήμη that makes
us happy (cf. 174a10–11) is that by which we know τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ τὸ κακόν:

“Vile creature! [ὦ μιαρέ],” I said, “you have all this time been dragging me
round in a circle, while concealing the fact that it was not the life according to
knowledge [τὸ ἐπιστημόνως ζῆν] that produces doing well and being happy [τὸ
εὖ πράττειν τε καὶ εὐδαιμονεῖν ποιοῦν], not even if it be knowledge of all the
other knowledges together, but only if it is of this single one concerning good
and bad.”119

“Vile creature” is a good translation as far as it goes, but since Plato uses ὦ
μιαρέ only twice in the dialogue—the first is addressed to Charmides (Chrm.
161b8), when Socrates suggests that it is from Critias the youth has heard
temperance defined as “doing one’s own things”—it is worth pointing out
that both times he is addressing future tyrants with a word that means some-
thing like “stained or defiled by blood.”
In turning now to Penner and Rowe, my strategy will be to allot only one
of the two dialogues to each: Laches to Penner,120 Charmides to Rowe.121
In responding to both, I will also begin the transition to this section’s sec-
ond and more properly Platonic part: texts from the two dialogues relevant
to their arguments will receive what amounts to independent consideration
in their own right and not simply as interpreted or employed by Penner
and Rowe; this, indeed, was already my purpose in following Irwin’s
descriptions of Charmides 174b11–c3 with the passage itself. But as in

118
 Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 41.
119
 Chrm. 174b11–c3 (Lamb modified). Cf. Peter Stemmer, “Der Grundriss der platonischen Ethik.
Karlfried Gründer zum 60. Geburtstag.” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 42, no. 4
(1988), 529–569, on 569 (last word).
120
 Based on Terry Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss—And Whether Socrates Thinks Courage
Merely a Part of Virtue.” Ancient Philosophy 12 (1992), 1–27.
121
 Primarily on the basis of Rowe, Plato and the Art.
152 Chapter 2

that case, so also in what follows: this section’s focus is not on the Play of
Character or the Argument of the Action. No matter how artificial it may
be (and is) to separate, for example, the historical facts about Critias and
Charmides from the interpretation of Charmides, it is Socratist arguments
about KGB as the basis for UV in Laches and Charmides that are my pres-
ent concern, and these tend to uphold—if, that is, they do not depend on a
prior act of upholding—the separation in question. Finally, before making
the other separation based on Penner and Rowe, a few remarks on Penner’s
“The Unity of Virtue” (1973) will serve as a preface, not only because it
is the founding document of PTI, but also because its last section treats
Laches and Charmides together.
“Putting together our results from the Laches and the Charmides, we have
again the unity of virtue, as well as a further characterization of the single
entity referred to in that doctrine.”122 In reaching this conclusion, two things
are striking about the final section of “The Unity of Virtue”: Penner’s analysis
of the two dialogues depends heavily on his prior account of Protagoras, and
nothing is said about either Nicias or Critias as characters.123 With respect to
the latter, he introduces KGB (which he calls “the science of good and evil”)
in the context of “the Utopia of my [sc. Socrates’] dream,” connecting it to
Charmides 174b11–d7.124 In glossing KGB as “the science which makes
others beneficial,” he astutely cites a crucial passage in Laches (as “195c7–
d9”)—it will be considered in more detail below—that denies this science to
the doctor, who does not know whom it is better to cure,125 without, however,
mentioning life and death (cf. La. 195c12–d2). He also links KGB to “the

122
 Cf. Penner, “Unity of Virtue,” 65.
123
 Stewart Umphrey, “Plato’s Laches on Courage.” Apeiron 10, no. 2 (November 1976), 14–22, on
20 (last word). See also 22n38: “Some commentators [he cites only Penner, “Unity of Virtue,”
in the sequel] have been insufficiently attentive to the fact that Plato’s Socrates does not assert
that virtue and knowledge are equivalent or identical without somehow indicating the problematic
character of that assertion.” Umphrey’s comments on Laches on 19 are likewise noteworthy.
124
 Penner, “Unity of Virtue,” 63: “Would it [sc. ‘this knowledge (science) of what one knows and
does not know (along with the knowledge that one knows or does not know whatever it is’] in
fact turn out to be a flawless guide to life, both for us and [my emphasis] those we rule over [cita-
tions deleted]; would the Utopia [my emphasis; cf. Chrm. 173a7–8] of my dream (says Socrates:
173a7–d5) come about with the human race all living knowledgeably and happily under the rule
of this science? Well, if all this were to come about, which of the many sciences would be the one
that would make us happy (173d8–174a11 [including Chrm. 174a4–6: a crucial passage discussed
below but which leaves no trace in this summary])? Arithmetic? Medicine? No, the science of
good and evil (174b11–d7 [Irwin’s passage plus 174c3–d7])—that is what we must have if the
other sciences are to benefit us.”
125
 Penner, “Unity of Virtue,” 65: “Moreover, the Laches makes it a little clearer [than Chrm.174b11–
d7, presumably] why the science of good and evil (goods and evils) = the science which makes
all others beneficial (195c7–d9).” In 65n39, Penner uses the equation, made by Nicias, of “terrible
or not” with “better or not,” as an indication that the definition itself is “Socratic.” Cf. 61 on “the
strongest possible evidence.”
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 153

political art” in Euthydemus, and thus to Republic,126 naturally without point-

ing out the difference between it and the Idea of the Good (cf. R. 505b8–10).
He confines to footnotes the problem of squaring a Socratic KGB in both
dialogues with Socratic ignorance127 as well the role of self-knowledge—as
opposed to knowledge of itself128—in Charmides.129
In “The Unity of Virtue,” Penner only refers to CPV in the passage that
follows TAL (La. 199e3–12) as “the premise in which he [sc. Socrates]
rubs Nicias’ nose.”130 But in “What Laches and Nicias Miss—And Whether
Socrates Thinks Courage Merely a Part of Virtue” (1992), he continues to
overlook the potential usefulness of the following passage, the second of
three establishing or rather asserting CPV,131 this one placed at the start
of TAL:

Socrates: Now, Nicias, please go back to the beginning [πάλιν ἐξ ἀρχῆς] and
answer us: you know we were considering [σκοπεῖν] courage from the begin-
nings of our discussion [κατ᾽ ἀρχὰς τοῦ λόγου] by considering [participial form
of σκοπεῖν] it as a part of virtue? Nicias: Quite so. Socrates: And you joined
in this answer—that it is a part, there being also other parts, which taken all
together have received the name of virtue. Nicias: Why, of course. Socrates:
Now, do you mean the same as I do by these? Besides courage, I refer to temper-
ance, justice, and other similar qualities. And you also, do you not? Nicias: Cer-
tainly I do. Socrates: So much for that; thus far we agree: we will now examine
[σκέπτεσθαι] what is to be dreaded and what to be dared.132

For Penner, this passage gives comfort to the enemy—Vlastos in par-

ticular—and he therefore devotes a section of his paper to defanging it.133

126
 Penner, “Unity of Virtue,” 65: “It is evident from the Charmides passages we have been consider-
ing that this knowledge is, in germ, the political art of the Euthydemus and Republic.”
127
 See Penner, “Unity of Virtue,” 59n32, 63n36, and especially 63n37, which contains a deflation-
ary account of it, to be further developed in Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss.” Cf. Andrea
Wilson Nightingale, “Plato on aporia and Self-Knowledge” in David Sedley and Nightingale
(eds.), Ancient Models of Mind: Studies in Human and Divine Rationality, 8–26 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), on 15. For the continental approach, see Bettina Fröhlich, Die
sokratische Frage. Platons Laches (Berlin: W. Hopf, 2007).
128
 Penner, “Unity of Virtue,” 63n36 (citations deleted): “This account is introduced as ‘temperance is
knowing oneself.’ It then becomes the science of itself and all other sciences, which is explicated
as in the body of the paper.” There is no indication that this “becomes” is based on deliberate fal-
lacy (see below). For self-knowledge, see 63n37.
129
 Equipped with a valuable discussion of the relevant literature to date, see Barbara Zehnpfennig,
Reflexion und Metareflexion bei Plato und Fichte: Ein Strukturvergleich des Platonischen Char-
mides und Fichtes Bestimmung des Menschen (Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 1987), part A
(17–106), especially 101–104. For her general philosophical orientation with respect to the Good,
see 219–223.
130
 Penner, “Unity of Virtue,” 61.
131
 The first is La. 190c8–d1; see Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 2.
132
 La. 197e10–198b4 (Lamb modified).
133
 From Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 2n3 to 13–15.
154 Chapter 2

I will begin my dialogue with him on Laches by suggesting that Socrates’

heavy-handed emphasis of CPV here supports Penner’s approach more
than he suspects.
The core of Penner’s argument is that “what Nicias [will] miss” is that
TAL is really a reductio on CPV. By showing that Nicias’ initial definition
(“courage is the knowledge of what is to be dreaded and what to be dared,”
hereafter “CK-DD”) is Socratic, and then by proving that TAL is a valid argu-
ment, Penner creates a zero-sum choice: abandon either CPV or CK-DD.134
The reason he devotes attention not only to what Nicias misses in TAL but
also to “what Laches and Nicias miss” is embodied by applying the words
“lure” and “wickedly” to Socrates:

Since the primary way in which Socrates identifies the part of virtue he
wants to narrow the inquiry down to, is the part that has to do with fighting
in armor, he must be wickedly trying to lure Laches into giving the account
of courage he knows Laches is itching to give anyway, namely: ‘want-
ing to stay in one’s position and ward off enemies while not running away’
(190e5–6).135

Instead of explaining away Socrates’ three statements of CPV,136 he would

have done better to use them collectively to prove that “Socrates deliberately
draws both Laches and Nicias into inadequate accounts of courage,”137 and
thus that “lure” and “wickedly” apply here as well.
Thanks to Reading Order, I’ve long since shown my hand: by identify-
ing DD in CK-DD with “future goods and future bads” (hereafter “FGB”),
Socrates shows that KGB—whether construed as courage alone or as the
whole of virtue—is impossible: quite apart from the afterlife, there is no
knowledge of FGB. But even though I’m claiming that this is what Plato
wants his Guardians to see for themselves, it is not by any means what he
expects the likes of Penner and Rowe to see. “Plato the author” (as Penner
calls him twice)138 deliberately draws men like them—along with the
rest of οἱ πολλοί, whom they despise—into an inadequate account of the

134
 Cf. Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 22: “the only premiss or inference it would be rea-
sonable to suppose Socrates was singling out and rejecting is the premiss that courage is part of
virtue.”
135
 Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 16.
136
 Cf. the question raised by Walter Schulz, “Das Problem der Aporie in den Tugenddialogen Platos”
in Dieter Henrich, Walter Schulz, and Karl-Heinz Volkmann-Schluck (eds.), Die Gegenwart der
Griechen im neueren Denken; Festschrift für Hans-Georg Gadamer zum 60. Geburtstag, 261–275
(Tübingen: Mohr, 1960), on 268.
137
 Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 18; cf. “I suggest that what Laches misses in his first
account of courage is precisely what Nicias misses in his otherwise superior Socratic account of
courage: Courage is not just a part of virtue.”
138
 Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 16 and 20.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 155

(happiness-maximizing) GoodE,139 and he does so in order that Plato’s best

students, by contrast, can use their hypotheses as “springboards and incen-
tives” to the Idea (R. 511b5). But those who took the Eudaemonist Shortcut
in Symposium as axiomatic and regulative without catching sight of transcen-
dent Beauty, those who identified the First Friend in Lysis with ἐπιστήμη or
with what Penner calls “MAXHAP”140 instead of philosophy, τὸ καλόν, or
“giving birth in the Beautiful,” those who failed to find the First Protreptic in
Euthydemus rife with deliberate fallacy and who thus meekly suffered “good
luck” to vanish into a μεταξύ-negating σοφία, these are now being lured into
rejecting the hammered CPV for the sake of KGB in Laches, so that Plato can
reveal them as intemperate disciples of Critias in Charmides.
Before returning to the future, it is important to clarify that what makes
Penner a radical Socratist is the way he distinguishes “Socratic” from
“Platonic”:

We ask: How could a man like this [sc. ‘the same Plato we have got to know in
the Republic and the Laws’] have produced the sunny, mischievous intellectual
adventures in the early, Socratic dialogues? Only one answer readily suggests
itself: that there lies behind the character Socrates in those early dialogues
an extraordinary personality, whose sheer intellect and character virtually
swamped the personality of the young Plato, literary and philosophical genius
though he was.141

For all his alleged antipathy to Aristotle142—who followed Plato in aban-

doning the truth of K and UV by intermixing non-cognitive elements in
virtue—Penner follows the Stagirite in taking Protagoras as the baseline
of what it means to be “Socratic.”143 Penner’s failure to grasp the pervasive

139
 After Penner states: “Socrates deliberately draws both Laches and Nicias into inadequate accounts
of courage” in “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 18, he adds: “Is this unfair to Socrates [this ques-
tion is better posed about Plato]? Not I suggest if these are the accounts Laches and Nicias would
have been likely to give anyway. But can I be right thus to find Socrates [for which I’d once again
substitute Plato] so remorselessly exposing what Laches and Charmides [for whom I’d substitute
‘Penner and Rowe’] miss in order to get us to see better?” With those substitutions made, I’d
answer in the affirmative; this is exactly how basanistic pedagogy works. It is because of what we
see others miss that we can be sure we’ve managed to pass Plato’s test.
140
 Penner, “Socratic Ethics,” 172.
141
 Penner, “Socrates and the Early Dialogues,” 130. In citing this article in “What Laches and Nicias
Miss,” he writes on 6n12 (emphasis mine): “For more on Socrates vs. Plato, see forthcoming.”
142
 For example, Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 21n35.
143
 For example, Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 6n12: “We should not be put off this read-
ing of Socrates [he has just cited Prt. 356d7–e2 for ‘the same steady ability, in spite of the blan-
dishments of pleasures, fears, or whatever, to see (or measure) what is worth trading for what’] by
the objections of the puritanical passage at Phaedo 67e ff., esp. 68d–69c [on which see Guardians
on Trial, §18]. There are, of course, objections to a conception of virtue which involves knowing
what is worth trading for what. But this passage, like the rest of Phaedo, I take to be Platonic—and
to be as anti-Socratic as the Republic’s parts-of-the-soul doctrine.”
156 Chapter 2

agency of “Plato as author” is therefore only the tip of an iceberg: in

viewing the dialogues as “a house divided against itself,” he needs to use
Plato’s Socrates against his creator. Over and above his wish to honor and
immortalize Socrates, Plato’s ongoing project is educating us from one end
of the ROPD to the other, and even though he can cause his Socrates both
to affirm views he regards as false and to deny what he thinks is true (e.g.,
R. 347d6–8),144 Plato’s Socrates is always advancing the aims of Plato the
Teacher.
And then there is the problematic way Penner throws around the term
“Socratic,” so clearly itching to identify (his conception of it) as simply
“true.”145 Most relevant to his reading of Laches is this passage:

Nicias: Well, for some time I have been thinking, Socrates, that you two are
not defining courage in the right way; for you are not acting upon an admirable
remark which I have formerly heard you make. Socrates: What is that, Nicias?
Nicias: I have often heard you say in those things in which he is wise [σοφός],
each of us is good [ἀγαθός], and bad [κακός] in that wherein he is unlearned
[ἀμαθής]. Socrates: You are speaking true things, by Zeus, Nicias. Nicias: And
hence, if the brave man is good, clearly he must be wise. Socrates: Do you hear
him, Laches? Laches: I do, and not understanding [μανθάνειν] all too much
what he is saying.146

Thanks to our familiarity with the first sophism in Euthydemus, and from
there back to Lysis and Symposium—for it is neither the σοφός nor the
ἀμαθής who is able to μανθάνειν, while the μεταξύ-bound philosopher (and
that means us) is thus neither κακός nor ἀγαθός—we can recognize what
makes the statement provocatively and characteristically “Socratic” while
simultaneously grasping that Nicias does not.147 Nor does Nicias promptly
reach his supposedly “Socratic” account of justice: to help Laches (and
that means the reader in this case) understand what Nicias understands by
it, Socrates asks him what kind of σοφία—“knowledge of what?” at La.
194e8—courage must be “according to your account” (La. 194e4), and only
asserts CK-DD at 194e11–195a1.
But it is not my purpose to reverse Penner’s zero-sum reductio read-
ing of TAL by showing that CPV is “Socratic” while CK-DD is not. Both

144
 See Plato the Teacher, §8, and Altman, “Reading Order,” §2.
145
 Already in Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 8; see also §2 above.
146
 La. 194c7–d7.
147
 Nicias, followed by von Arnim (see §4) takes it for granted that the good and wise exist (“whether
these are gods or men”); what Socrates means is that we would only be good if we were wise, and
bad if we were ignorant enough not to realize our ignorance. Cf. Ly. 218a2–6.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 157

propositions are better understood as “Platonic” insofar as they advance

Plato’s pedagogical project quite apart from whether either of them is true.
Just as the Shorter Way in Republic will rest upon the same hypothesis that
CPV does—that is, that virtue has four distinguishable parts—so too in
Laches will CK-DD allow Socrates, having substituted FGB for DD, to help
us see “what Nicias and Penner miss”: a wickedly “Socratic” reductio on the
possibility of K-F (i.e., “Knowledge of the Future,” with the dash between
them indicating its implicit presence in CK-FGB). But it is my purpose to
draw attention to the inadequacy of this:

Now, if we are being asked to choose between (1) and (2) [sc. between CK-DD
and CPV], there is very little doubt that we should find Socrates wanting to keep
the account of courage in (1)—since it was offered by Nicias as Socratic, and
apparently accepted by Socrates as such as well.148

Inadequate or not, however, Penner deserves our attention not only because
he falls into Plato’s trap but because he is smart, and therefore needs to be
read with great care, as indicated by what he writes next:

Nicias tells us explicitly that this account is based upon a Socratic belief that
‘one is good in something to the extent one is wise in it’ (194d1–9) [while
‘belief’ is too strong, once ‘saying’ is substituted (cf. 194c8) this is basically
true; the falsehood is to come]; and Socrates accepts the latter belief as his
own (194d3) [so far so good with respect, that is, to ‘saying’ as opposed
to ‘belief’], cf. d6 [‘Socrates: Do you hear him, Laches?’] and esp. d8–9
[which immediately follows ‘Laches: I do, and not understanding all too
much what he is saying,’ and will be quoted below] where the latter belief is
spelled out by Socrates as courage’s being ‘some kind of wisdom’ {science,
knowledge}.149

Here, then, is Laches 194d8–9: “Socrates: But I seem [δοκεῖν] to understand

[μανθάνειν], and to me the man seems [δοκεῖν] to be saying that courage

148
 Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 4; cf. 20 (emphasis mine): “But Plato the author also
allows us to see what Laches misses. For as soon as Nicias enters the conversation [sc. at La.
194c7], he, Nicias, proceeds to explain precisely what Laches has missed (though Laches still does
not see it). Nicias picks up the very thing that has been Laches’ downfall: knowledge. Courage
is a form of knowledge, he says—in this, we have already seen, offering an account of courage
which he says is Socratic and which Socrates accepts as being Socratic (194c2–d9).” By ending
with 194c9 (see below), Penner avoids claiming that CK-DD (not asserted until 194e11–195a1) is
Socratic although the unwary might well assume that it is. Cf. 4: “For it is hard to see, if courage
is a form of knowledge or science, what else it could be the knowledge or science of but the fearful
and the hopeful. So Socrates very likely does accept this account of courage.”
149
 Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 4 (emphasis in original).
158 Chapter 2

is some kind of wisdom.” In short, Penner is not the only one who needs
to be read carefully when it comes to what is and what is not “Socratic
[belief].”150
It is now the right time to substantiate my claim that TAL—despite
also being intended to lure its “Pennerite” readers into embracing not just
CK-DD but UV-virtue as KGB—is really a reductio on K-F. To begin with,
I take it for granted that none of us actually knows the future and that Plato
is well aware of that fact (cf. R. 516c8–d7). I therefore need to show what it
means to deny K-F in the context of Laches and of Penner’s account of it, start-
ing with the latter. In illustrating and defending as valid the step in TAL that
takes us from CK-FGB to a three-tensed KGB (i.e., knowledge of past and
present as well as the already established future),151 Penner uses the example
of bridge building: the science that will build the bridge of the future is the
same as the one that has built the bridge of the past and is now building them
in the present. Leaving aside the legerdemain required to render this example
apposite,152 the problem is that unlike “future bridges” themselves, “bridge-
making” is harmlessly future-oriented in that it makes possible the building of
future bridges just as it once made possible the building of those bridges that
are now built, that is, past. But it cannot know “future bridges,” for they don’t
yet exist, and thus could be built better or worse than the bridges that we can
know, and become so in any number of ways. The science of how we will go
about building a bridge in the future is therefore not analogous to KGB when
applied to FGB but rather to the (alleged) science of how we will respond to
some as yet unknown FGB. And that science does not and cannot exist.
Then there is Laches itself. As already indicated, Penner draws attention
to the passage about the limitations of the doctor’s art with respect to the bet-
ter (La. 195c7–d5) in “The Unity of Virtue” without, however, mentioning
the pair “life or death”—at once the most obvious examples of FGB and the
least susceptible to K-FGB—with which the passage climaxes (La. 195d1–5).
In “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” he uses another passage (La. 191d6–e6),
this one from the refutation of Laches, to suggest that even at this early stage

150
 After ending the paragraph (Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 4) with “so Socrates very
likely does accept this account of courage” (see previous note), he begins the next with: “The
claims of the preceding paragraph are strongly confirmed by the fact that at Protagoras 359c ff.,
esp. 360c–d, Socrates seems to argue for just this account of courage.” Despite the somewhat
jarring juxtaposition of this accurate “seems” with an overstated “strongly confirmed,” it is in the
light of Prt. that La. must be read to achieve Penner’s result, while Vlastos is rereading Prt. in the
light of La. See §11 for a synthesis of the two.
151
 These are the sixth and seventh steps of TAL in Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 118.
152
 Hence the discussion of laws at Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 8: “Just so for the
laws that govern the building of bridges. (The talk of unchanging laws removes the question
of technological advance that might not have concerned Socrates.)” More basically, of course,
the direction is wrong: the argument must move from (the non-existent) “science of, say, future
bridgebuilding.”
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 159

of the discussion, Socrates is tacitly upholding UV by suggesting that courage

“is identical with the temperance the many appeal to in describing the virtue
for dealing with desires and pleasures.”153

Socrates: and further, all who are not merely courageous against pains or fears
[λύπαι ἢ φόβοι], but are keen to fight [δεινοὶ μάχεσθαι] against desires and
pleasures [ἐπιθυμίαι ἢ ἡδοναί], whether standing their ground or turning back
upon the foe—for I take it, Laches, there are courageous people in all these
kinds. Laches: Very much so, Socrates. Socrates: Then all these are courageous,
only some have acquired courage in pleasures, some in pains, some in desires
and some in fears, while others, I conceive, have acquired cowardice in these
same things.154

Setting aside for the present the fact that discussion of temperance in this
form will be conspicuously absent in Charmides—apart, that is, from the
Argument of the Action—Penner has thus usefully raised, albeit indirectly,
the issue of FGB in the context of two more pairs to join (1) life and death:
(2) pleasures and pains, and (3) fears and desires.
The chiastic arrangement of λύπαι ἢ φόβοι and ἐπιθυμίαι ἢ ἡδοναί indi-
cates the problem: it might be natural to regard the first pair as specific to bad
things, the second to good ones. But to say nothing of our ignorance (lacking
K-F as we do) of how much FGB we will reap from the pleasures and pains
of today—for it’s difficult to measure what doesn’t yet exist155—we don’t
even know whether pleasures and pains themselves, regardless of whether
future or not, are good or bad, without, that is, endorsing the GP Equation
on which the hedonic calculus in Protagoras is based. The fact that scholars
will continue to divide until the end of time as to whether Socrates actually
endorsed the GP Equation just goes to show how little we really know about
the objects of FGB on which a “Socratic” KGB is made to depend in Laches,
quite apart from our insuperable lack of K-F. And even before reaching the
last words of Apology of Socrates (Ap. 42a2–5) or the last words of Socrates
in Phaedo (Phd. 118a7–8), we will be given very good reason—and most
prominently in Gorgias, our next stop after Charmides156—to doubt that life,
the paradigmatic future good, or death, the equally paradigmatic future bad
(cf. Ap. 29b8–c1), are either of them what they seem.

153
 Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 18.
154
 La. 191d6–e6 (Lamb modified).
155
 Cf. Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 8–9: “What one needs to know in balancing future
goods and bads against each other includes the relative goodness and badness of various kinds
of things to be risked and various kinds of things it is worth risking other things for. And such
knowledge applies indifferently to past, present, and future.”
156
 Since we are ignorant of whether it would be better for us to live or die, consider the “statesman”
(or tyrant) who lays claim, on the basis of KGB, to know that it is better for someone else to do so.
160 Chapter 2

But here it is necessary to tread lightly. The sequence embodied in the

ROPD precludes an easy reliance on the obvious connection to Apology of
Socrates, where our collective ignorance about death receives its canonical
expression (Ap. 29a2–b2). If death were not an unqualified κακόν in Alcib-
iades Major (Alc. 115b9), a death-defying ἀνδρεία would not be καλή (Alc.
115b5).157 In Laches, it is some post-medical expert who determines that,
in certain cases, death is better than life (La. 195c7–d9); this same merely
partial rehabilitation of death reappears in Gorgias (Grg. 512a2–b2).
It is therefore important that Plato is not using Socrates’ stated position in
Apology—in accordance with the ROPD, he cannot yet be doing so—to
perform an easily recognizable reductio on the K-F component of CK-
FGB, and it is indeed crucial to the structure of this book that he is not.
Instead, he is luring some of us on to find the Good where it isn’t and only
gradually reminding the rest of us about where it truly is. Nor will Apology
be the end of the story: we won’t reach Plato’s ultimate conclusions about
death until we read Phaedo.
It is therefore too much to claim that Plato has already taught us that a
steadfast endurance in our (Socratic) ignorance of whether life and death, or
pains and pleasures, are to be feared or desired is a more “Socratic” descrip-
tion of courage than CK-FGB. But that alternative—albeit merely inchoate
at this stage, and thus more dependent on the inner resources of Plato’s read-
ers than on the texts of Plato he knows they have already read—does serve
to illustrate how little anyone really knows about the kinds of things that
we must know if CK-DD, via CK-FGB, is to become KGB, and thus how
little we can depend for what’s “Socratic” on Protagoras. A more properly
Socratic account of courage has already been offered by Socrates in Alcibi-
ades Major: even if death is bad and life is good, courage—paradigmatically
if it means incurring wounds and death for the sake of one’s friends—is
καλόν158 while cowardice, though it secures our continued survival,159 is

157
 See Smith, “Did Plato Write the Alcibiades?,” 103: “At [Alc.] 115all–c5, Socrates distinguishes
between the goodness and nobility of courage (115b5–7) and the badness of certain of its conse-
quences—specifically wounds and death (115b9). It is Socrates who introduces the idea that death
and wounds are bad in this dialogue. But in Plato’s Apology Socrates has a very different attitude
about death. At Apology 29a4–b6, Socrates proclaims that he knows nothing about death—for all
he knows, it may even be the greatest of blessings. He says that those [are] guilty of ‘the most
shameful ignorance’ (29bl–2). Later in the same dialogue, we learn that death could be one of two
things, but both turn out to be blessings, at least to good men (Ap 40c4–4ld2). A similar view of
death may be found in the Gorgias (523al–7a4).”
158
 Cf. Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 19n33: “Being καλόν seems to be more often con-
nected in Socrates with being straightforwardly advantageous and not harmful than it does with
being ‘noble’ or ‘fair.’”
159
 Cf. the definition of MAXHAP in Penner, “Socratic Ethics,” 172 (emphasis mine): “the maximum
of the agent’s own real good (or happiness) that the agent’s circumstances will allow, over the
rest of his or her life.”
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 161

αἴσχρον (Alc. 115b1–c9).160 But as Plato is even more determined to teach

us in Alcibiades Major than in Laches,161 it is not only FGB of which we are
paradigmatically ignorant, but even more so of ourselves.162 Without self-
knowledge, what is good and bad for us is meaningless and utterly beyond
reach. As a result, in addition to our crude lack of K-F with respect to “future
bridges,” we must give greater emphasis to yet another kind of ignorance
while evaluating the view that either courage or virtue as a whole is KGB,163
particularly if the “G” in question is the GoodE.
Finally, the most obvious evidence in Laches itself that TAL is a reduc-
tio on K-F is the repeated references to the μάντις who predicts the future,
beginning at La. 195e3, less than a page after Nicias introduces CK-DD.164
This word appears ten times in Laches, and since KGB will also be (appar-
ently) valorized as “Socratic” in Charmides, it is worth mentioning that it
appears three more times there,165 along with προφήτης (Chrm. 173c6); in
addition, “the science of the μάντις” (μαντική) makes a single appearance
in both (Chrm. 173c and La. 198e4). Although the discussion of the μάντις
that quickly follows CK-DD (La. 195e3–196d6) indicates that Plato intends
for us to consider K-F on its own “merits” from the start, it is only the use
of the words μάντις and μαντική in the middle of TAL (La. 198e2–199a5)—­
immediately before CK-DD becomes a three-tensed KGB (i.e., past and
present as well as future) via CK-FGB (La. 199b9–e4)—that will perform
a K-F-based reductio on Nicias thanks to the Play of (historical) Character,
but I will reserve consideration of this crucial aspect of the Argument of the
Action for the following section.
In the more immediate context of “What Laches and Nicias Miss,”
Penner’s illuminating comments about Nicias deserve consideration, not
least of all because he brings into prominence what he failed to mention in
“The Unity of Virtue”:

160
 For the use of αἴσχρον here see Helfer, Socrates and Alcibiades, 51.
161
 The relationship between La. and Alc. is emphasized in Michel Foucault, The Courage of the Truth
(The Government of Self and Others II); Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, edited
by Frédéric Gros, translated by Graham Burchell (Houndmills, UK and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), on 125–127, 158–162, and 246: “starting now from the Laches rather than the
Alcibiades . . . We do not encounter Platonism and the metaphysics of the other world (l’autre
monde).” For the relationship between self and “Platonism,” see my “Self-Formation in Plato.”
Parrhesia 28 (2017), 95–116.
162
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §7.
163
 For a thoughtful guide to what is Socratic in La., see David Ebrey, “Socrates on Why We Should
Inquire.” Ancient Philosophy 37, no. 1 (Spring 2017), 1–17.
164
 That Plato expects us to find this humorous is suggested by parallels in Aristophanes, on which see
Werner Nagel, “Zur Darstellungskunst Platons insbesondere im Dialog Laches” in Robert Muth
(ed.), Serta philologica Aenipontana, 119–142 (Innsbruck: Sprachwissenschaftliche Institut der
Leopold-Franzens-Universität, 1962), 139.
165
 La. 195e1, 196a5, 196d5, 199a2; Chrm. 164e7, 173c6, and 174a1.
162 Chapter 2

In one of the best moves of any Socratic interlocutor in the whole of the early
dialogues, Nicias points out that while doctors may be experts on the question
whether someone will live or die, they are not experts on the question whether
or not it is better for someone to live rather than die.166

Since we are ignorant of whether it would be better for us to live or die, the
appearance of these particular “experts,” on the verge of a conversation with
future blood-stained tyrants in Charmides, is revealing, prompting us to begin
considering the “statesman” who lays claim, on the basis of KGB, to know that
it is better for someone else to do so.167 Since the same KGB that is made to grow
out of a Socratic saying thanks to Nicias in Laches is going to be reasserted by
Critias in Charmides, Plato is already preparing a reductio ad tyrannidem in this
passage, and although Penner’s fulsome praise for Nicias is no doubt less objec-
tionable that it would be if it were applied to Critias,168 KGB remains what it is.
Note that Penner is also praising Nicias for possessing courage as Laches had
defined it,169 although—as a true believer in KGB—he courageously conflates it
with wisdom: “Nicias wisely stays in line in the face of this assault.”170
Penner himself must likewise display courage by holding the interpretive
line on Socratic Ignorance:

But if Socrates knows what courage is and what virtue is, what else is there for
him to know? And if there is nothing else for him to know, how can he sincerely
claim to know only that he knows nothing?171

This is a modern example of the fallacious use of the “complex” or Double

Question.172 In combination, the two suggest that it will be enough for
Penner to identify some things that Socrates does not know—despite the fact
that he knows the whole of virtue is KGB173—in order to validate Socratic

166
 Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 20–21 (emphases in original).
167
 On Plt. 293a6–e6 see Guardians on Trial, §4.
168
 Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 21, refers to “Nicias’ astuteness amongst Socratic inter-
locutors,” and in 21n35 he writes: “what Nicias sees, Aristotle does not.”
169
 Cf. Socrates in Ap. 28d5–9.
170
 Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 22 (emphasis mine); the “assault” in question arises from
the claim that, for example, a wild boar is more courageous than a chipmunk. Cf. “Nicias holds
firm” on the same page.
171
 Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 23.
172
 See Cohen, “Plato’s Use of Ambiguity,” 103–105, and note the references to La.; however it is in
Grg. (466b11–467a10) that Plato names (δύο ταῦτ’ ἐστιν τὰ ἐρωτήματα at 466d5) and teaches us
how to identify a much better concealed version of the Double Question.
173
 Cf. Wolfgang Wieland, “Das Sokratische Erbe: Laches” in Theo Kobusch und Burkhard Mojsisch
(eds.), Platon, seine Dialoge in der Sicht der neuer Forschungen, 5–24 (Darmstadt: Wissen-
schaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), on 17: “Wer in einem Dialog von der Art des Laches hinter
der Aporetik ein derartiges Resultat zu identifizieren [as in Erler, Sinn der Aporien; cf. 16n43]
sucht, kommt in Schwierigkeiten, wenn er sich zugleich einen Reim auf das Nichtwissen machen
soll, zu dem sich Sokrates immer wieder bekennt.”
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 163

Ignorance.174 Penner will duly offer five “examples of the sorts of things that
Socrates might ‘think he does not know’ about courage and virtue.” In addi-
tion to “the nature of the happiness that the good are good at getting,” the
most interesting of these identifies the lack of “better arguments to show
that it always harms you to harm others (plainly some work was called for
here).”175 The origin of this revealing formulation is radical Socratism’s ruth-
less and gleeful post-Kantianism (see §2): although there can be no moral
(or rather “moralistic”) obligation to benefit others,176 the naturalistic and
inevitable pursuit of “the good for us” must nevertheless be taken to prove
that it could never be in the agent’s interest to harm anyone else.177 And since
the difference between benefitting others and benefitting oneself emerges as
a problem in Charmides (Chrm. 164a9–c6), this is as good a place as any to
shift attention to that dialogue, and thus from Penner to Rowe.178
A principal purpose of Rowe’s Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writ-
ing—and arguably the raison d’être of his otherwise welcome rejection of
developmentalism179—is to introduce and defend a Socratist understanding of
the Idea of the Good as “the human good,”180 and to emphasize its continuity
with what Socrates has been talking about “all along.”181 Naturally the First

174
 The real question is: “But if Socrates knows what courage is and what virtue is . . . how can he
sincerely claim to know only that he knows nothing?” Penner uses the distinction between know-
ing what courage is—that is, the referent of “courage”—and “the meaning of ‘courage’” (“What
Laches and Nicias Miss,” 23). Since Socrates does not seek “propositional knowledge,” Penner
feels entitled to conclude (24): “As long as there are still some ‘things yet to be known about
courage,’ Socrates may still claim not to know what courage is [n38].”
175
 Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 24n38.
176
 Cf. Reshotko, Socratic Ethics, 58–63 (“Harm is Self-Harm; Benefit is Self-Benefit”). This will
become a central issue in Chrm. (see below).
177
 For discussion, see Reshotko, Socratic Ethics, 65–71, climaxing with: “In the Apology [see 65–66
for her discussion of Ap. 25c8–e5], the Crito (48a–d), and the Gorgias (472c–481b), Socrates
argues that harming others results in harm to the soul of the perpetrator. I am more circumspect in
discussing this justification for Socrates’ contention that harm to others cannot result in benefit to
the self, because the available texts underdetermine the mechanism by which Socrates understood
the act of harming another to harm the soul.” On this, see Singpurwalla, “Review of Socratic
Virtue, on 277 (last word).
178
 Rowe struggles with the problem of Socratic Ignorance as well; see Plato and the Art, 127: “for
the Socrates of the Apology and the Charmides, the only difference between people that matters is
whether or not they are wise. ‘Virtue,’ or ‘excellence’ (or ‘goodness’: aretē) is knowledge—that
is the theme around which the Socrates of a whole series of dialogues dances, without ever firmly
asserting it; but then how could he assert it, when he knows nothing?” Cf. Rowe, Plato, Sympo-
sium, 136 (on Smp. 177d7–e1).
179
 See Rowe, Plato and the Art, vii–viii, 4n7, and 248. See also Christopher Rowe, “Plato, Socrates
and Developmentalism,” in Naomi Reshotko (ed.), Desire, Identity, and Existence: Essays in
Honor of T. M. Penner (Kelowna: Academic Printing and Publishing, 2003), 17–32.
180
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 244, glossed at 244n21 as: “the (form of the) ‘useful and beneficial.’”
181
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 243: “So, apparently, Socrates keeps his old skin. And that will itself be a
pretty striking outcome, insofar as it entails that the pre-Republic Socrates, including the Socrates
of the ‘Socratic’ dialogues, will have been talking about the form of the good all along.”
164 Chapter 2

Protreptic in Euthydemus plays an important part here.182 But Charmides

proves to be even more important for linking KGB183 to the Idea of the Good
by which “things become useful and beneficial [ὠφέλιμα]” (R. 505a4).184
Far from reading Socrates’ rejection of φρόνησις as the Good—in Plato’s
version of the Santas Circle, such knowledge would necessarily implicate
“knowledge of the Good” (R. 505b8–11)—as a rejection of KGB as “the
human good,” Rowe uses Charmides to establish a link to one of Socrates’
earlier claims: “and for good measure we should add that the argument of
the Charmides gives us a close parallel for ‘if we don’t know {the form of
the good}, and if we were as much as possible to know the rest, without it,
you know that there’s no benefit to us [οὐδὲν ἡμῖν ὄφελος]’ (Republic 6,
505a5–7).”185
Rowe’s attempt to link the two dialogues is praiseworthy, breaking
down as it does long-standing barriers between a Platonic or post-Socratic
Republic and Charmides as “an early Socratic dialogue.” And his deci-
sion to do so by means of words like ὄφελος (cf. Ap. 28b8), ὠφελίμως
(“beneficially”), and ὠφέλιμον (“beneficial”) is particularly “useful and
beneficial.” For example, it is in Charmides that Socrates first invokes
the distinction between temperance as possible or beneficial (δυνατόν and
ὠφέλιμον at Chrm. 169a7–d8); this distinction will reappear in the discus-
sion of the Three Waves of Paradox in Republic 5 (R. 457c2; cf. 450c7–9
and 456c5–6). But like the even more famous connection that causes Cri-
tias’ definition of temperance in Charmides to reappear as Socrates’ defini-
tion of justice in Republic 4, the discontinuities between the two dialogues
prove to be not only subtler but vastly more significant than the readily
apparent continuities that make them visible in the first place. A perfect
example of this is the way ὠφέλιμον and related words are used in the two
dialogues, and this will reveal why the more difficult Charmides plays
such an important role in Ascent to the Good.
Beginning in Protagoras, Plato has made sure we understand that ὠφέλιμον
is followed by a dative that tells us for whom a thing is beneficial: Socrates
memorably threatens to exit the conversation because Protagoras skillfully
turns a question about “what is beneficial for human beings” (Prt. 333d9–e1)
into an excuse for a powerful speech about what is beneficial for (among
other things) horses, cows, dogs, trees, roots, and shoots (Prt. 334a3–c6).

182
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 241n12.
183
 See Rowe, Plato and the Art, 241n11.
184
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 239–242.
185
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 242. The attached note (242n15) reads: “I refer here to that part of the
Charmides that issues in the conclusion ‘But my dear Critias, we shall have missed out on each of
these sorts of things {sc. the supposedly beneficial outcomes of the other sciences} happening well
and beneficially, if this one science {sc. of good and bad} is absent’: 174c9–d1.”
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 165

Now it is certainly true that throughout Charmides, Socrates insists that any
definition of temperance Critias may offer must prove itself to be “beneficial
for us,” and naturally Rowe finds this insistence heartening. As a radical
Socratist, he assumes that any number of beneficial things—knowledge,
virtue in accordance with CA, KGB, and the Good as the GoodE—must all
be necessarily and exclusively “good” or rather “beneficial for us.” And this
assumption explains his account of KGB in Charmides:

our lives would be happier if there were such a thing as knowledge of knowl-
edge and ignorance (and we could acquire it)—not knowledge of any old
knowledge and ignorance, but knowledge of knowledge and ignorance about
the good and the bad (174b–c), which is what actually gives all the other kinds
of expertise whatever value they may have. So if that is what sōphrosunē is, it
will be every bit as beneficial for us as Socrates is convinced sōphrosunē must
be. For, since what we all want is to be happy, in possession of the real good,
knowledge of our ignorance must motivate us to that sort of inquiry which alone
can lead us to an understanding of what that real good is.186

Rowe’s mention of “174b-c” recalls Irwin’s citations of 174b11–c3 as

well as Penner’s fuller reference to 174b11–d7; this is therefore an opportune
moment to consider Charmides 174c3–d7. Having responded with ὦ μιαρέ to
Critias’ introduction of KGB, Socrates continues:

“For, Critias, if you choose to take away this science [ἐπιστήμη; sc. KGB]
from the whole number of them [ἐπιστήμαι], will medicine any the less give
us health, or shoemaking give us shoes, or weaving provide clothes, or will
the pilot’s art any the less prevent dying [ἀποθνῄσκειν] at sea, or the general’s
[ἀποθνῄσκειν understood] in war?” “None the less,” he replied.187

Can the prevention of death by the pilot’s art or the securing of health by
medicine be regarded as beneficial without KGB? This question situates
Charmides between Laches (La. 195c7–d9) and Gorgias (Grg. 511c9–512b2)
where the same examples are used to make an apparently similar point.
But there are some important differences. To begin with, Socrates has
already stated earlier in Charmides (Chrm. 165d1–2) that medicine secures
“no small benefit [ὠφελία], for in health it produces a beautiful effect for us
[καλὸν ἡμῖν ἔργον].” And whereas in Laches the originating problem was
whether “fighting in armor” was “beneficial [ὠφέλιμον] for the young” (La.
181e1), and ruled out definitions of courage that made it other than καλόν
(La. 192c5–193d8), in Charmides, Socrates hammers home the point that

186
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 129.
187
 Chrm. 174c3–8 (Lamb modified).
166 Chapter 2

σωφροσύνη must be beneficial for us while rounding out the passage that
ends at 174d7:

“But my dear Critias, the happening well [τὸ εὖ γίγνεσθαι] and beneficially
[ὠφελίμως, with τὸ ὠφελίμως γίγνεσθαι understood] of each of these of things
will escape us with this [sc. KGB] being absent.” “That is true.” “And that sci-
ence, it seems, is not temperance [σωφροσύνη], but one whose effect [ἔργον] is
to benefit us [τὸ ὠφελεῖν ἡμᾶς]; for it is not a science of sciences and lack of sci-
ences, but of good and bad: so that if this is beneficial [ὠφέλιμος], temperance,
which is beneficial to us [ἡ ὠφελίμη ἡμῖν], would be something else [ἄλλο τι].”188

Within the narrow confines of Socratist hermeneutics, the arrival of KGB at

174b10 points to UV; as a result, it is easy to forget that the word ἀρετή appears
only once in Charmides (158a1),189 and that it is only in Laches where KGB fails
as a definition of courage because its referent (à la Penner) is virtue as a whole.
In addition to providing a Socratist reason why Charmides must follow Laches
in the ROPD, the lack of attention to ἀρετή in the one is matched by the com-
parative absence of concern with ὠφέλιμος—let alone what is “beneficial for
us”—in the other. Here are the five most important “benefit” words followed by
the number of times they appear in (Charmides/Laches) respectively: ὠφέλιμος
(7/1), ὠφελίμως (6/0), ὠφελεῖν (5/0), ὠφελία (5/1), and ὄφελος (2/1).190 As an
addendum to these statistics, two of the three instances of “benefit” words in
Laches are found in the speech of Nicias about “fighting in armor” and apply to
it (La. 181e1, 182a7) as does the third, in the speech of Laches, which sets up a
delicious dilemma: “Hence, what I said from the start [ἐξ ἀρχῆς]: either being
‘a study’ [μάθημα], it offers but this miniscule benefit [σμικρὰ ὠφελία], or, not
being one, although they say and pretend [προσποιεῖσθαι] it to be ‘a study,’ it is
unworthy to try to learn it” (La. 184b1–3). To continue the contrast, once cour-
age arrives on the scene in Laches and with it the question of its relation to what
is καλόν, it is the latter that occupies the place of τὸ ὠφελεῖν ἡμᾶς in the passage
from Charmides quoted above:

Socrates: Then you will not admit that such an endurance [sc. ‘being κακοῦργόν
τε καὶ βλαβερόν’ at La. 192d4–5] is courage, seeing that it is not noble [οὐ
καλή], whereas courage is noble [καλόν]. Laches: That is true.191

188
 Chrm. 174c9–d7 (Lamb modified).
189
 See Noburu Notomi, “Ethical Examination in Context: The Criticism of Critias in Plato’s Charmi-
des” in Maurizio Migliori, Linda M. Napolitano Valditara (eds.) and Davide Del Forno (co-ed.),
Plato Ethicus: Philosophy as Life; Proceedings of the International Colloquium, Piacenza (Italy)
2003, 245–254 (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2004), 249; see also the paragraph that begins: “I
propose a different explanation.”
190
 Cf. Stemmer, “Grundriss,” 544–545 with the texts from Chrm. cited in Stemmer, Platons Diale-
ktik, 156n16.
191
 La. 192d7–8 (Lamb modified).
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 167

It should be obvious why using “what benefits us” as the litmus test of cour-
age would have been inappropriate, and indeed the honest Laches will get
tripped up because he regards the skilled (and therefore self-benefitting) diver
as less brave than the one who is not skilled (La. 193c2–8), a judgment that
depends on his unstated but manifest preference for what is καλόν as opposed to
what is ὠφέλιμον ἡμῖν. In response, Socrates will argue that the unskilled divers,
who endure more thoughtlessly (ἀφρονεστέρως at La. 193c9; cf. 193a4), can-
not be called brave not because what they are doing is harmful to themselves,192
but because a thoughtless deed is αἰσχρόν (La. 193d1–7), that is, the standard
opposite of καλόν (Prt. 332c3–4). What is striking, then, is that when it comes
to σωφροσύνη in Charmides, the question of τὸ καλόν has vanished, and is
replaced by Socrates’ prophecy (μαντευέσθαι) that temperance must be “some-
thing beneficial and good” (Chrm. 169b4–5). More importantly, what is benefi-
cial is the senior partner of this critical pair because it is the ἔργον of KGB and
KGB alone—this is what disqualifies Critias’ last definition—to tell us what
benefits us (τὸ ὠφελεῖν ἡμᾶς at Chrm. 174d4).
It is easy to see, simply on the basis of the foregoing—and thus with no refer-
ence to Critias, Charmides, and the Thirty Tyrants—that Charmides is critical
for sorting out the relationship between the Idea of the Good, on the one hand,
and what is good or beneficial for me,193 that is, the difference between the
GoodE and the GoodT. What makes Rowe such a valuable interlocutor is that
he is upholding the unity of the two, and thus a judgment antithetical to mine.
But precisely because it is antithetical, I cannot regard it as accidental or as
merely the product of Socratist prejudice or misreading. Instead, I am claiming
that Plato has written Charmides in the order to distinguish the kind of temper-
ance that cannot be temperance unless we know for sure that it benefits us from
the kind of Socratic activity he will immortalize first in Gorgias, where benefit-
ing others may lead to our own death (Grg. 511b3–5; cf. 522c4–6).
But it is not only in relation to Laches, Gorgias, and Republic that we can
see Plato teaching us about this distinction; consider Rowe’s summary of a
critical passage in Charmides itself:

Critias proposed that “sound-mindedness,” sōphrosunē, was a matter of “doing

what belongs to oneself,” which in response to Socrates’ questioning he soon

192
 The standard opposite of ὠφέλιμον, that is, βλαβερόν, appears three times in this passage, the first
two in conjunction with κακοῦργον, or “evil-doing.” Like ὠφέλιμον, βλαβερόν requires a dative
to clarify whether harm to oneself or harm to others is intended, but κακοῦργον is unequivocal in
this regard. However the third and unaccompanied use of βλαβερόν at La. 193d2 implies harm
to oneself, and we are challenged to either accept or reject Socrates’ equation of βλαβερόν in
this sense with τὸ αἰσχρόν. Note that τὰ βλαβερά at Chrm. 163c5–6 are harmful to others, while
βλαβερῶς πράττειν at 164b11—on which more below—is to do something harmful to oneself.
This dyad will reappear in §14.
193
 See Rowe, Plato and the Art, 128n21.
168 Chapter 2

emends to “doing what is good (for oneself).” But, Socrates asks, mustn’t the
person who does what’s good for himself know when he’s doing that? Exactly,
says Critias—and this is the point where self-knowledge comes into the discus-
sion: sound-mindedness pretty much (schedon) is a matter of knowing oneself,
Critias now claims (164d3–4).194

Rowe usefully shows himself to be a bit too hasty here; not surprisingly, that
haste is most visible in this parenthetical use of “for oneself.” In fact, there
is no mention of “for us” in the revised version of τὸ τὰ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν
(introduced by Charmides at Chrm. 161b6, cf. 163a7). The latter results from
starting “again from the beginning [πάλιν ἐξ ἀρχῆς]” (Chrm. 163d7) with
Critias at 163d7–e11; πρᾶξις now appears twice, first as “the doing or making
of good things [ἡ τῶν ἀγαθῶν πρᾶξις ἢ ποίησις]” (Chrm. 163e1)—the addi-
tion of ἢ ποίησις is necessary to counteract the sophistry of Critias (Chrm.
163a10–c8)—and then simply (by Critias himself) as “the doing of good
things [ἡ τῶν ἀγαθῶν πρᾶξις]” (Chrm. 163e10).
This definition deserves consideration. After all, if we want a UV-defi-
nition of virtue, we could do a great deal worse than ἡ τῶν ἀγαθῶν πρᾶξις,
especially since it seems to subsume, activate, and complete KGB.195 It is
also a plausible answer to a typically Socratic question like “what ἔργον does
KGB produce?” And with ἀρετή having been compared with sight (ὄψις)
in Laches (La. 190a1–b5), there is a meaningful conversation to be had as
to whether ἀρετή in general or any ἀρετή in particular is better understood
as knowledge itself (of the good and the bad) rather than as a knowledge-
based πρᾶξις (of good things). Finally, the difference between knowledge
and πρᾶξις also raises the question of motivation: if to know the good were
the same thing as to wish always to act in accordance with it—a Socratist
commonplace, although “wish” is insufficiently deterministic for Penner196—
Charmides would not include a valuable and unusually systematic primer
linking desire (ἐπιθυμία) with pleasure, wish (βούλησις) with what is good,
and love (ἔρως) with beauty (Chrm. 167e1–9). This triad will complicate an
argument in Meno where Socrates conflates “desire” (ἐπιθυμεῖν) with “wish”
(βούλεσθαι) for equally indistinguishable good or beautiful things (Meno

194
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 128.
195
 Moreover, the presence of πρᾶξις, easily converted to the verb πράττειν by moving from what is
done to the doing of it, makes it easy to deploy the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy, and I have probably not
emphasized sufficiently thus far that the easiest way to resolve the Santas Circle is to ignore the
ambiguity of εὖ πράττειν, and to treat “to do well” (through knowledge) as identical in meaning
to “to fare well” (as happiness). See Devereaux, “The Relationship Between Justice and Happi-
ness,” 274 (“since one who ‘lives well’ is blessed and happy”) and the last sentence of 275n21. So
also Lee Franklin, “Commentary on Devereaux.” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in
Philosophy 20, no. 1 (2005), 306–311, on 311n12 and 311, yielding “the intrisic value of Justice
is identical with its value as the source of happiness.”
196
 See Penner, “Socratic Ethics,” 180–185.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 169

77b2–78b2).197 It is also useful for interpreting the passage in Gorgias that the
most radical Socratists regard as crucial;198 given the proximity of Charmides
and Gorgias in the ROPD, this should not be regarded as either accidental or
surprising.
Whatever may be the merits of ἡ τῶν ἀγαθῶν πρᾶξις as Critias’ revised
version of τὸ τὰ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν, there has so far been no indication that
the parenthesis in Rowe’s paraphrase—“doing what is good (for one-
self)”—is correct. But even though it is scarcely obvious that the paren-
thesis will be his destination at the start, Socrates takes the first step in that
direction:

“And nothing at all, I daresay, prevents you saying true things [i.e., that tem-
perance is ἡ τῶν ἀγαθῶν πρᾶξις]; but still I wonder,” I went on, “whether you
judge that temperate men are ignorant [ἀγνοεῖν] of their temperance.” “No, I do
not,’ he said. “A little while ago,” I said, “were you not saying that there was
no reason why craftsmen should not be temperate in making others’ things as
well?’ “Yes, I was,” he said, “but what of it?” “Nothing; only tell me whether
you think that a doctor, in making [participial form of ποιεῖν] someone healthy,
does [ποιεῖν] beneficial things [ὠφέλιμα] both for himself [καὶ ἑαυτῷ] and for
the person whom he cures [καὶ ἐκείνῳ ὃν ἰῷτο].” “I do.”199

This is the first appearance of ὠφέλιμα in the dialogue,200 and right from the
start, Plato makes sure we understand the relation of ὠφέλιμον to the dative.
Depending on whether it is followed by ἑαυτῷ or ἐκείνῳ, the phrase ποιεῖν (τὰ)
ὠφέλιμα loses its intrinsic ambiguity:201 doctors can do beneficial things for
themselves, or for their patients, or (as here) for both of them at the same time.

197
 It is in the context of this passage that the ὠφέλιμον and βλαβερόν dyad will reappear (see n. 192
above).
198
 See Grg. 466a9–468e5; for the radical Socratist reading, see Terry Penner, “Desire and Power
in Socrates: The Argument of Gorgias 466A–468E that Orators and Tyrants Have No Power in
the City.” Apeiron 24, no. 3 (September 1991), 147–202. Although Penner had overlooked the
connection between βούλησις and ἀγαθόν at Chrm. 167e4–5 (201n45), the fact that it must be
explained away in Kevin McTighe, “Socrates on Desire for the Good and the Involuntariness of
Wrongdoing: Gorgias 466a–468e.” Phronesis 29, no. 3 (1984), 193–236, on 198n15; cf. 216,
shows how it could be turned to Penner’s account. Inexplicably, it is not cited in Segvic, “No One
Errs Willingly,” on 17–18, where it would seem to make her point.
199
 Chrm. 164a1–b2 (Lamb modified). On the Vielschichtigkeit of Socrates’ initial comment—trans-
lated as “und es steht dem vielleicht nichts entgegen, daß du die Wahrheit sprichst”—see Bernd
Witte, Die Wissenschaft vom Guten und Bösen: Interpretationen zu Platons Charmides (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1970), 85–86.
200
 The adverb ὠφελίμως—on which more shortly—appears earlier at Chrm. 163c3.
201
 See Witte, Wissenschaft vom Guten, 86–93, on the sophistic background of die Mehrdeutigkeit
of das Nützliche. Particularly interesting is the link between ὠφέλιμον in Chrm. and χρήσιμον in
Tht. 167b7–d2 (87–88); the ὠφέλιμον-χρήσιμον link is useful for connecting the First Protreptic—
which relies primarily on the verb χρῆσθαι (cf. Euthd. 280b8–d7 and following)—and its Meno
Doublet, which uses ὠφέλιμον (Men. 87e1–89a2), both in the self-benefitting or sophistic sense.
170 Chapter 2

Even without proceeding further in Charmides, we have therefore already

taken a giant step toward Republic as part of an ongoing ascent to the Good.
There we will learn from the appropriate datives that it is not by the medical
art that the doctor benefits herself:

Socrates: “Then, Thrasymachus, is not this immediately apparent, that no

art [τέχνη] or office [ἀρχή] provides what is beneficial for itself [τὸ αὑτῇ
ὠφέλιμον]—but as we said long ago it provides and enjoins what is beneficial
to its subject [τὸ τῷ ἀρχομένῳ with ὠφέλιμον understood].”202

Although it is not until Charmides 174e3–175a5 that medicine is explicitly

identified as a τέχνη, there is no need to wait either for that passage or for
Republic 1 in order to realize that Socrates is making a deliberate use of fal-
lacy in what immediately follows:

“Does he [sc. the doctor] not do [πράττειν] the things that are required [τὰ
δέοντα], he who does these things [ταῦτα πράττειν]?” “Yes.” Is not he who does
what is required [τὰ δέοντα πράττειν] temperate?’ “Indeed he is.” “Well, is it not
necessary for the doctor to know both when he cures beneficially [ὠφελίμως]
and when not? And [is it not necessary] for each of the artisans [to know] both
when he is about to be benefited by the product [τὸ ἔργον] which he makes
[πράττειν], and when not?”203

The fallacy begins with ταῦτα πράττειν: if Socrates is including both what the
doctor does to benefit her patient and herself, then she is not doing τὰ δέοντα
in both cases. It is by virtue of the medical art that the doctor does τὰ δέοντα,
and those things are necessarily beneficial for the patient. Confirming the
transition from ποιεῖν to πράττειν, Socrates next establishes a link between
doing the required things—that is, the things required by the medical art—
and temperance: a comparatively benign transition.
What immediately follows, however, is a classic example of the complex
or Double Question: the answer to the first of Socrates’ questions is “yes,”
but Critias is correct to answer the second with “perhaps not.”204 The point is
an important one: if the doctor is actually doing τὰ δέοντα, then she knows
she is performing her art beneficially for the patient; indeed the two things are
one and the same. But it is by no means necessary that the doctor must also
know when performing τὰ δέοντα that she will be benefited by so doing.205

202
 R. 346e3–5 (Shorey).
203
 Chrm. 164b3–10 (Lamb modified).
204
 See Cohen, “Plato’s Use of Ambiguity,” 103–105.
205
 For an illuminating contrast between the doctors in Chrm. and La., see Witte, Wissenschaft vom
Guten, 93. In La., the doctor’s art was insufficient for determining whether curing the patient was
good for the patient; this illuminates the moral contrast that Critias can’t see but that we must.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 171

The demand that σωφροσύνη prove itself to be beneficial for the agent—the
doctor in this case—originates here, in an easily recognizable fallacy that
will be unmasked as not merely fallacious but morally false in Republic 1 for
those who missed that it was already both of those things here.206
But Plato doesn’t expect us to miss it: he has bigger fish to fry in Charmides,
and catching them in the first place depends on our awareness of what happens
in this passage. Having introduced the adverb ὠφελίμως, and having replaced
ποιεῖν with πράττειν, Plato will now put them together as ὠφελίμως πράττειν,
which might mean either “to act beneficially (to myself)” and “to act beneficially
(to others).” This, of course, is not the first combination of an adverb followed
by πράττειν: the crucial case is εὖ πράττειν. Precisely because the ambiguity of
the latter cannot be eliminated by means of the relevant dative, it is more difficult
to disambiguate, but there is more than a grammatical parallel with ὠφελίμως
πράττειν: the active sense of εὖ πράττειν applies to the doctor who, by doing τὰ
δέοντα, acts beneficially to the patient; the passive use, whereby “to fare well”
becomes synonymous with “to be happy,” is an example of “doing well” that
benefits the agent, in this case, the doctor. Here then is the passage that intro-
duces ὠφελίμως πράττειν along with its equally equivocal βλαβερῶς πράττειν
(where one acts harmfully either to oneself or to others), and finally σωφρόνως
πράττειν, which could mean either to do τὰ δέοντα for the patient or to know
oneself to have been benefited by so doing:

“Then sometimes,” I went on, “having acted beneficially [participial form of

ὠφελίμως πράττειν] or harmfully [βλαβερῶς with participial form of πράττειν
understood], the doctor does not know himself [γιγωώσκειν ἑαυτόν] how
he’s acted [πράττειν]; and yet, having acted beneficially [participial form of
ὠφελίμως πράττειν], by your statement, he has acted temperately [participial
form of σωφρόνως πράττειν]. Or did you not state that?” “I did.” “Therefore,
as it seems, sometimes having acted beneficially [participial form of ὠφελίμως
πράττειν], he—on the one hand—acts temperately [σωφρόνως πράττειν] and is
temperate, but on the other hand he does not know himself [ἀγνοεῖν ἑαυτόν] that
he is temperate.” “But that, he said, Socrates, could never be.”207

The phrase ὠφελίμως πράττειν appears three times and the first step is to
sort out how it is being used in each case. Because it is linked with βλαβερῶς
πράττειν, the first use must refer to the example of the doctor who, while
knowingly benefiting the patient in accordance with the requirements of art,
does not know whether she has acted beneficially or harmfully to herself.

206
 Cf. Schmid, Plato’s Charmides, 36: “Socrates does not argue here, as he does in the first book of
the Republic (341b–342e), that the artist qua artist is essentially oriented to the good of the other,
only accidentally to his own good.”
207
 Chrm. 164b11–c7 (Lamb modified).
172 Chapter 2

The second is an example of its objective use: Critias had agreed that the
doctor is being temperate by doing τὰ δέοντα (Chrm. 164b3–6), and this only
occurs when the doctor is benefitting the patient. Since this second use of
ὠφελίμως πράττειν is paired with the first use of σωφρόνως πράττειν, we are
likewise entitled to assume, at least for the present, that “acting temperately”
benefits others. The third use is the tricky one: insofar as σωφρόνως πράττειν
might mean to benefit the patient by doing τὰ δέοντα, it might seem that
ὠφελίμως πράττειν applies once again to benefiting the patient. But since the
second use of σωφρόνως πράττειν precludes being ignorant of oneself—this
is where Socrates has been driving Critias since 164a2–3—and since the
doctor is only ignorant that she is acting beneficially to herself and not the
patient, the meaning of ὠφελίμως πράττειν has shifted back, and σωφρόνως
πράττειν along with it: “to act temperately” now means “to act in such a man-
ner that you are never ignorant that you are benefitting yourself.”208
Here the reader will recognize the credo of the most radical Socratists
(although “belief” as in the Latin credere, really has nothing to do with it). Since
“practicable happiness” is what we are always necessarily pursuing,209 and since
this end is always that which benefits us, we reach in this passage the kind of
σωφροσύνη that perfectly captures their version of UV. Moreover, insofar as it
obliterates any distinction between (1) the knowledge of what always benefits
us (KGB), (2) our desire (or wish) for “the real good, a.k.a. happiness,”210 and
(3) our active and fully determined pursuit of that necessarily self-benefitting
good (i.e., the GoodE), it refers more fully to UV than does KGB alone. It is
therefore no accident that Charmides must figure prominently in the thought
of the most radical Socratists, and it is only because KGB, already found in
Laches, promptly reappears there, that it—and not the kind of temperance that
Socrates is determined to extract from Critias, and that he actually extracts from
him here—becomes the textual anchor of their position. By clearing the way for
a conversion of UV-virtue into a necessarily self-benefiting action—hence the
πράττειν in both ὠφελίμως and σωφρόνως πράττειν—that depends entirely on
our knowledge of what benefits us and when we are doing so, Plato may be said
to have offered his least virtuous readers a way out of the Santas Circle, and has
revealingly offered it to Critias.
It should also be becoming increasingly clear why the Εὖ Πράττειν
Fallacy—based as it is on a third adverb (εὖ) which prepares the way for
ὠφελίμως and σωφρόνως to be joined with πράττειν—is central to the ped-
agogical architecture of the pre-Republic dialogues, extending in its literal

208
 Cf. Schmid, Plato’s Charmides, 179n30.
209
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 128n21 cites Penner and Rowe, Plato’s Lysis, 90 and 263 for the term
“practicable happiness.”
210
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 128.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 173

form all the way to the end of Republic 1 (cf. R. 353e1–354a9). And my
position should be equally clear: the “solution” that the Fallacy provides
is the position we must overcome in order to tread the Longer Way. It is
only by treating the two different meanings of εὖ πράττειν as identical that
“faring well” as happiness becomes one with the knowledge that makes
“doing well” possible. The ascent to the GoodT is thus repeatedly made
easier once we recognize and then remember that the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy
is a fallacy, which of course it is.211 But there are worse things than failing
to recognize this fact, especially if it is only Plato’s least virtuous read-
ers who will be in eternal dialogue with the claim that happiness can only
achieved by doing well.
There is, however, another way of looking at this passage in the light of
Laches. In order for the doctor to know that she will be benefited—note the
use of μέλλειν in the phrase “when he is about [μέλλειν] to be benefited
[ὀνήσεσθαι] by the product which he makes” (Chrm. 164b8–9)—she must
possess that of which we are all ignorant: K-F. And even if by extracting
shrapnel from the toddler’s body the doctor would be killed by the next
hospital-targeting bomb, or be infected with Dengue fever by that appar-
ently merely irritating mosquito, it is possible or even likely that σωφρόνως
πράττειν in such a situation would mean the ability to bracket out all merely
personal distractions like fear of bombs (and insect bites) in order to concen-
trate on what she can know to be beneficial to the patient by calmly perform-
ing τὰ δέοντα in accordance with the medical art.
And then there is the question of death: can the doctor know that death,
even when a direct result of a choice to ὠφελίμως πράττειν, is something that
harms her? Certainly she cannot be sure of this if she is a Socratic as opposed
to a Socratist, and it is no accident that more of Charmides is devoted to
what we don’t know—that is, by knowing about the things we don’t know
that we don’t know them (cf. Chrm. 170c6–d4 and 171d2–4)—than to KGB,
or that a conversation about temperance, premised on the requirement that
it must benefit us, so effortlessly and deceptively shifts from “knowledge of
oneself” to “knowledge of knowledge” (Chrm. 166b9–c3).212 The deviation

211
 Despite Erler, Der Sinn der Aporien, 202n139. See also Arthur W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsi-
bility: A Study in Greek Values (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 252, and Stemmer, “Grundriss,”
547n58.
212
 Cf. Rowe, Plato and the Art, 130n25. See also Santas, “Socrates at Work (Charmides),” 118–120,
especially 119n12, Voula Tsouna, “Socrates’ Attack on Intellectualism in the Charmides.”
Apeiron 30, no. 4 (December 1997), 63–78, on 71, especially 71n19, and M. M. McCabe, ‘It goes
deep with me.’ Plato’s Charmides on Knowledge, Self-knowledge and Integrity” in Christopher
Cordner (ed.), Philosophy, Ethics and a Common Humanity: Essays in Honour of Raimond Gaita,
161–180 (Milton Park, UK and New York: Routledge, 2011), on 166–168. But first and foremost,
coinsult T. Godfrey Tuckey, Plato’s Charmides (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1951), 33–39 and 107–108.
174 Chapter 2

from Alcibiades Major is palpable,213 and it is no accident that Plato repeat-

edly points us back—in both Charmides and Laches—to where our quest for
self-knowledge began.214
Rowe begins the conclusion of his section on Charmides in Plato and the
Art of Philosophical Writing on a modest note:

There is insufficient space here for a full treatment of the Charmides, and of
the sometimes bewildering twists and turns of its arguments. However it can
hardly fail to be significant, for the topic of the present chapter, that Socrates’
(Plato’s) most extended discussion of self-knowledge should turn out to be a
discussion of the principle, and the possibility, of Socrates’ own preferred activ-
ity, of examining himself and others; even more significant, what the knowledge
which sōphrosunē or “sound-mindedness” would be able to test for, if it really
were capable of what Critias claims for it, would be knowledge of good and bad
(identified specifically as what makes us happy, eudaimones, or unhappy). Here
is Socrates’ vision of what sōphrosunē could do for us.215

There are, in fact, two passages in Plato’s Charmides that might possibly
deserve to be considered what Rowe calls “Socrates’ vision,” and the one
he goes on to quote at length (Chrm. 171d1–172a5) is actually the less obvi-
ously deserving of the two because Socrates calls the other passage “my
dream” (Chrm. 173a7–d7). But the end of the passage he quotes is sufficient
to explain why Rowe favors it:

“And thus, by means of sōphrosunē, every household would be well run, and
every city well governed, and so in every case where sōphrosunē reigned.

213
 Rowe’s footnote cited in the previous note is attached to the claim that Chrm. is “Socrates’
(Plato’s) most extended discussion of self-knowledge,” and given the role that Alc. 116b2–6 plays
in revealing the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy for what it is, it is no wonder that he overlooks it here (cf.
126n14 and 124).
214
 For the importance of “sight [ὄψις]” in Alc., La., and Chrm., see Ascent to the Beautiful, §6.
With the vocabulary in the primer on Socratic Ignorance (Alc. 117c6–e5), cf. the Happy City:
ἐπιτρέπειν (Alc. 117c7, 117d2, 117e5; cf. Chrm. 171e3), ἐπιχειροῦμεν πράττειν (Alc. 117d11 and
Chrm. 171e1), παραδιδόναι (Alc. 117e2 and Chrm. 171e2), and ἀναμάρτητοι (Alc. 117e4 and
Chrm. 171d6). Note also the use of the verb ἐμβλέπειν (LSJ: “to look in the face, to look at”):
in Alc., ἐμβλέπειν appears three times between Alc. 132e7 and 133a5 where Socrates analogizes
Delphi’s “Know Thyself” with “See Thyself.” This corresponds to the second of three uses in
Chrm. (160d6) where Socrates describes Charmides looking into himself to discover his own
σωφροσύνη. The first time, Charmides is the subject and ἐμβλέπειν is used to describe the way he
looks at Socrates, causing him to experience a kind of vertigo as a result (Chrm. 155c8); the third,
when Socrates sees the way Critias is looking at Charmides at Chrm. 162d4, was quoted in §4.
Without reference to ἐμβλέπειν, the first two of these are connected by Mary Margaret McCabe,
“Looking Inside Charmides’ Cloak: Seeing Others and Oneself in Plato’s Charmides” in Dominic
Scott (ed.), Maieusis: Essays in Ancient Philosophy in Honour of Myles Burnyeat, 1–19 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), on 11–14.
215
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 129–130.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 175

And with error rooted out and correctness in control, men so circumstanced
would necessarily fare admirably and well [καλῶς καὶ εὖ πράττειν] in all
their doings and, faring well [participial form of εὖ πράττειν], they would
be happy. Isn’t this what we mean about sōphrosunē, Critias,” I said, “when
we say what a good thing it would be to know what one knows and what one
does not know?”216

Rowe’s comment on the quotation must count as his last word in this
section,217 and I will now turn to a comparison—based on εὖ πράττειν,
which appears in both—of this crucial passage with “Socrates’ Dream”
(i.e., Chrm. 173a7–d7), the purpose of which is to show that even if it were
possible, this “knowledge of knowledge” would not benefit us. So let’s
begin with the way εὖ πράττειν is used here: although Sprague translates
καλῶς καὶ εὖ πράττειν as “[to] fare admirably and well,” that is incorrect.
It is only the second use of εὖ πράττειν that means “to fare well” so as to
make it synonymous with “to be happy,” and Socrates’ strategy is to use
first the phrase is in its active and transitive sense, meaning “to do [things]
beautifully and well,” and then to slide, through the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy,
to its passive and intransitive use:218 Consider the beginning of the sen-
tence, also quoted by Rowe:

“Neither would we ourselves be attempting to do [πράττειν] things we did not

understand—rather we would find those who did understand and turn the matter
over to them—nor would we trust those over whom we ruled to do [participial
form of πράττειν] anything except [ἄλλο τι ἤ] what they would [μέλλειν] do
correctly [ὀρθῶς πράττειν], and this would be that of which they possessed the
knowledge.”219

In context, then, the first use of εὖ πράττειν in καλῶς καὶ εὖ πράττειν means
exactly the same thing as the prior ὀρθῶς πράττειν: we would do things cor-
rectly, beautifully, and well and would therefore—by the deployment of the
Fallacy in the sequel—“fare well” and thus be happy.

216
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 130, followed by: “(Charmides 171d1–172a5, tr. Sprague in the Hackett
translation, but with minor modifications).
217
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 130: “Of course at this point in the dialogue, and indeed later on, it still
remains to be established that ‘knowledge of knowledge’ is possible, and what exactly its relation-
ship would be to the substantive knowledge of good and bad.”
218
 Cf. Witte, Wissenschaft vom Guten, 130: “Die Doppeldeutung von εὖ πράττειν, das in Griechischen
das ‘richtige Handeln’ und das daraus resultierende ‘Wohlergehen’ bezeichnet, ermöglicht Plato
diesen Übergang ohne ausführliche Argumentation.”
219
 Chrm. 171d8–e5.
176 Chapter 2

Before pressing forward, it is important to realize that the three

adverb-plus-πράττειν phrases in “the Happy City [Passage]” match the
three others in “the Self-Benefiting Doctor [Passage]” (for so will Chrm.
171d2–172a3 and 164a9–c6 will henceforward be called). This is no acci-
dent: with respect to KGB—as opposed to Athenian history—Charmides
is best understood as built around a series of these phrases, climaxing
in Socrates’ Dream.220 Plato uses ὀρθῶς πράττειν as a bridge between
the two triads found in the Self-Benefiting Doctor and the Happy City:
before appearing in the latter, it is deployed first at 171b9. In the Dream,
Plato will add one more version in the by now canonical form: ἐπιστη-
μόνως πράττειν at 173d1, 173d3–4, and 173d7. As should be obvious to
the reader of Euthydemus—and this is what I’m claiming the reader of Pla-
to’s Charmides is and was intended to be—this last form is synonymous
with the active and transitive use of εὖ πράττειν meaning: “to do [things]
knowledgeably” and thus “correctly” or “well.”
It is therefore the non-synonymous relationship between ἐπιστημόνως
πράττειν and the passive or intransitive (“fare well”) sense of εὖ πράττειν
that creates the climax of the Dream, and marks a turning point in Plato’s
deployment of the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy. By this I don’t mean to suggest that
it is only now that we learn that εὖ πράττειν is equivocal: on the contrary.
We were first exposed to the Fallacy in Protagoras before Plato made its
slipperiness impossible to miss in Alcibiades Major; as a result, we were
expected to recognize it for what it is in Euthydemus. But in those instances,
Plato depicted Socrates acting as if he saw no fallacy, and we saw that sliding
from one meaning to the other repeatedly benefited him on an argumentative
level. It was therefore only an awareness of Plato the Teacher—a significantly
more important factor than our own ability to detect the easily detectible Fal-
lacy he generously invited us to discover for ourselves—that allowed us to
see what Socrates was doing.
But why is he doing it, that is, what is Plato really using Socrates to
accomplish here? Is he merely advancing our continuing education in the
deliberate use of fallacy, or does our awareness of the Εὖ Πράττειν Fal-
lacy accomplish a greater result? In fact, the Fallacy is crucial to modern
efforts to reconstruct “the philosophy of Socrates,” and it is thanks to
the most radical Socratists that the Fallacy’s pedagogical value becomes

220
 In fact, that climax is followed by a brief coda at 174c9–d1 (quoted above) where two simi-
lar phrases—εὖ γίγνεσθαι and ὠφελίμως γίγνεσθαι—balance the introduction to the series at
162e7–163c3, where we encounter καλῶς ποιεῖν and ὠφελίμως ποιεῖν. Then follows the triad of
ὠφελίμως πράττειν, βλαβερῶς πράττειν, and σωφρόνως πράττειν in the Self-Benefitting Doctor,
and when I remark that the relevant equivocations have already been explained, I mean that Plato
has brought them to our attention.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 177

visible and Plato’s motive for deploying it recoverable. Equal priority (or
“First Friend” finality) can be extended to both Happiness and the (εὖ
πράττειν-active) knowledge that thereby becomes constitutive of “faring
well” only by combining the two different meanings of εὖ πράττειν into
one,221 that is, by ignoring the fallacious character of the Fallacy. In other
words, squaring the Santas Circle requires the Socratist to elevate—albeit
tacitly—an easily recognizable and pervasive equivocation to the status of
un-hypothetical principle. Indeed this is a crucial point.
In direct opposition to the Happy City, where Socrates exploits εὖ πράττειν
in the usual manner—and as he will do again (see Grg. 507c3–5 and R.
353e1–354a2)—it is in the Dream that he makes the rejection of the Fallacy
the core of his argument:

Thus equipped, I grant that the human race, on the one hand [μέν], would indeed
act knowledgeably [ἐπιστημόνως πράττειν] and live [knowledgeably]—for
temperance, on guard, would not let ignorance fall in amongst us and be our
workmate—but, on the other hand [δέ], that by acting knowledgeably [ἐπιστη-
μόνως πράττειν], we should do well [εὖ πράττειν] and be happy [εὐδαιμονε
ῖν]—this we are not yet able to grasp [μανθάνειν], my dear Critias.222

It is noteworthy that the question of happiness becomes as prominent at the

end of Charmides as virtue was in the beginning of Laches, a dialogue in
which no words relating to happiness appear. In Charmides, the verb εὐδαι-
μονεῖν appears first here, while the happy (εὐδαίμονες) made their first
appearance in the Happy City in the same context but with opposite effect
(Chrm. 172a3).
“When Critias replies to Socrates” μέν/δέ statement—he appears to be just
as shocked by it as Plato expects us to be—he reverts to the usefully equivo-
cal deployment of εὖ πράττειν when he states that without due respect for
ἐπιστημόνως πράττειν, we will not easily achieve what might be either “the
fulfillment of doing [things] well” or “the crown of happiness.”223

221
 Note that this move triggers the Problem of the One and the Many, that is, it treats two different
things as if they were one, and this creates the logical link between Plato’s deployment of the
Problem of the One and the Many beginning in Republic and of the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy in the
pre-Republic dialogues. The more important theoretical link between them is that both lead to
well-known deformations of the GoodT: one reduces it to the GoodE (or the knowledge that consti-
tutes it) and the other to the unifying One (see Introduction). The pedagogical link between them
is that both are easy to spot and therefore student-friendly: just as “doing well” is different from
“faring well,” so too the One that unites the Many as One cannot be the same thing as the One.
222
 Chrm. 173c7–d5 (Lamb modified).
223
 So translated by Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 115: “‘But if you [Critias is speaking to Socrates]
denigrate knowledge, you will not easily find the crown [τέλος] of happiness in anything else.’”
178 Chapter 2

“But still,” he [sc. Critias] replied, “you will not easily find any other [ἄλλο τι]
fulfillment [τέλος] of our welfare [τὸ εὖ πράττειν] if you dishonor [our acting]
knowledgeably [τὸ ἐπιστημόνως].”224

The effect is amazing: Critias has now becomes the proponent of the First
Protreptic—initial equivocation and all—in response to Socrates’ surprising
willingness to divorce τὸ ἐπιστημόνως [πράττειν] from to εὐδαιμονεῖν.225
Why has Plato chosen this particular moment to allow his Socrates to aban-
don the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy upon which the marriage of acting in accordance
with knowledge and being happy depends?226
If the answer to this question must be sought in Charmides alone, it is
likely to be discovered in connection with Plato’s ironic juxtaposition of
Socrates and Critias. Noburo Notomi, a prominent spokesman for the his-
torical/political reading of the dialogue, mentions three areas where “Cri-
tias introduces the apparently Socratic mottoes, ‘doing one’s own things,’
‘knowing oneself,’ and ‘knowledge of ignorance.’”227 It is necessary to
round out this list with two more: the apparently “Socratic” deployment of
the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy in the dialogues that precede Charmides, and the
importance of the Good (τὸ ἀγαθόν) in Republic, the great dialogue that
forms their crown or τέλος.
The latter appears in the wake of the Dream because Socrates demands to
know “of what” is the knowledge associated with τὸ ἐπιστημόνως πράττειν:

“Then inform me further,” I said, “on one more little matter [σμικρόν]: knowl-
edgeably of what [τίνος ἐπιστημόνως] are you speaking? Of shoe-making?” “By
Zeus, not I!”228

224
 Chrm. 173d6–7 (Lamb modified). Especially in the light of the last charge against Socrates in
Clt. (410e7–8), there is something to be said for construing the genitive in the phrase ἄλλο τι
τέλος τοῦ εὖ πράττειν as comparative, that is, “you will not easily discover any other end than
to εὖ πράττειν.” This indicates that it will not be easy—and for Critias, it will be impossible—to
locate the ἄλλο τι τέλος in the GoodT (cf. τι ἱκανόν at Phd. 101d8) rather than in the GoodE, here
formulated as a unified and therefore fraudulently unambiguous εὖ πράττειν.
225
 Cf. Tuckey, Plato’s Charmides, 74: “His [sc. Socrates’] expression of doubt whether ἐπιστημόνως
ἂν πράττοντες εὖ ἂν πράττοιμεν {‘acting knowledgeably we would also do well’} at once
demands the determination of the meaning of εὖ, which, as soon becomes clear, can only denote
moral as opposed to merely technical perfection.” With the role of Critias here, cf. Clt. 408c5–6.
226
 Cf. Schmid, Plato’s Charmides, 135: “Socrates’ point is that although we might ‘do well’ in the
sense of the correct practice of a technical art, we might not ‘do well’ in the moral sense of bring-
ing about well-being and happiness. This, we recall, was the point at which the earlier discussion
of sophrosune as ‘doing good’ had floundered.” On 164a1–c4, see 35–36 and 179n30.
227
 Notomi, “Ethical Examination in Context,” 254. See also Noburo Notomi, “Critias and the Origin
of Plato’s Political Philosophy” in T. M. Robinson and Luc Brisson (eds.), Plato: Euthydemus,
Lysis, Charmides. Proceedings of the V Symposium Platonicum: Selected Papers (Sankt Augus-
tin: Academia, 2000), 237–250.
228
 Chrm. 173d8–e1 (Lamb modified). Cf. Thomas M. Tuozzo, Plato’s Charmides: Positive Elenchus
in a “Socratic’ Dialogue (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 273n33.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 179

It is in pursuit of an answer to this question that a discussion of the spe-

cific kind of knowledge possessed by the happy man (ὁ εὐδαίμων at
173e6–7, 173e10, and 174a10–11) finally leads to KGB and thus to a
notion of τὸ ἀγαθόν (174b11, 174c2–3, and 174e2) that elevates it above
temperance, to which it had previously been connected at 161a11 and
172b1.
On the other hand, the Reading Order hypothesis repeatedly confirms the
insight that the answers to such questions must be sought not only within any
individual dialogue, but also in its synergetic connection to its neighbors.
On the microcosmic level, Laches is the crucial case, and the reappearance of
μαντική in the Dream (Chrm. 173c3–7)229—where Socrates grants the pos-
sibility that it will be “knowledge of the future [ἐπιστήμη τοῦ μέλλοντος]”
(Chrm. 173c4) possessed by those who are truly soothsayers and “prophets
of future things [τὰ μέλλοντα]” (Chrm. 173c6–7) right before arresting this
flight of fancy with the shocking μέν/δέ explosion of the εὖ πράττειν equivo-
cation (Chrm. 173c7–d5)—becomes inextricably mixed thereafter with the
content of the happy man’s knowledge:

“Perhaps you are speaking of [the topic is the happy man/ὁ εὐδαίμων of Chrm.
173e10] the one I was speaking of just now: the man knowing the future things
[ὁ εἰδώς τὰ μέλλοντα], everything that will be [πάντα ἔσεσθαι], i.e., the sooth-
sayer [ὁ μάντις]. Are you speaking of this man him or someone else?” “Yes,
I refer to him, he said, and someone else too.” “Whom?” I asked. “Surely it
could not be [ἆρα μή] this man, if anybody in addition to the future things [τὰ
μέλλοντα] also could know all things that have happened [τὰ γεγονότα πάντα]
and the things that now are [τὰ νῦν ὄντα] and was ignorant of nothing [μηδὲν
ἀγνοεῖν]?”230

It is “the sequence of tenses” in this remarkable passage that makes the

connection to Laches unmistakable. From Nicias’ “knowledge of what is to
be hoped and feared [i.e., CK-DD],” Socrates derived K-FGB before add-
ing past and present to secure KGB. Aside from our own (well-grounded)
suspicions about the possibility of K-F in general, Plato gave us no mani-
fest reason to doubt the validity of these moves, and as we saw, Vlastos,
Irwin, and Penner discovered no reason to question this aspect of TAL.
In Charmides—so much more difficult than Laches in any number of other
ways—he nevertheless makes it easier for us to see the problem this time:
after conjuring up a non-existent knowledge-based μαντική in the Dream
(Chrm. 173c3–4), he brings ὁ μάντις back as ὁ εἰδώς τὰ μέλλοντα with

229
 Cf. Tuozzo, Plato’s Charmides, 268: “Why does Socrates here add the rather peculiar art of divi-
nation to those that will be practiced in the city?”
230
 Chrm. 173e10–174a6.
180 Chapter 2

“the future things” now exaggeratedly glossed as πάντα ἔσεσθαι. Upon

this impossibility, he then heaps Ossa on Pelion by raising the significantly
less possible possibility—hence the first use of (the “surely you can’t pos-
sibly think”) ἆρα μή since the question that provoked the Lysis’ blush (Ly.
213d1)—by repeating to comic effect the move that so many others have
regarded as sensible in TAL: the knower of the future becomes equally
knowing of everything that is and has been.
Nor is Plato done with twisting this particular knife: without waiting for a
reply to this badgering question, his Socrates continues:

“But let us posit that such a one exists, for I don’t think you could mention
anybody living still [ἔτι] more knowledgeably [ἐπιστημονέστερον]231 than
this one.” “Clearly not.’ “Still [ἔτι] I further yearn after this: which of the
knowledges makes him happy? Or is it all of them alike?” “By no means all
alike,” he replied. “But to which most of all? The knowledge by which he
knows what thing [τί] likewise [καί] of the things that are [τὰ ὄντα] and of
the things that have been [τὰ γεγονότα] and of the future things that will be
[τὰ μέλλοντα]? Might it be, then [ἆρα γε], that by which he knows the art of
chess [τὸ πεττευτικόν]?”232

With the crucial KGB (Chrm. 174b10) now separated from τὸ πεττευ­-
τικόν only by only two more Socratic examples—that is, the knowledge by
which we know calculation (Chrm. 174b5) and health (Chrm. 174b7); Critias
allows this last one to be closer (μᾶλλον at Chrm. 174b8 leading to μάλιστα
at 174b9)—Plato has managed to enmesh “knowledge of the good and bad”
far more damagingly with knowledge of the future in Charmides than he did
in Laches, and he has been able to do so only because Charmides follows
Laches in the ROPD.233 In short, Plato has used first Nicias and then Critias
to show the epistemological limitations of τὸ ἐπιστημόνως πράττειν with
respect to K-F.
Even at this late stage, however, the last word on the moral limitations
of ὠφελίμως πράττειν has yet to be spoken. Having reintroduced ὠφελίμως
(without πράττειν) immediately after the appearance of KGB in order to

231
 Note that ἐπιστημόνως πράττειν is replaced with ἐπιστημόνως ζῶν beginning at Chrm. 173e7; cf.
the replacement of the active εὖ πράττειν (R. 353e5) by εὖ ζῆν (R. 354a1) in Republic 1. A lively
sense of how the meaning of εὖ ζῆν in Prt. 351b4 is different from its meaning in Cri. 48b5 is a
desideratum, disambiguating as they do the two meanings of εὖ πράττειν.
232
 Chrm. 174a6–b3. Note that while the expert in chess knows very well what moves have been
made and even which move would be made in response to any possible move an opponent might
make, nobody knows, no matter how expert, what move the opponent will actually make at any
stage of any future game.
233
 See also Altman, “Laches before Charmides.”
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 181

accommodate what “comes to be” in all three tenses at Chrm. 174c9–d1, and
having then made crystal clear that the kind of effect (ἔργον) he has a right
to demand from Critias’ σωφροσύνη is that it benefits us (τὸ ὠφελεῖν ἡμᾶς
at Chrm. 174d4), Socrates provokes the son of Callaischros (Chrm. 153c7
and 169b5)234 to offer a last defense of “the knowledge of knowledges” by
contrasting it with a necessarily self-benefiting KGB:

“so that if this [αὕτη; sc. KGB] is beneficial [ὠφέλιμος], temperance would be
something else [ἄλλο τι].” “But why,” he asked, “would it [αὕτη; sc. the knowl-
edge of knowledges] not be beneficial [ὠφελεῖν]? For if temperance is first and
foremost [ὅτι μάλιστα] a knowledge of knowledges, and it also presides over the
other sciences, surely it will also be ruling [ἄρχειν] this one, i.e., the knowledge
concerning the good [ἡ περὶ τἀγαθὸν ἐπιστήμη] so as to benefit us [ὠφελεῖν
ἡμᾶς].” “And would it cause [people] to be healthy [ὑγιαίνειν] too?” I asked:
“this one [αὕτη] but not medicine [ἡ ἰατρική]?”235

Starting from the environs of Laches,236 this passage hurls Charmides forward
into the orbit of Republic, simultaneously attracted by its gravitational force
and just as strongly repelled from its moral majesty by that very proximity.
Beginning in Republic 1, the relationship between benefiting and being ben-
efited will loom as large as the parallel active/passive relationship between
doing and suffering injustice will do in Gorgias.237
As already indicated, the verb ἄρχειν will play a crucial part in laying to
rest the fallacy of the Self-Benefitting Doctor in much the same way as the
conclusion of the Dream explodes the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy. For reasons that
have everything to do with the real Critias—and very little to do with the
truth about the Good—he can only conceive of the ruling art as benefiting
himself, and is therefore happy to subordinate ἡ περὶ τἀγαθὸν ἐπιστήμη to the
same kind of superordinate τέχνη we failed to find in Euthydemus. But Critias
doesn’t need Socrates to prove to him either that σωφροσύνη as he under-
stands it will benefit him or that it won’t: he knows that it will (see §7, ad fin.).
Knowing that self-benefit (hereafter “SB”) is all that counts with Critias, then,
Socrates promptly reminds the reader—always the sole object of Plato’s seri-
ous concern while writing the dialogues—of the doctor, and that means the

234
 It is worth noting that his delightfully oxymoronic patronymic means something like “beautiful
ugliness” or “noble baseness.”
235
 Chrm. 174d6–e3 (Lamb modified; this time without translating the bracketed ἡ ὠφελίμη at 174d7.
236
 See Hobbs, Plato and the Hero, 101: “Nicias needs to redefine benefit in order to show that there
is no real tension between the personally beneficial and the morally noble; if he does not, then
it is not at all clear why knowledge of the noble alone should be sufficient to ensure courageous
action.”
237
 See Plato the Teacher, 94–95.
182 Chapter 2

real, not the Self-Benefiting Doctor: the one who causes others to ὑγιαίνειν
by doing τὰ δεόντα with no concern for what benefits her.238
Of course Plato’s Republic is in retrospect everywhere visible in Charmi-
des, but nowhere more obviously than in the Dream and the Happy City.239
These connections probably explain why so many have thought that Plato
is actually sympathetic—or at least more sympathetic than Xenophon—to
his famous relative: so much of Critias will reappear in his masterpiece.
But where does it reappear, and on what terms? Like the Diotima discourse
in Symposium, Republic is a complex work, containing as it does both a
Eudaemonist Shortcut and “a Longer and Harder Way.” It is that dialogue’s
Shorter Way that repeatedly echoes Charmides, and even more obvious than
the anticipations of “Kallipolis” in the Dream and the Happy City is the rev-
elation of justice in Republic 4 as τὸ τὰ ἑαυτοῦ πράττειν (R. 433a8; cf. 378a4
and 433d8), that is, as Critias’ first choice for σωφροσύνη, and likewise the
definition that Plato uses to reveal him as a liar, a scoundrel, and the twisted
corruptor of the beautiful Charmides (see §4).
But Plato has his own purposes and knows how to place the bad at the ser-
vice of the good, and to make the false reveal the truth. The Longer Way is
present in Charmides and Critias as well, and even though this section’s
exclusion of the political and historical aspects of Laches and Charmides pre-
cludes a full discussion here, the Self-Benefiting Doctor is just as close to the
Longer Way in Republic 6–7 as “doing one’s own things” is to the Shorter,
and for very much the same reason. Consummated only in the reader’s
response to Republic 7, albeit carefully prepared in Republic 1 by the City of
Good Men Only (R. 347d2–8), the ascent to the Good can only take place in
defiant proximity with, and in dialectical antithesis to, “the good for me” so
unmistakably and beautifully linked to the tyrant Critias in Charmides.
Although only an awareness of Athenian history allows the reader to see
that K, CA, UV, TEA, and IOV are being subjected to a reductio ad tyranni-
dem in Charmides, the Self-Benefiting Doctor has already drawn the reader’s
attention to the crucial question of whom “the beneficial” benefits, and has
completely enmeshed happiness, thanks to the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy, with the
ruler’s benefit, and thus neither with the good of the ruled nor with the Idea
of the Good. For Critias, IOV is a given: KGB’s purpose is to benefit us, or
rather him. But there is a reason why Socrates keeps the conversation on this
level: Plato needs the intrinsic baseness of a strictly self-benefiting good to

238
 Cf. Tucker Landy, “Limitations of Political Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato’s Charmides.”
Interpretation 26, no. 2 (Winter 1998), 183–199, on 198: “These impulses [‘partly by eros, partly
by his indefatigable desire for conversation and mutual self-examination with them’] evidently
cause him [sc. Socrates] to act, like the doctor discussed at 164b, without knowledge of the benefit
to himself or the person he is treating.”
239
 Cf. Schmid, Plato’s Charmides, 127–128.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 183

propel those few among his students who are truly in love with giving birth
in the Beautiful—as he is—to break free from the shackles of the unknown
“Self” of whose “Good” we have no more knowledge than we do of its post-
mortem future.

§7. THE RETURN TO ATHENS IN

LACHES AND CHARMIDES

Despite the famous anecdote to the effect that the un-geometrical were not
permitted to enter the Academy, the sublime simplicity of Alcibiades Major
suggests that Plato himself established no such entry-requirements for his
school. This is particularly obvious in the case of mathematics: aside from
the crucial question raised in Hippias Major about whether or not “one” is
odd (Hp. Ma. 302a2–5)—something it could only be if it were a number,
which thanks to the Problem of the One and the Many, is exactly what it
cannot be, nor for that matter could any number possibly be “one” (cf. Prt.
329c5)—arithmetic plays no role in the pre-Symposium dialogues, and the
towering importance it will come to have in Republic 6–7 is only gradually
adumbrated by remarks in Euthydemus (Euthd. 290b10–c7),240 Charmides
(Chrm. 165e5–166a11), and Gorgias (see §8) before emerging from the
shadows in Meno (see §15).
When it comes to History, however, the situation is different: beginning
with the arrival of Alcibiades and Critias at the house of Callias in Protagoras
(Prt. 316a4–5), Plato has presupposed a familiarity with the immortal story of
Athens, a story, it should be added at the start, that Plato needs to be immor-
tal. If there were any entry-requirements at the Academy, they were musical
in nature, not mathematical, and as already argued in Ascent to the Beautiful,
the opening lines of Protagoras desiderate a student who can praise Homer
and recognize Xenophon’s footprints (Prt. 309a1–b2). But to desiderate is not
to require, and no matter how much knowledge of Herodotus, Thucydides,
and Xenophon Plato may have hoped the young readers of his Alcibiades
Major would already have—and it deserves emphasis from the start that any-
one’s pre-Platonic familiarity with the story of Alcibiades depends on both
Xenophon and Thucydides, who died before completing it—there is good
reason to think that he did not make entry into the Academy dependent on
their having it.
The “good reason” I have in mind is first indicated at the end of Ion,
where Socrates mentions three foreign-born generals in the service of Athens

240
 See Gonzalez, “How to Read,” 17 on Ly. 206e7–8.
184 Chapter 2

(Ion 541c7–d2), none of whom are mentioned only in Thucydides’ History,241

one in Xenophon’s Hellenica,242 and one in Plato’s Ion alone.243 Having fired
this shot across the bow, the student’s detailed knowledge of Athenian His-
tory is then tested in Menexenus because it will be required for understanding
Symposium.244 How much we knew about Athenian history when we entered
the Academy—or, to say the same thing less poetically, when we began read-
ing the dialogues—is something over which Plato the Teacher could have no
control, but by the time we hear Alcibiades’ last speech at Agathon’s, he has
ensured that we now know a great deal about it. In Ascent to the Beautiful,
I maintained that Symposium constitutes the τέλος of our education in Athe-
nian History; in fact, it is the culmination of only the first of three stages in
that process.
The second of those stages is embodied in Laches and Charmides—hence
this section’s preface—with the third stage beginning in Gorgias and con-
tinuing through Republic to Critias. A useful way to begin thinking about
this tripartite division is to consider Plato’s use of anachronism. In the first
stage, represented by both Menexenus and Symposium,245 Plato uses anach-
ronism to test whether we know our Athenian History: only those equally
familiar with Xenophon and Thucydides will get the joke of the posthumous
Peace. After the respite provided by Lysis and Euthydemus, the full sweep of
Athenian History returns, majestically, in Laches and Charmides, this time
perfectly unmarred by deliberate anachronism except insofar as the reader’s
consciousness is made to inhabit equally not only each dialogue’s conversa-
tional present, but its past and future as well. Our capacity to appreciate the
poly-synchronous literary magic that emerges from the historical accuracy of
Laches and Charmides depends entirely on our own detailed knowledge of
Athenian History, and the ROPD explains how Plato has ensured by this point
that his students’ knowledge is no longer merely desiderated, but required.246

241
 Despite Debra Nails, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics (India-
napolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 159, Heraclides of Clazomenae is not mentioned in Thucydides 4.50
although he does appear in [Aristotle], Athenian Constitution 41.3 and Andocides 3.29. See John
D. Moore, “The Dating of Plato’s Ion.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 15 (1974), 421–439.
242
 On Phanosthenes, see Hellenica, 1.5, 18–19; like Heraclides, he too is mentioned in Andocides
(1.149).
243
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §16.
244
 See Altman, “Reading Order,” section 4.
245
 See Kenneth Dover (ed.). Plato, Symposium (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1980), 10 and 119; note that Xenophon is the basis of our ability to detect the anachronisms in
both dialogues.
246
 Cf. de Romilly, “Réflexions sur le courage chez Thucydide et chez Platon,” 323: “Je n’ai voulu
montrer ici qu’une chose: c’est que, pour comprendre les dialogues de Platon, et surtout les pre-
miers, il faut ne pas s’enfermer des problèmes philosophiques formulés de façon plus ou moins
moderne, mais tenir le plus grand compte des textes non philosophiques, ceux à partir desquels
est née la pensée philosophique, qui la nourissent, qui la stimulent, et à laquelle, finalement, elle
répond de très près.”
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 185

While we must be able to place both Laches and Charmides between two
chronologically pinpointed events, a more philosophical use of anachronism
emerges in Gorgias. Like Republic, it is impossible to attach a consistent date
to the first dialogue we read after Charmides. But there is a connection none-
theless: by starting at Potidaea and ending with the Thirty—for such is the
magic Plato uses Critias to create—Charmides spans the War: it becomes for
the first time in the dialogues a whole. Building on the teaser at the end of Ion,
deliberate anachronism in Menexenus functioned as a test of our knowledge
of details. But its further deployment in Gorgias and Republic ensures that we
do not miss the forest for the trees: it is not the details of the War that are of
greatest concern to Plato despite the fact that, like the great History Teacher
he is, he requires us to know those details before proceeding. Beginning with
Gorgias, it is the War as a whole—its synthetic meaning and timeless signifi-
cance—that matters in the end. It is therefore no longer of consequence that
we can (or rather cannot) date Gorgias between the recent death of Pericles
and the latest King of Macedon (cf. Alc2. 141d5–e2 and Thg. 124d2–4): it is
the Melian Dialogue that echoes throughout the conversation with Callicles
and makes Plato’s Gorgias, no less than Thucydides’ History, “a possession
into eternity.” Of Republic too we can say of its historical setting only: “it is
the War.”247
In the first section of this chapter, I suggested that Plato uses ring-
composition in constructing the series of dialogues between Euthydemus
and Meno. The way specific historical events in the past and future create
the parameters of the conversation’s present in both Laches and Charmides
now offers another example of this compositional technique. Unfolding
between the War’s tyrannical aftermath (403 B.C.) and its beginning (431
B.C.), Charmides creates a chronological ring around Laches. Thanks to
both Delium (424 B.C.) and the Quarries of Syracuse (413 B.C.), Laches
begins later than Charmides but ends before it.248 But what makes the
return to Athenian History in these dialogues significant is not simply that
it supports or establishes the pedagogical priority of Laches to Charmides
in the ROPD: the hypothesis governing this section is that our detailed
knowledge of Athenian History, carefully nurtured by Plato the Teacher,
is the key to understanding both of them.
Before examining the historical details that are decisive for adequately
interpreting Laches and Charmides, it is necessary first to step back and

247
 Cf. Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1960), 990: “Ost oder West? Es
ist der Flachland, es ist der Krieg.”
248
 When Symposium is thrown into the mix, the pattern of the nesting dolls becomes even clearer: the
interval between the Battle of Mantinaea in 418 B.C. and the departure of the Sicilian Expedition
in 415 is smaller than the one in Laches.
186 Chapter 2

explain as fully and clearly as possible why Plato would bother to write
dialogues that depended on “the knowledge of Athenian History” (hereafter
“KAH”). After all, the claim that KAH is necessary for understanding these
dialogues might be taken to mean nothing more than that the philosophical
importance of these dialogues lies elsewhere, and that the Play of (histori-
cal) Character and the Argument of the (political) Action is merely a means
to some independent philosophical end. Since both the Play of Character
and the Argument of the Action do in fact make the dialogues more lively,
interesting, and pedagogically effective, and since the insights that flow from
KAH are, for lack of a better word, fun—fun to seek, fun to discover, and fun
to explain—it is easy to ignore the philosophical underpinning that makes
the fun possible, particularly when the chance to study each dialogue on its
own gives the interpreter freedom to explore such things in detail. But it is
one-sided to claim that the purpose of Charmides is teach us about Critias and
the Thirty Tyrants,249 fun though it is to explain why this lively dialogue is
something more than “Plato’s examination of temperance,” and is concerned
with something other than KGB.
Like everything else in Plato, the proper understanding of his concern with
KAH must be connected to and derived from the Allegory of the Cave. Begin-
ning in Lysis and Euthydemus, and bursting into the center of the reader’s
attention with the Happy City and the Dream in Charmides, Plato is leading
us on, repeatedly enacting a search for some superordinate knowledge most
plausibly configured as KGB. In fact, the true τέλος of this search is not a
superordinate science but rather a paradigmatic action: the true philosopher’s
voluntary Return to the Cave. This return is the precondition of the πολιτικός,
and even after the true object of KGB is revealed as the Idea of the Good,
mere knowledge of that Good is insufficient. Plato isn’t a Neoplatonist: the
philosopher who knows that the shadows are nothing more and avoids them
like the plague, who sets at naught the values of the city and matter generally
in a single-minded quest for the essential, who seeks ecstatic union with the
transcendent, is not Plato’s hero. If Plato had been Plotinus, there would be
no need for his students to acquire KAH.
The riddle of Platonism is the opposition at its heart. Of course the con-
templative life is better than the active, of course the transcendent Good is
the only object of the philosopher’s true concern, of course it is necessary
to emancipate one’s true Self from the merely adventitious and temporary

249
 As in Paul Stern, “Tyranny and Self-Knowledge: Critias and Socrates in Plato’s Charmides.”
American Political Science Review 93, no. 2 (June 1999), 399–412, building (402n18) on Chris-
topher Bruell, “Socratic Politics and Self-Knowledge: An Interpretation of Plato’s Charmides.”
Interpretation 6, no. 3 (October 1977), 141–203.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 187

enslavement to the body. The riddle is that all of those truths, and more of
their mystical ilk, do not justify Weltflucht or “assimilation to God” (Tht.
176b1) but rather justify—once the reader has moved beyond the GoodE—the
noble and dangerous return to the Cave. Plato requires his students to acquire
KAH because it contains (and continues to be) the best available prepara-
tion for the dangers we will encounter there. This riddle has proved to be
baffling, and Plato has left the tradition wondering whether he is the dreamy
philosopher of the timeless transcendent, or the first great thinker to have left
a written record of how philosophy emancipated itself from the heavens, viv-
idly grounding it in the political, spatiotemporal, phenomenological reality or
finitude of human being. The answer to the riddle of Platonism is that he is
both, and consistently so.
In short, the philosophical justification for this section’s “Return to Ath-
ens” must be sought in the Cave, for which both Laches and Charmides are
preparing us. Of course they are neither the first nor the last dialogues to do
so: all of the pre-Republic dialogues are preparing us for Plato’s masterpiece.
But there is going up and going back down, and the vision of the Beautiful
in Symposium, along with the mystery of the First Friend in Lysis are prepar-
ing us for the first, for there can obviously be no “Going Back Down” if one
has not first made the ascent to the Beautiful and then to the Good. Neither
the Neoplatonists nor the proponents of radical Anglophone Socratism can
explain the paradox of the philosopher who returns to the Cave, and both for
the same reason: Plato is counseling his students to choose ennobling self-
sacrifice in the Cave of politics over the base comforts of SB even when—
indeed particularly when—the latter takes the most beautiful, mystical, and
world-transcending form imaginable.
The shift in direction embodied in Laches and Charmides is already vis-
ible at the end of Euthydemus, not only because the superordinate knowledge
Socrates is seeking in the Second Protreptic is assumed to be political and
appears there in a (mysterious) form that will only become intelligible in
Republic (Euthd. 290b10–c6) but more importantly because of the frontiers-
men he criticizes at the end of the dialogue (Euthd. 305c6–306d1). These are
said (by Prodicus) to constitute or inhabit the μεθορία between “a philosopher
and a political man” (Euthd. 305c7), and Plato uses them to introduce the par-
adox of the philosopher who returns to the Cave. Throughout the critique of
those who hover between philosophy and political practice (Euthd. 306a1–c5),
Socrates assumes that both philosophy and “political practice [ἡ πολιτικὴ
πρᾶξις]” (Euthd. 306b2–3) can be called “good” in relation to two differ-
ent things but “not to the same thing [μὴ πρὸς ταὐτόν]” (Euthd. 306a5; cf.
306c3–4); it is on this basis that the blend of both must necessarily be worse
than each (Euthd. 306b4–c5). The solution is reached only when both aim at
188 Chapter 2

the Idea of the Good, but thanks to the two opposite directions involved, nei-
ther the resolutely naturalistic Socratist nor the mystical monist can explain
Plato’s concern with KAH.
My claim, then, is that without KAH, the student can’t understand Plato.
But this is not because the details such knowledge make it possible to unlock
the mysteries of Laches and Charmides, let alone because such details are
in any way as important as the ascent to the Good. Plato cannot know what
particular shadows his students will face in the future when they contemplate
the Cave in their own cities, for he—like all the rest of us—necessarily lacks
K-F. Instead, he can only prepare them as best he can, and he believes, with
good reason, that they will respond to FGB with more insight if they have
KAH. Thanks to Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, Plato knows that
we can acquire KAH, and thanks to Thucydides in particular, he has as good
a guide as any to “the things that will be [τὰ μέλλοντα].”250 By now we are
in a good position to see that he made a wise and prescient choice from a
pedagogical perspective: especially as transmitted by Thucydides, KAH has
taught mankind a great deal about the future in the intervening millennia.251
KGB is another story. It is not only to offer a tongue-in-cheek tribute to
Vlastos that I am employing “KAH” as one more monstrous acronym; it is to
put KGB in the proper perspective. Shown to depend on K-F in Laches thanks
to the benighted Nicias, and then introduced by the future tyrant Critias in
Charmides, KGB is the deceptive counterpart of KAH. The first is a kind of
knowledge that would benefit us if it existed; the other is the kind we must
acquire if we are to benefit others. But Plato’s interest in our acquisition of
KAH has nothing to do with teaching us the historical truth for its own sake:
unlike a historian’s, Plato’s interest in the War is purely philosophical. As a
result, he humbly builds on the shoulders of a giant—as Xenophon did as
well by continuing Thucydides—but not in pursuit of some new truths about
his city’s past. As far as Plato the Teacher is concerned, the great advantage
of the past, and more specifically the already brilliantly recorded historical
past, is that it, unlike the kind of KGB that depends on K-F, can be known
without the aid of a μάντις. Above all, it is concerned with things that already
have happened (τὰ γεγονότα) and thus can no longer change. Because it has
nothing to do with the future aside from what we can now learn from it, it is
eternal and was already embalmed with permanence when the octogenarian
Plato bequeathed his equally immortal dialogues to the students of the future.
While reading Laches and Charmides, “students of the future” is exactly
what we become, and that in a double sense thanks to the difference between

250
 Thucydides 1.22.4; cf. 3.82.2.
251
 Cf. F. M. Cornford, The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays, edited with an Introductory
Memoir by W. K. C. Guthrie (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 47–48.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 189

the subjective and objective genitive. We are not only looking back on Ath-
ens from the perspective of the future as students of the (distant) past, but
also reading these conversations as if we were prophets, already fully aware
of what Plato’s characters cannot possibly be: their own futures. Thanks to
KAH, we know what Nicias and Critias will do, and that knowledge under-
cuts their championship of KGB. Those readers who insist that KGB is the
philosophical core of both dialogues are revealed to be as blind as the two
historical characters who Plato uses to champion it, but this does not mean
that KGB is not in fact the center of his pedagogical concern. Within the
literary universe Plato creates in Laches and Charmides, KGB is inseparable
from KAH, and it is in their synergy that he expects us to discover that center.
In short, the interplay of KGB and KAH in Laches-Charmides is a perfect
example of why philosophical content cannot be divorced from dramatic
detail in Plato’s dialogues.
As a result, this section should not be understood as a palinode. Even when
discussed without reference to KAH, as it was in the previous section, KGB is
an epistemic and ethical ideal that proves itself fully capable of coming up
short all on its own. As a general principle, the purpose of attending to dra-
matic details is not to subvert Plato’s apparent message but to understand it
more clearly: to confirm and elucidate, not to reverse and undo.252 The good
news about Platonic hermeneutics as it has evolved over the course of my
lifetime is that it has moved away from the kind of disembodied argument-
extraction championed by Vlastos; the bad news is that those who have made
dramatic details their primary concern have generally been more hostile
to Platonism—and here I have Leo Strauss and his students foremost in
mind—than Vlastos ever dreamt of being. I have therefore separated these
two sections not in order to perpetuate the outworn “philosophical content vs.
dramatic situation” polarity, but rather to illustrate the kind of synthesis that
Plato’s pedagogical artistry achieves and was intended to achieve.253 With this
as a preface, then, it is high time to turn to the dialogues themselves, begin-
ning with Laches.
Thanks to Alcibiades in Symposium, we know exactly how to begin think-
ing about Laches and Socrates the moment we hear this new dialogue’s title;
Nicias, who is named with him in its first sentence, requires no such intro-
duction. In his account of Delium (Smp. 220e7–221c1), Alcibiades mentions
Laches three times but only twice by name (Smp. 221a2 and 221b1), the third
is when he calls him simply Socrates’ comrade (ὁ ἑταῖρος at Smp. 221b7).

252
 Cf. Clinton DeBevoise Corcoran, Topography and Deep Structure in Plato: The Construction of
Place in the Dialogues (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 33.
253
 Throughout this study I am attempting to prove that Plato possessed the pedagogical τέχνη of “re-
orientation [ἡ περιαγωγή]” that Socrates mentions at R. 717d3–7.
190 Chapter 2

By this instance of fill-in-the-blank—any reader would need to pause—we

have been trained, and in Laches, that training is put to use. The passage also
trains us in other important ways: we are, after all, joining Alcibiades in see-
ing Socrates “more nobly” (κάλλιον at Smp. 221a5–6), excelling Laches in
keeping his wits about him (Smp. 221a7–b1), and in any case seeing him for
the first time as a soldier in battle (Smp. 221b1–7; cf. 220c5) with both friends
and foes (Smp. 221b4). As for Nicias, Plato entrusts our advance preparation
for meeting him in person to Thucydides, but even here Alcibiades remains in
sight thanks to their famous debate about the Sicilian Expedition,254 the depar-
ture of which can be only days away when its drunken champion crashes
Agathon’s party.255
But despite their prominence in the dialogue’s opening words, we don’t
meet either Laches or Nicias in person until the speech of Lysimachus
has caused two other historical characters to pass before our mind’s eye:
Thucydides256 and Lysimachus’ own father Aristides the Just.257 Both will
reappear as the famous and accomplished fathers of not particularly accom-
plished sons in two other (consecutive) dialogues just as they do here (Men.
94a1, 94c1, and Thg. 130a5, 130a8–b1). But Aristides will also return, and
this time without Thucydides and with no reference to his son, in Gorgias
(Grg. 526a6–b3) where he is the great exception:

Socrates: for it is difficult [χαλεπόν], Callicles, and worthy of much praise,

being endowed with great opportunity for the doing of injustice [τὸ ἀδικεῖν], to
consistently live justly [δικαίως διαβιῶναι]. Few [ὀλίγοι] are they of this sort,
yet since they have come into being both here and elsewhere, I also believe they
will be in the future [οἶμαι δὲ καὶ ἔσονται] men both noble and good [καλοὶ
κἀγαθοὶ] in this virtue [ἀρετή]: that of handling justly [τὸ δικαίως διαχειρίζειν]
whatever anyone turns over [ἐπιτρέπειν] to them. And one there has been, and
very famous [πάνυ ἐλλόγιμος] even among the other Greeks: Aristides, son
of Lysimachus; but the majority [οἱ πολλοί] of the powerful, O best of men,
become bad [κακοὶ γίγνεσθαι].258

Since Aristides’ failure to provide for the superior education of his son proves
that his own incorruptibility was scarcely the product of academic instruction,

254
 Thucydides 6.8.2–6.24.1.
255
 Thanks to Athenaeus (second to third century A.D.), we know the year Agathon won the prize
(416), but if forced to rely only on Thucydides the son of Olorus (see following note), we actu-
ally get a clearer sense of things: the dinner takes place before the smashing of the Herms and the
departure of the Sicilian expedition, but not so very long before. Cf. Mann, Zauberberg, 9–10,
especially “wenn auch nicht lange vorher.”
256
 Thucydides the son of Melesias was not, of course, the historian.
257
 See Plutarch, Life of Aristides, 6.1; cf. 7.6. As was the case with Athenaeus 217a, Plato obviously
could not count on our knowing information derived from Plutarch.
258
 Grg. 526a3–b4.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 191

the fact that he nevertheless distinguished himself by modeling τὸ δικαίως

διαχειρίζειν while taking in hand “the affairs of the city [τὰ τῆς πολέως]”259
shows what Plato expects his students to do when they return to the Cave.
The entrance of Aristides in Laches therefore marks an important mile-
stone on the journey that leads to Gorgias, Republic, and thus to the heart
of Plato’s teaching, justifying in the process what I am calling “the Return
to Athens.” Midway between the proverbial “beautiful things are difficult
[χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά]” and the seventh sage who said “most men are bad” stands
Aristides: Plato’s proof that it is not only the bad things Thucydides described
so vividly that will come to be again. Modifying Bias of Prienne’s insight,
Plato the Teacher’s version is that most men, even if they appeared to be
promising students in the Academy, will become bad when given power, and
can only prove themselves to be καλοὶ κἀγαθοί, and thus worthy of praise
and being famous among the Greeks, by handling power justly. Doing so is
difficult but it has been done and therefore can be done again. And because
of that historical logic, and despite his ongoing debt to Thucydides the Athe-
nian, Plato introduces Aristides in Laches—even before allowing Socrates
to praise him in Gorgias and build on his example in Republic 7—because
he is also channeling Herodotus, whose purpose was to ensure that great and
marvelous deeds should not lack fame,260 and who therefore wrote this:

As the generals disputed, Aristides son of Lysimachus, an Athenian, crossed

over from Aegina. Although he had been ostracized by the people, I, learning
by inquiry of his character [τρόπος], have come to believe that he was the best
man [ἄριστος ἄνηρ] among the Athenians, and the most just [δικαιότατος].261

This is the first of three times that Aristides appears in the Histories, and
in this remarkable sentence, Herodotus allows him to make a grand entrance.
In the dialogue with his enemy Themistocles that follows,262 Aristides pro-
ceeds to teach us how the bitterest political rivalry can secure the greatest
of benefits to the city. Later in book 8, Herodotus brings him back—after
reminding the reader of this passage—as a man of action no less than a man
of wise words, once again in the context of the Battle of Salamis.263 But it is
in the more extensive account of the Battle of Plataea that Aristides has his
finest moment, and the subtlety of that account begins to suggest how much
Plato learned from Herodotus. In book 9, Herodotus mentions Aristides only
once: he is named as the commanding general of the eight thousand Athenian

259
 Beginning with Prt. 319a1 and Alc. 118b9–c1; see Ascent to the Beautiful, §1.
260
 Herodotus, 1.1.0; cf. La. 179d2–5.
261
 Herodotus, 8.79.1 (A.D. Godley translation modified).
262
 See Herodotus, 8.79.2–8.81.
263
 Herodotus, 8.95.
192 Chapter 2

hoplites in Boeotia,264 serving under the command of the Spartan Pausanias

who “won the most admirable victory of all those we know.”265 But Hero­
dotus describes five independent actions of “the Athenians,”266 and just as
Plato made us discover Laches for ourselves the third time he appears in
Symposium, the historian invites us to discover for ourselves the characteris-
tic τρόπος of the ἄριστος ἄνηρ, the only Athenian who deserved to be called
δικαιότατος before Socrates (Phd. 118a17).
Of these, the most beautiful is the third: since the Spartans have never met
the Persians in battle before, whereas the Athenians have already defeated
them at Marathon,267 Pausanias proposes that his Spartans switch places with
them in the battle line so that the Athenians will be opposite the Persians,
and the Spartans will face the Theban turncoats, whom they have frequently
bested in battle.

“It occurred to us,” the Athenians replied, “long ago—ever since we saw that
your section would have to face the Persian thrust—to make the very suggestion
which you have now been the first to put forward; but we were afraid of offend-
ing you. Now, however, that you have mentioned it yourselves, we willingly
accept, and will do what you ask.”268

Once again, Herodotus allows us to see the exquisite tact Aristides employs
with his rivals, allows us, that is, to see and discover it for ourselves. By tell-
ing us from the start how highly he valued Aristides, Herodotus knows that
every reader who is reading his book for the right reason—that is, in order
to become an ἄριστος ἄνηρ and δικαιότατος by imitating the great and mar-
velous actions whose fame the historian is preserving for just that very pur-
pose—will know the eagle by his talons.269
Plato’s Laches cannot be read intelligently unless the reader has recently
reread Herodotus’ account of the Battle of Plataea; such is the threshold but
representative claim to which this section is devoted. It applies as well to
Thucydides’ account of Nicias’ disastrous retreat from Syracuse and—in the
parallel case of Charmides—to Xenophon’s description of Critias in Memo-
rabilia and the Thirty Tyrants generally in Hellenica. In addition to the fact

264
 Herodotus, 9.28.6.
265
 Herodotus, 9.64.1.
266
 See Herodotus, 9.44.1–45.1, 9.46.1, 9.46.3, 9.56.2, and 9.61.1.
267
 Herodotus, 9.46.2.
268
 Herodotus, 9.46.3 (Aubrey de Sélincourt).
269
 The speech of the Athenians at 9.27 in the debate with the Tegeans also bears the mark of Aristides
(as we will not discover until 9.28.6), ending with 9.27.6 (Godley): “Yet seeing that this is no
time for wrangling about our place in the battle, we are ready to obey you, men of Lacedaemon
and take whatever place and face whatever enemy you think fitting. Wherever you set us, we will
strive to be valiant men. Command us then, knowing that we will obey.” The rhetorical excellence
of the speech should be noted.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 193

that Socrates will specifically mention Plataea in his dialogue with Laches to
illustrate how an army can demonstrate courage by retreating (La. 191b6–c7),
all of the following aspects of Herodotus’ account of this battle are relevant
to important themes in Laches: the actual motives behind Pausanias’ retreat,
the steady flow of reinforcements to the Greek army (cf. La. 193a4–5),270 their
decision to leave the high ground (cf. La. 193a6),271 the roles of a soothsayer
(μάντις) on both sides in postponing the battle, and the fact that the Persians
were defeated because they had not been trained “to fight in armor.”272 As a
hermeneutic hypothesis, then: if Laches and Charmides could be adequately
interpreted without KAH, Plato would not have included in both dialogues so
many details that presuppose the reader’s ready access to it.
Thanks to the early appearance of Aristides in Laches, and thus to Herodo-
tus’ presence both there and thereafter, the temporality of the dialogue
becomes even more complicated but also more logically comprehensive,
forcing the reader to simultaneously consider past, present, and future while
reading it. To begin with, this is obviously as it should be if Plato’s Laches is
understood, as it must be, as an integrated whole: just as KGB will explicitly
implicate future, present, and past (La. 198d1–199a9)—a pattern repeated and
thus presupposed in Charmides (cf. Chrm. 174a4–6)—so too will Plato’s use
of KAH implicitly do the same thing. To hammer the point, it is in synergy
of KGB and KAH, both equally connected to the past, present, and future,
that the pedagogical purpose of Laches and Charmides will be discovered.
In comparison with Potidaea in Charmides, it is easy to configure Delium
as “the past” in Laches but the presence of Aristides and Herodotus suggests a
different configuration as well. Thanks to the reunion of Laches and Socrates,
the Battle of Delium—although clearly in the dialogue’s past—functions as a
way of delineating its present since it has now become its immediate past; this
is why Plato allows Laches to define the dialogue’s present in relation to the
disaster there (La. 181b1–4)273 while the far greater disaster (cf. πτῶμα at La.
181b4) that will befall Athens thanks to Nicias is always yet to come. In this
typology, then, it is the retreat from the Asopus in Herodotus that becomes the
dialogue’s (distant) past, while the retreat from Syracuse remains its future; the
retreat from Delium defines what is closest to its dramatic present.

270
 Cf. Herodotus, 9.38.2, 9.41.1, and 9.41.4.
271
 Cf. Herodotus, 9.25.2.
272
 Cf. Herodotus, 9.63.2 (Godley): “For what harmed them the most was the fact that they wore
no armor [ὅπλα] over their clothes and fought, as it were, naked against men fully armed [πρὸς
ὁπλίτας].”
273
 On the civic significance of the language used here of Socrates (La. 181a7–b1), see C. Emlyn-
Jones, “Dramatic Structure and Cultural Context in Plato’s Laches.” Classical Quarterly 49, no.
1 (1999), 123–138, on 133.
194 Chapter 2

Battered by this triad of retreats, Laches’ hoplite-based, formation-

preserving, and hold-the-line definition of courage begins to look a bit bet-
ter, and Herodotus’ story of the Spartan Amompharetus earns for him the
reader’s sympathetic admiration for the same reason.274 When stationed at
his post by a wise commander (Ap. 28d5–29a2), Socrates will defend that
definition with words in Apology and with deeds in Crito; only devoted
Socratists,275 hell-bent on finding in Laches what their Socratism requires
them to find despite all dramatic or historical indications to the contrary
notwithstanding, could think that Plato or Socrates has more sympathy for
the savant Nicias than for the sturdy Laches. But the lesson of a Platonic
dialogue can never be that Socrates prefers one interlocutor to another even
when Plato is challenging us to recognize the limitations of this character
or that one: it is always the reader whom Plato is addressing, counseling,
challenging, provoking, testing, and therefore teaching. Although all this
takes place through the Play of Character, Plato’s intentions must always
be discerned above and behind it. It is more than decoration but less than
substance. Along with the words they speak, Plato’s characters constitute
nothing more than the body of each dialogue;276 the reader’s response to
those characters is its soul.
We must therefore learn to look through Laches no less than Nicias,
and this we can only do thanks to Thucydides. After securing Laches’
assent that if it isn’t καλόν, then it can’t be courage (La. 192d8; cf. Prt.
349e3–8), Socrates goes to work on the revised view that courage is not
only “endurance [καρτερία],” but “endurance with φρόνησις” (La. 192c8)
or “reasoned [φρόνιμος] καρτερία” (La. 192d10). “Reasoned with respect
to what [εἰς τί φρόνιμος]?” Socrates inquires, quickly asking whether it
might be endurance “with respect to all things, both great and small” (La.
192e1–2).277 The first example is designed to excite any gentleman’s oath-
bound disgust (La. 192e2–5); would you call the investor “brave” who
spends money reasonably (φρονίμως) knowing that having spent it he will
acquire more? Then comes the doctor who endures in the demand that his
sick son or some other patient should eat or drink what she has prescribed
for inflammation of the lungs; surely that too is not what Laches means

274
 See Herodotus, 9.53.2–9.57.3.
275
 See George Rudebusch and Chris Turner, “A Philosophical Solution to the Problem of Socrates.”
Journal of Ancient Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2014), 1–39, on 29–30; see especially the comments on
Kurt Hildebrandt, Platon: Der Kampf des Geistes um die Macht (Berlin: G. Bondi, 1933).
276
 Cf. Frédéric Cossutta, “Dialogic Characteristics of Philosophical Discourse: The Case of Plato’s
Dialogues.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 36, no. 1 (2003), 48–76, on 51: “Plato constructs a universe
of discourse animated by internal laws realized through a multiplicity of characters who are but
the scenic and dialogic embodiments of the great philosophical issues they are charged with
expressing.”
277
 Cf. Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 109, 111, and 114.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 195

(La. 192e6–193a2). Then comes the third example, tailor-made not only
for a general but for this one:

Socrates: But a man enduring in war, and willing to fight, calculating reason-
ably [φρονίμως λογίζεσθαι], knowing, on the one hand, that others will come
to his aid, and, on the other, that he is fighting against fewer and feebler men
than those with whom he is, and further that he holds stronger positions [χωρία
κρείττω]; would you then say that this man, enduring with this reasoning
[φρόνησις] and preparation, would be braver than the one in the opposing army
who is willing both to remain [ὑπο-μένειν] and to endure?278

First of all, there is the text-imminent element: since Laches’ first defi-
nition of the courageous man was: “if someone should be willing, while
remaining [participial form of μένειν] in the formation, to withstand the
enemy and not flee” (La. 190e1–2), he was practically duty-bound to endure
in his commitment to the soldier who is willing to ὑπομένειν. Nor need we
look outside Plato’s dialogues, not only the ones we have already read,279 but
more importantly the one we are about to read (cf. Chrm. 163c3–8) in order
to see the philosophical implications of Socrates’ hammered use of φρόνησις,
φρόνιμος, and φρονίμως: Critias might well have regarded as more temperate
the self-benefiting general who “endures” on the higher ground. But it is only
because of Thucydides that we know that Laches, whose army was larger,
and was being daily augmented by the arrival of allied troops, himself led his
army down from the high ground before it was routed at Mantinea,280 where
he was killed. Plato demands that we possess KAH.
Since every reader of Thucydides knows that Laches made a strategic blun-
der by coming down off of that ridge, how does Plato expect us to respond
to this passage in Laches? Consider first the parallel problem in the previous
example: how does Plato expect us to respond to the fact that it was either the
doctor’s son or someone else who was sick (La. 192e7)? Would the doctor
not have endured in the demand that any patient keep to the health-restoring
regimen, that is, τὰ δεόντα (Chrm. 164b3)? Since the doctor is φρόνιμος
specifically with respect to medicine—just as the cobbler is φρόνιμος with
respect to his art (Alc. 125a8–10)—it cannot be because of φρόνησις that the
doctor would be more intent on benefiting a son than anybody else. Is it the
doctor’s self-interested love for the son? How can it be if the son, not yet

278
 La. 193a3–9.
279
 Consider Alc. 125a1–15, Alc2. 139c6–8, 145a6–b3, and 145d10, and Ly. 209c3–210c5.
280
 See Thucydides, 5.65, especially 5.65.6 (J. M. Dent translation): “The generals, half-stunned
for the moment, afterward led them down from the hill [ἀπὸ τοῦ λόφου], and went forward and
encamped in the plain, with the intention of attacking the enemy.” Schmid brought this crucial
connection to light (394n21); see his On Manly Courage, 52–55, especially 52.
196 Chapter 2

being φρόνιμος, is of no benefit to him (Ly. 210c5–8)? To recur to Laches,

whatever else it means to φρονίμως λογίζεσθαι, the relationship between
what is καλόν and what will soon enough be ὠφέλιμον has already been
hurled into doubt: can an action truly be noble if, though braver, it harms
one’s own soldiers? But by what right do we call an action “brave” if it aims
at nothing more than what benefits me?
By raising these questions and leaving them unanswered, my intent is to
justify the earlier claim that the reader’s response to Plato’s characters is the
soul of the dialogues. This is why Plato gives Nicias the chance to say that
anyone who converses with Socrates ends up “being tested [βασανίζεσθαι]”
(La. 188b5), is compelled “to give an account of oneself, whatever way
[τρόπος] he is living now, and however he has lived his life beforehand” (La.
187e10–188a2), and finally that Socrates will not let him go “before he will
test [βασανίζειν] all of these things both well and beautifully” (La. 188a3).
These are the words that try our men’s souls, and it is his reader’s soul that is
always Plato’s present and exclusive concern. My concern, therefore, is nei-
ther to answer every question nor to deny that each of them can be answered
incorrectly, but rather to show that we must take all of Plato’s words into
consideration, reading all of his dialogues to the best of our ability in the
order in which he appears to have intended them to be studied, and to imagine
ourselves at every step as being questioned, taught, and tested by a master
teacher, the founder of the Academy.
But Nicias considerably understates the case by saying that it is only one’s
past and present that Socrates will test: in his own case, Nicias will also be
measured against a future that “he” cannot yet see. Any thoughtful critic must
recognize that the conversation in Laches unfolds in the shadow of Nicias’
disastrous overreliance on the soothsayers in Syracuse.281 But even though
this historical future overshadows his performance in the literary present,
Plato will give him a brighter literary future as well: his son will be with
Socrates down in the Piraeus during the longest of Attic nights (R. 327c2),

281
 Schmid, On Manly Courage, 38–47 deserves pride of place; cf. Vlastos, Platonic Studies, 268.
Representative are Robert G. Hoerber, “Plato’s Laches.” Classical Philology 63, no. 2 (April
1968), 95–105, on 100, Darrell Dobbs, “For Lack of Wisdom: Courage and Inquiry in Plato’s
Laches.” Journal of Politics 48, no. 4 (November 1986), 825–849, on 841n4 (“Nikias’ notorious
superstitiousness is hardly at odds with the scientism manifest in his contention in the dialogue.
They are kindred expressions of precisely the same yearning for certainty”), Linda R. Rabieh,
Plato and the Virtue of Courage (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 70,
and Richard Foley, “The Better Part of Valor: The Role of Wisdom in Plato’s Laches.” History of
Philosophy Quarterly 26, no. 3 (July 2009), 213–233, on 225. More important than the authori-
ties who mention the connection, however, are those who don’t; consider Jörg Hardy, “Is Virtue
Knowledge? Socratic Intellectualism Reconsidered” in Hardy and George Rudebusch (eds.),
Ancient Ethics, 141–170 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), and Penner, “What Laches
and Nicias Miss.” Santas, “Socrates at Work (Laches),” 434, should be regarded as transitional:
the debacle at Syracuse is mentioned but palliated.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 197

and he will return the moment after Critias ends.282 Although Nicias pre-
pares the way in Laches for the allegedly “Socratic” Critias in Charmides,
the resulting comparison redounds to his credit as well. Immortalized by
Thucydides, Nicias repeatedly shows himself to be useful to Plato now that
Alcibiades has spoken his last word in Symposium, and no matter how ineptly
he may have handled the army in Sicily, it would not have been there at all if
it were not for his young and power-drunk opponent. Although his attempt to
stop the Expedition backfired,283 Nicias must never be judged too harshly for
playing his assigned role in the tragedy of Athens, the most instructive story a
future statesman could possibly ponder. We might just as well blame Socrates
for having saved Alcibiades’ life at Potidaea (Smp. 220c5–e2).
And with that fateful name, we return to the beginning of Charmides.
In the greatest imaginable contrast to the transcendent anachronism that
tests the student’s general knowledge of KAH in Menexenus, and the ideal-
izing use of chronological inconsistences that will soon make Gorgias and
Republic impossible to date for the sake of the War as a whole, the problem
of the precise historical circumstances of Socrates’ return from Potidaea as
described at the start of Charmides is one that admits of a solution, and Plato
expects us to solve it. In making this claim, I am following the lead of Chris-
topher Planeaux, who solved a chronological riddle that others had dissolved
by trigger-happy recourse to Plato’s historical imprecision. What makes Pla-
neaux’s elegant solution relevant to my own project’s larger concerns is that
it depends exclusively on the juxtaposition of two texts that Plato expected
every reader of Charmides to have studied carefully: Thucydides’ History
and his own Symposium. It is the latter that must be considered first, since it
touches on a crucial aspect of the ROPD.
The primary justification for locating Symposium earlier than the so-called
“early,” “Socratic,” or “transitional dialogues” considered in Ascent to the Good
is found in Ascent to the Beautiful, and is based on the connections between it
and Protagoras, Alcibiades Major, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, Ion, and
Menexenus. In the broadest strokes, an early Protagoras complements or is
rather complemented by an early Symposium, an early Alcibiades is equally
complemented by his last word at Agathon’s, and the humorously accessible
investigation of τὸ καλόν in Hippias Major becomes intelligible as preparation
for Diotima.284 But for the reader who comes to this book first, it would be dif-
ficult if not impossible to accept the possibility that a middle-period dialogue
like Symposium was somehow prior to early dialogues like Charmides, Laches,

282
 It was Nicias who almost stopped Atlantis from attacking Athens the first time; see Guardians in
Action, 125–126.
283
 Thucydides, 6.24.1–3.
284
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §11.
198 Chapter 2

and Lysis. Presupposing a willingness not only to consider replacing the Order
of Composition paradigm with Reading Order, but also to imagine the possibil-
ity of Plato’s use of basanistic pedagogy, a post-Symposium reading of Lysis
in particular—especially when unsupported by the contextualized reading of
Symposium developed in Ascent to the Beautiful—could easily foster a natural
incredulity in a scholarly environment that has not even accorded Kahn’s pro-
leptic reading of Lysis the attention it deserves.285
In chapter 1, three themes were used to justify reading Lysis and Euthyde-
mus in relation to an earlier Symposium: (1) the dramatic centrality of ἔρως
in all three, (2) a μεταξύ-based understanding of philosophy developed in
the first two, but seemingly superseded in the First Protreptic, and (3) the
persistence of the Eudaemonist Shortcut culminating in KGB, accepted as
hermeneutic bedrock by the radical Socratists despite its elision of ἔρως,
the beneficent μεταξύ between knowledge and ignorance, and the crowning
vision of a transcendental τὸ καλόν. Only the first could be conceived in com-
plete independence from the hypothesis of basanistic pedagogy, and making
a plausible case for all three depended almost as much on reading Euthyde-
mus after Lysis as it did on reading Lysis after Symposium. For a number of
reasons, then, a stand-alone Reading Order approach to the post-Symposium
dialogues was inevitably confronted from the start with a daunting structural
weakness. With “the Return to Athens” in Laches and Charmides, however,
that argumentative weakness can finally be redressed.
In the most general terms, the part of Alcibiades’ drunken speech in praise
of Socrates that deals with Potidaea and Delium (Smp. 219d3–221c1) does
not depend on the reader’s prior knowledge of Laches and Charmides while
these two paradigmatically (“early” and short) Socratic dialogues can be
shown to presuppose the reader’s prior knowledge of Symposium. I sug-
gested earlier that the reader has already been trained to recognize Laches as
Socrates’ comrade before reading the eponymous dialogue’s first sentence,
but Plato also allows Alcibiades to prepare the reader for Laches both in the
obviously applicable description of the retreat at Delium and in his account
of the winters in Potidaea. To begin with, Alcibiades introduces his account
of both by referring to Socrates’ καρτερία:

“After that, can you imagine what a state of mind I was in, feeling myself to
have been dishonored, yet admiring both the nature [φύσις] of the man and his
temperance and courage [σωφροσύνη καὶ ἀνδρεία], for I had hit upon on a man
such as I never would have dreamt of meeting with respect to thoughtfulness
[φρόνησις] and endurance [καρτερία]?’286

285
 Cf. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 281–291, and my “Reading Order,” 28–29.
286
 Smp. 219d3–7 (Fowler modified).
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 199

The two virtues Alcibiades most admires in Socrates prepare the reader for
Charmides and Laches in a general sense; Plato then deepens the connection
to the latter by having Alcibiades join φρόνησις to καρτερία.
After having introduced Socrates’ capacity for endurance in this passage,
Alcibiades then hammers the point: in times of need, no one in the army could
match Socrates’ capacity “in relation to the enduring [πρὸς τὸ καρτερεῖν]”
of such hardships (Smp. 220a1) before completing a grammatical trifecta
by adding the substantive καρτέρησις (LSJ: “patient endurance of a thing”)
to the verb (καρτερεῖν) and the abstract noun (καρτερία) when he describes
the amazing things Socrates did “in relation to the endurance-tests of winter
[πρὸς τὰς τοῦ χειμῶνος καρτερήσεις]” (Smp. 220a6). This same noun, found
only in Plato, will reappear three times in Laches (La. 193d1, 193d7, and
194a4), the first two times to describe a senseless endurance, while the third
applies to a more characteristically Socratic καρτέρησις that is anything but:

Socrates: So are you then willing that we should be obedient to what we are
saying in this way at least? Laches: What way is this and with which “what’?
Socrates: With the statement [λόγος] that commands us to endure [καρτερεῖν].
If you are willing, let us too both remain [ἐπι-μένειν] committed to the search
and let us endure [καρτερεῖν] so that this courage itself [αὐτὴ ἡ ἀνδρεία] will
not also laugh at us since we are not searching for it courageously [ἀνδρείως]
if perchance, indeed, this endurance-test itself [αὐτὴ ἡ καρτέρησις] is courage
[ἀνδρεία].287

Generalized to include something more than the characteristic courage of

the hoplite, Laches’ λόγος will continue to guide Socrates from Laches and
Charmides all the way through to Apology, Crito, and Phaedo: he will both
remain and endure. By hammering into the reader’s head a typically Socratic
καρτέρησις in words, Laches therefore seconds Symposium, which depicts
with the same hammered emphasis a no less typically Socratic endurance in
deeds. By means of the synergy between Symposium and Laches, then, Plato
is telling us that Socrates displayed the same καρτέρησις as a soldier that he
does as a philosopher. He is also confirming that Laches follows Symposium
in the ROPD.
It is therefore not only the arguably somewhat less than rational recipient
of the Divine Sign—its “most humble and obedient servant”—who tends
to disappear in Socratist accounts of Socrates,288 but the steadfast Athenian

287
 La. 193e8–194a5 (Sprague modified).
288
 For a reading of Euthd. that emphasizes the role of the Sign (Euthd. 272e3–4), see Richard T.
Whittington, “Where Is Socrates Going? The Philosophy of Conversion in Plato’s Euthydemus”
(PhD dissertation, Baylor University, 2008).
200 Chapter 2

hoplite as well.289 Whether abroad or at home, Socrates is always fighting

for Athens.290 And while Socratic courage is clearly something more than
the courage of a hoplite, this is only because it a hoplite’s courage and
then some. He deploys it against enemies both foreign and domestic—this
explains why Socrates joins battle with Critias as soon as he returns to Ath-
ens from Potidaea291—and thus proves himself skillful in combating not only
external dangers (future tyrants for example), but pains and fears, desires and
pleasures (La. 191d6–e1). Connecting both Charmides and Laches to a prior
Symposium, KAH reveals the Socrates that Socratists tend to forget, and in
their hurry to valorize KGB, and thus to find “fellow Socratics” in Nicias and
Critias, they have overlooked the staying power of Laches’ λόγος and those
winters in Potidaea. As Alcibiades tells us: “for winters there are fearful
[δεινοὶ γάρ αὐτόθι χειμῶνες]” (Smp. 220a7).
Christopher Planeux has proved that we need to take the plural form
χειμῶνες seriously: the only way to harmonize the historical accounts in
Symposium and the opening of Charmides is to grasp that Socrates has spent
three winters in and around Potidaea, and for most of that time, that means
“around.”292 The fight that has just taken place was the Battle at Spartolus
in 429, where all three Athenian generals—hence “many of the notables” at
Charmides 153c1—were killed; this defeat followed the surrender of Potid-
aea the previous winter, after a successful but difficult siege that began in 432,
when two thousand Athenian hoplites, Socrates and Alcibiades included,293
had commenced operations against the recalcitrant city. Previous scholars

289
 Not only in Socratist accounts of course; see Leo Strauss, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse: An
Interpretation of the Oeconomicus (South Bend, IL: St Augustine’s Press, 1998), 88–89. For
discussion of Socrates as citizen, see Wolf Steidle, “Der Dialog Laches und Platons Verhältnis
zu Athen in den Frühdialogen.” Museum Helveticum 7, no. 3 (1950), 129–146, especially 136:
“Er [sc. Socrates] erstrebt eine Neubelebung des alten Bürgerethos auf der Grundlage bewußter
Einsicht.” The last paragraph (145–146) likewise deserves attention, linking Socrates as “der
einzige echte Bürger Athens” to the Academy, which preserves “in gewandelter, vergeistiger
Form wesentliche Elemente des attischen Gemeinschaftslebens und des bürgerlichen Ethos.”
Cf. Mark Anderson, “Socrates as Hoplite.” Ancient Philosophy 25 (2005), 273–289, especially
274–277 on Vlastos.
290
 The goddess of wisdom was always well-armed in her city’s defense; see Heinrich Heine, On
the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings, edited by Terry Pinkard
and translated by Howard Pollack-Milgate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
last word.
291
 See S. Sara Monoson, “Socrates in Combat: Trauma and Resilience in Plato’s Political Theory”
in Peter Meineck and David Konstan (eds.), Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks (Hounsmill,
UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 131–162.
292
 Chr. Planeaux, “Socrates, Alcibiades, and Plato’s ΤΑ ΠΟΤΕΙΔΕΑΤΙΚΑ. Does the Charmides
Have an Historical Setting?” Mnemosyne 52 (fourth series), no. 1 (February 1999), 72–77.
293
 For more technical aspects of “Socrates as hoplite,” see A. W. Gomme, “The Athenian Hoplite
Force in 431 B. C.” Classical Quarterly 21, no. 3/4 (June-October 1927), 142–150, and George
Th. Mavrogordatos, “Two Puzzles Involving Socrates.” Classical World 105, no. 1 (Fall 2011),
3–23, on 11–20.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 201

had assumed—the best with due caution294—that the defeat that immediately
precedes Charmides was the same battle in which Socrates had saved Alcibi-
ades’ life and weapons in Symposium (Smp. 220d7–e2). By combining the
plural χειμῶνες in Symposium with an absence long enough to allow Char-
mides to move from child to adolescent (from παῖς to μειράκιον at Chrm.
153b3–5), Planeaux dissolved the resulting inconsistencies with a revealing
discovery: in Socrates’ case, “fighting for Athens” meant a great deal more
than had been previously thought.
In making his compelling historical case,295 Planeaux obviously needed
Thucydides in order to harmonize Charmides and Symposium but he deftly
sidesteps the question of whether Thucydides was also Plato’s source in
constructing the historical elements in those dialogues.296 My approach is dif-
ferent: not only am I assuming that Thucydides was Plato’s source, but that
Plato intended or rather still intends the readers of Charmides to use both
Symposium and Thucydides in order to reconstruct for themselves Planeaux’s
solution, for nothing more than rereading is necessary. But such rereading
also has a philosophical significance over and above providing us with a
clearer picture of the kind of καρτέρησις Socrates the soldier had displayed.
Although the student would also need to reread book 1—where Thucydides
describes the arrival of the Athenians, the beginning of the siege, and the
battle described in Symposium—the crucial evidence needed to resolve the
chronological conundrum created by the opening of Charmides is in book 2,
and finding it requires the reader to make a return journey to a destination for
which Laches has prepared us from the start: to Plataea. It turns out that there
are important lessons to be learned there.
Thucydides describes the surrender of Potidaea in a manner that allows
us to flesh out our sense of the suffering of the Athenian besiegers and the
far greater horrors they had imposed on the besieged.297 His account of the
defeat at Spartolus—a chapter that also allows the reader to connect Socrates
to Thrace, so that he can plausibly meet there “one of the Thracian doctors
of Zalmoxis” (Chrm. 156d4–6)—is found a few chapters later.298 Having
emphasized that the Peloponnesians were making their annual invasions
of Attica to loosen the Athenian grip on Potidaea,299 Thucydides begins the
next section in what proves to be an ominous fashion: “The next summer the

294
 Cf. Dover, Plato, Symposium, 165 at “(iii),” especially “improbably.”
295
 Cf. Nails, People of Plato, 311.
296
 Planeaux, “Socrates, Alcibiades, and Plato,” 72: “It is my intention to push as far as possible
Plato’s account of Socrates in Thrace, taking every detail as potentially significant. We will test
Plato’s account against the accounts of Thucydides and the epigraphic record. I make no judg-
ments on what Plato could have known nor on what his readership was expected to know.”
297
 See Thucydides, 2.70.1–2.
298
 Thucydides, 2.79.
299
 Thucydides, 2.70.1.
202 Chapter 2

Peloponnesians and their allies, instead of invading Attica, marched against

Plataea, under the command of Archidamus, son of Zeuxidamus, king of the
Lacedaemonians.”300 The first part of the terrible story of Plataea follows.301
Thanks to the recently read Laches, and the arrival therein of Aristides
“the most just,” fresh from the stirring pages of Herodotus, the thoughtful
reader of Charmides is therefore compelled to remember the terrible contrast
between the great victory at Plataea in the Persian, and the destruction of Pla-
taea at the hands of the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, the death-spiral
of decline that will culminate in the Thirty Tyrants.
Certainly it is a contrast that Thucydides had no intention of letting his
readers forget. After Plataea finally surrenders,302 her representatives are
allowed to make a speech before being put to death,303 one of the greatest
in the History.304 Since the speech culminates with the Spartan general
Pausanias and the graves of his soldiers at Plataea,305 Thucydides uses it
to create a poignant contrast between the Persian and the Peloponnesian
Wars, and he will revisit this contrast, now with the lightest of touches,
in the Melian Dialogue.306 Thucydides therefore gives Plato a foundation,
and beginning with Aristides and the allusion to Plataea in Laches (La.
191b8–c6), he will build on it. Although Plato’s most extended account
of Athenian History focuses on the decline of Athens after the Persian
War (Lg. 3.697c5–701c4),307 that late story begins in the synergy between
Laches and Charmides, equally haunted as both are by the past and future
of famous Athens.
Planeaux’s identification of the dramatic date of Charmides implicates
another crucial passage in Thucydides. Since Socrates has been in Potidaea
between 432 and the summer of 429, he has not experienced the plague in
Athens. To put it in literary terms, solving the chronological puzzle at the

300
 Thucydides, 2.71.1 (Dent).
301
 Thucydides, 2.71–2.78; the story resumes at 3.20–24 and is concluded at 3.52–69.
302
 Thucydides, 3.52.1–3.
303
 Thucydides, 3.53–59.
304
 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Thucydides, 42; cf. C. W. Macleod, “Thucydides’ Plataean
Debate.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 17, no. 3 (1977), 227–246, and H.-P. Stahl,
Thucydides: Man’s Place in History (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2003), 115: “All the
descriptions of Plataea, as we saw earlier, are composed with a view to the deadly end which
awaits its besieged inhabitants. This is true also of the speeches, and the historian’s sympathy with
the fate of the condemned has always been felt.” Stahl appropriately emphasizes that “the end of
the Plataeans reflected poorly on Athens” since she did not come to the aid of the city that fought
by her side at Marathon (Herodotus, 6.108).
305
 Thucydides, 3.58.4–5.
306
 Thucydides, 5.102.
307
 On this passage, see Christopher Rowe, “Plato and the Persian Wars” in Emma Bridges, Edith
Hall, and P. J. Rhodes (eds.), Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third
Millenium, 85–104 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For Rowe on Lg., see Guardians
on Trial, 225n51.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 203

start of Charmides requires the reader to sort out the relationship between
two widely separated passages in the History.308 Thucydides’ account of
the plague—introduced by the first time the word for winter appears in his
history309—is found between them.310 Making it clear that the physical symp-
toms of the plague began in the head311—likewise the locus of Charmides’
distemper (Chrm. 155b3–5; the word κεφαλή appears nine more times in
the dialogue)—Thucydides concludes this famous passage with its even
more devastating spiritual effects, for it is only after this description that
Thucydides concludes: “Such was the nature of the calamity, and heavily
did it weigh on the Athenians; death raging within the city and devastation
without.”312

Fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them. As for the first, they
judged it to be just the same whether they worshipped them or not, as they saw
all alike perishing; and for the last, no one expected to live to be brought to trial
for his offences, but each felt that a far severer sentence had been already passed
upon them all and hung ever over their heads, and before this fell it was only
reasonable to enjoy life a little.313

Still confronted with the Spartan depredations, the purpose of which was to
break off the siege of Potidaea, Athens succumbs in the absence of Socrates
to “the plague of the soul,” and since her doctors proved powerless at this
critical time,314 the Zalmoxis-inspired critique of Greek medicine in Charmi-
des seems peculiarly relevant to the situation at home: in treating the body,
they neglect to treat the soul (Chrm. 156d4–157c6). The only doctor who can
cure the Plague of the Soul is Socrates; neither Charmides nor Critias will
take his medicine.315
The interpretive tradition that emphasizes the changes in Athens that
have taken place in Socrates’ absence is therefore justified in the context
of the plague,316 and given Thucydides’ description of how it felt to recover

308
 Thucydides, 1.61–65 and 2.70–79.
309
 Thucydides, 2.47.1.
310
 Thucydides, 2.47–54.
311
 κεφαλή at 2.49.2 and 2.49.7; noted by Lampert, How Philosophy Became Socratic, 162.
312
 Thucydides, 2.54.1 (Dent).
313
 Thucydides, 2.53.4.
314
 Thucydides, 2.47.4.
315
 For a Zalmoxis-centered reading of Chrm., see David Lawrence Levine, Profound Ignorance:
Plato’s Charmides and the Saving of Wisdom (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016), especially chapter
3. For a Zalmoxis-centered reading of Chrm. in the Vlastosian tradition, see Mark L. McPherran,
“Socrates and Zalmoxis on Drugs, Charms, and Purification.” Apeiron 37, no. 1 (March 2004),
11–33.
316
 See Lampert, How Philosophy Became Socratic, 4, 10, and 154–155.
204 Chapter 2

from it,317 KAH may also help to clear up what Plato meant with the verb
ἀπαθανατίζειν (Chrm. 156d6). But two other passages in Thucydides’
description of the plague are clearly relevant for understanding the emphasis
on SB in Charmides. The first illustrates the process by which the noblest
Athenians—those for whom it was incumbent “to be unsparing of themselves
[ἀφειδεῖν σφῶν αὐτῶν]”—were culled out for destruction:

On the one hand, if they were afraid to visit each other, they perished from
neglect; indeed many houses were emptied of their inmates for want of a nurse.
On the other, if they ventured to do so, death was the consequence. This was
especially the case with such as made any pretensions to virtue [οἱ ἀρετῆς
τι μεταποιούμενοι]: shame [αἰσχύνη] made them unsparing of themselves
[ἀφειδεῖν σφῶν αὐτῶν] in their attendance in their friends’ houses, where even
the members of the family were at last worn out by the moans of the dying, and
succumbed to the force of the disaster.318

Linking ἀρετή to an unwillingness to put one’s own safety above the needs of
one’s friends, Thucydides creates a clear contrast between SB and αἰσχύνη,
and pending the advent of Diotima—whose vision will inspire Plato’s readers
to be something more than virtue’s μεταποιούμενοι (LSJ: “lay claim to, pre-
tend to”)—shame remains the most readily accessible means for preferring τὸ
καλόν to τὸ αἴσχρον (cf. Smp. 178d4–e3).
As Thucydides will tell us in the famous passage about Corcyra,319 words
now began to change their meanings, and it seems only natural that Plato
would use Critias, the son of Καλλαίσχρος, to exemplify how the ugly had
become beautiful in Socrates’ absence thanks to the plague:

Perseverance in what was esteemed beautiful [τὸ δόξαν καλόν], nobody was
eager for that, believing it unclear whether one would perish before reaching it,
but present pleasure, and all that was profitably productive [κερδαλέον] of that,
this was held to be both beautiful [καλόν] and useful [χρήσιμον].320

Although the plague of the soul had already reached an advanced stage at
Athens before Socrates left—the warm endorsement of the GP Equation by
the foremost intellectuals in Greece as depicted in the pre-War Protagoras
suggests this (Prt. 358a5–b3)—it is a short jump from Thucydides’ χρήσιμον
and κερδαλέον to the ὠφέλιμον of Critias, a jump made natural for those with
KAH. The larger point is that Plato requires us to become at home in Athens

317
 Thucydides, 2.51.6.
318
 Thucydides, 2.51.5 (Dent modified).
319
 Thucydides, 3.82.4.
320
 Thucydides, 2.53.3.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 205

as it declines from its former greatness, for it is only in such a place that it
is necessary for philosophers to return to the Cave.321 Whether democracy
evolves from oligarchy before descending into tyranny as in Republic 8, or
whether it is the oligarchs who will create a tyranny after overthrowing a
democracy—as happened in Athens, thanks to the Thirty—Plato’s teaching
comes into its own during the plague of the soul, that is, in the twilight of a
great democracy turned upside down by power, greed, and an abandonment
of the moral values that made it great in the first place.
Perhaps the fact that Socrates mentions Solon’s praise for Critias the son
of Dropides in his account of Charmides’ family tree (Chrm. 157e5–6) means
that Herodotus can be found in Charmides as well as in Laches, but the ele-
phant in the room will always be Xenophon. For too long, the continuator of
Thucydides has been viewed as nothing more than the inept imitator of Plato;
in fact, his testimony is indispensable for reading the dialogues. Even Alcibi-
ades’ story is only completed in Xenophon’s Hellenica, and neither Charmides
nor Critias are so much as mentioned in Thucydides. Although Plato’s depen-
dence on Herodotus and Thucydides is seldom affirmed to the extent that it
should be, it is even more rarely denied outright. But it has long been open
season on denying the possibility that Plato’s masterpieces likewise depended
on the foundation laid by the son of Gryllus. Starting with the opening words
of Protagoras,322 I defended the unfashionable position that Plato relies from
start to finish on his reader’s intimate familiarity with Xenophon in Ascent to
the Beautiful. That defense must now be renewed, and begins with the claim
that Plato expects the readers of Charmides to have read Hellenica 2 for the
same reason that readers of Laches must have read Thucydides 6–7.323 Without
knowing the future of Nicias, many passages in Laches must remain obscure,
but without the reader’s knowledge of what Critias and Charmides have in
store for Athens, Charmides is unintelligible as a whole.
In practice, this is seldom denied: no interpretation of Charmides could
afford to ignore the history of the Thirty.324 But it is insufficient for the inter-
preter to refer only to “the famous Critias” without facing the fact that it is
Xenophon who made him so. Paradoxically, this becomes particularly obvi-
ous in the light of modern attempts to gain a more historically accurate appre-
ciation of Critias’ aims: since Xenophon is the primary source of the negative

321
 See Plato the Teacher, 53 and 180.
322
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §2.
323
 Cf. Hubert Rick, “Der Dialog Charmides.” Archiv für die Geschichte der Philosophie 29, no. 3
(1916), 211–234, for the claim (233–234) that “der Verfasser des Charmides” (who was not Plato)
was responding to Xenophon’s Memorabilia, 4.2. For more recent discussion of this connection,
including comment on Rick’s claim, see Bernd Effe, “Platons Charmides und der Alkibiades des
Aischines von Sphettos.” Hermes 99, no. 2 (1971), 198–208, on 205n4.
324
 Cf. Witte, Wissenschaft vom Guten, 46–51.
206 Chapter 2

valuation, any revisionist account must show why we should discount his
testimony.325 My claim is that Plato builds his Charmides around that nega-
tive valuation,326 not by any means because Plato himself was dependent on
Xenophon for information about his own kinsmen, but because he knew that
his future readers would be. Although it is obvious that Plato expects us to
know about his famous relatives (Chrm. 154a8–b2),327 the tradition has failed
to ask itself how he could have expected that his future readers would be able
to do so, a failure that arises from not having paid sufficient attention to the
pedagogical element in the dialogues.
The most convenient dodge has been to make the calamitous assumption
that Plato was writing only for his contemporaries, and that “they”—phan-
tom construction though this “they” must be—can be reasonably construed
as “already familiar” with every fact later scholars have been able to glean
from the historical tradition as a whole, including those facts that, as far as
we know, were only recorded after Plato’s death. There are doubtless some
great stories in Plutarch, for example, that it would be convenient to claim
that “Plato’s readers knew,”328 but since Plato outlived Xenophon, there are
no such things to be found in his writings. My approach has been to assume
that Plato, like Thucydides and Xenophon,329 intended his writings to speak
to the readers of the distant future—as of course they have done—and that he
therefore needed to ask himself what else he could reasonably expect those
readers to have read. Thucydides’ History and Xenophon’s Hellenica stand
very high on that list, almost as high as the works of Homer, and higher not
only than any given play of Euripides and Aristophanes—important though
both of these, and many others, are as well—but also than Herodotus.
By the very act of continuing Thucydides, Xenophon proves that he
clearly recognized a great predecessor’s enduring value and thus his pros-
pects for literary immortality. It was easy for Plato to share that awareness,
and he therefore located his dialogues in a well-known and easily accessible
historical past. We remember Athens because the Athenians insisted that
we should and they therefore made it possible for us to do so. Plato made
himself an integral part, and arguably the culminating and most perennially
important part, of that amazing process: it doesn’t diminish his achievement
or underestimate his conception of self-worth to recognize his dependence on

325
 See Frances Pownall, “Critias in Xenophon’s Hellenica.” Scripta classica israelica 31 (2012),
1–17, especially 4 (“the Xenophontic Critias”), 6 (“Xenophon implies”), and 10.
326
 In opposition to the balance struck in Richard McKim, “Socratic Self-Knowledge and ‘Knowledge
of Knowledge’ in Plato’s Charmides.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 115
(1985), 59–77, cf. 63n7 with 60.
327
 See Witte, Wissenschaft vom Guten, 51–53.
328
 As, for example, that he is the first to tell us that Aristides was nicknamed “the Just.” See also
Guardians in Action, 190.
329
 Cf. Thucydides 1.22.4 and Xenophon, Cynegeticus 13.7.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 207

Thucydides and Xenophon. The fact that Xenophon had the good sense and
humility to cast himself explicitly in the role of mere epigone to Thucydides
should make us hesitant to imagine that he was also merely Plato’s (inept)
continuator as well. In fact, the textual evidence points the other way as well,
and all three of the ancient authorities who discuss the relationship between
Plato and Xenophon mention the passage in Laws 3 where the Athenian
Stranger makes a disparaging remark about “the education of Cyrus.”330
This is not the place to re-litigate the relationship between Plato’s dialogues
and Xenophon’s Socratic writings.331 But it should not go unmentioned that in
addition to the information he provides about the Thirty in Hellenica, Xeno-
phon emphasizes Critias’ lack of σωφροσύνη in Memorabilia 1.332 It was
not because Plato had described Alcibiades and Critias entering the home
of Callias together in Protagoras (Prt. 316a4–5) that led Xenophon to offer
an apologetic discussion of Socrates’ relationship with both in Memorabilia
1.333 And since I have emphasized the links between Alcibiades’ speech in
Symposium and Laches-Charmides, the reference there to both Charmides
the son of Glaucon (cf. Prt. 315a1–2) and Euthydemus the son of Diocles
(Smp. 222b1–2) as (Platonic) lovers of Socrates suggests a subtler connection
between Xenophon and Plato’s Charmides. In Memorabilia,334 Socrates criti-
cizes Critias for lusting like a pig after the beautiful Euthydemus—criticism
that helps us to see the sexual subtext in Charmides335—while Xenophon’s
antipathy to Critias in Hellenica is conveniently explained by the hypothesis
that Euthydemus, who dominates Memorabilia 4, is Xenophon himself.336
If this is so, then Plato is referring to Xenophon in his Symposium no less than
Xenophon is referring to Plato in his.337
In the midst of all these details, three points deserve particular emphasis.
Although our knowledge of Critias depends on Xenophon, Plato’s did not.

330
 See Gabriel Danzig, “Did Plato Read Xenophon’s Cyropaedia?” in Samuel Scolnicov and Luc
Brisson (eds.), Plato’s Laws: From Theory into Practice: Proceedings of the VI Symposium Pla-
tonicum Selected Papers (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2003), 286–296.
331
 See my “Division and Collection: A New Paradigm for the Relationship Between Plato and
Xenophon” in Gabriel Danzig, David Johnson, and Donald Morrison (eds.), Plato and Xenophon:
Comparative Studies (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), 99–114.
332
 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.15, 1.2.25, and 1.2.29–30. Cf. Schmid, Plato’s Charmides, 12.
333
 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.12–47.
334
 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.30.
335
 Cf. Schmid, Plato’s Charmides, 188n32.
336
 See H. G. Dakyns (translator), The Works of Xenophon (London and New York: Macmil-
lan and Co., 1890–1897), volume 3, part 1, xl–xliv, entitled: “On the personal note in the
Ἀπομνημονεύματα: Who is Euthydemus? (in Bk. IV).” Sympathy for Euthydemus can likewise be
found in the valuable notes of Louis-André Dorion (ed.), Xénophon, Mémorables, volume 2, part
2, Book IV (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011), and although he does not cite Dakyns, he mentions
the Euthydemus as Xenophon hypothesis on 65–66n3.
337
 See Gabriel Danzig, “Intra-Socratic Polemics: The Symposia of Plato and Xenophon.” Greek,
Roman and Byzantine Studies (2005), 331–357.
208 Chapter 2

As will become clearer in the following chapter—where the links between

Charmides and Gorgias will receive attention—Plato needs his readers to
recognize his own personal connection to Critias, and this connection is based
on an intimate awareness of Critias’ aims and agenda that far exceeds Xeno-
phon’s. Indeed the best argument available to those who seek a sympathetic
portrait of Critias in Charmides—and thus one fully emancipated or even
oblivious of Xenophon’s damning version—is that so much of Plato’s more
sensible and programmatically serious Critias reappears in Republic,338 par-
ticularly with respect to “doing one’s own things.”339 Since I am reading the
entire six-dialogue series that begins with Euthydemus as proleptic and thus
pedagogically preparatory to Republic, this connection will naturally receive
further consideration below.340
The second point is that Plato also knows that our knowledge of Critias and
the Thirty does depend on Xenophon, and my claim is that he fully expects
and indeed requires us to read and understand Charmides in the light of that
knowledge. Like Socrates’ more than hoplite courage, Plato’s Critias is as
dangerous as Xenophon’s and then some, not least of all because he has
managed to persuade thoughtful readers that Plato is not attacking him at
all,341 and that despite the evidence Plato provides of his self-aggrandizement
(Chrm. 154e4–155a7; cf. Ly. 205d6), proclivity to deception (Chrm. 155b3–6;
cf. Ly. 211a2–5), lack of self-control (Chrm. 162c3–4; cf. Ly. 213d3–4),
and outright lies (Chrm. 161c2).342 The reason that Plato made his Laches
so accessible is that it introduces a dialogue—Charmides in the reassuring
guise of its twin—that takes the reader to a whole new level. But Plato can’t
get us there without Xenophon’s Hellenica any more than we can understand
Laches without Thucydides.343
Most importantly, by building on the reader’s knowledge of Xenophon and
Thucydides, Plato ensures that the future haunts both of these matched dia-
logues. Although in itself sufficient proof of his literary genius, it is rather the

338
 Particularly illuminating is Schmid, Plato’s Charmides, 157; cf. 178n22.
339
 See Gabriel Danzig, “True Justice in the Republic.” Illinois Classical Studies 23 (1998), 85–99.
The fact that Critias’ definition of temperance becomes the definition of justice along the Shorter
Way is Plato’s hint that we should be suspicious of it from the start, and thus pay due heed to the
warnings at R. 434e4–435a4 and 435c9–d4.
340
 To glance for a moment even farther ahead, in both Guardians in Action (133–135 on Timaeus-
Critias) and Guardians on Trial (237, 276, and 445 on Laws-Epinomis), I consider Critias’ abiding
influence on Plato. It was because he had once been Aristocles the son of Ariston that a ready
access to the youngster who had originally admired Charmides and Critias (Ep. 324d1–3) became
an integral part of Plato’s ability to deploy basanistic pedagogy. He knows what leads to tyranny
from personal experience.
341
 In addition to Witte, Wissenschaft vom Guten, 49 (“diese idealisierende Tendenz”), see Tuozzo,
Plato’s Charmides, 53–66, especially 58.
342
 Cf. Guardians in Action, 120–122, especially 120n449 and 122n458.
343
 For an attempt to do so, see Jörg Hardy, Platon, Laches; Übersetzung und Kommentar (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), especially “vielleicht” 125n37.
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 209

intersection of this literary technique with the philosophical content of the dia-
logues that is even more characteristically Platonic. From Nicias’ hyper-doctor
who would only be brave if he knew in advance who would be better off dead
(La. 195b3–e4) to Critias’ sub-doctor who couldn’t be temperate unless he knew
that he would benefit from doing what was necessary (Chrm. 164a9–c6), his
characters depend on untrammeled access to an inaccessible future at the same
time that they are mocked by their own blind ignorance of their own. This then is
a crucial point: thanks to KAH, it is upon the reader that Plato bestows a literary
simulacrum of K-F, and by implicating the twin defenders of a pseudo-Socratic
KGB (cf. Clt. 408c5–6 and 409a4) with the vain pretensions of something more
substantial, he ensures that they are haunted by the future in a double sense.
Trained by Attic Tragedy, Thucydides’ readers could foretell the kind of thing
that will eventually happen in the Great Harbor of Syracuse at the moment when
the Fleet leaves the Piraeus and races to Aegina;344 Plato’s technique, though
dependent on others for its effect, is all his own. By temporarily allowing us to
become prophets, he allows us to see the present for what it is, that is, to see
Critias for who he is.
But before ending with what Plato teaches us about his infamous relative, it is
necessary to highlight the amazing literary skills he demonstrates in Laches and
Charmides. By standing on the shoulders of giants—in this case, Thucydides
and his continuator Xenophon—Plato has turned his readers into prophets,
knowing the future his characters cannot. By artfully providing us with K-F, he
reveals that it is beyond the reach of those whose pseudo-Socratic conception of
virtue demands it. Thanks to both KAH and Plato’s literary genius, the Play of
Character cannot be separated from the serious philosophical content of these
two inseparable dialogues.
In a brilliant 1976 article,345 A. W. H. Adkins opened up a whole new world
of possibilities for the better understanding of Critias in Charmides, and at first
sight, that fact is ironic. In his 1960 book Merit and Responsibility, Adkins had
fired a hollow-point bullet at the altruistic heart of Plato’s Republic, and still
true to form, he ends his article with a Critian or Thrasymachean reading of the
Shorter Way.346 Based on the Nietzsche-inspired conception of οἱ ἀγαθοί that
he had learned from his teacher, E. R. Dodds347—a use, it should be added, that
is difficult to find in either Plato or “the Old Oligarch,”348 who instead calls the

344
 Thucydides, 6.32.2; cf. Altman. “Reading Order,” 37–38.
345
 A. W. H. Adkins, “Polupragmosune and ‘Minding One’s Own Business’: A Study in Greek Social
and Political Values.” Classical Philology 71, no. 4 (October 1976), 301–327.
346
 Adkins, “Polupragmosune,” 326–27.
347
 See Plato the Teacher, 213–215.
348
 See Gregory A. McBrayer (ed.), Xenophon, The Shorter Writings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2018), 160–174.
210 Chapter 2

natural Herrenvolk οἱ χρηστοί349—Adkins starts from the position that all of

Athenian literature, and thus Plato’s dialogues as well, was written by the self-
styled “good.”350 But in turning to Charmides, he makes a number of interesting
observations about “minding one’s own business,” beginning with the fact that
aligns Socrates against both Critias and Alcibiades:
The Socrates of the Charmides treats the definition simply as material for the
elenchus; it has no positive role to play in the philosophy. Similarly, in Alcibi-
ades I (which, though almost certainly not by Plato, is fourth-century work and
reflects Platonic usage and thought), ta hautou prattein (127b5–6) is attacked
by Socrates as not capable of producing a condition in which cities are well
administered, since philia (cooperative activity, “friendship”) will not be pos-
sible under such circumstances; and it is defended by Alcibiades.351

This observation suggests the existence of a Platonic solution very different

from the one Adkins will find in Republic 4; Socrates will echo Critias only
along the Shorter Way.
But regardless of Socrates’ (or Plato’s) position, Adkins convincingly
demonstrates that σωφροσύνη, understood as “minding one’s own business,”
functioned in fifth-century Athens as an oligarchical Schlagwort, created by
οἱ ἀγαθοί to keep “the many” in their place:
We need not be surprised to find that ta hautou prattein, whether termed dikaio-
sune or sophrosune seems to be prized by the agathos. He stands to gain by it
[N.B.; cf. “benefit by it”] both because an absence of “meddling” will leave his
share of status, position, and power larger than that of his social inferiors, and
also because, when the agathos ta hautou prattei, “does his own things,” the
“things’ that he “does” may include political activity: not all agathoi were politi-
cally active, but the active politicians were traditionally prominent agathoi.352

349
 Cf. [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 1.1–4.
350
 Adkins, “Polupragmosune,” 308: “all the literature of the period was written by agathoi, and
therefore all the complaints about ‘sycophants’ were written by agathoi. Xenophon (Hell. 2.3.12)
says that the Thirty Tyrants began by killing those who ‘lived by being sycophants and were a
nuisance (βαρεῖς) to the kaloi kagathoi.’”
351
 Adkins, “Polupragmosune,” 302. An authentic Alc. creates problems for Adkins: Alcibiades
embraces τὰ αὑτῶν πράττειν (Alc. 127a14) as a formula for justice (Alc. 127c7), and Socrates’
questions (Alc. 127a14–d3) reveal its limitations; when Alcibiades admits “to have forgotten
myself [λεληθῆναι ἐμαυτόν]” (Alc. 127d7), he opens the door for Socrates to introduce “taking
care of oneself [τὸ ἑαυτοῦ ἐπιμελεῖσθαι]” (Alc. 127e9; cf. 127e1–2). Thanks to Smp., Plato has
already placed Alcibiades at Socrates’ side in Potidaea at the beginning of Chrm.; the contrast
between Chrm. and Alc. on self-knowledge—necessarily prior to to eautou prattein—becomes
more obvious as a result.
352
 Adkins, “Polupragmosune,” 325. Cf. Gabriel Danzig, “Plato’s Charmides as a Political Act:
Apologetics and the Promotion of Ideology.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 53 (2013),
486–519, on 499, and Pownall, “Critias,” 11: “Critias’ conception of moderation, therefore, seems
to have been imbued with the stereotypical oligarchic nuances of the conservative Athenian elite.”
 Laches and Charmides: Fighting for Athens 211

Despite the fact that the passage that follows will climax with Plato (qua ὁ
ἀγαθός) showing his upper-class hand in Republic 4353—hence the addition
of dikaiosune—Adkins is fully aware that he cannot extract any Platonic
endorsement of ta hautou prattein in this sense from Charmides, and more-
over that he must uphold the excision of Alcibiades Major from the canon
because Socrates attacks it there; hence the crucial passage must begin, at
least, in a circumspect manner:

Now the use of polupragmosune and ta hautou prattein in Platonic dialogues

other than the Republic is difficult to evaluate and doubtless not too much
should be built on it, but approval of ta hautou prattein certainly seems charac-
teristic of such Athenians as Charmides, Critias, and Alcibiades. Charmides and
Critias were extreme oligarchs, and evidently wished to confine political activity
to their own, very small, group of aristocratic Athenians.354

Leaving for later the light this passage shines on the Shorter Way, the
crucial point for now is that Critias’ position in Charmides has acquired,
thanks to Adkins, a new and fearful coherence. Since he is one of “the good,”
Critias knows that σωφροσύνη as “minding one’s own business” will be
beneficial (ὠφελιμόν) to him—that is, he “stands to gain by it”—because it
will keep “the bad” far away from the business of the city.355 This will leave
wielding power to him. As a result, Plato’s Critias—who knows himself as
one of οἱ ἀγαθοί356 and thus that οἱ πολλοί are “the bad”—has combined self-
knowledge and SB with KGB. Plato, by contrast, knows that the Good is only
to be found elsewhere, and it is because he expects you to acquire the virtue
necessary for stopping his kinsmen357 in their tracks that the next battle for
Athens (and beyond) will be fought in Gorgias.

353
 See Adkins, “Polupragmosune,” 325–327 (“Plato and Pragmosune”), especially 327: “Plato has
retained this ‘flavor’ of sophrosune, and indeed has brought it into the foreground. He has linked
it—and dikaiosune—with ‘minding one’s own business’ and avoiding polupragmosune. His phi-
losophy in the Republic goes, of course, beyond the mere preferences of the agathoi; but certain
fundamental characteristics of the kind of state which he prefers—limited in scale, militarily
efficient but not expansionist, opposed to change of any kind—derive from the preferences not
only of Plato himself but of agathoi in general. Plato, and they, are yearning for the past, for a past
before the disturbing changes of democratic life, when everyone knew his place and kept to it.”
354
 Adkins, “Polupragmosune,” 325.
355
 Adkins, “Polupragmosune,” 322: “Sophrosune has a wide range of usage, but I am here concerned
only with that aspect of it which is displayed by submitting to another person who is superior
in strength, power, influence, or status.” Cf. Danzig, “Plato’s Charmides,” 499, and Luciano
Gianfrancesco, “Aspetti propogandistici della politica dei Trenta Tiranni.” Contributi dell’ Istituto
di Storia Antica 2, 20–35 (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1974), especially 35.
356
 Cf. Witte, Wissenschaft vom Guten und Bösen, 83–84.
357
 οἰκεῖοι at Ep. 324d1; cf. Grg. 480c2.
 Chapter 3

Plato and Gorgias

Socrates’ Touchstone

§8. FROM GORGIAS TO REPUBLIC

Gorgias is the first dialogue in the ROPD that prepares the student for the
sheer magnitude of the ten-book Republic, and greater time and effort must
therefore be devoted to it. Nor is it only a question of length. The physical
magnitude of Gorgias is commensurate with its philosophical and pedagogi-
cal importance in the series of dialogues between Symposium and Republic,
and it is only fitting that the chapter devoted to it should occupy the central
place in this book, that it be longer than the others, and will begin with an
overview. This chapter consists of five sections, three of them, this one
included, emphasizing the crucial role of Gorgias in preparing the student
for Republic. And since the distinction between the Shorter and the Longer
Way is crucial for grasping why Republic is the pivot around which the
ROPD turns (see §2), two of this chapter’s sections are based on that distinc-
tion: §10 will show how Gorgias prepares the reader for the Shorter Way and
§12 for the Longer. Not surprisingly, it also prepares the student for under-
standing the distinction itself.
As developed at length in Plato the Teacher, the interpretive core of my
reading of Republic is the previously unrecognized connection between
the Shorter Way and the methods associated with the second (or dianoetic,
that is, based on διάνοια) part of the Divided Line as well as the analogous
connection between the Longer Way and its (highest and dialectical) First
Part. It is on these connections that the distinction between “justice” and
“Justice” depends: the first, revealed in Republic 4, is based on the meth-
ods of the Second Part of the Divided Line and is therefore subject to the
limitations described there; the latter is based on the Allegory of the Cave
and the Idea of the Good. Although the importance of the Divided Line is

213
214 Chapter 3

universally acknowledged, the interpretive significance of the distinction

between the Shorter and Longer Ways is not: the former is never actually
mentioned and can only be inferred from the two times that the Longer
Way is (R. 435d2–3 and 504b2). It is therefore fair to say that the full
implications of the distinction—which on my account divides the return
to the Cave in the light of the Good as Justice along the Longer Way from
the “psychic justice” that emerges from the Image of a City and the vari-
ous questionable Hypotheses on which it is based along the Shorter—only
become visible by linking it to the Divided Line. This section will there-
fore begin by showing how Gorgias prepares the reader for the Line.1
The starting-point is that the Divided Line is a four-part analogy, and the
relevant connection to Gorgias is established at Gorgias 465b6–c3;2 there
Socrates, explicitly following the practice of the geometers (465b7), intro-
duces two four-part analogies for which he has been preparing the reader
since 463a1: (3) cosmetic : gymnastic :: sophistic : legislative, and (4) cook-
ery : medicine :: rhetoric : justice. I have numbered these “(3)” and “(4)”
because Socrates has already prepared the reader for them with two other
four-part analogies: (1) cookery : rhetoric :: cosmetic : sophistic (463b1–6),
and (2) medicine : gymnastic :: justice : legislative (464b7–c3).3 Having
separated the four parts of “(1)” under the heading of “flattery” (κολακεία at
463b1; cf. κολακευτική at 464c5) from those of “(2),” which are always in
service to “the best” (464c3–5), he then mixes the two kinds in both “(3)”
and “(4).” The basic point, then, is that by the time students have mastered
this long and complicated passage in Gorgias, they are well prepared to
understand the four-part analogy they will encounter at the end of Republic 6.
Nor is it only a question of the mechanics of analogy. In preparing the
reader for understanding the double four-part analogy, Plato—naturally
one could also say that it is Socrates who is preparing Gorgias and Polus
(463e3–464a1)—(a) distinguishes soul and body (464a1), (b) asserts that
there is a kind of well-being (εὐεξία) that applies to each (464a2), (c) distin-
guishes between a real and apparent εὐεξία in the case of the body (464a3–6),
and (d) distinguishes from both the real and apparent εὐεξία itself (he has
switched to εὖ ἔχειν at 465a4) the thing that produces it in either body or soul
(464a7–b1). It will be seen that “(d)” is the basis for both “(3)” and “(4)”:
all eight members of the double analogy are the productive arts or knacks
that create real or sham εὐεξία in body and soul. As for “(c),” Socrates has

1
 For the role of Alc. in this development, see Ascent to the Beautiful, §6. For La and Chrm. as
preparation for the Line see respectively Schmid, On Manly Courage, 45–48 (also Kohák, “Road
to Wisdom,” 127–128) and Schmid, Plato’s Charmides, 157.
2
 All otherwise unidentified parenthetical references in this section will be to Grg.
3
 It will be noted that if “(2)” were to follow the pattern of “(1),” the analogous order would be: (2a)
medicine : justice :: gymnastic : legislative, and if “(1)” were to follow the pattern of “(2),” the
analogous order would be: (1a) cookery : cosmetic :: rhetoric : sophistic.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 215

already collected the sham knacks in “(1)” (463b1–6), before introducing

“(a)” through “(d)” (464a1–b1); only then does he mention the four genuine
εὐεξία-producing arts in “(2)” (464b7–c3).
But if both “(c)” and “(d)” figure prominently in the final arrangement of
“(3)” and “(4),” the same cannot be said of “(a).” The distinction between
“(3)” and “(4)” is based on what Dodds calls “regulative” and “corrective,”4
and indeed what makes the passage so difficult is that the reader is forced to
invent terms of this kind to explain what is going on. But in addition to the
fact that these terms are not found in the text, it is obvious that the two sets
of four could just as easily have been combined in a more natural or rather
more text-imminent manner, that is, one based on “(a)”: (5) sophistic:
legislative :: rhetoric : justice (all relative to the soul), and (6) cosmetic :
gymnastic :: cookery : medicine (all relative to the body). Why does Plato
choose to suppress the soul/body distinction in the formulation of “(3)”
and “(4)?” One answer might be that the body-soul mixture in both “(3)”
and “(4)” prepares the student for the Divided Line, where the distinc-
tion between intelligible and visible—corresponding loosely to “(a)” in
Gorgias—is the basis on which the first cut in the Divided Line is made (R.
509d6–8). And especially when “(4)” is reformulated—such is the flexible
beauty of the four-part analogy—by placing the soul-pair in front of the
body-pair as: (4a) justice: rhetoric :: medicine : cookery, it can be made to
resemble the Divided Line, with the shadows then following the substance
in general accordance with “(c).” But that answer is inadequate.
It is not on the basis of Republic 6 that Plato expects us to understand
what is happening in Gorgias; it is rather on the basis of Gorgias that Plato
will expect us to better understand what happens later in Republic. Long
before the formulation of “(3)” and “(4),” the suppression of the soul-body
distinction has already begun with the introduction of εὐεξία in “(b).” First
in Erastai (Am. 134c6), and then in Gorgias itself (450a6), εὐεξία has been
applied correctly to the well-being of bodies specifically (LSJ: “good habit of
bodies, good health”). The notion that justice produces εὐεξία in the soul in
the same way that medicine produces εὐεξία in the body is useful as the basis
on which “(4)” rests, but it is also misleading in that it suggests that the soul is
body-like in a crucial respect.5 §10 will explore the relationship between the
tripartite soul in Republic 4—a crucial component of the Shorter Way—and
the “order” (τάξις at 503e6; cf. 506d7) and “arrangement” (κόσμος at 504a7;
cf. 506e2) of the soul in Gorgias, but for now the important thing is that the
use of εὐεξία here anticipates both τάξις and κόσμος there. And thus by the

4
 Dodds, Plato: Gorgias, 226.
5
 For the problematic character of this connection, see Stemmer, “Grundriss,” 560, and Peter Stem-
mer, “Unrecht Tun ist schlechter als Unrecht Leiden. Zur Begründung moralischen Handelns im
platonischen Gorgias.” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 39, no. 4 (October–December
1985), 501–522, on 509–510, 515–518, and 521–522.
216 Chapter 3

time that we find ourselves treading the Shorter Way in Republic 4, Gorgias
will have prepared us for the convenient misapplication of εὐεξία to the soul
(R. 444e1). A closer look at the wording of “(c)” and “(d)” proves that Plato
fully expects us to recognize that it is, in fact, a misapplication.6
Precisely because they are doubled, the analogies in Gorgias appear to be
more complicated than the single one in the Divided Line, but this ignores the
geometrical aspect of the latter. Since the second and third cuts in the Line are
in the same proportion with the first (R. 509d6–8), the length of the Second
Part must always be equal to the Third,7 and this crucial equality—which
serves to suppress the intelligible-visible distinction in the Line in much the
same way that the soul-body distinction is suppressed in Gorgias—consti-
tutes a third area in which Gorgias prepares for the Divided Line. To sum-
marize the first two: (i) the student gains familiarity with the mechanics of
any four-part analogy, and (ii) the extension of εὐεξία to the soul in Gorgias
prepares the student for the Shorter Way in Republic 4. Finally, (iii) Gorgias
prepares the reader for better understanding the mathematical aspects of the
Divided Line, crucial for seeing the connection between its Second Part and
the Shorter Way.
To begin with, the analogies in Gorgias are explicitly connected to “the
geometers” (465b7). More controversially, I take 508a6 to refer to the kind of
“geometrical equality [ἡ ἰσότης ἡ γεωμετρική]” that causes the Second to be
equal in length to the Third Part of the Divided Line—for there is nothing else
to which the phrase applies so well—and not to “geometrical proportion.”8

6
 464a3–b1 (Lamb modified): “Socrates: There are things, I suppose, that you call body and soul?
Gorgias: Of course. Socrates: And each of these again you believe to have a good condition
[εὐεξία]? Gorgias: I do [this response opens the door:]. Socrates: And again, a good condition
[εὐεξία] that may seem so, but is not? As an example, let me give the following: many people
seem to be in good condition [εὖ ἔχειν] with respect to their bodies when it would not be easy for
anyone but a doctor, or one of the athletic trainers, to perceive that they are not in good condition
[εὖ ἔχειν]. Gorgias: You are right. Socrates: Something of this sort I say there is in body and in
soul, which makes the body seem to be in good condition [εὖ ἔχειν] and the soul, though they are
none the more so in fact.”
7
 See Kent Moors, “Equality and Cognition in Plato’s Divided Line.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura
Classica (n.s.) 16 no. 1 (1984), 147–157, Richard Foley, “Plato’s Undividable Line: Contradiction
and Method in Republic VI.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 46, no. 1 (2008), 1–24, and Plato
the Teacher, 135–136.
8
 Cf. Vlastos, Platonic Studies, 195n119, and Terence Irwin, Plato, Gorgias; Translated with Notes
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 226, on 508a; for “normally,” consider “subsequently.” First
found in the ancient scholiast (Greene, Scholia Platonica, 167–168), interpreting ἡ ἰσότης ἡ
γεωμετρική as “geometrical proportion” requires us to read Grg. in the light of Lg. 757b1–c7, and
Plato in the light of Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 5.3 (1131b13–24), and can then be used to ratio-
nalize, not to reject, the determination of Callicles “to have more” (cf. 483c1–6), as Irwin points
out on 226. For bibliography, see Devin Stauffer, The Unity of Plato’s Gorgias: Rhetoric, Justice,
and the Philosophic Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 137n15; for explica-
tion in relation to Republic 7, see David Roochnik, Of Art and Wisdom: Plato’s Understanding of
Techne (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 202–204.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 217

Most importantly, there is Socrates’ definition of arithmetic at 451a8–b4.9

In explaining the Second Part of the Divided Line, Socrates refers to “hypoth-
esizing the odd and the even” (R. 510c3–4) without specifying that a plural-
ity of monads—appearing in Gorgias as “however so many [ὅσα] each of
them happens to be”—is the basis of “the odd and even.”10 This is important
because it is primarily on the basis of hypothesized monads that the dianoetic
objects of the Line’s Second Part can be linked to what Aristotle called “the
intermediates.”11 Although the importance of “(iii)” only becomes conspicu-
ous in Republic and the dialogues that follow it, enough has now been said to
show that the analogies in Gorgias prepare the reader for better understanding
the connection between the Divided Line and the Longer and Shorter Ways.
Although §10 is the center of this central chapter, the reader would be
well advised to regard §9 as the center of this book as a whole, and since it
contains seventeen sections, it is obviously the ninth of them that creates a
geometrical equality between the eight sections on either side of it. It is in
“Plato’s Confession” (§9) that I will spell out a more intimate connection
between Charmides and Gorgias than that arising from the claim that Gorgias
is a virtue-dialogue that follows Laches and Charmides in the ROPD (see §5).
§11 will revisit the suggestion made in the Epilogue of Ascent to the Beautiful
that before Plato’s students began studying Alcibiades Major, they attended
a dramatic performance of Protagoras,12 and that having reached Symposium
they watched Protagoras performed again,13 this time with greater under-
standing.14 In “Protagoras Revisited,” my goal is to use the dialogue’s the-
atrical features to explain the many connections between Protagoras and the
dialogues considered in Ascent to the Good, and with Gorgias in particular,15
where the GP Equation is expressly denied.

9
 451a8–b4 (Lamb modified): “Socrates: just as if somebody asked me about one or other of the arts
which I was mentioning just now: ‘Socrates, what is the arithmetical art?’ I should tell him, as you
did me a moment ago, that it is one of those which have their effect through speech. And suppose
he went on to ask: ‘Concerning which of those?’ I should say: ‘Among those [it is] a knowledge
concerning both the odd and the even [περὶ τὸ ἄρτιόν τε καὶ περιττὸν γνῶσις], however so many
each happens to be [ὅσα ἂν ἑκάτερα τυγχάνῃ ὄντα.].’”
10
 And therefore of number as such; see Denyer, Plato, Protagoras, 192 (on Prt. 356e6–357a1): “the
numbers generally were described as ‘the odd and the even’ (cf. e.g. R. 510c, Tht. 198a).”
11
 See Plato the Teacher, §29, Guardians in Action, §11, and Guardians on Trial, §16.
12
 In addition to the well-known speculations in Ryle, Plato’s Progress, 32–44, see Thesleff, Studies
in Platonic Chronology, 209. Thanks to its many stage-directions, chorus (Prt. 314e3–b8), and
numerous speaking parts, Prt. is better suited to performance than Grg. from an actor’s standpoint;
while the latter looks more like a modern script, the former is more like a screenplay. See Ascent
to the Beautiful, §1.
13
 Cf. Thesleff, Studies in Platonic Chronology, 234, especially “studied and perhaps ‘performed’ it
again and again—presumably Plato’s friends and pupils in the Academy.”
14
 Cf. Thesleff, Studies in Platonic Chronology, 285.
15
 There are many other parallels as well; cf. Thesleff, Studies in Platonic Chronology, 282, and
Weiss, “The ‘Socratic’ Paradoxes,” 351–362.
218 Chapter 3

A few more remarks about Protagoras are appropriate here. As was made
clear in §2, despite the fact that the hedonic calculus is not the only defense
for UV in the Socratic dialogues, there is a very good reason why the strain of
radical Socratist thought that Vlastos called “PTI” has insisted on a deadpan
reading of the hedonistic interlude in Protagoras: a whole series of claims—
including not only UV but also K, SP, CA, KGB, TEA, and IOV—are most
plausibly defended in relation to the art of measurement that begins with the
GP Equation and thus with the resulting equation of the Bad and the Painful.
Quite apart from the denial of that Equation in Gorgias—a denial, it should
be added, that compelled Taylor, the “T” in PTI, to team up with J. C. B.
Gosling, who had edited Philebus, in writing The Greeks on Pleasure (1982)
in order to minimize, parse, and finesse it—the basic claim at the center of
this chapter must be recognized from the outset as a serious challenge to UV.
And that claim is that Plato devotes a degree of attention to justice that
is out of any proportion—whether arithmetical, geometrical, or exponen-
tial—with the other four virtues. Already obvious thanks to the brute fact
of the mighty Republic, the dominant character of justice in Plato’s thought
is further emphasized by the hypothesis that it is the central concern of his
Gorgias, likewise a behemoth among the pre-Republic dialogues. This point,
although difficult, must therefore be clearly understood: since this chapter
on Gorgias is organized around the distinction between the Shorter and
the Longer Way, and since my interpretation of Republic depends on the
reader’s recognition of the deliberately inadequate basis on which Plato has
constructed the Shorter, the evidence that he abandons Socratism is not that
he now embraces a tripartite soul that leaves no room for K and SP, or that
he has abandoned UV for the sake of the fourfold division of the virtues in
Republic 4. Instead, I am claiming that neither Plato nor his Socrates ever
embraced the Socratist position on UV, and that the proof of this—already
announced in Alcibiades Major, which likewise revolves around justice—is
the Justice-based connection between Gorgias and Republic.
For reasons that should now be obvious, then, my ongoing dialogue with
the Socratists will be renewed in §10.16 But that dialogue is never very far
from the surface, and that is because the Socratist position—like the hedonic
calculus in Protagoras, the Eudaemonist Shortcut in Symposium, the invita-
tion to instrumentalize virtue for the sake of the First Friend in in Lysis, the
exhortation to equate εὖ πράττειν and εὐτυχία in Euthydemus, the ostensibly
Socratic provenance of KGB in Laches, and most importantly the Shorter
Way in Republic—is best understood as a lure to be resisted, a ridge blocking
the sight of the sea, a test to be passed, a fallacy to be detected, a hypothesis

16
 It will then be resumed in chapters 4 (§14) and 5 (§17).
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 219

to be transcended, and a springboard to be used on the final ascent to the Idea

of the Good. It is not a figment of Anglo-American prejudice but rather a
product of Plato’s awareness that the reasoned pursuit of SB—embodied by
Critias in Charmides—is neither beautiful nor just, and that our ignorance of
the source of τὸ ὠφέλιμον is equaled only by our ignorance of the Self we
are trying so hard to benefit. Nor does it matter in the least whether we speak
Greek, Latin, or English, or whether our present is haunted by the World
Wars of the twentieth or by those of the fifth century B.C.
Alcibiades Major has prepared us to recognize the importance of these
things from the start, and Plato’s greatness as a teacher shines forth from
the mirror of that wondrous text, at once childishly simple and infinitely
profound. It is by choosing not to recognize it as Plato’s that we really have
fallen victim to a figment of our own imagination; battle-tested though he
intended us to be, this was not a battleground he could have anticipated.
And I want to suggest that the reason Paul Friedländer remains the greatest
German Plato scholar of the twentieth century—and that may well be an
understatement although I have consistently found Guthrie to be more use-
ful if also less profound—is because he began his career by fighting for the
authenticity of Alcibiades Major: it’s the right place for a student of Plato
to begin. In any case, it is one of Friedländer’s insights, announced at the
beginning of his Gorgias chapter, which provides this introductory section’s
foundation:

In the Gorgias, Plato returns to the Thrasymachus, raising both form and con-
tent of the earlier work to a new creative level. The theme in both dialogues is
the problem of justice and the struggle against its opponents. In each dialogue,
Socrates has three such opponents, and they are progressively farther from him.
Thus, both dialogues move through three successive stages with the intensity of
the struggle gradually increasing.17

To begin with, there are enough important insights in this passage that it
would be a mistake to turn directly to the one I regard as most significant,
and the first of these is the simplest: Friedländer recognizes that the theme
of Gorgias is justice. In the first note to the chapter,18 he describes Olympio-
dorus’ attempt of to determine the dialogue’s theme or σκοπός, with the
second of three proposals made by even more ancient authorities being: “but
others say [the first group, naturally, regards its subject as rhetoric] that it
is about justice and injustice.” Although Friedländer records the fact that
Olympiodorus rejected all three of his predecessors’ proposals as merely

17
 Friedländer, Plato, 2.244.
18
 Friedländer, Plato, 2.353n1.
220 Chapter 3

partial, the commentator’s own—“concerning the ethical principles guiding

us to political happiness [πολιτικὴ εὐδαιμονία]”—is a decisive step away
from the standard “concerning rhetoric σκοπός,” pointing rather toward jus-
tice as its true subject. And since I have emphasized the distinction between
the Shorter and the Longer Ways, it is appropriate at this point to distinguish
terminologically the kind of justice discovered in the former as a small-case
“justice,” defended on the eudaemonist basis of the agent’s personal advan-
tage or benefit, while reserving “Justice” for the Longer Way.
The second is as complex as the first is simple: although I regard Friedlän-
der’s view that book 1 of the Republic was once an independent Thrasy-
machus as mistaken,19 and therefore consider the notion that Thrasymachus
precedes Gorgias as misguided in principle regardless of hermeneutic para-
digm, an explanation of what makes it objectionable from the perspective of
Reading Order specifically brings to light some important issues. The place
to begin is with the Self-Benefiting Doctor in Charmides. As already noted
in the previous section, there is a zero-sum conflict between that passage and
Republic 1: in the latter, Socrates makes it clear that a τέχνη, for example,
medicine, aims at what is beneficial for the patient, not for the doctor (R.
346e3–7; cf. 342e7–11). But as should be obvious, the doubled use of “for”
in the previous sentence is dative-dependent, and is therefore couched in the
terms appropriate to Charmides, not to further developments in Republic 1.
In the latter, the fundamental contrast remains unchanged, but the grammati-
cal expression of the contrast will shift to the difference between an active “to
benefit [ὠφελεῖν],” which is what the doctor does, as opposed to the passive
“to be benefited [ὠφελεῖσθαι].”20
With its vivid image of “the Doctor on Trial” (521e2–522c3), Gorgias
mediates between Charmides and Republic, and marks out a path that reaches
its culmination in Apology of Socrates and Phaedo. Developing a previous
hint (465d5–6) to which he now points back (521e2–3)—a common prac-
tice in the lengthy Gorgias (see §12)—Socrates anticipates the difficulties
he would, or rather will, face in defending himself (ἀπολογεῖσθαι at 521e5)
against the speech of his accusers (521e6–522a3). It is the doctor’s perfect
awareness of those difficulties, and indeed of the futility of any defense “in
this bad situation” (522a4), that makes Gorgias a turningpoint in the ROPD,
particularly because the doctor in Charmides was considered to be intemper-
ate because he did not know when he was benefiting himself by doing τὰ
δεόντα (Chrm. 164b3–c6).

19
 Following Charles H. Kahn, “Proleptic Composition in the Republic, or Why Book 1 Was Never
a Separate Dialogue.” Classical Quarterly (n.s.) 43 no. 1 (1993), 131–142.
20
 See Plato the Teacher, 91–95.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 221

In Gorgias, by contrast, the doctor knows full well that he is not benefiting
himself in doing everything he does “healthfully [ὑγιεινῶς]” (522a6) and in
this crucial respect the Doctor on Trial anticipates the philosopher’s return to
the Cave (R. 517a4–7). This is why it is a mistake to configure Apology of
Socrates and Crito as “early Socratic dialogues.”21 Along with Phaedo, they
follow Republic in the ROPD because they instantiate that Return. Just as the
gulf between two doctors in Charmides-Gorgias prepares the reader to grasp
the maxim of the action imaged in the Cave, the dialogues depicting Socrates’
trial and death illustrate the action of that maxim.
As already indicated above, the principal proof that the true theme of
Gorgias is justice—and here I need to add that its pedagogical purpose is to
prepare the reader for Justice (see §12)—is the hammered claim, arguably
the most striking in the dialogues and certainly the most striking in Gorgias,
that it is preferable “to suffer an injustice [ἀδικεῖσθαι]” than to do one, that
is, to ἀδικεῖν (introduced at 469b8–c2). For a start, then, I regard the shift
from the dative with ὠφέλιμον in Charmides to the ὠφελεῖν/ὠφελεῖσθαι
contrast in Republic 1 as a post-Gorgias development, building as it does on
that dialogue’s contrast between an active ἀδικεῖν and a passive ἀδικεῖσθαι.
As I argued in Plato the Teacher, Socrates’ claim in the City of Good
Men Only (R. 347d2–8) “that every man of understanding [πᾶς ὁ γιγνώσκων]
would rather choose to be benefited [ὠφελεῖσθαι] by another than to be
bothered with benefiting [ὠφελεῖν] him” (R. 347d6–8) is the single most
important deliberate falsehood in the dialogues as a whole, and thus the para-
digm and principal proof-text of Plato’s use of basanistic pedagogy. It not
ony contradicts what Socrates has said earlier in the sentence,22 but the very
essence of Justice, and thus a truth readily accessible to every decent person
on the planet.23
Following Kahn’s lead, I cited the City of Good of Good Men Only in
Plato the Teacher as the strongest evidence that there never was an indepen-
dent Thrasymachus.24 But in the context of Charmides and Gorgias, Friedlän-
der, no matter how mistaken I regard him to be on Republic 1, points to an
important truth. Bear in mind that Friedländer, who is using Order of Com-
position to trace “Plato’s Development,” places his Thrasymachus between
Laches and Charmides, failing to note while doing so the conflict between the
latter and Republic 1 on the relation between craft and self-benefit. But once
that conflict is recognized, an important aspect of Plato’s use of basanistic

21
 Cf. the treatment of Crito in C. C. W. Taylor, “Review of Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher
by Gregory Vlastos.” Philosophical Quarterly 42, no. 167 (April 1992), 228–234, on 230.
22
 On R. 347d2–8, see Plato the Teacher, §8.
23
 See also Guardians on Trial, 415–417, on Socrates’ last bath in Phd. 115a3–9.
24
 See Kahn, “Proleptic Composition in the Republic,” 138.
222 Chapter 3

pedagogy rises to the surface: it would have defeated his purpose to place
Thrasymachus immediately after Charmides. The point is subtle, so let me try
to clarify: if Friedländer had noted that Thrasymachus contradicts Charmides,
he would have needed to offer some kind of development-based explanation
of that change. Working with an alternate paradigm, and while teasing out
the implications of Friedländer’s suggestion that Thrasymachus predates
Gorgias, I have discovered a ROPD-based explanation of why Thrasymachus
could not directly follow Charmides, that is, could not fill the place of the
ostensibly later Gorgias.
When conjoined with the hypothesis of basanistic pedagogy, the Reading
Order paradigm no more regards inter-dialogue contradictions as indicating
Plato’s change of mind (or “development”) than it does those contradic-
tions—as in the City of Good Men Only—that are intra-dialogue. In the
relevant case, the conflict between Charmides and Republic 1 does not arise
from Plato’s change of mind, but rather from the fact the Self-Benefiting
Doctor, thanks to a deliberate use of fallacy, promotes a conception of virtue
that, no matter how attractive it may be to Critias, is one that Plato already
expects some of us to reject on our own. Plato will confirm that better reading
of Charmides in Gorgias with the memorable image of Socrates accused by
a pastry-cook before a jury of children; this “Other-Regarding Doctor,” who
cares nothing for self-benefit but only for the good of his patients no matter
how benighted, will be discussed in §12. But Plato knows that not all of us
will read Charmides as he intends. So here’s the point: it would defeat Plato’s
pedagogical purpose—not only with respect to those who have begun to see
for themselves, but more importantly, with those who have not—to place
Thrasymachus immediately after Charmides in the ROPD.
A hundred years ago, the German Army on the Western Front withdrew to
the well-prepared Hindenburg Line, luring its enemies to advance into a no
less carefully designed morass of booby-trapped territorial “prizes.” I have
already suggested that Plato does something similar by luring the devotees of
Diotima’s Eudaemonist Shortcut, fresh from a dubious battle to sustain that
devotion in Lysis, into the morass of deliberate fallacy that is Plato’s Euthyde-
mus. An even more extensive strategic retreat, likewise designed to lure the
proponents of SB into a cul-de-sac, begins in Charmides. More specifically,
Plato leads them into what I have called a reductio ad tyrannidem, the first
step of which is a conversation with a future tyrant who is never identified
as such—neither the word τύραννος nor any words related to it appear in
Charmides—but who is unmasked by Socrates, particularly by means of the
Self-Benefiting Doctor, as the kind of man who measures the value of virtue
solely in relation to his own good.
Gorgias follows Charmides in the ROPD because it brings into the open
the zero-sum conflict between Socrates as the Other-Regarding Doctor and
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 223

the tyrant we have already met in Critias. Although the latter is not men-
tioned by name in Gorgias (cf. 480c2), the subject of tyranny emerges from
the textual shadows to which it is confined in Charmides: the word τύραννος
appears there twenty-two times, along with the abstract term for “tyranny
[ἡ τυραννίς]” (five times) and the verb “to exercise tyranny [τυραννεῖν]”
(four times). Linked to rhetoric by the kind of absolute power Polus admires
(466b11–c2; cf. 470c9–471d2) and linked to Justice as its antithesis, tyranny
is best understood as the middle term connecting or rather subsuming the
“concerning rhetoric σκοπός” to justice, the true subject of Gorgias. And hav-
ing been introduced in Charmides thanks to KAH, the theme of tyranny
will continue to hold a position very close to center stage in Theages (Thg.
124d2–125a2).
But as will become clear in §10, Socrates’ argument with Polus against
the tyrant will remain on the Shorter Way, demonstrating as it does only that
tyranny is not ὠφέλιμον for the tyrant. While it is true that Plato expects
us to reject tyranny as something that would not be good for us, an argu-
ment against tyranny based on SB leaves open the crucial question of what
motivates Socrates to make such an argument in the first place, and it is this
question that leads us from justice to Justice. Unlike justice, Justice cannot
be defended on the basis of SB; it is practiced for the good of the patient, not
for that of the doctor, and starting with the so-called Thrasymachus, Justice
is the subject of Plato’s Republic.
This is why Plato creates for the first time an image of the trial and death
of Socrates in Gorgias, and then continues to deepen it in Theages and
Meno en route to Cleitophon-Republic. By bringing into the open the deadly
consequences of being the Other-Regarding Doctor, he expects us to rec-
ognize that it is not to benefit himself that Socrates is combating tyranny in
Critias, Gorgias, Polus, Callicles, Theages, Meno, and Cleitophon. But since
he expects us to recognize for ourselves the post-SB basis of Justice when
we come to Republic 7—Recollection being the principal reason that Meno
mediates Gorgias and Republic—Plato needed to delay the argument with
Thrasymachus about τέχνη and SB, and thus Friedländer’s suggestion that
Thrasymachus predates Gorgias is most illuminating for what it gets wrong.
But such is not the case with Friedländer’s brilliant insight about the
structure of the two dialogues: it is the parallelism between Gorgias, Polus,
and Callicles in Gorgias and Cephalus, Polemarchus, and Thrasymachus in
Republic 1,25 that justifies the quotation from his Plato. Even if we didn’t

25
 For illuminating comments on the trio of Republic 1 in the context of National Socialism, see
Barbara Zehnpfennig, “Platon heute” in Aleš Havlíček, Chrisoph Horn, and Jakub Jinek (eds.),
Nous-Polis-Nomos: Festschrift Francisco L. Lisi, 71–79 (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2016), last
paragraph.
224 Chapter 3

recognize that Gorgias was a virtue-dialogue when we encountered it in the

ROPD, the parallel structure of Republic 1—where the “what is justice” ques-
tion is of course front-and-center (R. 331c1–e2)—ensures that every reader
will feel at home from the start of Plato’s most important and challenging
dialogue. Indeed the initial feeling would be one of relief: just as the direct-
dialogue simplicity of Laches allows us to recover our footing and capacity
for dialectical καρτερία after the deliberate fallacies and narrative complexi-
ties of Lysis and Euthydemus, our prior acquaintance with Gorgias ensures
that Republic will initially seem simple. Unaware of the significance that we
are accompanying Socrates and Glaucon on a journey down to the Piraeus at
the start, we conceive of ourselves as walking on familiar ground, little real-
izing that our ready access to everything we have already learned will now be
required from us, and thus that it is this downward journey that will complete
our ascent to the Good.
Friedländer aptly refers to “the intensity of the struggle,” and no adequate
discussion of Gorgias can fail to state the obvious: it is a brilliant play,
sizzling with dramatic and intellectual intensity, and arguably the Platonic
dialogue most ripe for cinematic treatment. To this end, even the weaknesses
of the direct dramatic format contribute: the speechless pauses of Socrates’
interlocutors prove no less expressive than their words. It would require a very
constricted view of the power of Attic Tragedy to imagine that we would be
better served if Euripides’ Antiope had survived in place of Plato’s Gorgias.
From the broad comedy of Socrates’ dialogue with himself (506c5–507c9)—
a passage that would allow a skilled Platonic rhapsode to give the protagonist
two different voices (see Introduction)—to the agonized power and pathos
of 480b7–d6 (to be considered in the following section), and finally in the
mysterious revelation of its Final Myth, Gorgias is a sustained masterpiece
of dramatic art on a much greater scale than Plato has given himself before.
Longer than any single book of Republic, it prepares the reader for accepting
as much needed the latter’s division into ten at the same time that it makes
obvious that the dialogue that begins with “I went down” is the greatest of
Socrates’ great speeches, fusing rhetoric, justice, and Justice—along with
comedy, pathos, and myth—into a unified whole.
In turning at last to Friedländer’s insight about the character-based triadic
structure of both Gorgias and Republic 1, the similarities and differences
between Cephalus and Gorgias are the first things to consider. Since Gorgias
is the mentor of Polus, and Cephalus the father of Polemarchus, the rela-
tionship between fathers and sons—brought into the open in Euthydemus
and Laches—is placed in ironic juxtaposition with a more spiritual kind of
paternity, the ugly side of which emerges in Charmides, where there can
be no doubt that Critias is responsible for the handsome young man’s ugly
future. We are invited to judge Cephalus and Gorgias on the basis of Polus
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 225

and Polemarchus, and Plato doesn’t make it obvious that the latter will have
turned to philosophy (Phdr. 257b3–4) before being murdered by the Thirty.26
As is the case with Critias in Charmides and Protagoras in Protagoras, Plato
makes it plausible to claim that the portrait of Gorgias in Gorgias is a sym-
pathetic one; against the latter misconception—useful though it is for testing
the reader’s instincts and prejudices—is the wonderful word Socrates uses
(and Plato coins) in Theages:

Socrates: You scoundrel [ὦ μιαρέ]! So it was while desiring to tyrannize

[τυραννεῖν] over us that you were blaming your father all along for not sending
you to a teacher, some kind of tyranny-teacher [τυραννοδιδασκάλος τις]?27

Although Socrates will not mention Gorgias and Polus specifically as the
kind of teachers the young “scoundrel” Theages should consider seeking
out until Thg. 127e8–128a1, the progressive structure Friedländer remarks
in Gorgias makes τυραννοδιδασκάλος a remarkably accurate word for the
mentor of Polus and the guest of Callicles. As for the ὦ μιαρέ, the reader can
hardly fail to remember that Socrates had saluted both Charmides (Chrm.
161b8) and Critias (Chrm. 174b11) in the same way, and when mediated
by Gorgias, the connections between Charmides and Theages—and it is
worth anticipating §13 by mentioning here that young Charmides appears
in Theages as an example of someone who ignored a Sign-inspired warning
from Socrates (Thg. 128d8–129a1)—point not only to the political prob-
lem of the tyrant, but to the problem, both political and pedagogical, of the
τυραννοδιδασκάλος, no matter how amiable or slippery. To state something
else about Gorgias that no adequate interpretation can fail to emphasize no
matter how obvious it may be: although the dialogue’s opening words sug-
gest that Socrates has arrived too late for the battle (447a1–4), the battle has
only just begun. Gorgias is a battleground, and Justice—anticipated here by
the onerous and dangerous necessity of combating a rhetoric-inspired tyranny
with its own weapon—is its true σκοπός.
It was the protagonist of Cicero’s dialogue On the Orator who remarked:
“I read with great care the Gorgias, in which book I admired Plato especially
for this: because in ridiculing orators, he himself seemed to me to be the
greatest orator.”28 No less than he is the heir of the Attic Tragedians, Plato
must be counted among the Attic Orators as well, and even though it is per-
haps somewhat less obvious than the other two obvious truths about Plato’s
Gorgias, Cicero’s insight must join their ranks: the dialogue is a rhetorical

26
 See Guardians in Action, §5.
27
 Thg. 124e11–125a2.
28
 Cicero, De oratore, 1.47.
226 Chapter 3

tour de force. As such, it is a standing objection to a deadpan reading of the

playful Plato: those who regard him as the enemy of rhetoric ought to find
a different author to explicate,29 likely as they are to find in him the enemy
of poetry, imitation, and writing in general. “How well he’s read to reason
against reading” is Shakespeare’s version of a characteristically Platonic spe-
cies of “Performative Self-Contradiction”30—defined as a claim put in the
mouth of one of his characters that makes what Plato himself is doing seem
anti-Platonic—and Cicero counts as its discoverer. More specifically, Cicero
made Plato’s insight about rhetoric explicit in his youthful De inventione;31
it is a φάρμακον as described by Jacques Derrida,32 equally poison and cure.
For it is not only the speeches of Callicles that can stand beside the
speeches in Thucydides as masterpieces of rhetoric: Gorgias teems with
examples of Socrates’ eloquence, used for a just end. The longest of these is
the last: the Final Myth that reverses the trial of the Other-Benefiting Doc-
tor with a vision of the unjust soul’s future. Something of the full force of
Friedländer’s insight comes into play here: it is tales such as these that have
awakened Cephalus to the need for repentance and sacrificial expiation (cf.
R. 330d4–331a1). In using rhetoric to awaken our inner Cephalus, Plato con-
nects Gorgias with Republic 1 no less than with Republic 10, where the tale
of Er (R. 614b2–621b7) repeats the motif of the final eschatological myth.
And just as Plato places an important truth in the mouth of Cephalus, so too
does he entrust a crucial insight to Gorgias: although he lacks his brother’s
medical τέχνη, he shows himself to be more capable of persuading the doc-
tor’s patients to undergo the necessary medical treatment than the doctor
himself (456a7–b5).33
The usefulness of rhetoric in persuading the diseased to undergo treatment
no matter how painful gives rise to what I will call “the Second Platonic Para­
dox” (hereafter “PP-2”): Socrates will try to persuade us that just as it is pref-
erable to suffer an injustice than to be unjust—hereafter “the First Platonic
Paradox” or “PP-1”—the unjust man who does not “pay the penalty [διδόναι
δίκην]” is more wretched than the one who does (472e4–7). This establishes
a further link between Gorgias and Cephalus: in Republic 1, it is the latter’s
myth-based fear that he will be forced “to pay the penalty [διδόναι δίκην]”

29
 Cf. James L. Wiser, “Philosophy as Political Action: A Reading of the Gorgias.”American Journal
of Political Science 19, no. 2 (May 1975), 313–322.
30
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, Preface.
31
 Cicero, De inventione, 1.5.
32
 See Jacques Derrida, Disseminations, translated with an introduction and additional notes by Bar-
bara Johnson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 63–171.
33
 See Marina McCoy, Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists (Cambridge, UK: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2008), chapter 3, especially 89–92. Cf. James L. Kastely, “In Defense of
Plato’s Gorgias.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 106, no. 1 (January 1991),
96–109, on 100.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 227

there for the injustices he has committed here (R. 330d4–e2) that introduces
the subject of justice in Republic; between PP-1, PP-2, and the Final Myth,34
Plato ensures that it has long since been introduced in Gorgias. Only by
supplementing the Other-Benefiting Doctor’s technical knowledge of τὰ
δεόντα with the rhetoric of Gorgias can Socrates persuade us to take our
medicine; the Final Myth in Gorgias therefore connects Gorgias to Cephalus
in Republic 1.
But it is important to realize that the Final Myth does not simply antici-
pate Republic from its first book to its last: it also makes Gorgias the ironic
consummation of the deliberately fraudulent K-F basis of KGB introduced
in Laches and allowed to bloom into Critias in Charmides (see §6). Since
Socrates derived KGB (La. 199c5–d1) by extending to all three tenses (La.
198c9–199a9) what began as “knowledge of what is and is not fearful” (from
La. 195d8–9 via 196d1–2 to 198b2–c8), the question of the afterlife is insepa-
rably connected to that origin, and the emergence of our soul’s future as a
theme in Gorgias can only serve to remind us of how limited is our access
to K-F. It is easy to dodge the bullet by making the perfectly accurate point
that Socrates does not certify the Myth as simply true (527a5–8; cf. 523a1–3);
more important in the context of the ROPD is the fact that it gives a vision
of the future that the proponents of K-F cannot dismiss as simply false.
The mere possibility of post-mortem existence renders the measured pursuit
of “practicable happiness” or MAXHAP problematic, for what now consti-
tutes “the whole span of our lives?”35 There is nothing more Socratic than his
claim that there is nothing of which we are more ignorant than whether we
have more to fear than hope from death (Ap. 29a5–b2; cf. 42a2–5).
But Gorgias only begins the process of peeling away the triple-tensed
universality of KGB as developed in Laches and extended in Charmides.
Although the proofs adduced by Socrates for the veracity or value of the
Sign in Theages necessarily refer to the future consequences of heeding or
ignoring it (Thg. 128d7–129e3), as a matter of experience, the Sign always
impinges on our present (Euthd. 272e3–4). Since the Sign is explained as
apotreptic (Thg. 128d2–5; cf. Ap. 31d2–4), it arrests Socrates in the process
of doing something that he had already judged it best to do. So even if we
were to grant that it is exclusively on the basis of what he judges to be most
conducive to a long-term preponderance of pleasure over pain—or alterna-
tively, what is ὠφέλιμον for him, or contributes to his MAXHAP—the fact
that the Sign stops him from doing it ipso facto undermines the supposedly
“Socratic” theory of motivation. But what could be more characteristically
Socratic than obedience to his Sign? Calling into question our present grasp

34
 Note the return of PP-1 and PP-2 at 527b2–c4.
35
 Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy 4, 303.
228 Chapter 3

of KGB immediately after Gorgias has shown the limited reach of KGB with
respect to the future, Theages is then appropriately followed by the introduc-
tion of Recollection in Meno, which will do the same to our past.36 This is the
“sequence of tenses” by which Plato performs a truly Socratic reductio on
KGB when the “G” in question is the GoodE.
But let’s not miss the forest for the trees: the problem of the Self is prior
to any mysteries about its past, present, or future,37 and thus the root of
Plato’s post-eudaemonist ethics is visible from the start. The moment the
non-embodied soul becomes the Self (Alc. 129e7–130a2), conventional
“happiness” is under threat just as SB becomes problematic the moment
we acknowledge a Delphi-inspired ignorance of ourselves (Alc. 129a2–10).
In Gorgias, the problem returns in the context of life and death: if the body
is the tomb of the soul (493a1–3), then what we call “life” is really death
(492e7–493a1). The reason that justice can be defended on a eudaemonist
basis in the Shorter Way is that tripartition presupposes the soul as embod-
ied, that is, as it appears at present (R. 611c4–5), but beginning with the
word ὑμεῖς (R. 520b5), the Longer challenges us—we who did not even
exist when he addressed us—to reconfigure ourselves as unbound to time
or place in order to participate in a living dialogue with Plato. If we could
know for certain that our Self neither preceded our embodied life nor could
possibly survive it, if we knew that neither the Sign nor Plato’s Republic
could mysteriously invade and reshape our present, then we could in good
conscience pursue SB on the basis of KGB. But we don’t and we can’t, for
it is only here that SP become inescapable.38
It is therefore not the tense-based unraveling of KGB that exclusively
or even primarily prepares us for Republic, especially since something
resembling KGB will ultimately be redeemed by the Idea of the Good.
The process that makes Gorgias, Theages, and Meno the dialectical suc-
cessors of Euthydemus, Laches, and Charmides repeats Plato’s pattern
of a deceptive strategic retreat to the Hindenburg Line for a pedagogical
purpose. Lured by the promise of KGB in the earlier triad, the later one
sets about to unravel its pretensions with respect to future, present, and
past. But by the time we reach Charmides, where KGB must by definition
secure SB, we are already on the high road to the Longer Way, and a prob-
lematically Happy City first emerges there as a result. Plato will now lure
the proponents of the Eudaemonist Shortcut into another trap, this time

36
 Cf. Schulz, “Das Problem der Aporie,” 273.
37
 Cf. M. F. Burnyeat, “Socratic Midwifery, Platonic Inspiration.” Bulletin of the Institute of Clas-
sical Studies 24 (1977), 7–16, on 9: “Self-knowledge is the benefit peculiarly associated with the
Socratic method.”
38
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §5.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 229

based on the problem of what it means to be “beneficial.” In preparation

for Republic, where the chasm between ὠφελεῖν and ὠφελεῖσθαι will be
used to adumbrate Justice in book 1, both Gorgias and Meno will invite the
unwary to imagine that the identification of “good” with ὠφέλιμον requires
no disambiguating dative (see sections §10 and §15). For the present, how-
ever, the identification of a fourth obvious truth about Gorgias is sufficient:
its Final Myth, in addition to showing Plato’s reliance on rhetoric, opens
up the problem of the soul’s future.
Having indicated the link between Gorgias as the doctor’s persuasive
brother and the nightmares of Cephalus, it is time to turn to Polus and
Polemarchus, Friedländer’s second pair: the one a eulogist of tyrants, the
other their victim. Since the proof that it is unjust to harm anyone in Republic
1 rests upon the identification of harm with making a person more unjust (R.
335d12–e1), PP-2 in Gorgias has already done the heavy lifting where the
refutation of Polemarchus is concerned: any reader who has pondered the
claim that the best way to harm an enemy (cf. 480e6 with R. 332d7, 334d4,
and 335a6–b1) is to make sure he is never given the chance to διδόναι δίκην
(Grg. 480e8–481b1) will now breathe a sigh of relief. But the problem of how
we are to treat friends and enemies remains a central one throughout Republic
thanks to Polemarchus, and although the philosopher will not be harming the
acolytes of Thrasymachus in the strict sense by returning to the Cave to pre-
vent them from ruling,39 those acolytes are likely to feel that they are in fact
being harmed. But harmed or not, others will be benefited, and indeed there
can be no argument against benefiting everyone (cf. Clt. 410b1–3)—except,
that is, the one that makes SB the sole determinant of our motivations—
especially when we mean by that making them more just.
But the pattern that appears in Republic 1 emerges in Gorgias, and this
is the most important aspect of Friedländer’s insight: Plato will entrust one
golden truth to each member of the two matched triads that collectively con-
stitute Socrates’ six interlocutors. In the case of Polus, it is his willingness
to separate what is καλόν from what is ἀγαθόν (474c9–d2).40 It is necessary
to be perfectly clear on this crucial point: it is only after Justice emerges as
a lit torch in the reader’s hand that the inseparability of the Good and the
Beautiful becomes manifest as Platonism’s culminating truth, thus validat-
ing the GB Equation. Until the revelation of the Idea of the Good, we must
wrestle with the GoodE and what is ὠφέλιμον for me. As a result, as long as
KGB is necessarily what contributes to SB, the Beautiful and the Good are

39
 See Plato the Teacher, 236n225.
40
 Cf. Gregory Vlastos, “Was Polus Refuted?” American Journal of Philology 88, no. 4 (October
1967), 454–460. See also Stemmer, “Unrecht Tun,” 501–506.
230 Chapter 3

not only separable in principle,41 but the reader’s ability to separate them—
the GB Equation notwithstanding—is the necessary and sufficient spring-
board that makes the ascent to the GoodT possible. For all his many errors,
Polus models this separation: it is his pedagogical redemption.
Alcibiades is the first of Plato’s characters who aligns what is just with the
things that are beautiful, admirable, and noble (τὰ καλά), thereby implicitly
separating the Beautiful from what is advantageous (τὰ συμφέροντα at Alc.
113d5–6) or good for me:

Socrates: Now tell me: you say that some of the just things [τὰ δίκαια] are
advantageous, and some not? Alcibiades: Yes. Socrates: What then? Of them
some are the beautiful things [τὰ καλά] but some not? Alcibiades: What are you
asking? Socrates: If anybody seems to you to do things on the one hand ugly
[αἰσχρά], but on the other just. Alcibiades: Not to me. Socrates: And all the
just things [τὰ δίκαια] are also beautiful? Alcibiades: Yes. Socrates: What then
of the beautiful things [τὰ καλά]? Are all good [ἀγαθά], or some are and some
aren’t? Alcibiades: I myself think, Socrates, that some of the beautiful things
[τὰ καλά] are bad [κακά]. Socrates: And are there ugly things [αἰσχρά] that are
good [ἀγαθά]? Alcibiades: Yes.42

It is this text, placed at the beginning of the ROPD, that shows why an ascent
to the Beautiful necessarily precedes the ascent to the Good: only when the
Idea of the Good becomes as fully transcendent in Republic as τὸ καλόν is
seen to be in Symposium will the latter be complete. But the road to a post-
eudaemonist τὸ καλόν begins here, with Alcibiades, who has not yet lost sight
of what Thucydides called τὸ δόξαν καλόν, that is, “what was esteemed beau-
tiful” before the plague.43 Since the plague has not yet occurred at the time of
Protagoras-Alcibiades, however, Socrates uses war to make the point:

Socrates: Are you then saying the following: that many in war, having gone to
the aid [participial form of βοηθεῖν] of a companion or relative, have received
wounds and died, whereas those who have not gone to their aid [participial
form of βοηθεῖν], as needed [δέον], have come away healthy? Alcibiades: Very
much so.44

The presupposition of the discussion that ensues in Alcibiades Major

is that while a courageous willingness to face wounds and death while

41
 Cf. Stemmer, “Unrecht Tun,” 502: “Während also τὸ καλόν (oder auch τὸ καλόν καὶ τὸ δίκαιον) in
der antiken Ethik das Moralische, das, was wir im Blick auf die anderen tun sollen, bezeichnet, ist
mit τὸ ἀγαθόν, dem Gegensatz von τὸ κακόν, das gemeint, was wir in unserem eigenen Interesse
tun wollen, was unserem Wohl dient, zu unserem Glück beiträgt.”
42
 Alc. 115a1–16.
43
 Thucydides, 2.53.3, considered in §7.
44
 Alc. 115b1–4.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 231

coming to the aid of one’s friends is beautiful (Alc. 115b5), life is good
and death is bad (Alc. 115b9); this proves sufficient for making the student
reflect critically on the GB Equation, to say nothing of the BP Equation in
the last argument in Protagoras. But the discussion also points forward,
and in anticipation of the Shorter Way and the gymnastic exercises that
follow Symposium, Socrates will resolve this dilemma in Alcibiades Major
by means of the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy: the one who does beautifully neces-
sarily fares well, and is thus happy (Alc. 116b2–5). The post-Symposium
dialogues, and Euthydemus in particular (§3), will test our commitment to
this Fallacy; Plato will lay it bare as such in Charmides (§6) before using
it as a helpful marker for the better identification of deliberately deceptive
argument in Gorgias (507c3–5) and Republic (R. 353e1–352a2). But the
reason that Plato continues to allow some readers of his post-Symposium
dialogues to substitute happiness for the post-eudaemonist vision of the
Beautiful revealed in the Diotima-discourse is that he is now turning our
attention to an equally post-eudaemonist Good by means of a necessarily
other-regarding Justice. This will require him to revisit the equations of
life with good and death with bad on which the original dilemma about
the Beautiful and the Good depended in Alcibiades Major.
Socrates will challenge those equations in Gorgias by recording the insight
of those wise men who regard life as death and the body as a tomb (493a1–3).
But it is thanks to Polus that the division of the Beautiful and the Good
appears there as well, with a discussion of PP-1 appropriately setting the stage
for the series of equally paradoxical reverses that will follow it:

Socrates: Tell me, then, so that you will know [i.e., why Socrates upholds
PP-1], as though I was asking you from the beginning [ἐξ ἀρχῆς]: which of
the two seems to you, Polus, to be worse [κάκιον]: doing injustice or suf-
fering it [τὸ ἀδικεῖν ἢ τὸ ἀδικεῖσθαι]? Polus: Suffering it, [it seems] to me.
Socrates: And why, indeed [τί δὲ δή;]? Which of the two, doing injustice
or suffering it [τὸ ἀδικεῖν ἢ τὸ ἀδικεῖσθαι], is uglier [αἴσχιον]? Answer
[ἀποκρίνου]! Polus: Doing it [τὸ ἀδικεῖν]. Socrates: Therefore it is also
worse [κάκιον] if indeed it is uglier [αἴσχιον]. Polus: By no means! Socrates:
I understand: you do not consider both beautiful and good [καλόν τε καὶ
ἀγαθόν] as the same, it seems, nor bad and ugly [κακὸν καὶ αἰσχρόν]. Polus:
Clearly not.45

Thanks to Socrates’ quick review of the Table of Opposites introduced in

Protagoras (Prt. 332c3–6),46 Plato makes it easy for the student who remem-
bers the dilemma in Alcibiades Major to grasp the most important point: if

45
 474c4–d2. Note the pause that precedes and elicits ἀποκρίνου.
46
 Cf. 476b3–477a4 (climaxing with the entrance of ὠφελεῖσθαι) and Prt. 332a3–c3.
232 Chapter 3

τὸ ἀδικεῖν is, as Polus admits, αἴσχιον, then τὸ ἀδικεῖσθαι is “more beauti-

ful (κάλλιον)” when incurred as a result of our attempt to “run to the aid
(βοηθεῖν)” of our friends, as of course it is. Flagged by Callicles as the admis-
sion that allowed Polus to be refuted (482d7–e2), it is rather the moment
where Plato prompts us to educate ourselves, and to remember what he has
been teaching us from the start.
As already mentioned, the argument that follows—where what is
καλόν is fallaciously confined to what is either pleasant or beneficial to
the one who beholds it (474d3–e4)—will be considered in the context of
the Shorter Way. But Plato offers us a peek at the Longer when Socrates
asks: “And why, indeed [τί δὲ δή;]? Which of the two, doing injustice
or suffering it [τὸ ἀδικεῖν ἢ τὸ ἀδικεῖσθαι], is uglier [αἴσχιον]? Answer
[ἀποκρίνου]!” (474c7–8). The answer to his first question is obvious:
Polus thinks suffering an injustice is worse because it is worse for the
person who suffers it. But thanks to the transition from passive to active,
decisive from a pedagogical standpoint, it is rather to do injustice (τὸ
ἀδικεῖν)—which Polus clearly does not believe is worse for the person
who does it since he thinks the tyrant benefits from his crimes—is nev-
ertheless more ignoble, ugly, and despicable for the person who commits
it.47 Socrates asks this second question because Plato counts on us to
remember that what is truly beautiful would never need to be concealed
(Hp. Ma. 299a3–6) nor would it necessarily redound to our personal
good (Alc. 115b5–c2); Polus pauses before answering—hence the sty-
listically brilliant ἀποκρίνου48—because what Thucydides called “shame
[αἰσχύνη]”49 is losing its grip on him; he nevertheless answers as he does
because it has not yet vanished completely. And that is enough, just as it
is enough that Gorgias, like Republic, is set simply “during the War.”50
The wartime origin of the dilemma in Alcibiades Major serves to better
connect Polus to Polemarchus: we incur death and wounds at the hands
of our enemies in order to benefit our friends. If death is an evil, and if
only what benefits us—in the paradigmatic case, what preserves our life,

47
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 249 (on 474c4–476a2) deserves careful study.
48
 For other pauses, cf. 468c7, 468d6 (the first two are marked with τί οὐκ ἀποκρίνῃ;), 475d5, 509e2,
leading up to 509e3, and then the whirlwind of 515b1, 515c1, and 515c3 (two), leading up to 519d5
and 520a6 (two more).
49
 Thucydides, 2.51.5. On the role of shame in the refutation of Polus, see Christina H. Tarnopolsky,
Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants: Plato’s Gorgias and the Politics of Shame (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2010), 65–78.
50
 See Arlene W. Saxonhouse, “An Unspoken Theme in Plato’s Gorgias: War.” Interpretation 11,
no. 2 (May 1983), 139–169, and Michael Svoboda, “Athens, the Unjust Student of Rhetoric: A
Dramatic Historical Interpretation of Plato’s Gorgias.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37, no. 3 (Sum-
mer 2007), 275–305, especially 286–295, beginning with the historical implications of “Gorgias’s
Visit to Athens in 427 BCE” (but see 302n7).
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 233

health, and happiness—is good, then Alcibiades is senseless to prefer

death to cowardice (Alc. 115d7). Plato counts on us to recognize that he is
not. Beginning with the Grand Triple Equation of the Good, the Beautiful,
and the Pleasant in Protagoras,51 our awareness of what makes courage
beautiful has been tested; in Symposium, this awareness can “ascend the
brightest heaven of invention” only if we are prepared to climb to the top
of Diotima’s ladder. And it is only on the basis of a prior ascent that we
can “go back down.”
It is thanks to the repeated allusions to the trial and death of Socrates
beginning in Gorgias that we are being urged to see what it really means
to give both friends and enemies their due, and thanks to the notion that
life as we know it is death, the exclusively self-benefitting good—already
associated with Polemarchus’ executioner in Charmides—is beginning to
lose its grip. What Plato expects us to glean from the parallel between Polus
and Polemarchus is the awareness that suffering an injustice at the hands of
enemies in order to benefit our friends, even if that means receiving a death
sentence from the jury of children, is not only more beautiful than doing an
injustice to others, but is the very the essence of Justice in the light of the
transcendent (and therefore post-SB) Idea of the Good.
This brings us at last to the third and culminating members of their
respective triads: the frequently linked pair of Callicles and Thrasymachus.
The right place to begin building on Friedländer’s insight is with his com-
ment that Socrates’ three opponents are “progressively further away from
him.” Simply put, I will be claiming in the next section that this is not true.
Although Callicles remains obdurate throughout the dialogue, Socrates
famously claims in Republic 6 that Thrasymachus was not his enemy before,
and has just now become his friend (R. 498d1–2). Despite offering the kind of
opposition to Socrates that has made them an obvious and indeed inevitable
pair, Plato has therefore made it almost as easy to believe that this opposition
is much stronger and more intractable in one case than it is in the other. Hav-
ing already shown in Plato the Teacher that appearances are deceiving with
respect to the apparent friendship between Socrates and Thrasymachus,52 the
next section will challenge the parallel conception by showing how the clos-
est imaginable friendship arose between Socrates and Callicles. I will there-
fore conclude this section by adding a fifth and by no means obvious truth

51
 Cf. R. Hackforth, “Hedonism in Plato’s Protagoras.” Classical Quarterly 22, no. 1 (January 1928),
39–42, on 42: “To establish his point that ignorance is the reason why cowards will not face war,
Socrates has to recur to the triple equation καλόν=ἀγαθόν=ἡδυ (360a3). Without that equation it
would be arguable that cowardice is compatible with a recognition that to face the danger shirked
is ‘honorable and good’; with it, this is no longer arguable.” Hackforth was an early champion of
a deadpan (i.e., revisionist) reading; see Vlastos, “Introduction,” xl.
52
 See Plato the Teacher, §15.
234 Chapter 3

about Plato’s Gorgias: readers who are certain that Callicles will continue to
remain obdurate in the unwritten silence that follows the dialogue will never
themselves become Plato’s Guardians.

§9. PLATO’S CONFESSION

Soon enough Anytus will get up and go (following Men. 95a1), and this
proves that Plato’s characters not only threaten to leave—as Socrates does in
Protagoras (Prt. 335c3–9)—but also that they actually “break off betimes”
when they have a mind to do so. It is therefore significant that Callicles does
no such thing: since the dialogue’s last word is “O Callicles” (527e7), we can
be sure that he stays until the end. This indicates that Callicles has overstated
the case at what proves to be a critical moment:

Callicles: Well, and not a jot do I care, either [οὐδέ γέ μοι μέλει οὐδὲν], for
anything you say; I only gave you those answers to gratify Gorgias. Socrates:
Oh well, then what shall we do? Break off the discussion [λόγος] in the middle
[μεταξύ]? Callicles: You must decide that for yourself.53

It turns out that Socrates has just overstated the case as well (505c3–4):
Callicles is responding to Socrates’ claim that he is unwilling to remain
(ὑπομένειν) and be benefitted (ὠφελεῖσθαι), and since the younger man
clearly does remain—the question of his being benefitted naturally remains
open—it seems unlikely that what Socrates has to say is, as he claims, of
no concern to him whatsoever. On the other hand, there clearly is a sense in
which—thanks to the silence of Callicles if not to his actual departure—the
λόγος breaks off in the middle (μεταξύ).54
Had Cleitophon not been excised from the canon, it is likely that more
scholars would have recognized that Plato’s Gorgias is likewise incomplete:
the latter leaves us waiting for the response of Callicles just as the former
leaves us waiting for Socrates’ reply. The reception of Nietzsche has made it
even more difficult to recognize that Gorgias is incomplete,55 and the fact that
E. R. Dodds, still the foremost Anglophone commentator on the dialogue,
was also the author of The Greeks and the Irrational—arguably the moment

53
 505c5–9.
54
 Cf. Gabriela Roxana Carone, “Calculating Machines or Leaky Jars? The Moral Psychology of the
Gorgias.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 26 (2004), 55–96, on 94.
55
 See Monique Dixsaut, Platon-Nietzsche: L’autre manière de philosopher (Paris: Fayard, 2015)
and Mark Anderson, Plato and Nietzsche: Their Philosophical Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2014),
140–147. Cf. Steven Rendall, “Dialogue, Philosophy, and Rhetoric: The Example of Plato’s Gor-
gias.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 10, no. 3 (Summer 1977), 165–179, on 178.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 235

when Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy went mainstream among English-

speaking classicists56—is proof of this: “Callicles remains unconvinced to the
end.”57 In fact, this is a notable and indeed paradigmatic example of the argu-
mentum ex silentio: since Callicles says nothing “at the end,” we simply don’t
know. But here’s something that can be known: the greater one’s sympathy
for Nietzsche, the greater will be one’s misplaced certainty that we do. Plato
points us in a better direction when Socrates explains why Callicles should
not break off the discussion:

Socrates: Why, they say one does wrong to leave off even stories [μύθοι] in
the middle [μεταξύ]: one should set a head [κεφαλή] on the thing so that it may
not go about without a head [ἄνευ κεφαλῆς]. So proceed with the rest of your
answers, that our argument [λόγος] may pick up a head [κεφαλή]. Callicles:
How overbearing you are, Socrates!58

The hammered use of κεφαλή points to the truth despite the persuasive power
of Nietzsche: by allowing the silence of Callicles to follow the greatest (to
date) of Socrates’ μύθοι, Plato allows us to recognize that his Gorgias,
especially when considered as the λόγος that it is, “ends” in a μεταξύ, and is
therefore ἄνευ κεφαλῆς.59
As always in Plato, the final responsibility rests not with his characters but
with his readers: thus it is on our sovereign decision that the headless ending
of Gorgias depends. If we decide that Socrates’ λόγος is compelling—and
that means if it succeeds in persuading us—we will be more inclined to
imagine that Callicles changed his mind, whereas if we don’t, we will supply
the dialogue with quite another κεφαλή. It is therefore our responsibility to
answer Socrates’ question:

Callicles: Take my advice, and let this argument [λόγος] drop, or find someone
else to converse with. Socrates: Who else is willing, then [τίς οὖν ἄλλος ἐθέλει]?
Let us not leave the argument [λόγος] there, unfinished [ἀτελής]!60

56
 See E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951);
with little to say about Socrates’ Divine Sign (117, 185, and 217), Dodds upholds Nietzsche’s por-
trait of “Socratic rationalism” (217; cf. 230n48) and affirms “the historical portrait” Plato offers us
in Protagoras on 184. In a note attached to this passage (198n32), he cites Hackforth, “Hedonism.”
See also 198n33.
57
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 352.
58
 505c10–d4.
59
 Thanks to KAH, we know that any beneficial effect Socrates may have had on the κεφαλή of
Charmides was limited, and the hammered use of that word (sixteen times between Chrm. 155b4
and 158c1; none thereafter) is another indication that the two dialogues are connected; since there
is no further discussion of the young man’s κεφαλή, there is a sense in which it too is headless.
For another similar connection, cf. the democratic incantations of 483e6–484a5, which apparently
had no effect on Charmides.
60
 505d4–7.
236 Chapter 3

The reader is that “someone else” (ἄλλος τις), and in the silence that follows
the dialogue, we step into the breach, filling in the ἀτελὴς λόγος as we see fit.
There is a sense, then, in which the unknown response of Callicles is irrel-
evant as long as we are that ἄλλος τις who wishes to see the thing through to
its end. And there is plenty of evidence in Gorgias that Socrates, like Plato,
needs only a single witness:

Socrates: But I, being one [εἷς ὤν], do not agree with you, for you are not com-
pelling me: you only attempt, by producing a number of false witnesses against
me, to expel [ἐκβάλλειν] me from my property [ἡ οὐσία] and the truth [τὸ
ἀληθής]. But if I should not produce you, being one [εἷς ὤν], as a witness agree-
ing with the things I am saying, I believe that nothing of any account has been
accomplished by me about the things with which our discussion is concerned,
nor do I believe that you have either, unless I, being one [εἷς ὤν], bear witness
for you, while letting all the others go hang.61

Although Socrates is speaking to Polus here, and thus neither to Cal-

licles nor the reader, the universal point applies: it is always to an audience
of one that Plato is really speaking. Even if everyone else were to find what
Socrates says to be paradoxical to the point of patent absurdity, that is not
the kind of refutation that matters,62 and the hammering of εἷς ὤν points
to the individual reader’s response. At this stage, the debate is about the
tyrant: the citizens he can kill or exile (hence the use of ἐκβάλλειν)63—like
the property he can confiscate—are likened to τὸ ἀληθής, Socrates’ true
οὐσία. So even before the arrival of Callicles, Socrates has emphasized not
only the importance of the discussion per se, but also the critical impor-
tance of securing a witness, especially if it is a single witness (“being one)”
to the truth:

Socrates: For indeed the points which we have at issue are by no means of slight
importance: rather, one might say, they are matters on which it is both most
honorable [κάλλιστον] to know [εἰδέναι], and most disgraceful [αἴσχιστον] not
to know [μὴ εἰδέναι]; for the chief point [τὸ κεφάλαιον] of these matters is either
to know or not to know [γιγνώσκειν ἢ ἀγνοεῖν] both who is happy [εὐδαίμων]
and who is not.64

61
 472b3–c2.
62
 472c2–9 (Lamb): “Socrates: Well now, this is one mode of refutation, as you and many other
people understand it; but there is also another which I on my side understand. Let us therefore
compare them with each other and consider if there is a difference between them.”
63
 For the use of this word in Plt. (293d4–5, 298b6, and 309a2), see Guardians on Trial, 113–122; the
Eleatic Stranger will confer upon his πολιτικός two out of the three components of Polus’ “Tyrant’s
Triad” (466b11–c2, 468d1–2, and 470b2–3). But as is not infrequently the case, it appears first in
Prt. (325a7–c4).
64
 472c6–d1.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 237

Just as Socrates will emphasize the life-shaping importance of his conversa-

tion with Thrasymachus in Republic 1 (R. 336e7, 344d7–e3, and 352d6–7),
the question of whether it is Polus’ tyrant or Socrates’ (easily wronged) just
man who is εὐδαίμων introduces the Shorter Way that connects Republic 4
to Republic 8–9.
But as Friedländer has pointed out, the intensity of the dialogue increases
with the arrival of Callicles, and it is only after he has argued in defense of
the proposition that nobody who is a slave to anything can be εὐδαίμων (see
491e5–492c8; especially 491e5–7) that Socrates finds in the two words πῶς
βιωτέον—“how it is necessary for us to live” (492d5)—the classic formula-
tion of the high stakes debate that links Gorgias to Republic:

Socrates: Not ignobly in the least [οὐκ ἀγεννῶς γε], Callicles, are you
marching forth [ἐπεξέρχεσθαι] with your argument [λόγος], speaking freely
[παρρησιάζεσθαι] as you do so: for now you are stating clearly the things
that others think but do not wish to say [σαφῶς γὰρ σὺ νῦν λέγεις ἃ οἱ ἄλλοι
διανοοῦνται μέν, λέγειν δὲ οὐκ ἐθέλουσιν]. I therefore beseech you in no manner
to give way, so that in fact [τῷ ὄντι] it may become crystal clear [κατάδηλον]
how it is necessary to live [πῶς βιωτέον].65

In relation to the dialogue’s true σκοπός, the comment of Dodds on this

passage is worth quoting: “the ostensible question of rhetoric has vanished
into the background.”66 The problem with this dichotomy, however, is that it
prepares the way for his later claim that “Callicles remains unconvinced to
the end.”
The purpose of this section is to challenge this plausible and predictable
response to the “fill-in-the-blank” or “supply-the-missing-ending” puzzle that
Plato has created at the end of Gorgias. Although it is fun, solving the puzzle
is not only a game, and Plato has created it because he knows that it bears
directly on making κατάδηλον his own answer to the πῶς βιωτέον question,
directed as it is to each one of us. My claim is that an obdurate Callicles
is the antithesis of Plato himself. It is not only or even primarily Callicles
who is saying what others think but do not wish to say: by the act of writing
Gorgias, it is Plato who is doing so, and it would give Callicles more sub-
stance than he deserves to add “as well.” As those with KAH know, nobody
named “Callicles” is to be found there.67 In a dialogue that fails to come to a

65
 492d1–5.
66
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 299 (on 492d5); note the mythic speech of Socrates that follows
(492e7–493c7), the purpose of which is “to persuade [πείθειν]” (493c6–d3).
67
 Cf. Nails, People of Plato, 75–77 with Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 12: “Of Callicles we know abso-
lutely nothing beyond what Plato tells us in the Gorgias.”
238 Chapter 3

head, a brilliant but otherwise unknown young man, with a name resembling
“Aristocles,” articulates with great force and vigor a position that distils the
plague-ridden spirit of Athens. In response, Plato depicts Socrates doing
everything he can to change (note the three uses of μετατιθέναι at 493c3–d3)
the young man, and we are challenged to decide for ourselves whether he
will have succeeded in doing so. The reason this section is called “Plato’s
Confession” is that those who know that Callicles could have changed—for
nobody can know that he didn’t—will discover in Gorgias the proof that he
did so: he became Plato.
Although Dodds is sympathetic to this identification,68 he is so for exactly
the wrong reason. In the most important passage of his commentary, he writes
this about 483c7–484c3 in the Great Speech of Callicles:

In such writing we may feel the force of Plato’s own emotional reactions to
democracy, though his practical conclusions were different—for Callicles’ ‘leo-
nine’ man he would substitute the ‘kingly’ man who possesses ἐπιστήμη and is
therefore entitled to rule ἢ κατά γράμματα ἢ παρὰ γράμματα (Polit. 296de, Laws
875cd). We may conjecture, with Festugière (387) and Jaeger (Paideia, ii. 138),
that ‘in his own character Plato had so much of that unruly will to power as to
find, and fight, part of himself in Callicles’; or with Alain (Idées, 17) that ‘Plato
paints himself here as he might have been, as he feared to be.’69

Despite the influence of Nietzsche on Jaeger,70 the latter sees Plato more
clearly as fighting against his inner Callicles. Dodds therefore ends with the
quotation from Alain because it suggests that it was Plato’s fear and not his
Platonism that allowed him to overcome “the unruly will to power” inside
himself.71 But the crucial point is that Dodds points to the Eleatic and Athe-
nian Strangers as evidence that Plato, albeit in a form at once more practical
and scientific, remained Callicles. Starting from the opposite response to the
question of whether Callicles remained obdurate, I claim that it is because
Socratic persuasion succeeded in Plato’s case—Gorgias itself being the

68
 Cf. Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 14: “One is tempted to believe that Callicles stands for something Plato
had it in him to become (and would have become, but for Socrates), an unrealized Plato who, as
Jaeger has said [the note also cites Festugière], lies deeply buried beneath the foundations of the
Republic.”
69
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 267 (on 483c7–484c3); see Guardians on Trial, 237n90
70
 Katie Fleming, “Fascism” in Craig W. Kallendorf (ed.), A Companion to the Classical Tradition,
342–354 (Chichester: Blackwell, 2010), 349, on “Jaeger’s desire to find a ‘third way’ between
Wilamowitz and Nietzsche.”
71
 But see Alain (Émile Chartier), Idées: Introduction à la philosophie; Plato–Descartes–Hegel–
Comte (Paris: Hartmann, 1939), 15.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 239

written proof it did so—that the man who outgrew Callicles72 was not only
able to test his readers with two crypto-Critian Strangers, but more impor-
tantly found it necessary to do so.
Strictly speaking, discussion of Plato’s relationship with his two Strang-
ers might seem out of place here, but the observation of Dodds points to the
far-reaching consequences of recognizing Callicles as the pre-Socratic or
rather as an un-Socratized version of Plato. Naturally those consequences
are most obviously relevant to the interpretation of Gorgias itself, begin-
ning with the fact that the hypothesis gives the dialogue its missing κεφαλή;
reading Gorgias as “Plato’s Confession” also suggests a new way to resolve
to the ancient problem of the dialogue’s unifying σκοπός.73 And since many
have struggled to distinguish the Platonic from the Socratic elements mixed
together in the dialogue, anything that increases our awareness of Plato’s
relationship with Socrates must prove helpful in clarifying the points at issue.
But if Plato has given us a portrait of his pre-Socratic sensibility in Gorgias,
we will not only better understand his attitude toward his famous kinsmen in
Charmides but also his ready access to points of view, like that of Critias,74
hostile to and indeed otherwise incompatible with the Platonist he became
and would remain. If Callicles did not remain obdurate—that is, if Plato out-
grew the Callicles he would have become without Socrates—Dodds, despite
his own intent, helps us to see why Plato cannot be so readily identified with
his Strangers. What makes his observation so valuable is that it points to the
experiential basis of Plato’s use of basanistic pedagogy: he saw the necessity
of testing us with a more practical and scientific version of an outlook he
knew from personal experience needed to be outgrown.
As already mentioned in the Preface, the word βάσανος figures promi-
nently in Gorgias (486d2–7), where we can be sure that anyone is speaking
the truth, ourselves included (cf. 486e5–6 and 487e1–3), only after they and

72
 It must be emphasized from the start that I am not claiming that Callicles is an accurate portrait
of the youngster Plato was when he was converted by Socrates: he depicts his former self as now
grown to manhood, with the requisite experience in war and political practice (see Nails, People
of Plato, 75). For what little such speculations are worth—see Ronald Hathaway, “Sceptical Max-
ims about the ‘Publication’ of Plato’s Dialogues” in Richard Freis (ed.), The Progress of Plato’s
Progress, 28–42 (Berkeley, CA; ΑΓΩΝ, 1969), 30—I would suggest that Plato wrote Grg. when
he was the same age that he depicts Callicles as being. With “who Plato might have been without
Socrates,” cf. John Halverson, “Plato, the Athenian Stranger.” Arethusa 30, no. 1 (1997), 75–102.
73
 To borrow from Stauffer’s title (The Unity of Plato’s Gorgias: Rhetoric, Justice, and the Philo-
sophic Life), “the unity of the Gorgias” resides in the fact that Socratic rhetoric persuaded Plato
to lead the philosophic life, and that having himself been persuaded, he is now persuading us to
choose Justice: since Justice requires the philosopher to return to the Cave, rhetoric becomes an
essential part of the philosophic life.
74
 Hence the value of the conjecture that Callicles is Critias; Cf. Christian Cron, Beiträge zur
Erklärung des platonischen Gorgias im ganzen und einzelnen (Leipzig: G. Teubner, 1870), 11–25;
for comment, see H. Bonitz, Platonische Studien, second edition (Berlin: Franz Vahlen, 1875), 19n15.
240 Chapter 3

we have been rigorously tested. In one of the most memorable passages in

the dialogue—critical for recognizing it as “Plato’s Confession”—Socrates
calls Callicles a godsend (ἕρμαιον at 486e3) because if Socrates can secure
the young man’s agreement, his own claim to the truth will thereby have
been adequately tested. It is important to note that Socrates’ confidence that
he would be confirmed in the truth (τἀληθῆ at 486e6) by the conversion of
Callicles has contributed to making the dialogue a developmental battle-
ground, creating as it does an uneasy relationship with Socrates’ profession
of ignorance (508e6–509a7). It is therefore Socrates’ unique and immediate
response to the Great Speech of Callicles that makes the focus of the dia-
logue’s dramatic intensity the open question of whether or not Callicles will
change his mind:

Socrates: If I happened to have a soul of gold, Callicles, don’t you think I’d be
delighted to discover one of those stones—the best [ἡ ἀρίστη] of them—with
which they test [βασανίζειν] gold, which, if I applied it, and if this should agree
with me [μοι ὁμολεγεῖν] that my soul had tended beautifully [καλῶς], I would
know well that I am doing sufficiently well [ἱκανῶς] and have no need of any
further test [βάσανος]? Callicles: What is the point of that question, Socrates?
Socrates: I will tell you. I am just thinking that in having happened upon you,
what a godsend [ἕρμαιον] I have happened upon! Callicles: How so? Socrates:
Well I know that if you were to agree with me [μοι ὁμολεγεῖν] concerning the
things that my soul is considering [δοξάζειν], these very things are thereby the
true ones [τἀληθῆ].75

Without denying that there is a sense in which Plato, over the heads of both
Callicles and Socrates, is addressing this speech directly to the individual
reader—the witness, “being one [εἷς ὤν],” whose confirmation it is always
his primary concern to secure—the hypothesis that Callicles will change
his mind by becoming Plato should be regarded not as an alternative to
understanding it as a direct address to us but as that address’s pedagogi-
cal point of origin. Plato can only dare to imagine converting his readers
because Socrates was able to convert him. It is because Socrates had made
him feel the life-and-death consequences of his own personal choice that
Plato can continue forever to do the same for us. Especially in the wake
of Nietzsche, an insistence that Callicles would have had no good reason
to change his views is to pronounce Plato dead at the very moment that
he is bringing himself back to life in Gorgias for our benefit: “I do not
shame to tell you what I was since my conversion so sweetly tastes being

75
 486d2–e7.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 241

the thing I am.”76 The unparalleled compliment Socrates pays to Callicles

here is better taken as proof of Plato’s confidence than of his despair, of his
perennial vitality rather than his current irrelevance. Indeed Nietzsche has
made Plato more relevant than ever. We need only recognize which one of
the two remained Plato’s Callicles.
Apart from the intrinsic excellence of the position to which Socrates is
trying to convert him, the best evidence that Callicles is already wavering is
the following:

Cavllicles: I do not know in whatever way it is that you seem to me to be

speaking well [οὐκ οἶδ᾽ ὅντινά μοι τρόπον δοκεῖς εὖ λέγειν], O Socrates, but
I’ve experienced the experience of the many [οἱ πολλοί; i.e., πέπονθα δὲ τὸ τῶν
πολλῶν πάθος]: I am not completely persuaded by you [οὐ πάνυ σοι πείθομαι].77

Unsure of why it is that he now feels that Socrates is speaking well—the sym-
pathetic reader knows that it is because Plato has given Socrates the capacity
to εὖ λέγειν,78 and thus that his words are hitting their mark79—the most he
can say is οὐ πάνυ σοι πείθομαι,80 and that πάνυ joins the previous οὐκ οἶδα
to give us a crystal clear picture of his utterly confused state of mind.81 With
Callicles having admitted his kinship with οἱ πολλοί, Socrates suggests the
reason for his confusion, and points to an antidote:

Socrates: For the love of the people [ὁ δήμου ἔρως], O Callicles, present in your
very soul [ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ τῇ σῇ], obstructs me: but if again and again [πολλάκις]
perhaps [ἴσως], and better we would examine thoroughly these very same things
[ταὐτὰ ταῦτα], you would be persuaded.82

76
 As You Like It, IV.iii.136–137.
77
 513c4–6.
78
 For some deflationary interpretations of this critical moment, see Carone, “Calculating Machines,”
69n36 (91 is better); Seth Benardete, The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy: Plato’s Gorgias
and Phaedrus (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 93; Dominic Scott, “Platonic Pes-
simism and Moral Education.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 17 (1999), 15–36, on 21, and
Franco V. Trivigno, “Paratragedy in Plato’s Gorgias.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 36
(Summer 2009), 73–105, on 94.
79
 Cf. J. Clerk Shaw, “Socrates and the True Political Craft.” Classical Philology 106, no. 3 (July
2011), 187–207, on 195.
80
 See T. H. Irwin, “Coercion and Objectivity in Plato’s Dialectic.” Revue Internationale de Philoso-
phie 40, no. 156–157 (1986), 49–74, on 70n59.
81
 See Emily Austin, “Corpses, Self-Defense, and Immortality: Callicles’ Fear of Death in the
Gorgias.” Ancient Philosophy 33 (2013), 33–52, especially on her “Conflict Reading” (42–44).
Relevant to the previous note is 42n16.
82
 513c7–d1.
242 Chapter 3

Here Socrates gives voice to an even greater confidence than in “Callicles the
Touchstone” (for so 486d2–e7 will hereafter be called)83 and why should we
be surprised? Callicles has just told us he is wavering.
While Socrates’ solution to the present impasse points forward to the
further investigation of the matters under discussion—a solution that
makes Callicles’ presence at the end of the dialogue so significant—his
identification of the underlying cause of that impasse points backwards:
the speech to which Callicles is responding was designed to challenge his
love of the People (ὁ δήμου ἔρως) by suggesting that only by a slavish
adherence to its whims could he secure the ability “to [be able to] do big
things.”

Socrates: But if you suppose that anyone in the world can transmit to you
such an art [τέχνη] as will make you have great power [μέγα δύνασθαι] in
the this city [ἐν τῇ πόλει τῇδε] while being dissimilar to its constitution
[πολιτεία], either for better or for worse, you are not, as it seems to me,
deliberating correctly, Call­icles; for it is not [only] necessary to be an imita-
tor [μιμητής], but be naturally similar to them [αὐτοφυῶς ὅμοιος τούτοις]
if you intend to render anything genuine through friendship to the Athenian
People [ὁ Ἀθηναίων δῆμος], and also, by Zeus, to the son of Pyrilampes as
well.84

By claiming that “we may feel the force of Plato’s own emotional reactions
to democracy” in the Great Speech,85 Dodds assumed that it was contempt
for ὁ Ἀθηναίων δῆμος that revealed the abiding continuity between Callicles
and Plato; Socrates sees the problem very differently. Callicles is confused
because he is torn between ὁ δήμου ἔρως and his awareness of his own indi-
viduality, that is, that which makes it impossible for him to imagine himself
as αὐτοφυῶς ὅμοιος τούτοις regardless of whosoever those τούτοις may turn
out to be. The best Callicles could manage would be to be a μιμητής of the
πολιτεία, and Socrates has shown that this would be insufficient: he must
naturally have been something that he knows he is not and could never be.
Plato being Plato, it is to the speech that causes Callicles to waver
(511c4–513c3) to which he is drawing our attention by that wavering, and
it deserves it.86 In fact, the speech is so important that the evidence it sup-
plies for identifying Callicles with Plato is by no means its most significant

83
 For comment on 486d2–e3, see Blondell, Play of Character, 189n83 (“ironic but not necessarily
insincere”), and Andrea Wilson Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Phi-
losophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 84–85 (on ἕρμαιον).
84
 513a7–b6 (Lamb modified).
85
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 267.
86
 Cf. George Klosko, “The Insufficiency of Reason in Plato’s Gorgias.” Western Political Quarterly
36, no. 4 (December 1983), 579–595, on 593, especially “suddenly, almost inexplicably.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 243

feature.87 But since that identification is at the center of this section, it is

important to begin with the fact that it is a peculiarly personal speech, and in
analyzing it, I will therefore refer to it as “the Ad hominem Speech.”88 This
aspect of the speech is already evident in what little of it has already been
quoted: Callicles ends up being caught in a trap between his love for the
Athenian People and his amour-propre.89 An even more personal example
of this inner conflict is brought into the open when Socrates unmasks Cal-
licles—despite ὁ δήμου ἔρως that prevents him from being completely per-
suaded—as an incorrigible snob:

Socrates: But nonetheless you despise [καταφρονεῖς] him and his art, and you
would call [ἀποκαλέσαις] him ‘engineer’ in a taunting sense, and neither would
you wish [ἐθέλοις] to bestow your daughter on his son or let your own son marry
his daughter. And yet, given the reasons you are praising [ἐπαινεῖς] your own
pursuits [τὰ σαυτοῦ], by what just account [τίς δικαίος λόγος] are you despising
[καταφρονεῖς] the engineer and the others whom I was mentioning just now? I
know you would claim [φαίης] to be better and [descended] from [his] betters.90

The six uses of the second-person singular in this passage are characteristic
of the Ad hominem Speech: it is a personal attack on Callicles as opposed to
a refutation of his views.
The fact that Socrates knows Callicles to despise (καταφρονεῖν) the crafts-
men who secure our personal safety (512c3–d1) is not only inconsistent
with his love of the People, but more importantly with his praise for a self-
benefiting use of rhetoric (486a7–d1), the lack of which will make Socrates
vulnerable to attacks from the wicked and despised (511b1–5). As a result, it
is the dilemma caused by a noble contempt for the merely self-benefiting that

87
 See Brickhouse and Smith, “Socrates on Goods,” 11, 16, and 25n33 for discussion of 512a2–b2.
88
 The reader is asked to distinguish this use of ad hominem from the one frequently found in the
literature which distinguishes bona fide Socratic or Platonic content from Socrates’ immediate (and
therefore not doctrinally significant) goal of refuting a particular interlocutor, as in Kahn, “Drama
and Dialectic,” 76–77. In trying to catch sight of Plato through 511c4–513c3—as the man I. F.
Stone liked to call (in conversation) “a haughty aristocratic prig”—the relevant Latin phrase may in
fact be ecce homo; cf. the comment on “self-recognition” in Rachana Kamtekar, “The Profession of
Friendship: Callicles, Democratic Politics, and Rhetorical Education in Plato’s Gorgias.” Ancient
Philosophy 25, no. 2 (Fall 2005), 319–339, on 337, along with the attached note (337–38n36). For
a precedent in deploying ad hominem in this sense, see Malcolm Schofield, “Callicles’ Return:
Gorgias 509–522 Reconsidered” in Thomas Bénatouïl, Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, Michel Narcy
(eds.), Platon et la politique. Philosophie antique 17, 7–30 (Villeneuve: Presses Universitaires du
Septentrion, 2017), 16; see 21–24 for thoughtful analysis of the speech itself, culminating with
“probably safe to suppose” on Callicles’ wavering.
89
 Cf. Austin, “Corpses, Self-Defense, and Immortality,” 34–35: “I focus on Socrates’ efforts to con-
vince Callicles that his fear of suffering a politically motivated death will force him to prostitute
himself to the demos.” See 40–42 for her useful analysis of both the Ad hominem Speech and Cal-
licles wavering in response to it.
90
 512c3–d2 (Lamb modified).
244 Chapter 3

stands in the center of the Ad hominem Speech,91 and that is why immediately
after revealing Callicles to be a snob, Socrates continues:

Socrates: But if ‘the better’ [τὸ βέλτιον] is not what I say it is, and this very
thing is virtue [ἀρετή]—the saving of oneself and the things of oneself [τὸ
σῴζειν αὑτὸν καὶ τὰ ἑαυτοῦ ὄντα], whatsoever kind of person has hit upon it—
then utterly ridiculous becomes your blame for the engineer and the doctor and
of all the other arts [τέχναι] that have been created for the sake of this saving
[τὸ σῴζειν]. No, O blessedly happy one [ὦ μακάριε,], examine [ὅρα] whether
the noble [τὸ γενναῖον] and the good [τὸ ἀγαθόν] is something other than the
saving and being saved [τὸ σῴζειν τε καὶ σῴζεσθαι].92

On the personal level, then, Socrates continues to drill into the exposed nerve
of Callicles’ inconsistency around the issue of class: despite his personal
pretentions to being one of the better people,93 there is no moral difference
between him and those whose sole concern is with self-preservation (and
SB). Confident that he is “the best from the best,” and ashamed to admit
that he could be anything else, Callicles despises the practitioners of the
self-preserving τέχναι inconsistently, for Socrates demonstrates that despite
his grandiose self-appreciation, he thinks exactly like οἱ πολλοί, and has
redefined ἀρετή—and this should sound familiar—as that which secures τὸ
σῴζειν αὑτὸν καὶ τὰ ἑαυτοῦ ὄντα, not what looks to τὸ βέλτιον, τὸ γενναῖον,
and τὸ ἀγαθόν.
It is the introduction of τὸ σῴζειν, understood specifically as that which
preserves and saves our lives, which points to a larger and more familiar
issue. To begin with, the verb σῴζειν appears thirteen times in the Ad homi-
nem Speech, and beginning with his initial question about swimming (511c4–
5), Socrates has been presenting the kind of τέχνη that aims only at saving us
from death (511c7) as less than noble. Nor is there any moral gap between
its active and passive use in the phrase τὸ σῴζειν τε καὶ σῴζεσθαι: the first
means: “to save oneself” through rhetoric, and thus “to be saved” from death
or injury. The implicit claim—Socrates fully expects Callicles to admit its
force, and his wavering in response to the speech indicates that he does so—is
that an ἀρετή that aims at nothing higher that the preservation of one’s own

91
 It is in relation to this dilemma that the many examples of inner inconsistency in Callicles should
be explained, with no effort made to palliate, synthesisize, or resolve; cf. G. B. Kerford, “Plato’s
Treatment of Callicles in the Gorgias.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 20
(1974), 48–52.
92
 512d2–8 (Lamb modified).
93
 See Joachim Dalfen, Gorgias, Platon; Übersetzung und Kommentar (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2004), 442–443 (on 512d).
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 245

life doesn’t deserve the name.94 It is therefore of great significance that σῴζειν
appears three times in the final argument of Protagoras (Prt. 356e2–8), twice
with “life” as its direct object, and in the same passage where the art of mea-
surement (ἡ μετρητικὴ τέχνη) is identified with “the safety/salvation of our
life [ἡ σωτηρία τοῦ βίου]” (Prt. 356e5–6 and 357a6–7; cf. 356d3).
Thanks to its being contrasted with τὸ σῴζειν τε καὶ σῴζεσθαι, we can
therefore see that the appearance of τὸ ἀγαθόν at 512d7 constitutes a turn-
ing point in the post-Symposium ascent to Good: a CA-type K aimed at the
GoodE must at the very least secure self-preservation. The measuring art of
Protagoras depended on identifying what is good with what is pleasant for
me—that is, on the GP Equation—and maximizing pleasure over the course
of a lifetime presupposed the intrinsic value of that life. As long as we con-
ceive of virtue as a self-benefiting τέχνη, aimed exclusively at securing the
GoodE, that is, that which benefits us, it was only the Beautiful that consti-
tuted an alternative; hence the life-death and courage-cowardice oppositions
in Alcibiades Major. But even after Hippias Major has made it easy to see
through the BP Equation (Hp. Ma. 302d3–7; cf. 298d6–299d3)95—the most
vulnerable part of the Grand Triple Equation of Protagoras (Prt. 360a3)—the
Eudaemonist Shortcut in Symposium based on the GB Equation continued to
allow some of us to imagine that even in the absence of the disambiguating
dative, the Good is the ὠφέλιμον for us, any “metaphorical baggage” about
the the transcendent Beautiful to the contrary notwithstanding.96 Having now
been distinguished from τὸ αὑτὸν σῴζειν, and joined in the process with τὸ
γενναῖον, the τὸ ἀγαθόν of 512d7 has been revealed as the morally βέλτιον
and has thus taken a giant step closer to τὸ καλόν. Gorgias is the critical
dialogue in the transition from the GoodE to the GoodT, and this is why Plato
depicts Callicles as wavering in response to the Ad hominem Speech.
Since Gorgias has generally been read as “a transitional dialogue”
in which Plato moves to some as yet to be determined extent past the
Socratic inheritance (see §10), it makes sense that a reading based on the

94
 See Eric Buzzetti, “The Injustice of Calliucles and the Limits of Socrates’s Ability to Educate a
Young Politician.” Ancient Philosophy 25, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 25–48, on 33: “Callicles’s account,
in short, confusedly contends that true virtue both does not demand and yet may occasionally
demand, self-sacrifice.” As a result, it is “in a memorable speech [sc. the Ad hominem Speech]”
that we reach “the true epiphany of the conversation” (42).
95
 With Hp. Ma. 299d2–3 and 302d4–5, cf. Phlb. 13c5. For comment on the latter in the context of
the former, see J. C. B. Gosling, Plato, Philebus; Translated with Notes and Commentary (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975), 74; other relevant passages can be found on 134 and 176, where we are
directed back 73–80.
96
 See Christopher Rowe, “Socrates and Diotima: Eros, Immortality, and Creativity.” Proceedings of
the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 14 (1998), 239–259, on 257; note the radical
Socratist credo on 257n32. Cf. Rowe, Plato, Symposium, 196–197.
246 Chapter 3

hypothesis that Plato emerged from Callicles would intersect in a signifi-

cant way with the position of the most radical Socratists. My claim is that
Plato depicts Callicles as wavering in response to the Ad hominem Speech
because what transformed Aristocles into Plato was the latter’s rejection
of the exclusively self-benefitting conception of ἀρετή championed by
Socratists whether modern or ancient, with the latter revealed as merely
pseudo-Socratic by Nicias in Laches and Critias in Charmides. In the well-
constucted universe of the ROPD, Gorgias does not constitute a rejection
of Socrates: it re-enacts Plato’s transformation, and it follows Charmides
because our realization of the moral bankruptcy of SB must precede our
reorientation towards the GoodT. The reason that we are allowed to see
only gradually that the life-saving conception of virtue as ἡ μετρητικὴ
τέχνη in Protagoras is not Socrates’ true position (see §11) is because
Plato requires us to undergo the same transformation that he did; as a
result, it is Socrates’ self-confirming alliance with the remade Callicles
that will allow us to see Plato himself for the first time, now in the process
of describing what he could otherwise have become in his Gorgias.
To both Callicles and the Socratists, then, Socrates says simply: “take
a look [ὅρα].” Once we have caught sight of τὸ καλόν in Symposium, the
broad outlines of the path to be followed are already visible, and indeed
we have been enjoined in Alcibiades Major, in the first anticipation of the
Divided Line in the dialogues,97 to know ourselves only in the mirror of
something infinitely greater.98 But the final leap we need to make in our
post-Symposium ascent to the Idea of the Good is the transcendence—and
note the objective genitive—of a self-benefiting pursuit of happiness as the
good for us. If Gorgias really can be understood as “Plato’s Confession,”
he is depicting his own personal struggle with the life-altering choice to
make this leap,99 and Plato the Teacher—more specifically the author of
Gorgias—is to be found on the other side of that leap. To be sure Gorgias
is a battleground, and as long as Protagoras is regarded as simply Socratic,
the Socratists have good grounds for regarding the transitional Gorgias as
something more like Platonic. But as Callicles the Touchstone indicates,
Plato’s Gorgias is not the rejection of Socrates, but rather constitutes his
confirmation, his victory, and the primary basis for securing his literary
immortality.100

97
 See Denyer, Plato, Alcibiades, 236.
98
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §6.
99
 Cf. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 146 on “a simulacrum.”
100
 Diskin Clay, Platonic Questions: Dialogues with the Silent Philosopher (University Park: Penn-
sylvania State University Press, 2000), 5: “Without Socrates, there could have been no Plato. In
retrospect and from the vantage of Plato’s later career and Socrates’ posthumous life in Plato’s
Socratic dialogues, it is fair to say too that without Plato there could have been no Socrates.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 247

But in outgrowing Callicles, Plato did not cease to be an elitist; he rather

became the first time a consistent one. The single-minded pursuit of SB,
especially when it masquerades as ἀρετή or τέχνη or some combination of
the two, is αἴσχρον, the opposite of τὸ καλόν—hence the pedagogical pri-
ority of the ascent to the Beautiful culminating in Symposium—and if we
have any sense whatsoever of Diotima’s τὸ καλόν, we ought to be ashamed
to pursue anything else. What emerged out of Callicles’ inconsistency (see
also §13) is Plato’s affirmation of noblesse oblige as embodied in his stand-
ing challenge to return to the Cave: a consistent nobility led him to prefer
benefiting others to being benefited by them (cf. R. 347d6–8) to prefer
praising Socrates to being praised (cf. R. 599b6–7), and especially for his
having saved others, including Plato himself, rather than either saving him-
self or being saved. Nothing emerges with greater clarity in Gorgias than
Socrates’ preference for suffering an injustice at the hands of senseless men
to doing one, and it is Callicles’ indignant response to this preference—the
one that is least compatible with the imperative of self-preservation—that
both furnishes the conversational pretext for the Ad hominem Speech,101
and leads to its longest and most important sentence:

Socrates: For as to living any particular length of time, this is surely a thing
that for the true man [ὁ ὡς ἀληθῶς ἀνήρ] it is necessary to let go [ἐατέον],
and it is not necessary to be a life-lover [φιλοψυχητέον] but rather having
turned over concern for such things to god [ὁ θεός], and having trusted
with women that not one of us can escape [ἐκ-φεύγειν] his fated day [ἡ
εἱμαρμένη], the thing it is necessary to consider [τὸ σκεπτέον] is what is the
way in which he will live out his time so that he might live as best as pos-
sible [ὡς ἄριστα]:102

By the time we reach ὡς ἄριστα at the midpoint of this sentence, we

have transcended an exclusively class-bound sense of what makes a person

101
 511b1–c5 (Lamb modified): “Socrates: I know that [sc. that the one who imitates the master will
put to death and confiscate the property of the one who doesn’t; see 511a5–7], my good Callicles,
if I am not deaf, as I have heard it so often of late from you and Polus, and from almost every
one else in the town; but you in return must hear what I say—that he will put a man to death if
he pleases, but as a villain [πονηρός] killing a gentleman [καλὸς κἀγαθός]. Callicles: And is not
this the very thing that makes one indignant [τὸ ἀγανακτητόν]? Socrates: Not if one is a man of
sense [νοῦν ἔχων], as our argument indicates. Or do you suppose that the object of a man’s efforts
should be to live as long a time as possible, and to cultivate those arts [τέχναι] which preserve
[σῴζειν] us from every danger; such as that which you bid me cultivate—rhetoric, the art that
preserves [δια-σῴζειν] us in the law courts? Callicles: Yes, on my word I do, and sound advice it
is that I give you. Socrates: But now, my excellent friend, do you think there is anything grand in
the accomplishment of swimming?”
102
 512d8–e5 (Lamb modified); with “his fated day,” cf. Phd. 115a5–6.
248 Chapter 3

either better or best. Socrates is no longer challenging Callicles as an aristocrat

to distinguish himself from those who practice the arts of self-preservation,
he is questioning whether he really is ὁ ὡς ἀληθῶς ἀνήρ he imagines himself
to be.103 The trifecta of verbal adjectives, so crucial for establishing what it
is our duty to do (cf. καταβατέον in R. 520c1),104 complete a revaluation of
values that makes the inconsistency in Callicles’ class-based snobbery seem
insignificant by comparison: we must leave to God a concern with the length
of our lives, overcome our will to life as if that life were a good in itself, and
concern ourselves with answering πῶς βιωτέον with as best, not with as long
as possible. It is therefore not only ignoble and base in a class-bound sense to
be concerned with self-preservation, it is also futile, impious, and unmanly.
It will also ultimately cost Callicles dearly:

Socrates: whether it is by assimilating himself [ἐξομοιῶν αὑτὸν] to the polity

[πολιτεία] in which he lives, and therefore that it is now necessary for you to
become as like as possible to the Athenian people [ὁ δῆμος ὁ Ἀθηναίων] if
you intend to be dear [προσφιλής] to it and to be able to do great things [μέγα
δύνασθαι] in the city, and examine [ὅρα] if this is what advantages you and me
so that we should not suffer, O divine fellow [ὦ δαιμόνιε], the fate that they
say befalls those who pull down the moon—the hags of Thessaly; that over the
things that are most dear [τὰ φίλτατα; cf. Prt. 314a] will be our choice [ἡ αἵρεσις
ἡμῖν] of this power in the city.105

Plato does not clarify what Socrates means here by τὰ φίλτατα because
how we understand “the things that are most dear” depends entirely on
our own choice (ἡ αἵρεσις ἡμῖν). It is first and foremost with a choice that
Socrates is confronting Callicles, and through him, all the rest of us as well.
But Callicles is so vividly drawn as a character—for a perfectly natural rea-
son on my account—and his appearance in the dialogue has been so well
prepared by the build-up of intensity resulting from Socrates’ prior conversa-
tions with Gorgias and Polus, that we can be forgiven for forgetting that it
is our choice to make, and be swept along by Plato’s artistry into locating
the dialogue’s substance in the Play of Character. Because the Ad Hominem
Speech is in fact a persuasive speech, because its purpose is to persuade Cal-
licles to choose nobility over self-preservation and suffering injustice over

103
 Cf. Dalfen, Gorgias, 443 (on 512e): “Ein ‘wahrer Mann’ im Sinn des Sokrates sieht anders aus als
der ‘richtige Mann’ der dem Kallikles vorschwebt (491e ff.).”
104
 Cf. Stemmer, “Grundriss,” 554: “Platon hat ebesowenig wie die griechische Ethik vor und nach
ihm über den begrifflichen Rahmen einer deontologischen Ethik verfügt. Sie lag außerhalb des
Horizonts der griechischen Welt.”
105
 512e5–513a7.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 249

doing it,106 the dialogue’s drama constitutes its real unity, a unity that depends
on the reader’s ability to look for its unifying σκοπός in the right place: in the
Argument of its (Missing) Action.
Since Socrates will diagnose the continued resistance of the wavering Cal-
licles after the Ad hominem Speech as a symptom of his ἔρως for the Athenian
People, the first appearance of ὁ δῆμος ὁ Ἀθηναίων (513a2; cf. 513b5 and
513c7) must be significant, especially on the hypothesis that Plato is here
revealing something significant about himself. As Socrates will remind Calli-
cles in the speech’s aftermath (513c8–d5), there are two ways to serve another
with healing care (θεραπεύειν at 513d2–3), one aimed at pleasure, the other at
what is best (513d3–4), one whose purpose is to gratify (καταχαρίζεσθαι), the
other which is prepared to do battle (διαμαχέσθαι at 513d5). Just as Plato’s
noblesse oblige both preserves and transforms the snobbery of Callicles, his
willingness to διαμαχέσθαι for the Athenian youth—as the founder of the
Academy and the creator of its immortal curriculum—both transforms and
preserves Callicles’ ἔρως. Plato will stay in Athens as a schoolteacher, an
aristocrat, and as ὁ ὡς ἀληθῶς ἀνήρ, but above all he will remain as a lover of
Athens, which will therefore find herself lovingly preserved in his dialogues,
exactly as she was for good or ill in her glory days, that is, at the time of her
crisis, when Plato too made his decision.
Hippothales had asked Socrates to help him become προσφιλής to Lysis
(Ly. 206c3); Socrates warns Callicles that his way of becoming προσφιλής to
Athens will likewise cost him τὰ φίλτατα. But it is not his ἔρως as such that is
objectionable. It is rather the lover’s shameful willingness to καταχαρίζεσθαι
the beloved that leads to the undoing of both, and as befits a speech ad homi-
nem, Socrates shows Callicles that he is jeopardizing his sense of himself
as one of the better ones, indeed as a true man of any class, by gratifying—
instead of fighting against—the worst tendencies of ὁ δῆμος ὁ Ἀθηναίων.
The kind of love that Plato will ultimately offer the youth of Athens will
replicate the kind of love that Socrates offers Callicles, and that is why the
Ad hominem Speech ends as it does:

Socrates: Whoever, therefore, can render you most like them, he will make
you—as you wish to be a statesman [πολιτικός]—a statesman and an orator

106
 Cf. Willie Costello, “Unifying Callicles: Nature and Negative Liberty.” Available at: http:​//
ind​ividu​al.ut​oront​o.ca/​willi​ecost​ello/​Willi​eCost​elloU​nifyi​ngCal​licle​s.pdf​ (accessed October 30,
2017), 17–18: “Callicles is not without reason in remaining unpersuaded and clinging to his dis-
credited values, for Socrates’ position, as logical as it may be, is not an easy pill to swallow. It
is a position that calls for a great deal of sacrifice: a willingness to give up one’s own life when
necessary, to endure abuse and ridicule from one’s peers, and to forgo many of the sensational
joys of pleasure. Callicles is by no means thick in not being immediately converted to this view;
rather, he is voicing the hesitation nearly any one of us would feel if we were asked to take up
Socrates’ way of life—that is, a life of martyrdom, public ridicule, and fewer sensual pleasures.”
250 Chapter 3

[πολιτικὸς καὶ ῥητορικός]; for by speeches spoken in their own character [ἤθος]
everyone delights, but they are repelled by the other kind [ἀλλότριον], unless
you, O dear heart [ὦ φίλη κεφαλή], are maintaining something else. To these
things what are we saying, O Callicles?107

Thanks to Socrates, Plato will become both πολιτικὸς καὶ ῥητορικός, but not
by the kind of nobility-destroying assimilation of the city’s ἤθος that Callicles
is presently pursuing at the shameful cost of himself.108 In the last analysis,
Callicles wavers because Socrates was right to address him lovingly as ὦ
φίλη κεφαλή,109 for it is in Plato’s choice that Gorgias—at once the memorial
and the fruit of that choice—finally finds its head.
In the meantime, however, Callicles must remain both a fool and a coward,
and that is why Socrates says this in response to his threat to break of in the
middle (μεταξύ) and leave the discourse ἄνευ κεφαλῆς:

Socrates: This man [ἀνήρ] does not endure [ὑπο-μένειν] being benefited [parti-
cipial form of ὠφελεῖσθαι] and himself experiencing what our talk [ὁ λόγος] is
about: being corrected [participial form of κολάζεσθαι].110

It is, of course, only because Socrates is attempting to ὠφελεῖν him that it

is possible for Callicles to refuse to be ὠφελεῖσθαι. One might also add that
to μένειν is what Laches claims the courageous man does (La. 190e5) as
opposed to the coward who thinks the right time to arrive at a battle is after it
is over (447a1–2). Even the use of ἀνήρ will become a bitter reproach a few
pages later in the Ad hominem Speech (512e1). But the remarkable thing here
is the fact that Socrates characterizes ὁ λόγος—and presumably this refers to
the entire discussion with Callicles if not to Gorgias as a whole—in terms
of κολάζειν, a verb that means in the active to “check, chastise, punish” and
in the passive, as here, “to be corrected, chastened, punished” (LSJ). What
makes this significant is that once Gorgias is understood as the punishment,
correction, and chastisement of Callicles, it becomes—on the hypothesis
that Callicles is who Plato once would have become, or “the Callicles/Plato
Hypothesis” (hereafter “CPH”)—“Plato’s Confession.”

107
 513b6–c3.
108
 Cf. Rod Jenks, “The Power of Shame Considerations in Plato’s Gorgias.” History of Philosophy
Quarterly 29, no. 4 (October 2012), 373–390, on 380: “He [sc. Callicles] almost feels enough
shame at these consequences to abandon the exclusive pursuit of power. Almost.”
109
 Cf. Dalfen, Gorgias, 445 (on 513c): “diese Anrede klingt ironisch und jovial herablassend. Als
‘liebes Haupt’ bezeichnet Sokrates auch den sophistischen Eristiker Dionysodorus [but see Euthd.
297a4, which will justify Socrates’ affection] und den Rhapsoden Ion (Euthyd. 293e, Ion 531d
[note the dialogue’s first oath just before at Ion 531d11]: in diesen Fällen ist ebenfalls Ironie im
Spiel, anders als Phdr. 264a).” The context of this last passage may be more relevant: Socrates has
just claimed that Lysias begins his speech “from the end [ἀπὸ τελευτῆς]” (Phdr. 264a5).
110
 505c3–4 (Lamb modified).
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 251

To put it another way, it is thanks to κολάζεσθαι that we find ourselves

following a trail that leads to discovering in the Argument of the Action
the dialogue’s unifying σκοπός. The first time the verb appears in Gorgias
is immediately after Socrates renews his pitch to Polus about his being the
only witness with whom he is concerned (475e9–476a2; cf. 472b6–8)—a
pitch ultimately supplanted and elevated by Callicles as Touchstone—
when τὸ κολάζεσθαι is linked to justice by equating it with “paying (the
just) penalty [τὸ διδόναι δίκην” (476a7–8).111 This means that κολάζεσθαι
is inextricably connected to the defense of PP-2—first introduced at
472e5–7 and then called “the second [τὸ δεύτερον]”—which begins at
476a2–6. As a result, when Socrates claims that in refusing to endure being
benefited Callicles is refusing to undergo the very thing they are discussing
(505c3–5), he is using κολάζεσθαι to link what he sees as the subject of
ὁ λόγος to PP-2. With the theme of Justice already linking PP-2 to PP-1,
we are only left with the problem of linking PP-2 to rhetoric in order to
reach a more satisfying conception of the dialogue’s unifying σκοπός.
Plato will solve that problem and enable us to achieve that conception
when Socrates explains what he regards as rhetoric’s “principal usefulness
[μεγάλη χρεία]” (480a2).
The Key Passage in Plato’s Gorgias is the Golden Sentence that begins
at 480b7 and continues until 480d6, and in analyzing it—its length dictates
that it must be quoted in stages—my intent will be to show how it confirms
CPH,112 although in fact it does something more. Its contextualized purpose
is to answer the question about the μεγάλη χρεία of rhetoric, and since that

111
 It then appears five more times before being linked with ὠφελεῖσθαι (477a3), where being
punished justly (δικαίως κολάζεσθαι) is a benefit (ἡ ὠφελία) because by it one becomes better
(βελτίων) with respect to one’s soul (477a5–6).
112
 480b7–d6 has received surprisingly little attention; it is not cited in Guthrie, History of Greek
Philosophy, or more recently in Stauffer, Unity of Plato’s Gorgias, or Gabriela Roxana Carone,
“Socratic Rhetoric in the Gorgias.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 35, no. 2 (June 2005),
221–242. Among the papers collected in Michael Erler and Luc Brisson (eds.), Gorgias—Meno;
Selected Papers from the Seventh Symposium Platonicum (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2007), it is
discussed only in Matthias Vorwerk, “Der Arzt, der Koch und die Kinder: Rhetorik und Philoso-
phie im Wettstreit” (297–302) on 301n16: “Die einzige Anwendung der Rhetorik, die Sokrates
Gorg. 480b7–d7 gelten läßt, ist die Selbstanklage und die Anklage von Freunden und Verwandten,
um durch Bestrafung eine Heilung von begangenem Unrecht herbeizuführen; vgl. 527b2–c4.”
Since Vorwerk is correct about that einzige, one would think the passage deserves more atten-
tion, and it receives some of its due in Tarnopolsky, Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants, where it is
mentioned (34n25, 41, and 51), quoted in full (107), and then discussed (107–108). Naturally
both Dodds, Plato, Gorgias (see 258 on 480b7–c5) and Irwin, Plato, Gorgias (see 168 on 480b)
mention it, the latter with astonishing brevity (“Socrates alludes [sc. with patris] to the different
attitudes of the rhetor and of the ‘real politician’ to the faults of the state; cf. 473e–474a, 502e,
Ap. 30c–31a; contrast perhaps Cri. 51a–c”), and the former not altogether accurately, and with
an obviously deflationary intent: “Socrates forbids us to defend our parents or our country when
they are wrong—which for a Greek is going pretty far—since to do so would be for their ultimate
moral harm as well as our own [my emphasis; note that he overlooks Vorwerk’s Selbstanklage].”
252 Chapter 3

answer grows directly out of a restatement, first of PP-1 (480a1–5), and then
of PP-2 (480a6–b2), I will call it “PP-3,” that is, the Third Platonic Paradox.
So paradoxical is PP-3, indeed, that Socrates introduces it with its antithesis:

Socrates: For the apologetic defense [τὸ ἀπολογεῖσθαι] on behalf of injustice

[ἀδικία], then—of one’s own [ὑπὲρ τῆς ἀδικίας τῆς αὑτοῦ], one’s parents or
comrades or children, or one’s unjust fatherland [πατρίς; cf. Prt. 346a-b], for us,
this rhetoric [ἡ ῥητορική] has no use whatsoever, Polus,113

Socrates explains the conventional use of ἡ ῥητορική—inextricably linked

to ἀδικία, and thus to PP-1—in relation to what I will call “the Rhetorical
Triad”: the defense (τὸ ἀπολογεῖσθαι) of (1) oneself, (2) one’s family and
friends, and (3) one’s city. With the conventional use of rhetoric first rejected
as useless, Socrates then introduces PP-3:

Socrates: unless if someone [τις] were to take it up [sc. ἡ ῥητορική] for the
opposite [ἐπὶ τοὐναντίον]: as necessary to accuse [κατηγορεῖν δεῖν] most of all
oneself [μάλιστα μὲν ἑαυτοῦ], and thereafter also his relations and of his other
friends whosoever of his other friends might always happen to be being unjust
[καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ὃς ἂν ἀεὶ τῶν φίλων τυγχάνῃ ἀδικῶν]114

Rhetoric is not for defense (τὸ ἀπολογεῖσθαι) but rather for the opposite purpose
(ἐπὶ τοὐναντίον): it is only usefully employed to prosecute (κατ­ηγορεῖν), and first
and foremost (μάλιστα) to be the accuser of oneself. And my claim is that an
eloquent self-accusation (in German, a Selbstanklage)115 is exactly what Gorgias
is: in accordance with CPH, Plato is the unnamed τις who is bringing a charge
of injustice against himself, the man he was or rather would have become—the
unchastised outgrowth of his former self—before he allowed himself to be ben-
efited and thus chastised by Socrates’ proper use of rhetoric.
In the Preface, I used the passage that begins with the Eleatic Palamedes
(Phdr. 261d6–262d1) as an example of how a text that is necessary for
reconstructing the ROPD can at the same time be crucial for interpreting
the dialogue in which it is found. The Golden Sentence is a pre-Republic
example of the same phenomenon, and given the shared concern with

113
 480b7–9.
114
 480b9–c3. See Christina Tarnopolsky, “Platonic Reflections on the Aesthetic Dimensions of
Deliberative Democracy.” Political Theory 35, no. 3 (June 2007), 288–312, on 305: “The Gorgias
as a whole is an attempt to expand the concept of ‘rhetoric’ to include the elements of the noble but
painful rhetoric that Socrates describes as one of accusing one’s friends and relatives of injustice
rather than simply flattering them (Gorgias 480b7–d9).”
115
 Dalfen, Gorgias, 307–308 (on 480c): “das allgemeine Empfindung wird die Forderung nach
Selbst­anklage als absurd bezeichnen.” Cf. Vorwerk, “Der Artzt,” 301n16.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 253

rhetoric in Phaedrus and Gorgias, perhaps that is no accident. In any case,

despite many other connections between Gorgias and Charmides—doctors,
tyrants, and lack of self-control spring to mind—it is the middle member
of the Rhetorical Triad that is most relevant to reconstructing the ROPD.
It is because Plato has already accused “the friends and relations” portion
of the Rhetorical Triad in Charmides that it is his city’s turn in Gorgias,
and—thanks to CPH—also his own. Just as Socrates revealed himself as
the surly neighbor who hasn’t the slightest wish to excuse politely a soph-
ist’s ignorance halfway to Symposium in Hippias Major (note that “he”
is speaking at Hp. Ma. 299d2–6), so now Plato reveals himself halfway
to Republic in Gorgias, if, that is, he hasn’t already introduced himself
as the unnamed ἑταίρος in Charmides (Chrm. 154b8, 155c5, 173b8),116
fascinated by Socrates’ tale of his unjust relatives Charmides and Critias.
It is because the Golden Sentence explains what Plato is doing in both
dialogues that Gorgias follows Charmides in the ROPD.

Socrates: and not to hide away [ἀποκρύπτεσθαι] the criminal injustice [τὸ ἀδίκημα]
but to bring it into the open [ἀλλ᾽ εἰς τὸ φανερὸν ἄγειν] so that he might pay the
penalty [διδόναι δίκην] and become healthy [ὑγιής]; and to compel [ἀναγκάζειν]
both himself and the others not to play a coward’s part [ἀποιλιᾶν] but to provide
[παρέχειν] (oneself)—having closed one’s eyes [μύσαντα] well and courageously
[εὖ καὶ ἀνδρείως]—as if for a doctor to cut and to burn117

I have preserved the verb “to close one’s eyes”—we would say: “to grit
one’s teeth”—in its participial form because just as infinitives multiply
(seven of them) in the passage just quoted beginning with κατηγορεῖν δεῖν
(480c1), so also will accusative singular participles (eight of them), most
ending in –οντα, multiply in the passage that follows. The grammatical
element deserves emphasis lest we miss the forest for the trees in analyz-
ing this lengthy sentence: it is a rhetorical masterpiece. And since the
principal usefulness of rhetoric is when it is used for self-accusation—not
to ἀποκρύπτεσθαι, but to bring εἰς τὸ φανερὸν (cf. Phdr. 261e4) one’s
own ἀδίκημα (480c3–4)—the moment we recognize Plato as a reformed
Callicles, now bringing to light the injustice of the man he would have
been, we realize that Socrates’ description of PP-3 is itself the instantiation
of the paradox he is describing. Just as Plato finds a way to tell us that his
Symposium is both a tragedy and a comedy (Smp. 223d3–6),118 he has now

116
 As insightfully suggested by Laurence Lampert, How Philosophy Became Socratic: A Study of
Plato’s Protagoras, Charmides, and Republic ( Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010),
235–236; note that Socrates addresses the comrade as “friend [ὦ φίλε]” the second and third times.
117
 480c3–7.
118
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §14.
254 Chapter 3

revealed that Gorgias as a whole is the medium of the Golden Sentence’s

message.
Naturally such a reading goes against the temper of the times.
A reformed and chastised Callicles is the very last thing that any admirer of
Nietzsche wants to find in Gorgias, preferring instead to find him obdur­ate,
unrepentant and above all right, intact for later revival, and ready to
remake a post-modern Plato in his image.119 But in addition to the unique
combination of rhetorical power, paradox, and heartfelt contrition in the
Sentence itself—especially since it is so often strangely overlooked in
discussions of the dialogue—those of us who can still recognize intrinsic
literary excellence, its intimate connection to the question of rhetoric, and
finally the difference between Plato and Nietzsche, need to bite the bullet
ourselves. Plato is asking us to do as Callicles did: submit ourselves to
Socrates the Doctor, regaining our spiritual health through a chastening
confession, accompanied by pain and anguish, of our own crimes, those of
our friends and relations, and those of our troubled and troubling πάτρις.
In the Era of Trump, the basis for such a confession is, in my own case at
least, not so very difficult to find.
Plato’s medical imagery is of capital importance,120 not least of all because
Socrates has used it to summarize PP-2 just before the Golden Sentence
introduces PP-3:

Socrates: But if he is guilty of wrongdoing, either himself or anyone else he may

care for, he must go of his own freewill where he may soonest pay the penalty
[διδόναι δίκην], to the judge as if to his doctor, hastening so that the disease of
injustice shall not become chronic and make his soul rotten within [ὕπουλον]
and incurable.121

As the Golden Sentence will then explain, rhetoric is most useful when one
appears before the judge or doctor, deployed to bring into the open one’s
disease or injustice. It is therefore no longer a case like the one described by
Gorgias, where a doctor borrows his brother’s eloquence in order to persuade
the patient to undergo the painful treatment. It would appear that it is now
the patient who must persuade the doctor that radical measures are neces-
sary. But the emphasis on courage and cowardice—the vivid image of the
closed-eyes patient ready to be cut or cauterized, and of the festering ὕπουλον

119
 As does Lampert, How Philosophy Became Socratic; see especially 417.
120
 Fritz Wehrli, “Der Arztvergleich bei Platon.” Museum Helveticum 8, no. 2/3 (1951), 177–184,
connects this medical imagery, quoting 480b1–2, to the Final Myth on 184.
121
 480a6–b2 (Lamb modified).
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 255

within—suggests that Selbstanklage, imagined as taking place before a cor-

rective expert like a judge or doctor, begins rather with self-persuasion. True
oratory is a confession,122 and rhetoric has become the language of repentance.
In the sanitized world of the Socratists, however, there is no place for
repentance, conversion, and cleansing punishment. There are no festering
and incurable sores on the soul: ignorance of what conduces to maximizing
our happiness over the course of a lifetime—and thus of what truly benefits
us—is the worst malady any of us can suffer, and the medicine we need is
knowledge, not punishment.123 Although they cannot simply ignore the letter
of texts like this one, Socratists must ignore the spirit that motivates them.
A courageous willingness to come face to face with one’s crimes must be
dumbed down into Socratic Ignorance, and self-accusation must be made to
coalesce, painlessly, with self-preservation and self-benefit. But Plato seems
to have thought differently, and the reason that the Golden Sentence is a rhe-
torical masterpiece is because it needs to be nothing less: it is itself a product
of the conversion it prescribes, and before the letter could emerge in Gorgias
as an exhortation to repentance, the spirit behind it must first have overcome
the objections of its originally unrepentant author.
It is against this backdrop that CPH makes the most sense. Gorgias is a
masterpiece of dramatic intensity because its author is bringing into the open
the soul-searing story of his own conversion. For all its violence and warlike
intensity, then, Gorgias replicates the role of repentance in the great mono-
theistic religions: we have sinned, and we most confess our sins if we are to
attain atonement. Plato seems to have decided that before he could effectively
persuade others to take their Socratic medicine, he needed to prove that he
had already used rhetoric to persuade himself to take his. In short, the logic of
repentance and conversion indicates that he needed to make the same choice
that Socrates is now forcing on Callicles. Since the passage that immediately
follows the Golden Sentence—where Socrates argues that submitting oneself
to corrective punishment is so beneficial that one should do everything in
one’s power to prevent one’s enemies from paying the penalty of their crimes
(480e5–481b5)—will not be considered until the end of this chapter (see
§12), it is easy to forget how close we are to Callicles’ Question (481b6–c4).

122
 Cf. David Sedley, “Myth, Punishment and Politics in the Gorgias” in Catalin Partenie (ed.),
Plato’s Myths, 51–76 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 55: “The fact that
Socrates [sc. at 480b–d, 508b] makes this revelatory exercise start with the denunciation of its
practicioner’s own vices, before going on to those of relatives and friends, makes it sound uncom-
fortably like the confessional (or worse).”
123
 See Christopher Rowe, “A Problem in the Gorgias: How Is Punishment Supposed to Help with
Intellectual Error” in Christopher Bobonich and Pierre Destrée (eds.), Akrasia in Greek Philoso-
phy: From Socrates to Plotinus, 19–40 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), especially 32 on 478a6–7.
256 Chapter 3

It is the spirit of the Golden Sentence that forces him into the open,124 and
even though Callicles, as a character, thinks he is repudiating that spirit, he is
really confirming it. In the Great Speech of Callicles, Plato will confess his
injustice.
For the present, however, he is describing the agony of repentance, and the
drama of self-accusation. Like self-control and self-mastery—both of which
famously pose a threat to Socratic intellectualism (see §10)—self-accusation
and self-confession are difficult or impossible to square with self-benefit pre-
cisely because we are perfect strangers to the only Self that could be benefited
by bringing our injustice into the open in this painful way. Hence the power-
ful series of participles in the Golden Sentence, triumphantly reshaping the
Socratic Paradox into something even more paradoxical:

Socrates: pursuing [διώκοντα] the good and beautiful [τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ καλὸν],
not calculating [μὴ ὑπολογιζόμενον] the painful: if his crimes have deserved
a flogging, submitting [παρέχοντα] to the hitting; if (worthy) of fetters, to
the binding; if of a fine, paying [ἀποτίνοντα] (it); if of banishment, fleeing
[φεύγοντα]; or if of death, dying [ἀποθνῄσκοντα];125

How can any of us deserve flogging, chains, fines, flight, or death if nobody
is willingly unjust? It is instruction that we need, not the repentance and
punishment of this Platonic penitentiary.126 In the supposedly fully Socratic
Protagoras, it is precisely the painful that we do need to calculate, measur-
ing it against “the good and beautiful” qua pleasant. Since we cannot choose
to do wrong, we only require a τέχνη that will prevent us from doing it
involuntarily (509d7–510a5 will be considered in §10): a self-serving art of
measurement that will infallibly lead to maximizing our practicable happi-
ness. It is therefore no wonder that Gorgias has proved to be an interpretive
battleground.
In the midst of so many pain-inducing participles, it is easy to miss the
countervailing pursuit of τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ καλόν. The phrase is noteworthy.
Not only is the post-Protagoras emancipation of “the good and beautiful”
from the pleasant already being confirmed (cf. 500d6–e2), but so too is the

124
 The Golden Sentence is mentioned and its place in Grg. is emphasized in Eric Voegelin, Order
and History, volume 3: Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State Univer-
sity Press, 1957), 28: “Callicles has rightly sensed the revolution in the words of Socrates.” By
using PP-4 to justify Euthyphro’s prosecution of his father, it is rendered farcical in Beversluis,
Cross-Examining Socrates, 166–167; cf. 337–338. See also 339–340 for his discussion of CPH.
Cf. Friedländer, Plato, 2.258.
125
 480c7–d3.
126
 See Rowe, “Problem,” 36: “Socrates continues to think that what people need is talk.” Cf. “The
Four Great Errors” in Twilight of the Idols, especially §7; Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke.
Kritische Studiensausgabe in 15 Bänden; Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1986), 6.95–96.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 257

proverbial χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά.127 Socrates is using rhetoric to exhort us to choose

something both difficult and painful, and therefore the painful is something
we need to exclude from consideration entirely.128 Thanks to the easy equa-
tion of the good with the beneficial, and the beneficial with what benefits me,
the tension between “good” and “beautiful” has been the engine of pedagogi-
cal progress since life as good (and death as bad) was contrasted with courage
as beautiful in Alcibiades Major.129 Anticipating the Ad hominem Speech,
then, the linking of τὸ ἀγαθόν with καλόν in the Golden Sentence points to
the post-eudaemonist Idea of the Good. It is in pursuit of the GoodT that we
will learn not to calculate self-benefit in relation to the Painful. The rhetoric
of self-accusation finds its anchoring principle in something more beautiful
than self-benefit, and forces us to come face to face with a far different Self
than rhetoric in its conventional form allows us to preserve. And it is with
the dialogue between the self-accusing and the self-benefiting Self that the
Golden Sentence ends:

Socrates: himself being [ὄντα], first, accuser both of himself [αὐτὸν πρῶτον
ὄντα κατήγορον καὶ αὑτοῦ] and of his other relations, and using [χρώμενον]
rhetoric [ἡ ῥητορική] for this: so that—with their crimes having become crystal
clear [κατάδηλον]—they can rid themselves of the greatest evil, injustice.130

To summarize, the Golden Sentence is the key that unlocks Gorgias as a

whole because it secures for it a σκοπός that links justice to the proper use of
rhetoric and thus injustice to its abuse. Rhetoric is useful for bringing one’s
injustice into the light, and the moment we admit that Gorgias is a dialogue
between αὐτόν and αὑτοῦ—that is, admit the possibility that Callicles (as
αὑτοῦ) is who Plato would have been—we realize that Gorgias instantiates
the paradox the Golden Sentence describes. But even if Plato has constructed
Callicles out of his former self, the two cannot be identical, for the first must
see the second as both himself and as other, and it is the hypothesis of “the

127
 Cf. Stemmer, “Grundriss,” 563–565.
128
 Naturally the Golden Sentence is excluded from consideration entirely (i.e., neither quoted nor
cited) in Gosling and Taylor, Greeks on Pleasure.
129
 Cf. Hobbs, Plato and the Hero, 221 (emphases mine; Greek replaces transliteration): “The sub-
stitution of ‘beneficial’ for ‘good’ [sc. at R. 457b4–5] is important: Socrates is well aware that it
is the alleged tension between the καλόν and, specifically, the good-qua-beneficial that he needs
to deny. Such a reading will, I believe, effectively serve the required purpose of reducing the
potential for a tragic split between noble and beneficial options.” Her “tragic split” is my “engine
of pedagogical progress”; what her Plato “needs to deny” my Plato needs the reader to affirm.
Attached to a valuable observation about Alc. 115a–c—she describes Socrates as “arguing uncon-
vincingly that rescuing one’s comrades is not harmful and noble in the same respect” (90)—is
90n26: “Even if Alcibiades 1 is spurious (as I am inclined to think), it is still a useful source for
nonphilosophical [N. B.] conceptions of the relation between the kalon and the agathon.”
130
 480d3–7.
258 Chapter 3

former self” that converts this paradox into self-persuasion. Allowing us to

trace his intellectual pedigree to Gorgias, Plato uses the dialogue with Polus
to set the stage for the full revelation of his former self in Callicles, and
what brings unity to Plato’s Gorgias is the realization that the medium is the
message. In that light, Gorgias becomes an eloquent speech that persuades
us to submit ourselves to chastisement only because Plato has become and
eternally remains his own eloquent accuser, and it is for what made Callicles
obdurate—and thus what persuades others that he remains so—that he now
repents.
The reason that Charmides precedes Gorgias in the ROPD is that the earlier
dialogue instantiates the second part of the Rhetorical Triad: in conformity
with the Golden Sentence, Plato is bringing to light the crimes of his relatives
(cf. οἱ οἰκεῖοι at 480c2 and Ep. 324d1). He does not blame Critias for his
own crimes any more than he blames Gorgias. How could he? The logic of
repentance and confession demands personal accountability and punishment
appropriate for the perpetrator alone. There is pride to be considered as well:
Plato gives us no reason to think that he regarded Callicles as intellectually
inferior to Critias, let alone Charmides, as a defender of injustice on the theo-
retical level. In short, when combined with its neighbor Charmides, Plato’s
Gorgias—itself a rhetorical masterpiece—answers the question that precedes
the Golden Sentence: “What is the greatest use of rhetoric?” (480a1–2). Plato
has now accused himself, his family, and his city of the greatest of evils and
of the worst abuse of rhetoric: to conceal, protect, and defend injustice, and
thus to secure self-preservation by preventing one’s crimes from coming to
light.
It will be noted that the third member of the Rhetorical Triad quickly
disappears from the Golden Sentence. But since Gorgias has universally
been read, and with good reason, as Plato’s indictment of Athens—that is,
of his πατρίς (480b8)—this disappearance should be regarded as further
evidence of the Golden Sentence’s crucial importance for understanding
the dialogue as a whole. Naturally any such indictment depends on the
reader’s KAH, and I have already indicated in §7 that Gorgias opens the
third and final stage of the reader’s education with respect to the War. Hav-
ing demanded that we read the historians with great care, Plato can now
presuppose our detailed knowledge of Athens’ story; he therefore turns
our attention finally to its essence, and he will use Callicles’ Great Speech
to do just that.131 But before turning to the Athenian aspect of “Plato’s
Confession,” and thus to Thucydides, it is first necessary to consider the
KAH-based objections to CPH.

131
 Cf. Saxonhouse, “An Unspoken Theme,” 139: “Callicles stands for Athens.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 259

The most fundamental of these objections is based on the fact that even
though there is no evidence in the historical record that Callicles himself
was a real person, Plato has connected him to a time, that is, the wartime
setting of Gorgias, that precludes the possibility that he could be the real
Plato. As already indicated, one of the merits of CPH is that it explains
the dramatic intensity of Gorgias by locating its principal conflict, the one
between Socrates and Callicles, in Plato’s soul; it is therefore to miss the
point to imagine that Plato is describing an actual encounter between himself
and Socrates in which he simply substitutes Callicles for himself, and called
himself “Callicles.” The fact that Callicles is considerably older and more
accomplished than Plato could have been at the time of his conversion only
confirms that CPH’s purpose is not to solve the problem of the non-historical
Callicles in the chronologically indeterminate Gorgias with a simple substitu-
tion, or to equip a spiritual problem with a historical solution. In short, Plato
has fictionalized his conversion.
The more serious objection arises from the fact that Plato has connected
the historically indeterminate Callicles to several other people who have left
a mark on the historical record. In addition to strengthening the case against
CPH in the crude form of a simple substitution, it also weakens the case for
the spiritual form of it that I endorse: if Callicles stands for Plato in a spiritual
but not a historical sense, why does he connect him erotically to the son of
Pyrilampes (481d5 and 513b6) and make him the fourth member of a quartet
of “comrades in wisdom” (487c2) that includes “Tisander of Aphidna and
Andron son of Androtion and Nausicydes of Cholarges” (487c3–4)?132 Even
if the purpose of these details is to establish the common ground between
Socrates and Callicles (481d1–5) and to validate the latter’s amiable good
will toward the former (487b7–d4), the brute fact of the details remains, and
must be addressed. The first step, then, is to determine what Plato could rea-
sonably expect a reader of the future to know about these named individuals.
Since two of these names appear in other dialogues of Plato, both of them
prior to Gorgias in the ROPD, he clearly expected us to know that Pyrilampes
was Charmides’ uncle (Chrm. 158a2–6) and that Andron the son of Andro-
tion—along with Phaedrus and Eryximachus—appears in the entourage of
Hippias in Protagoras (Prt. 315c2–5). Although the fact that “the son of
Pyrilampes” was named “Demos” does not appear in Gorgias, it does appear
in Lysias and Aristophanes,133 and Plato appears to presume that we will

132
 Dalfen, Gorgias, 346–347 (on 487c) is suggestive on this question; see also 117 on Isocrates, and
and 133 on “Weisheitsklubs.”
133
 Nails, People of Plato, 124–125. For an interesting discussion of the connections between Grg.
and Aristophanes, see Gerald M. Mara, The Civic Conversations of Thucydides and Plato: Clas-
sical Political Philosophy and the Limits of Democracy (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2008), 135–139.
260 Chapter 3

recognize that Socrates is playing with his name when he speaks of Callicles’
“love of Demos” (513c7) after linking his friendly service to both “the son of
Pyrilampes” and ὁ Ἀθηναίων δήμος (513b5–6). As for Andron, while Plato
doubtless expected us to remember the fact that it is Hippias who introduces
the law vs. nature distinction in Protagoras (Prt. 337c7–d3) that then figures
so prominently in Callicles’ Great Speech (482e5–6), there is nothing else
about the son of Androtion we can assume he expected us to know.134 With
Andron linking Callicles to Hippias, and the son of Pyrilampes linking him to
Plato’s family and Charmides, these details cannot be said to weaken CPH.
There is even less to know about Nausicydes and Tisander. Even if we
assume that the former is the man of the same name that Xenophon’s Socrates
uses as an example of gaining wealth in Memorabilia 2 and that Aristophanes
mentions in Ecclesiazusae135—both times without his deme, and all three
times without a patronymic—we know so little about him that he cannot
be said to enhance the likelihood that there was an actual Callicles. As for
Tisander, we know his patronymic from an inscription,136 but as far as literary
evidence goes, his deme, recorded in Gorgias alone, is the only fact we know
about him. The similar absence of Callicles’ patronymic fuels the suspicion
that Plato intended to make him no more unassailably historical than either
Nausicydes or Tisander. He has seen cowardice in battle (498a5–6), is from
the posh deme of Acharnae (495d3), and is just beginning “to do the business
of the city [πράττειν τὰ τῆς πόλεως πράγματα]” (515a1–2); none of these
facts, and none of his connections, contribute to making Callicles too real
for Plato to have used him to represent a version of own earlier self grown
to greater maturity in the generically wartime Gorgias, i.e., to disprove CPH.
Although the quartet of Callicles and his associates contributes precious
little to the reader’s grasp of KAH, the same cannot be said of the quartet
of Themistocles, Cimon, Miltiades, and Pericles (503c1–3).137 Since it is
most obviously and most consistently with them that Plato brings to light
the crimes of his πατρίς—they reappear at 515d1, and are the theme of
an extended discussion thereafter (515d1–517a6)—they serve to confirm
the relevance of the Golden Sentence to Gorgias. The importance of that
confirmation cannot be overstated. Although CPH explains many things
about the dialogue, its justification rests on the Golden Sentence. And the
amazing thing is that of the three parts of the Rhetorical Triad, the one that
is least prominent in the Sentence—both self and associates are mentioned

134
 See Nails, People of Plato, 28–29 for additional inscriptional evidence.
135
 Nails, People of Plato, 210–211.
136
 Nails, People of Plato, 294–295.
137
 Note Themistocles and Pericles at 455d8–e6. On the latter, cf. Svoboda, “Athens,” 295–295; Vlas-
tos, “Socrates and Athenian Democracy,” 501; and Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models
of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 143–146.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 261

at least three times (480b8, 480c2–3, 480d3–4; cf. 480c5) but the πατρίς
only once (480b8)—becomes the most prominent in the dialogue. While it
is obvious that Gorgias can be read as Plato’s indictment of Athens,138 the
reader must work to discover that Plato is indicting himself, and we can
find the proof that he is indicting his kinsmen only in what we have just
read in Charmides.
In short, the only indisputable example of the rhetoric of self-accusation in
Gorgias centers on what I will call “the Athens Quartet,” and as an indication
that there is no shortage of eloquence in this, rhetoric’s proper use, consider
the following:

Socrates: And you now, Callicles, are doing something exactly like this: you are
singing the praises [ἐγκωμιάζειν] of men who have feasted the citizens, delight-
ing them with what they desired [ἐπιθυμεῖν], and they say that they have made
the city great. But that it swells—as does an infected sore [ὕπουλος]—thanks
to those ancient leaders, this they don’t perceive. For without temperance and
justice but with harbors and arsenals and walls and tribute and suchlike trash
[λιμένων καὶ νεωρίων καὶ τειχῶν καὶ φόρων καὶ τοιούτων φλυαριῶν] they have
engorged the city; and therefore, with the eventual outbreak of the sickness, they
will blame the advisers who are with them at the time, and sing the praises [ἐγ
κωμιάζειν] of Themistocles and Cimon and Pericles, the causes of these evils
[τὰ κακά]139

There was likewise a string of six genitives plural in the most poetic passage
in Ion (534b1); how distant from the honey-flowing gardens of the Muses is
the festering Athens that Plato is describing here! It is important to identify
this description as Plato’s. Just as he is accusing himself in Callicles, his rela-
tives in Charmides, it is his city that is gorged with garbage. The key word,
of course, is ὕπουλος, appearing here for the second time in the dialogue,
and serving to connect this eloquent if heartbreaking passage to the Golden
Sentence (480b2).
But where the crimes of Athens are concerned, nothing comes close to
Melos,140 and that is why Plato can kill two birds with one stone—can indict
both himself and his city—by allowing Callicles to spew forth with consider-
able eloquence the festering evil that Thucydides brought into the open and

138
 For a balanced account of Plato’s testimony, see Gregory Vlastos, “The Historical Socrates and
Athenian Democracy.” Political Theory 11, no. 4 (November 1983), 495–516; as for his treatment
of Xenophon, the less said the better.
139
 518e1–519a7 (Lamb modified). Cf. Vlastos, “Historical Socrates,” 513n11 for a useful reminder
that the Quartet “cuts across party lines.”
140
 Cf. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.3.
262 Chapter 3

then publicly lanced in the Melian Dialogue.141 Miltiades drops out of the
Athens Quartet in the passage just quoted because it is the Melians, not the
Athenians, who could now enlist him for their cause: bigger does not always
mean better,142 and sometimes a smaller city can defeat a larger one,143 as
once upon a time Athens defeated the Persians at Marathon. Since then, and
more specifically since the plague, the equation of the just and the beautiful
has been unmasked as merely conventional—along with equality itself—as
here by Callicles:

Callicles: So this is why by convention [νόμῳ] it is termed unjust and base

[αἰσχρόν] this seeking to have more [πλέον ἔχειν] than the many [οἱ πολλοί] and
why they call it to do injustice [ἀδικεῖν]: but nature herself [ἡ φύσις αὐτή], in my
opinion, proclaims it: that it is just for the better to have more [πλέον ἔχειν] than
the worse, and the abler than the feebler. It is obvious in many cases that this is
so—both among the other living beings and generally in the cities and the races
of men—that the just [τὸ δίκαιον] is judged as follows: the stronger to rule and
have more [πλέον ἔχειν] than the weaker. For by using what kind of justice did
Xerxes campaign against Greece, or his father against Scythia? Or take the ten
thousand other cases of the sort that one might mention.144

Although this hymn to πλέον ἔχειν shows the dependence of Callicles

on the Melian Dialogue—the relevant passage will be quoted below—it is
important not to miss the evidence of Plato’s own artistry here. He is kill-
ing not two birds but three. To appreciate Gorgias as a work of art, it is
not enough to see how the Golden Sentence justifies CPH, and thus why
Plato’s indictment of Athens is being combined, through Callicles, with his
indictment of himself. If we are to see for ourselves why the dialogue must
come to a head with Callicles’ conversion, Plato must first allow his char-
acter to state his position with great force and clarity while simultaneously
helping us to detect the hidden flaw or ὕπουλος that infects and vitiates
it. He does so here. Amidst the myriad examples of “might makes right,”
the two he uses—Xerxes against the Greeks, Darius against the Scythians,
both from Herodotus—make the defeat of Darius at Marathon conspicuous
by its absence. The Xerxes example is already embarrassingly unpatriotic

141
 Cf. Saxonhouse, “An Unspoken Theme,” 142 and 152.
142
 As indicated by Socrates’ response to Callicles’ “Melian Moment” at 488b8–c8 (Lamb modified):
“Socrates: Is it the stronger folk that you call superior, and are the weaker ones bound to hearken
to the stronger one—as for instance I think you were also pointing out then, that the great cities
attack the little ones in accordance with the just by nature [τὸ φύσει δίκαιον], because they are
superior and stronger, on the ground that the superior and the stronger and the better are all the
same thing; or is it possible to be better and yet inferior and weaker, and to be superior and yet
more wicked?”
143
 Thucydides 5.102.
144
 483c6–e1 (Lamb modified).
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 263

enough; he slides to the Scythians in order to divert attention from that

embarrassment.145 But because of Darius, he jumps from the frying pan
into the fire. Too intelligent not to realize the source of his dilemma, but
still too stubborn to confront it,146 Callicles resorts to the grandiose exag-
geration of the ten thousand things since the single most obvious example
is sufficient to refute him.
But Callicles’ discomfiture is short-lived, and Plato immediately allows
him to cause us to forget the missing Marathon with the brilliant, oath-certi-
fied, and freshly minted oxymoron147 with which he copies Thucydides while
simultaneously transforming and improving upon him:

Callicles: But I think they do these things according to the nature of the just
[κατὰ φύσιν τὴν τοῦ δικαίου], and also, by Zeus, according to the very law of
nature [κατὰ νόμον γε τὸν τῆς φύσεως], although perhaps not according to the
one we’ve made.148

The original passage in Thucydides, quoted here in the classic translation of

Thomas Hobbes, is as follows:

Athenians: For of the gods we think according to the common opinion [δόξῃ]; and
of men, that for certain by necessity of nature [ὑπὸ φύσεως ἀναγκαίας] they will
everywhere reign over such as they be too strong for. Neither did we make this law
[ὁ νόμος] nor are we the first that use it made; but as we found it, and shall leave it
to posterity for ever, so also we use it, knowing that you likewise, and others that
should have the same power which we have, would do the same.149

While making the position of the Athenian ambassadors his own, Callicles
goes one step further than Thucydides by combining the opposites “law” and
“nature” into one.
Confronted here by Callicles’ originality, we must not miss the forest for
the trees: Plato is the agent, and the originality is his. In an obvious and argu-
ably not yet sufficiently emphasized sense, Callicles must be Plato if only
because Plato is the ultimate source of everything he has to say. The insights

145
 See Gonzalez Lodge (ed.), Plato, Gorgias (Boston, MA and London: Ginn & Company, 1896),
139–140.
146
 Cf. Scott, “Platonic Pessimism,” 25: “But the fact that they [sc. those interlocutors, like Callicles,
who ‘are so enamoured of their opinions that they will never relinquish them’] become angry or
embarrassed about their inability to deal with him [sc. Socrates] should not be confused with the
idea that they might be becoming receptive to his point of view.”
147
 Following Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 268.
148
 483e1–4.
149
 Thucydides, 5.105.2 (Hobbes).
264 Chapter 3

of Jaeger,150 Alain, Dodds, John Bremer,151 and others who have championed
or at least anticipated CPH does not rest but rather builds on this literary com-
monplace, and for Dodds at least, it is the truth he finds in Callicles’ words
that leads him to find Plato behind them. In the phrase ὁ τῆς φύσεως νόμος, it
is impossible to ignore that this is Plato’s insight: it is too original and para-
doxical to be anything else. But the truth of Callicles’ position is not to be
found in its Hobbes- or Nietzsche-inspiring originality but rather in the depth
of the psychological insight with which Plato presents it, making it original to
be sure, but utterly personal and ruthlessly honest rather than true.
On either side of the compelling simplicity of his pre-Nietzschean or rather
post-Thucydidean “truth,” Callicles is made to reveal the troubled complex-
ity of his pre-Platonic psychology. The boyish bravado of the ten thousand
examples, arising directly from the embarrassment of ignoring Herodotus on
Marathon, is followed by Callicles’ distillation of Thucydides: it is because
Melos is the acme of Athenian injustice that the Melian Dialogue is the theo-
retical highpoint of his History.152 But it is important to emphasize that it is
not therefore its dramatic highpoint: for that, Thucydides makes us wait until
the catastrophe in Sicily. In a dramatic sense, the disaster in the Great Harbor
is the recompense or punishment for what the Athenians did on Melos, but
Thucydides will not let us forget that what they did was itself a consequence
of what they believed, as mirrored in what they had said.
Plato’s Gorgias replicates that structure: Callicles is made to echo the
Athenian Ambassadors—and even to improve on them in a theoretical
sense—because he too is bound for his own personal Syracuse, and the chas-
tened Athenian who will emerge from that compensatory punishment is Plato
the Teacher who will therefore next give us a vivid “Portrait of the Artist (of
injustice) as a (lonely) Young Man.”

Callicles: molding [πλάττοντες] the best and strongest of ourselves [ἡμεῖς

αύτοί], taking hold of them [λαμβάνοντες] as youngsters, like young lions, both
chanting and bewitching [κατεπᾴδοντές τε καὶ γοητεύοντες], we enslave them
utterly, saying [λέγοντες] that it is necessary to have the same [τὸ ἴσον ἔχειν by

150
 See Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, translated by Gilbert Highet, three vol-
umes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946–1947), 2.137–38, especially: “if he [sc. Plato] had by nature been
only a second Socrates, the real Socrates would hardly have had such an overwhelming effect on
him as he had. His sympathetic portraits of the great sophists, orators, and adventurers show quite
unmistakably that he possessed, in his own soul, all their powers, with their brilliant advantages
and their terrible dangers; but they had been tamed by Socrates, and, like his poetic impulse, had
bowed to and mingled with the Socratic spirit, to form a higher unity within his works.” For more
on this “higher unity,” see below.
151
 John Bremer, Plato and the Founding of the Academy; Based on a Letter from Plato Newly Dis-
covered (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), 100–101.
152
 Cf. Daniel Boyarin, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2009), 116 on “the horrific doctrine of nature raw in tooth and claw.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 265

contrast with πλέον ἔχειν] and that this is the beautiful [τὸ καλόν] and the just
[τὸ δίκαιον]. But if, as I believe, there should be a man [ἀνήρ] having a suitable
nature [φύσιν ἱκανὴν ἔχων], having shaken off all these things [ἀποσεισάμενος],
having broken them apart [διαρρήξας] and escaped them entirely [διαφυγών]—
having trampled down [καταπατήσας] our writings [τὰ ἡμέτερα γράμματα] and
trickeries [μαγγανεύματα] and chants [ἐπῳδαί] and laws [νόμοι], all those that
are against nature [παρὰ φύσιν]—having stood up [ἐπαναστάς], he rose revealed
as master [δεσπότης], this slave of ours [ἡμέτερος ὁ δοῦλος], even there shined
out [ἐκλάμπειν] the just by nature [τὸ τῆς φύσεως δίκαιον].153

This is the passage, quoted earlier, where Dodds finds Plato, and there is
plenty of him to be found here.154
It is in the Plato who speaks so eloquently through Callicles’ Great
Speech that we discover why the Ad hominem Speech made him waver.
What shines forth in the Great Speech is an individual, completely aware
of what makes him unique. He naturally imagines that what makes him
unique entitles him to consider himself not only different from but also
superior to the rest, and if superior, to be their natural ruler. What Socrates
manages to do in the Ad hominem Speech is to show that the only effective
means to gaining that power is to want it so badly that you are willing to
conform yourself entirely to those who have the power to make you all-
powerful.155 Socrates is aware that Callicles is one of a kind: there would
be no justification for Callicles as Touchstone had he not been.156 And he
sees that this man’s loyalty to his own uniqueness can be leveraged against

153
 483e5–484b1. In The Greeks and the Irrational (226n30), Dodds perceptively links ἐπῳδαί here
to its use in Lg. (it is not only Athenian democrats who can use incantations) and Chrm. 157b1–2
and 157c4. See also Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 269 (on 483e6).
154
 As a teacher of youth—for the most part fifteen to nineteen year-old boys on my account—Plato nec-
essarily found plenty of reminders among his students, and it was, after all, they who needed to find
themselves in Callicles. There are two paradoxes relevant to teaching adolescents effectively, and
both are relevant to Grg. The first is that some of the most effective high school teachers were not
goody-goodies, apple-polishers, brownnosers, or gold-star earners when they were in school: they
were undisciplined smart-alecks and trouble-makers who thought they were better and smarter than
other people and their teaches in particular. Having outgrown such nonsense, they are born-again stu-
dents, remade by their studies, and now can meet their former selves—the most challenging students
in any school that isn’t simply a prison for juvenile criminals—on terms of equality and tame them,
even as they have tamed themselves. And the second paradox is the first’s corollary: somewhere
among the best high students are the ones you “flip,” the highly intelligent discipline problems who
enter your classroom chanting the by no means entirely false mantra that “school sucks” and that
their teachers are stupid. For the same reason that the best teachers are often reformed delinquents,
the best students are often the brightest of today’s delinquents, the ones who fight you every step
of the way until you win them over. They know all the wrong arguments, all the dodges, excuses,
rationalizations, and have finally come to see them for what they are. At the risk of making a claim
only a high school teacher could understand, Plato wrote Gorgias for sophomores.
155
 Cf. Dalfen, Gorgias, 444 (on 513a).
156
 Cf. Rendall, “Dialogue, Philosophy, and Rhetoric,” 165–179.
266 Chapter 3

his will to power, which at its base is merely a symptom of what makes
him unique, not its cause. Everyone else seeks self-preservation and self-
benefit; Plato will be different by both transforming and preserving the
individuality of Callicles. Both will be equally unique, but also equally
lonely.
Socrates hails Callicles as his Touchstone because he sees a unique oppor-
tunity to forge an alliance with another. It is no accident that Socrates claims
to be the only πολιτικός in Athens (521d6–e2)—itself the perfect expression
of his own isolation—having already indicated in the Ad hominem Speech
that a πολιτικός and a ῥητορικός is exactly what Callicles most wishes to
become (513b8). Throughout Gorgias, Socrates will give ample evidence
of his eloquence but the true patent of his claim to be a πολιτικός will only
be revealed at the end of Meno: the true statesman must be able to make
somebody else into a πολιτικός (Men. 100a1–2). In anticipation of that claim,
Plato is emerging in Gorgias as the proof that Socrates was the true πολιτικός.
But he himself is no mere cipher “to this great accompt,” and the reason that
he needs to introduce himself in Charmides and Gorgias is because we won’t
fully understand Republic unless we can recognize that its author is what
Jaeger called “a higher unity” of two equally lonely men: Socrates and Cal-
licles. Not Aristocles but Plato is the product of their alliance.
As proof of this, consider the extent to which Callicles’ criticism of
Socrates applies to Plato the Teacher:

Callicles: But when I see an elderly man still going on with philosophy and not
getting rid of it, this is the man, Socrates, who thereby seems to me to require a
whipping. For as I was just now saying, it is characteristic of this person, even
if he should be naturally very well endowed [πάνυ εὐφυής], to become unmanly
[ἄνανδρος], fleeing [participial form of φεύγειν] the centers of the city [τὰ μέσα
τῆς πόλεως] and its markets, in which the poet said, men become outstanding
[ἀριπρεπής]; but to have ducked into a corner to live the rest of his life whis-
pering with three or four lads [μειράκια], but never pronouncing what is free
[ἐλεύθερον] and both great and suitable [καὶ μέγα καὶ ἱκανὸν].157

Despite being πάνυ εὐφυής, the Academy’s founder will devote his life to
those μειράκια, and he was evidently fully aware that there would be those who
would despise him for it. But even if it were only by writing the Great Speech
of Callicles, Plato the Teacher finds a way to continue giving voice to great and
suitable things with the utmost freedom. And that is only the beginning.
In Gorgias, Plato is preparing his students to absorb the stern lesson of his
Republic, for it is there that he will whisper in their ears that it is incumbent

157
 485d1–e2 (Lamb modified).
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 267

on them to accomplish something ἀριπρεπής by returning to the Cave. Refus-

ing to do so would be every bit as ἄνανδρος as Callicles says that it is, and
in Crito—since it both instantiates and echoes PP-1 (Cri. 49c4–5)—Plato
will dramatize Socrates’ refusal to φεύγειν. What is easy to miss, then, is that
Plato will confirm and even institutionalize Callicles’ claim about old men
and philosophy through his entertaining dialogues and his school, but he will
at the same time refute that criticism by teaching the youth to return to τὰ
μέσα τῆς πόλεως as Guardians once they have become philosophers.
Teaching the youth to πράττειν τὰ τῆς πόλεως πράγματα (515a1–2) through
philosophy—for this is the lesson of the Allegory of the Cave—is not only a
Platonic μεταξύ between the active and contemplative lives but the result of
the touchstone-tested alliance between Callicles and Socrates. The eloquence,
the burning ambition to be ἀριπρεπής, and even Callicles’ love of the demos
(ὁ δήμου ἔρως) live on in Plato the Teacher. As a result, the criticism that
Callicles levels at philosophy does not apply to those who have completed the
study of Plato’s thirty-five dialogues in the Academy:

Callicles: For philosophy, you know, Socrates, is a charming thing, if a man has
to do with it moderately in his younger days; but if he continues to spend his
time on it too long, it is ruin to any man. However well endowed [πάνυ εὐφυής]
one may be, if one philosophizes far on into life, one must needs find oneself
ignorant [ἄπειρος] of everything that ought to be familiar [ἔμπειρος] to the man
who would be a thorough gentleman [καλὸς κἀγαθός] and make a good figure
[εὐδόκιμος] in the world. For such people are shown to be ignorant [ἄπειροι]
of the laws [οἱ νόμοι] of their city, and of the words which have to be used in
negotiating agreements with their fellows in private or in public affairs, and of
human pleasures and desires; and, in short, to be utterly inexperienced [ἄπειρος]
in men’s characters [ἤθοι].158

The key word is the hammered ἄπειρος. It is precisely because Plato

will not allow his students to be ἄπειροι of the ἤθοι of men that he forces
us to see for ourselves what Socrates saw when he noticed the way that
Charmides and Critias were looking at each other in Charmides. The abil-
ity to read the characters of men—above all the character of Callicles—is
both taught and tested in Gorgias and we have been prepared for that
test in Symposium, Lysis, Euthydemus, Laches, and Charmides. Through
these dialogues, we have gained worldly experience through the Play of
Character, becoming in the process suspicious, discerning, and political.
And by the time we finish Laws—with our skills already sharpened by
earlier encounters with Timaeus, Parmenides, Philebus, Theaetetus, and

158
 484c5–d7 (Lamb).
268 Chapter 3

the Eleatic Stranger—we will be just as ἔμπειρος with respect to οἱ νόμοι

as we are with ἤθοι. Nor will we be ἄπειροι with respect to pleasures and
desires; Plato will tempt us with both. Able to detect (deliberately) falla-
cious arguments, to recognize and deliver eloquent speeches of our own,
to ascend to ethereal beauty and then the Idea of the Good before returning
to the darkness of the Cave, Plato’s Guardian goes out into τὰ μέσα τῆς
πόλεως as a battle-tested philosopher, as ἔμπειρος.
But even more importantly, Plato wants us to become καλὸς κἀγαθός
(511b4, 514a1, 515a6, 515e13, 518a7–b1, 518c4, 526a7, and 527d1–2),159
and this is what is missing from the literature. Unfortunately, the interpreta-
tion of Plato has been entrusted to the kind of philosopher that Callicles dis-
dained, or even worse, to those who regard philosophizing with three or four
of their students as even less important than publishing books and advancing
their “academic” careers. Because of what it now means to be an academic,
we have failed to grasp how civic, political, and patriotic it was for Plato to
create the Academy and locate it in Athens, for his goal was never to produce
an Aristotle. Instead, he was challenging his students to break the pattern of
the Athens Quartet, and this explains his fulsome praise for Aristides at the
end of Gorgias:

Socrates: for it is difficult, Callicles, and worthy of much praise, being endowed
with great opportunity for the doing of injustice, to consistently live justly. Few
are they of this sort, yet since they have come into being both here and else-
where, I also believe there will be in the future men both noble and good [καλοὶ
κἀγαθοί] in this virtue: that of handling justly whatever anyone turns over to
them. And one there has been, and very famous [πάνυ ἐλλόγιμος] even among
the other Greeks: Aristides, son of Lysimachus; but the majority of the power-
ful, O best of men, become bad.160

In accordance with the example of Aristides, Plato seems to have believed

that once they had overcome the imperious and corrupting “Will to Self-
Benefit” through a rigorous process of introspection, self-accusation, and
self-overcoming, his students would emerge, through philosophy this time,
as καλοὶ κἀγαθοί, and thereby prove themselves capable of handling power
justly, not selfishly.
Although anchored in ontology, Plato’s message therefore will and
must remain essentially civic, and is therefore most clearly expressed in
his Πολιτεία (R. 520e4–521a2): “‘For the fact is, dear friend,’ said I, ‘if
you can discover a better way of life than office holding for your future

159
 Note that the first time Socrates uses the term at 511b4, he applies it to himself; the first time it
appears in the dialogue (484d1–2), Callicles imagines that it applies to someone like him.
160
 526a3–b4.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 269

rulers, a well-governed city becomes a possibility.’” Many have assumed

that we can learn more about Plato from Speusippus, Xenocrates, Aris-
totle, Posidonius, and Plotinus than we can from Lycurgus, Phocion,
Demosthenes, Cicero, and Plutarch; a reconsideration of his dialogues
as a whole based on Reading Order suggests that this assumption needs
to be revised. As his praise for Aristides at the end of Gorgias indicates,
Plato did not outgrow the manly ideals of Callicles, only his will to SB:161
the taproot of injustice.162 He would be delighted to learn that one of
his students—Cicero comes to mind—would become πάνυ ἐλλόγιμος,
εὐδόκιμος, and ἔμπειρος while remaining καλὸς κἀγαθός.
So much of Callicles remained in Plato because Callicles represents, like
the πάνυ εὐφυής Alcibiades of Alcibiades Major before him, exactly the kind
of student that Plato the Teacher was trying “to flip,” and Plato needed to
introduce himself in Charmides and Gorgias because he needed to prove that
Socrates was the kind of πολιτικός who could produce another like himself.
I suggested earlier that the basis of CPH is the Golden Sentence but this
formula fails to give Callicles as Touchstone its due: it is only in the synthe-
sis of Socrates and Callicles that we will discover Plato. Gorgias is Plato’s
Confession, but the Callicles he never became will not entirely disappear. It is
not only that Plato will manifest himself as the πολιτικός and ῥητορικός that
Callicles wanted to become: in Glaucon or Adeimantus, he will show us that
not all of his family deserved punishment the way Critias and Charmides did.
As for the third part of the Rhetorical Triad, the example of Aristides “the
most just” proved that Athens was still worth dying for, especially when the
alterative was Macedonian tyranny. It is rather in the synergy of the Golden
Sentence, Callicles the Touchstone, and the Ad hominem Speech that the
justification of CPH is to be found.
Finally, like most everything else in Gorgias, “Plato’s Confession” needs
to be understood in relation to Republic. At its moment of crisis (R. 520b5–
d5), Plato will speak to us directly, and with the verbal adjective καταβατέον,
he will enjoin upon us the unpleasant duty of returning to the Cave. We will
need to recognize his voice when he speaks to us, and it is as the man who
chose not to become Callicles that we will know him. He has rejected selfish-
ness, self-benefit, and self-preservation “all the way down” only because he

161
 Consider the implicit criticism of Terry Penner, “Socrates on the Impossibility of Belief-Relative
Sciences.” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 3 (1988), 263–325,
on 319, in Shaw, “Socrates and the True Political Craft,” 202n54: “Penner is right that Socrates
is ironic in attributing divinely provided true belief, and so virtue, to Athenian politicians (except,
perhaps, Aristides).” Naturally Penner had not mentioned this exception.
162
 Except, that is, when tamed or chastened by upholding the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy as true. Although
it is the Longer Way that challenges the philosopher to return to the Cave, Plato’s construction of
the Shorter demonstrated that he had done so.
270 Chapter 3

had first built upon them a brilliant, articulate, and indeed amiable self (cf.
487b7–d4) before finding it “worthy of nothing” (527e7), thanks to Socrates.
He will repent, and SB will give way to benefiting others (515a1–b5).163
Unlike Callicles, Plato will take his bearings from the GoodT, and by doing
so, he will become our teacher; in Republic, he will whisper the secret of
how to become a true πολιτικός. But he will not thereby become a pleasant
person, entertaining and well intentioned though he undoubtedly is. He was
too critical of himself to be anything but suspicious of us. He will benefit
us, but he will not make it easy: we will be tested continuously, and made
to do the heavy lifting on our own. He will not cease to be an elitist and will
accept nothing less from his students than that they become καλοὶ κἀγαθοί.
And if we imagine that he ever overcame his love for Athens—despite her
crimes—we had better find ourselves another teacher, and here, once again,
Aristotle leaps to mind.

§10. GORGIAS AND THE SHORTER WAY

Given that W. H. Thompson’s had been published in 1871,164 E. R. Dodds had

good reason to imagine that his 1959 commentary on Gorgias would hold the
field for the next hundred years but it was not to be. As “a revised text with
introduction and commentary,” and brimming with sufficient classical erudi-
tion to balance its debts to the ultra-modern Nietzsche,165 it is best understood
as apparently and self-consciously archaic, forcing comparison with the great
Plato commentaries of Victorian and Edwardian England. Vlastos, whose
path-breaking Introduction to Protagoras it cites,166 hailed it in 1967 as the
best commentary on a Platonic dialogue since Cornford’s on Timaeus,167 but
the comparison proved to be inapt and even ironic. To begin with, Cornford’s
commentary is a self-consciously modern work, as innovative in format as
that of Dodds is conservative.168 More importantly, no other Anglophone
commentary on Timaeus has appeared since 1937 whereas Oxford University
Press would publish Irwin’s commentary on Gorgias in 1979. And despite

163
 George Klosko, “The Refutation of Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias.” Greece & Rome 31, no. 2 (Octo-
ber 1984), 126–139, on 134.
164
 W. H. Thompson, The Gorgias of Plato; with English Notes, Introduction, and Appendix (London:
Whittaker and Co., 1871).
165
 In addition to Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 387–391 (“Appendix: Socrates, Callicles, and Nietzsche”),
Nietzsche is also mentioned on 265 (the point of entry for the Appendix) and 291, a more interest-
ing passage, which refers to Vilfredo Pareto; cf. 352 and 364 on Wilfred Trotter.
166
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 16n2 and 22n3; see also 218.
167
 Vlastos, “Was Polus Refuted?,” 454n1.
168
 On Francis MacDonald Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1937) and the works it displaced, see Guardians in Action, §1.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 271

the sincerity of his praise for Dodds, it was the Socratist sea change that Vlas-
tos himself had inspired—Irwin was his student—that created the pressing
need for a rival commentary only twenty years later.
Between Vlastos and the even more radical Socratists who follow him,
Irwin is unique and commensurately valuable for keeping his attention
focused on Plato, and thus on Plato’s complicated relationship with Socra-
tism. This focus is ultimately responsible for the Gorgias commentary, and
it is easy to see in both Plato’s Moral Theory and Plato’s Ethics that it is his
awareness of the troubling relationship between Protagoras and Gorgias that
made the latter of particular interest to him.169 By taking the hedonic calculus
in Protagoras at face-value and refusing to entertain any doubts about the
Socratic Paradox no matter how objectionable he himself found it to be, Vlas-
tos had advanced further along the path first marked out by Aristotle in mak-
ing that dialogue the bedrock of “the philosophy of Socrates”; as part of PTI,
Irwin will travel that path even farther. But since Irwin is genuinely interested
in Plato, and thus in how the Socrates of Republic 4 could have emerged from
the Socrates of Protagoras—neither Vlastos nor the most radical Socratists
were particularly interested in this problem and thus offered simplistic solu-
tions to it—he turns to Gorgias intent on finding answers and as a result his
valuable commentary raises critical questions.170
The most obvious discrepancy between Protagoras and Gorgias involves
the express denial of the GP Equation in the latter, and Irwin emphasizes this
in his commentary’s Introduction,171 as he had already done in Plato’s Moral
Theory.172 But here Irwin—who as a charter member of PTI naturally upholds
a deadpan reading of Protagoras173—does not advance beyond Dodds, who
had already cited the authority of Vlastos for rejecting the claim that “the
[hedonist] assumption is made merely for the sake of argument.”174 It is rather
in the attention Irwin pays to the Socratic Paradox (SP) that the influence of
a Vlastos-inspired Socratism becomes visible. Dodds had passed over the
question of whether the Socrates of Gorgias was more Socratic or Platonic,175
and that stance, along with his unqualified claim that its Socrates “continues

169
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, ch. 5, and Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, ch. 8.
170
 Cf. Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 131 (on “The Results of the Gorgias”): “The Protagoras’s views
are rejected, but the questions they tried to answer are still unanswered. . . .The Gorgias shows
the problems arising for any defence of Socratic ethics which cannot count on support from the
Protagoras.”
171
 Irwin, Plato, Gorgias, 8.
172
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 158; cf. 130–131.
173
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 116: “I have argued that the Protagoras accepts a hedonist view of
virtue and the good; and I will argue that the Gorgias rejects it.”
174
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 21n3
175
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 16: “This is not the place to attempt a characterization either of the histori-
cal or the Platonic Socrates.”
272 Chapter 3

to hold” SP,176 illustrates what caused his commentary to become obsolete:

Irwin is far more attuned to the mixed message of Gorgias with respect to
SP,177 and he also takes seriously the evidence for “psychic conflict” in the
dialogue,178 thus anticipating the role of irrational (or “good-independent”)
desires in the tripartite soul of Republic 4.179
By emphasizing its mixed message, Irwin not only confirmed the view that
Plato’s Gorgias is best understood as a moral battleground, but also showed
why it would necessarily become more specifically the Battleground of Soc-
ratism. In response to Irwin’s amiably aporetic commentary, the most radical
Socratists paradoxically confirmed that Gorgias is an interpretive battleground
precisely by denying that its message is mixed in the crucial sense, that is, with
respect to Socratism.180 Leading the way, Penner upheld a Socratist reading
of the dialogue by emphasizing 466a-468e (hereafter “Penner’s Passage”);181
this allowed him to unmask Irwin as a mere moralist.182 But even if Irwin
had failed to give Penner’s passage a suitably radical or Pennerite reading,183
he had regarded it as upholding SP,184 and thus as constituting the Socratist

176
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 17: “He [sc. the Socrates of Grg.] continues to hold that “virtue is knowl-
edge [i.e., K]” (460a–c), that οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἁμαρτάνει [i.e., SP] (467c–468e), that true possession
of one ‘virtue’ implies possession of them all [i.e., UV] (507a-–c). But he has acquired other con-
victions that do not spring at all directly from these; some of them are listed below.” These (see
20–21) do not include any counter-indications with respect to K, SP, and UV.
177
 On SP, see Irwin, Plato, Gorgias, 7, 190, 195 (quoted below), and 222 (on καρτερεῖν at 507b8):
“G. makes claims inconsistent with the Socratic Paradox. If some desires are good-independent,
knowledge of the good will not infallibly control them; this is why courage and temperance need
endurance and order as well as knowledge. But we have seen that the G. does not explicitly reject
the Socratic Paradox; and so Plato does not explain why the Socratic accounts of the virtues are
altered. He explains more clearly at R. 429b–431c.”
178
 Irwin, Plato, Gorgias, 7: “(a) [he is listing differences from the earlier dialogues] The treatment of
psychic conflict, and the account of virtue as psychic harmony, seem to conflict with the Socratic
Paradox and the claim that knowledge is sufficient for virtue; see 491d, 507bc [see 221–224; cf.
previous note]. (b) Socrates discusses the political implications of his moral doctrines more fully
than in the shorter dialogues. (c) His views on hedonism seem to imply the rejection of the views
of the Pr.”
179
 On SP, see Irwin, Plato, Gorgias, 195 (on 493e); on “non-rational desires” see 221.
180
 For criticism of this move, see Rachana Kamtekar, “Plato on the Attribution of Conative Atti-
tudes.” Archiv für die Geschichte der Philosophie 88 (2006), 127–162, on 143n31.
181
 Despite Penner, “Desire and Power,” it is not of course his or indeed important only to him; for
a useful overview of the historical dimensions of the crux—especially what he calls “the neopla-
tonic interpretation” (195–198)—see McTighe, “Socrates and Desire for the Good.” Combining
a response to both Penner and McTighe, and therefore useful for sorting out the debate, is David
Wolfsdorf, “Gorgias 466a4–468e5: Rhetoric’s Inadequate Means.” Classical Philology 103, no. 2
(April 2008), 109–134, especially 110–112. See also Segvic, “No One Errs Willingly,” 11–12n13
and 40–45. More recently, see Ian J. Campbell, “Power, Getting What You Want and Happiness.”
Journal of Ancient Philosophy 11, no. 2 (2017), 22–44.
182
 Penner, “Desire and Power,” 187n32, especially: “Justice’s merit is not its ‘morality,’ but its mak-
ing you happier.” Cf. the emphasis on “moral knowledge,” “a moral agent,” and even “a moral
wizard” in Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, “Socrates and the Unity of the Virtues.”
Journal of Ethics 1, no. 4 (1997), 311–324, on 324.
183
 See Penner, “Desire and Power,” 197–201.
184
 See (d) in Irwin, Plato, Gorgias, 143 (on 468a–b).
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 273

component of the dialogue’s mixed message; this left the core of his case
untouched. It was therefore left for Rowe (to attempt) to make the more diffi-
cult case: “The moral psychology of the Gorgias, then, I claim, is Socratic, and
fully intellectualist.”185 Although Rowe’s full argument was advanced in three
separate articles,186 he summarized and condensed them in Plato and the Art of
Philosophical Writing,187 staged in relation to his “Socratic” resolution of “the
problems” at the heart of Irwin’s commentary.188
In addition to Vlastos, Irwin, Penner, and Rowe, there are a few more
combatants to be considered in this preliminary overview of Gorgias as
“the Battleground of Socratism.” By emphasizing the role of shame in
the dialogue, and then by linking it to “high spirit [θύμος]” in the tripar-
tite soul of Republic 4, Jessica Moss lays the foundation for resolving its
problems on a “Platonic” basis,189 that is, by an “un-‘Socratic’” reading
that would be as un-mixed as Rowe’s but antithetical to it.190 As creative
as Moss’s approach undoubtedly is, it is not difficult to see in it the influ-
ence of her supervisor, John M. Cooper, and thanks to his 1982 review of
Irwin’s commentary,191 and then an extensive 1999 article on Gorgias,192
Cooper’s must be regarded as a significant voice in the debate about its
mixed message with respect to Socratism. Although his article keeps up a
running battle with Kahn193—whose preference for an early Gorgias will
prevent the inventor of “proleptic composition” from applying it in this
crucial case194—his response to Irwin is ingenious: it is not the dialogue’s

185
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 155.
186
 See Rowe, “A Problem,” “The Good and the Just in Plato’s Gorgias” in Damir Barbarić (ed.),
Platon über das Gute und die Gerechtigkeit, 73–92 (Würzberg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005),
and “The Moral Psychology of the Gorgias” in Michael Erler and Luc Brisson (eds.), Proceedings
of the Seventh Symposium Platonicum, 90–101 (Sankt Augustin: Academica, 2007).
187
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, ch. 4 (“The moral psychology of the Gorgias”).
188
 Consider Rowe, Plato and the Art, 143n1, concluding with: “What I set out to resist in the pres-
ent chapter is something very like Irwin’s account here; though I differ significantly in the way I
state (1), the Socratic position. See n. 5 below.” Not surprisingly, 144n5 cites Penner, “Desire and
Power,” and concludes: “My own interpretation follows Penner’s not Irwin’s.”
189
 Jessica Moss, “Shame, Pleasure, and the Divided Soul.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy
2005, 137–170.
190
 It is unfortunate that Christine Tarnopolsky did not build on this foundation. For comment on
Tarnopolsky, Moss, and others in the context of his own emphasis on “internal shame” (‘when
we come to recognize that a principle we have endorsed entails approval activities we really do
despise’), see Jenks, “The Power of Shame,” 376.
191
 John Cooper, “The Gorgias and Irwin’s Socrates.” Review of Metaphysics 35, no. 3 (March 1982),
577–587.
192
 John Cooper, “Socrates and Plato in Plato’s Gorgias” in Cooper, Reason and Emotion: Essays in
Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999),
29–75.
193
 Beginning at Cooper, “Socrates and Plato,” 30n3; see also 36–38nn9–11, 46n23, 49n27and
69–70n60.
194
 See Kahn, “Drama and Dialectic,” and Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, chapter 5.
274 Chapter 3

character, that is, Socrates, who is inconsistent, but rather its author.195
Pointing to Callicles’ reliance on non-rational desires as evidence, Cooper
argues that Gorgias is transitional because Plato, not Socrates, is already
on the road that leads to Republic 4.196
With this chorus of voices now assembled,197 it is time to contribute my
own to the cacophonous symphony, and without clarifying what I mean
by the Shorter Way, it is impossible for me to explain the part assigned to
Gorgias on the path to it. In the context of the other voices, the principal
point to make at the outset is that I think Irwin is on the mark: Gorgias is
a battleground text with a mixed message. Both Irwin and Cooper are right
to emphasize that one side of the mixture leads to Republic 4, but Cooper
is right to locate “the cause of the mixture” (cf. Phlb. 23d7) in Plato, not in
Socrates. Plato is not confused, however, and Gorgias is “transitional” only
in the sense that it is intended to help the reader make the transition from Pro-
tagoras—for it is useful to put first things first—to Republic. Gorgias would
not be a mixture if it were no longer possible to make a case for the Socratist
side,198 but an over-concern with “the philosophy of Socrates”—especially
given the role Aristotle assigned to Protagoras in defining it in relation to
SP and K(SV)—has drawn the crucial contrast in the wrong place. Gorgias
effects the transition between eudaemonist Socratism and the tripartite soul of
Republic 4 by showing how they can be combined: despite their differences,
both are equally constitutive of the Shorter Way.
The crucial claim is simple, and bridges the alleged gap between Plato
and the Socrates of his early dialogues: the Shorter Way in Republic 4
deploys “psychic harmony” for a eudaemonist end. In Gorgias, we begin to
see how the two can work together without thereby attaining a satisfactory
result: it is the Shorter Way as a whole—not either one of the two different
streams that flow into it—that the reader must transcend while making the
ascent to the GoodT. It is therefore not a case of preserving a systematic

195
 Cooper, “Gorgias and Irwin’s Socrates,” 585: “it is Plato, not his character Socrates, who can be
seen to have begun to have different thoughts. For Plato is the author of Callicles’ view as well as
Socrates’ in this dialogue, and in the theory of desire and action that lies behind Callicles’ theory
of human excellence, even more than in that latter theory itself, we can see the themes and issues
of the moral philosophy of the Republic coming to life for him.”
196
 See Austin, “Corpses, Self-Defense, and Immortality” for a more interesting variant on this
position, i.e., that it is Callicles’ troubled psychology as opposed to his theoretical position that
anticipates the tripartite soul; see especially 51.
197
 For a recent review of scholarly opinion, see Daniel R. N. Lopes, “Moral Psychology in Plato’s
Gorgias.” Journal of Ancient Philosophy 11, no. 1 (2017), 20–65; he states his own (Cooper-
inspired) conclusion on 63 (last word).
198
 Cf. Rod Jenks, “The Sounds of Silence: Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Refutation of Callicles in
Plato’s Gorgias.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 40, no. 2 (2007), 201–215, on 212 (emphasis mine):
“In the Gorgias, it is evident that Plato is also beginning to doubt the Socratic thesis that no one
does wrong willingly and for its consequence, that knowledge is sufficient for virtue [i.e., KSV].”
It would be better to say that it is the reader who, having reached Grg., is “beginning to doubt.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 275

and ruthlessly eudaemonist Socratism from Platonic contamination, nor

of joining Plato as he moves beyond a Socratic commitment to SP, K, and
UV on the path that culminates in Aristotle’s Ethics. It is the single-minded
pursuit of SB as the GoodE, whether achieved through “Socratic” intellec-
tualism or “Platonic” psychic harmony, that Plato challenges his students
to overcome in Republic. The Longer Way will place before us the choice
to reject both of them together, culminating as they do in an unsatisfac-
tory Shorter Way that—in anticipation of Aristotle—locates the Good in
the agent’s happiness and well-being, not as the transcendent inspiration
for selflessly benefiting others in accordance with Justice,199 at the expense
of our lives if necessary. In commenting on Gorgias 507c, Irwin therefore
asks exactly the right question:

Socrates has not shown that a ‘good’ and ‘virtuous’ man on his view, someone
with an orderly soul promoting his own happiness, has the recognized virtues,
producing just actions. He need not claim that the conventional views of just
actions are entirely correct; but he must show that his just person will benefit
rather than harm others, so that he will even be willing to suffer injustice from
others rather than do injustice. Could Socrates show this?200

Irwin’s great service is that he shows that Gorgias poses the problem with-
out answering it. But the equally great service of the most radical Socratists
is the celebration of a post-moral Socrates: “Justice’s merit is not its ‘moral-
ity,’ but its making you happier.”201 By systemizing Socratism as ruthlessly
eudaemonist and preserving “morality” only in quotation marks, Penner
unwittingly points to the true battleground, not that of Socratism—for this is
based on Aristotle’s mistaken division between Plato and his Socrates—but
of Platonism. The difference between Irwin’s aporetic awareness of a moral
lacuna in Gorgias and Penner’s dogmatic insistence that there is no place for
“morality” in Socratic justice creates the friction that will ultimately light
the torch of Justice in Republic.202 Despite Penner’s acknowledged debt to
Prichard (see §1), he fails to give due weight to the fact that his predeces-
sor’s claims were anchored in the supposedly “Platonic” defense of justice
based on “psychic harmony” along the Shorter Way. Although Penner clearly
admires the intellectualist means his Socrates uses to achieve a eudaemonist
end in Protagoras far more than he admires those used by his “Plato,” the end

199
 Consider Strauss, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, 85: “The habit of benefiting people is identified
by Xenophon with justice”; cf. Thomas L. Pangle, The Socratic Way of Life: Xenophon’s Memo-
rabilia (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 222n13 (on Thg.) with δικαιότατος at
Smp. 172b5, and δίκαιος at Cra. 428a5.
200
 Irwin, Plato, Gorgias, 224.
201
 Penner, “Desire and Power,” 187n32.
202
 See Plato the Teacher, §21.
276 Chapter 3

remains the same,203 and no matter how it is attained, it is the transcendence of

that eudaemonist end for the sake of the Idea of the Good—that is, the ascent
from the GoodE to the GoodT—that makes Plato a Platonist. As a result, Irwin
sees the real problem more clearly:

Socrates claims, as in the Apology and Crito, that it is always worthwhile to be

just, and that just action matters most for happiness (512d6–e5), as though the
just man were self-sufficient, and independent of other dangers to his happiness.
But the account of justice as mere prudential psychic order does not support this
claim; that order has been shown to be useful, not to be intrinsically good; and it
does not clearly require the kind of just action Socrates defends in the Apology
and Crito, and again in the Gorgias. He has refuted Callicles’ argument that my
good necessarily conflicts with other people’s, because it requires unrestrained
desires; but he has not argued against the possibility of conflict. He has not
shown that an s-just [sc. ‘Socratically-just] man with an orderly soul, seeking
his own good, will always find it worthwhile to benefit others.204

Precisely because it would have been better to add “and practices” after
“defends,” these observations indicate why Apology and Crito (along with
Euthyphro and Phaedo) are best understood as post-Republic dialogues:
it is through his trial and death that Socrates demonstrates that he is “the
good politician,”205 and will therefore always and forever “find it worth
while to benefit others” even if that will require him to make the ultimate
sacrifice.206 Irwin is correct: “mere prudential psychic order” is insufficient
to motivate, let alone to require, the kind of just action—that is, Justice as
the philosopher’s return to the Cave—that will lead to the trial and death of

203
 Cf. Vlastos, Socrates, 176–177, including 177n95; his attempt to find “a release from that form
of egocentricity which is endemic to Socratic eudaemonism, as in all eudaemonism” in “Socratic
piety” is notable, and distinguishes Vlastos from PTI.
204
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 130 (emphasis mine); cf. Brickhouse and Smith, “Socrates on
Goods,” 13–20, and Stemmer, “Grundriss,” 558, on Julia Annas, “Plato and Common Moral-
ity.” Classical Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1978), 437–451; in fact it is only along the Shorter Way that
“Plato’s theory of justice is agent-centered” (444).
205
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 126–127: “The good politician is a craftsman with his eye on the
good (503d5–504a5), and concerned to make the citizens better (504d5–e4, 507a8–e3). Socrates
needs to show that this treatment of the citizens is just—that their ‘improvement’ really benefits
them, and that the s-just man has reason to benefit them. He suggested that a man’s own good
requires friendship with others (507d6–e6); but he has not defended steady and reliable concern
for other people’s interests; why should a wise man not ‘improve’ people for his benefit, not their
own?”
206
 Cf. Daniel Babut, “ΟΥΤΟΣΙ ΑΝΗΡ ΟΥ ΠΑΥΣΕΤΑΙ ΦΛΥΑΡΩΝ: Les Procédés dialectiques
dansle Gorgias et le dessin du dialogue.” Revue des Études Grecques 105 (1992), 59–110, on 110
(last word): “Si naïve que nous paraisse l’anecdote du paysan corinthien converti à la vie philos-
ophique par la lecture du Gorgias [see Riginos §135], il est permis de penser que son inventeur a
mieux saisi que ne l’ont fait plus tard de savants commentateurs le sens profond de cette oeuvre
[sc. Grg.], plaidoyer éloquent et passionné pour la philosophie à laquelle le maître de Platon avait
consacré sa vie, jusqu’à lui en faire finalement le sacrifice.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 277

Socrates,207 prefigured in the serio-comic trial of the other-benefiting doctor

(521e2–522a7).
And it is this same insufficiency, anticipated in Gorgias as Irwin has
shown, that distinguishes the Shorter from the Longer Way in Republic; it
will thereafter be overcome more dramatically by Socrates’ actions—­likewise
anticipated in Gorgias—in Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. Therefore “the first
point about the Shorter Way” (hereafter “SW-1”) must be that it can only be
fully understood in opposition to the Longer. The latter is defined in relation
to the Idea of the Good; the former is not. Happiness, MAXHAP, the prepon-
derance of Pleasure, KGB, or more generally “the good for me”—whether
achieved by intellectualist Socratism or by psychic harmony—is not the Idea
of the Good, for it alone is the Philosopher’s Stone. No other alchemy can
transmute “a s-just man with an orderly soul, seeking his own good” into the
kind of philosopher who “will always find it worth while to benefit others.”
With SW-1 in place, I will use “SW-2” to designate the kind of psychic
harmony that provides the basis for justice in Republic 4, and which, fol-
lowing Irwin’s lead (and of course Cooper’s), I find anticipated in Gorgias.
Although other texts will be considered in this section, the core of its argu-
ment revolves around a single passage (505d6–508b3) that not only illustrates
SW-2 but also “SW-3,” by which I mean the eudaemonist element—long
since prepared in Protagoras, Alcibiades Major, Symposium, Euthydemus,
and Charmides—which will be combined with SW-2 in the Shorter Way.
The following analogy may be helpful at the outset: SW-3 : εὖ πράττειν ::
SW-2 : εὖ ἔχειν.208 In any case, I will use “SW-4” to indicate the connection
between the Hypotheses and Images of the Second Part of the Divided Line
and the Shorter Way; although there are hints of it in Gorgias (508a4–8),
SW-4 comes fully into its own only in Meno, and it will be considered in §15.
In summary, while everyone would admit that SW-1 and SW-2 are aspects
of the Shorter Way in Republic 4, I will show on the basis of 506c5–507c7
that Gorgias prepares the reader to see why SW-3 is an aspect of it as well.
And even though it is implied by SW-1, it can do no harm to emphasize that
Plato expects the student to understand that the Shorter Way, while pedagogi-
cally necessary for ascending to the Longer, is inadequate.209 I will show in
this section that its inadequacy is informally prefigured in Gorgias.
The road that leads from Gorgias to the Shorter Way begins with the one
who is temperate or σώφρων at 491d10. Callicles has just defined justice (τὸ

207
 Cf. Sachs, “A Fallacy.”
208
 By this I mean that neither the passive sense of εὖ πράττειν as “to fare well”/“to be happy” (see §3)
nor the necessarily inactive εὖ ἔχειν—with spiritual εὐεξία (see §8) now configured as τάξις and
κόσμος (503e6–504a10)—can motivate or require Justice (SW-1). See Plato the Teacher, §14.
209
 The formal basis of its inadequacy depends on SW-4, and thus on the connection between the
Second Part of the Divided Line (R. 510b4–6) and the Shorter Way.
278 Chapter 3

δίκαιον) as the rulers—“those who are wise [φρόνιμοι] in the affairs of the
city and brave” (491c6–7)—having more (πλέον ἔχειν) than the others, that
is, the ruled (491d1–3). This means that when Socrates will introduce his
σώφρων at 491d10, he adds the (missing) fourth virtue to the three that have
just been co-opted by Callicles; I will use “SW-5” to represent the fact that
the Shorter Way involves defining these four (distinct) virtues in both City
and Man. The City/Man parallelism (hereafter “SW-6”) is anticipated by the
question Socrates poses in response. Picking up on the active/passive pair
of ἄρχειν/ἄρχεσθαι that will play such an important part in Republic 1 (R.
342e8–9), Socrates transfers both the rulers and the ruled into the individual:

Socrates: What’s that? What are they of themselves? Rulers or ruled? Callicles:
What are you saying? Socrates: I am saying that each of us is a self-ruling over
himself [αὐτὸν ἑαυτοῦ ἄρχοντα]. Or is this in no way necessary—one ruling
oneself [αὐτὸν ἑαυτοῦ ἄρχοντα]—but (only) ruling over others? Callicles: How
do you mean ruling over himself [ἑαυτοῦ ἄρχοντα]?210

Here we are finally offered the definition of temperance made conspicuous

by its absence in Charmides:211 it is the self-control that Socrates displays
ad oculos (Chrm. 155c5–e3),212 and that Critias is likewise shown to lack
(Chrm. 162c3).213 With the enigmatic phrase αὐτὸς ἑαυτοῦ ἄρχων, Socrates
introduces the transfer at the heart of SW-6: in Charmides, the City of the
Shorter Way was anticipated by the relationship between rulers and ruled in
the Happy City (cf. Chrm. 171d8–e7) and the Dream; in Gorgias, Socrates
suggests that both the ruler (αὐτὸς ἄρχων) and the ruled (ἑαυτοῦ) must some-
how be within the individual Man:

Socrates: Nothing complex [οὐδὲν ποικίλον], but just like the many [οἱ πολλοί]:
being temperate and with self in control [ἐγκρατής] of himself [σώφρων ὤν καὶ
ἐγκρατής αὐτὸς ἑαυτοῦ], ruling over the pleasures and desires [αἱ ἡδοναί καὶ
ἐπιθυμιαί] that are in himself [ἐν ἑαυτῷ].214

Since Socrates is at least bifurcating the self, the denial of complexity in

his response to Callicles’ Question must be regarded as a joke, but one

210
 491d4–9.
211
 Cf. Louis-André Dorion, “Enkrateia and the Partition of the Soul in the Gorgias” in Rachel Bar-
ney, Tad Brennan, and Charles Brittain (eds.), Plato and the Divided Self, 33–52 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 39n23; 49n70 bears witness to the importance of Devereux.
212
 Cf. Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 199.
213
 For a temperance-based reading of Grg., see Nicholas P. White, “Rational Prudence in Plato’s
Gorgias” in Dominic J. O’Meara (ed.), Platonic Investigations (Washington DC: Catholic Uni-
versity of America Press, 1995), 139–162.
214
 491d10–e1.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 279

made for a serious purpose. In order to refute Callicles’ definition of τὸ

δίκαιον—where the ruler gains self-aggrandizing control over the ruled exter-
nally215—Socrates has invoked the self-ruling σώφρων, and once αἱ ἡδοναί
καὶ ἐπιθυμιαί are assigned to a part of the soul (already implied by ἐν ἑαυτῷ)
as the ruled, it will be little-case justice, reconfigured as psychic harmony,
that will accomplish the same result in the Shorter Way.
Because he wants to preserve SP as Socratic, Rowe attaches great impor-
tance to the mention of οἱ πολλοί: Socrates is using a popular conception
of the σώφρων as ἐγκρατής that he himself rejects—as Socrates must do
in order to uphold his characteristically Socratic denial of ἀκρασία—only
in order to refute Callicles. It would certainly be an error to maintain that
Plato’s Socrates would never do such a thing: in opposition to the PTI reading
of Protagoras, this is why Socrates invokes οἱ πολλοί in his first attempt to
overcome Protagoras’ initial opposition to the GP Equation (Prt. 351c2–3).
Since I regard the tripartite soul of Republic 4 as an inadequate shortcut (as
per SW-1 and SW-4), I have no problem with Socratist objections to it based
on SP and UV,216 one of which is incompatible with SW-2, the other with
SW-5. But the inadequacy of the Shorter Way does not prove that the Socrat-
ist objections to it are either true or Socratic, at least if we are using Plato’s
dialogues to define “Socratic.” This is why the introduction of the hypotheti-
cal method in Meno—in anticipation of SW-4—is so significant: it will be
the un-hypothetical Idea of the Good that will define the equal inadequacy of
TEA, the uncontested hypothesis (cf. Euthd. 278e3–5)217 on which both the
Shorter Way and systematic Socratism are based.
Equally significant for what will become the pluralized soul of Republic 4
is the introduction of τάξις and κόσμος in Gorgias.218 Socrates begins with the
craftsmen who join “the one thing to the other [τὸ ἕτερον τῷ ἑτέρῳ]” (503e7–
8)—this slippery expression (see §3) makes it unmistakable that we are
turning Many into One—“until the whole [τὸ ἅπαν] is put together [passive

215
 Cf. 491e2–6 (Lamb): “Callicles: You will have your pleasantry! You mean ‘the simpletons’ by
‘the temperate.’ Socrates: How so? Nobody can fail to see that I do not mean that. Callicles: Oh,
you most certainly do, Socrates. For how can a man be happy if he is a slave to anybody at all?”
What makes the Ad hominem Speech effective is that Socrates shows that Callicles himself has
become a slave to the δῆμος (see §9).
216
 Having been introduced to Platonism by Alcibiades Major, I am content to locate the ἡδοναί καὶ
ἐπιθυμιαί that the σώφρων needs to control in the body, not the soul, and to preserve temperance
as the domain of the ἐγκρατής on that (literally) simple-minded basis. For a more sophisticated
alternative to “binary opposition,” see Jorgenson, Embodied Soul, beginning with 8–10n8.
217
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 30 will be quoted below.
218
 For emphasis on a “κόσμος-τάξις-Seinslehre” in Grg., see Krämer, Arete bei Platon und Aristo-
teles, 57–83; connecting the Prinzipienlehre to the tripartite soul of the Shorter Way is “having
become one out of many” (R. 443e1–2), on which see 55 and 87–89; see also Alexander Becker,
Platons »Politeia«: Ein systematische Kommentar (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2017), 193–199. Cf. Plato
the Teacher, 152–155.
280 Chapter 3

of συν-ιστάναι] as a [single] thing having been both arranged [τεταγμένον]

and ordered [κεκοσμημένον]” (503e8–504a1).219 An even greater transfer is
then accomplished when κόσμος assumes its cosmological dimension as “the
whole [τὸ ὅλον]” (508a3). This time it is not οἱ πολλοί but rather “the wise
[οἱ σοφοί]” who help Socrates lay the theoretical foundations for the tripar-
tite soul of Republic 4, with temperance and justice now linked to a cosmic
“community [κοινωνία]” and “friendship,” and intemperance (ἀκολασία)
equated with ἀ-κοσμία (507e6–508a4). There is good reason to identify these
οἱ σοφοί with the Pythagoreans,220 and SW-4 explains why there are echoes
here of Republic 7 (note the emphasis on συνιστάναι at R. 530a4–8) where
the Pythagoreans are mentioned (R. 530d7–9) in the context of the κοινωνία
between five mathematical sciences (R. 531c10) climaxing with Astronomy
and Harmony. After chiding Callicles for his neglect of geometry (508a4–8),
another of those sciences, Socrates challenges him or anyone else either to
refute or to accept as true the λόγος that links Happiness to the acquisition of
justice and temperance (508a8–b3).
My claim throughout is that we are challenged to discover for ourselves
why the Shorter Way must not be accepted as simply true, and because SW-4
depends on applying the Divided Line forward to Republic 7 and backward
to Republic 4, we won’t be able to discover the theoretical explanation of its
inadequacy for quite some time. We will, however, be well prepared to sense
its inadequacy in practice beforehand, and thus to be suspicious of it from the
start. All good teachers carefully prepare their students to master the most dif-
ficult problems they will eventually need to solve, and once we acknowledge
that Plato is a great teacher, it makes good sense that he will prepare us for
Republic through the most perfectly Platonic example of τάξις and κόσμος:
the ROPD. Just as Meno prepares us for the Second Part of the Divided Line,
so too does Gorgias prepare us for what will become the Shorter Way. That
preparation is most obvious in Socrates’ remarkable speech between 506c5
and 507c7 to which it is now time to turn, considering first the portion of
it relevant to SW-2. But in the decisive respect, 506c5–507c7 resembles
the more difficult passage we have just been considering (507e3–6), where
the “cosmological” or SW-2 element (507e6–8) is linked to a eudaemonist
(or SW-3) end (507e8–508b3), and indeed this same linkage will be visible
throughout the speech as a whole (507c8–508b2).

219
 Joined first by these two perfect passive participles, he then accomplishes the transfer of τάξις and
κόσμος—paired four times between 504a7 and 504d1—from the body (as its health) to the soul
(its justice and temperance at 504d3). For this move the doubled four-part analogies have already
prepared us (see §8).
220
 In addition to Dalfen, Gorgias, Plato, 430–433 (on 507e f.), see John Palmer, “The Pythagoreans
and Plato” in Carl A. Huffman (ed.), A History of Pythagoreanism, 204–226 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2014), on 205–210.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 281

Socrates: ‘But further, we are good—both we and everything else that is good
[καὶ τἆλλα πάντα ὅσ᾽ ἀγαθά ἐστιν]—by some virtue [ἀρετή] coming to be pres-
ent [participial form of παραγίγνεσθαι]?’ ‘In my view this must be so, Callicles.’
‘But surely the virtue of each thing, whether of an implement or of a body, or
again of a soul or any live creature, does not come to be present most beautifully
by accident, but by an order [τάξις] or rightness [ὀρθοτής or art [τέχνη] that is
apportioned to each. Is that so?’ ‘I certainly agree.’221

Jumping into the speech in medias res—the mention of τάξις creates the
link to SW-2—it is noteworthy that the language used here places Gorgias
between Laches and Meno: the use of the verb παραγίγνεσθαι to describe
the presence of ἀρετή links it to the one (La. 189e3–190b5), the claim that
we become good by the presence of virtue is echoed in the other (Men.
87d8–e1). But the claim, not found in Meno, that all other things (καὶ
τἆλλα πάντα) become good in the same way is odd, and not only because
it is untrue of the Idea of the Good (cf. SW-1), which does not come to be
good by virtue of anything, and is what it is only by virtue of itself. Nor do
we need to wait for Republic: Socrates has just made the claim that we are
pleased by the presence of what is pleasant (506c9–d1), and that seems
right, but would those who claim that Pleasure is the Good say that it is
good thanks to the presence of ἀρετή?222 On the other hand, we are now
operating in a world where a soul can have εὐεξία (see §8), so we may
readily grant that bodies, tools, and all other things have ἀρετή when they
are good—as in “the virtue of the knife is its sharpness”—and move on:

Socrates: ‘Is the virtue of each thing, then, that it has been arranged and ordered
[τεταγμένον καὶ κεκοσμημένον] by arrangement [τάξις]?’ ‘I at least should say
so.’ ‘Hence is it a certain order [κόσμος τις] proper [οἰκεῖος] to each existent
thing, that by coming to be in each makes it good?’ ‘That is my view.’ ‘So then
a soul which has its own proper order [κόσμος] is better than one which is unor-
dered [ακόσμητος]?’ ‘Necessarily.’ ‘But further, one that has order [κόσμος]
is orderly [κοσμίος]?’ ‘Of course it will be.’ ‘And the orderly one is temperate
[σώφρων]?’ ‘Most necessarily.’ ‘So the temperate soul is good.’ ‘For my part,
I can find nothing to say in objection to this, my dear Callicles; but if you can,
do instruct me.’223

Unfortunately, we move from the frying pan into the fire, for here we
discover why the One cannot possibly be good, let alone the Good: nothing

221
 506d2–8.
222
 And to add the other member of the pair at R. 505b5–6: what shall we say of Knowledge or
φρόνησις, as in, for example, KGB? Is not KGB itself the source of ἀρετή, and could it become
good by the presence of that which it is?
223
 506e1–507a3 (Lamb modified).
282 Chapter 3

unitary has any parts that can be ordered or arranged, whether properly or
otherwise.224 If taken as a matter of doctrine, then, the claim that it is by
τάξις and κόσμος that a thing becomes good once again—in accordance with
SW-1—excludes the Idea of the Good or indeed any canonical “Platonic
Form,” none of which has parts.225 But if taken as preparation for the Shorter
Way—in anticipation of SW-2—the claims made here are perfectly proper,
especially when they provoke a protest from the reader, as they ostentatiously
do not from Callicles:

Callicles: Proceed, good sir. Socrates: ‘I say, then, that if the temperate [ἡ
σώφρων] is good but the one that has endured what’s opposite to the temperate
[ἡ σώφρων] is bad; and that one was both senseless [ἡ ἄφρων] and intemperate
[ἀκόλαστος].’ ‘Certainly πάνυ γε].’226

Although Callicles fails to object, the same cannot be said of the commen-
tators. Dodds draws attention to the ambiguity in the meaning of σώφρων,
which is alternately “sensible” (in opposition to ἄφρων, which is simply
“senseless”) and “self-controlled” (in opposition to ἀκόλαστος);227 he also
perceptively notes how Protagoras has prepared the reader to detect this
ambiguity.228 As for Irwin, the strength of his Socratist commentary is that
Socrates’ statements are repeatedly measured against whether or not he can
prove that τάξις and κόσμος are good for the agent.229 But in Plato’s Moral
Theory—where his canvass is broader—he responds effectively to Dodds,
who had detected a possibly illegitimate slide between κόσμος to κόσμιος,230
by considering what will happen next:

Dodds and Adkins [citations deleted] object to the move in 507el from kosmia
to sōphrōn. I do not think this is indefensible—for Socrates’ argument against
Callicles has shown that the kosmos required will include the control of desires
which might be held to make someone sōphrōn. The trouble is in the move from

224
 Not also the (self-contradictory) implications for UV in Thomas Brickhouse, “Ziegler on Plato’s
Gorgias and Psychological Egoism.” Personalist 60 (1979), 451–454, on 452. Cf. F. C. White,
“The Good in Plato’s Gorgias.” Phronesis 35, no. 2 (1990), 117–127, on 125n11.
225
 Cf. Thompson, Gorgias of Plato, viii..
226
 507a4–7.
227
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 336 (on 507a7): “Plato proceeds to take advantage of the ambiguity to
show that the σώφρων must possess the other virtues.” Cf. Irwin, Plato, Gorgias, 221 (on 507a);
note that a Socratist reading requires the cognitive aspect; a reading consistent with SW-2 requires
the affective.
228
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 336 (on 507a7): “Cf. the more elaborate ‘proof’ at Prot. 332a–333b which
exploits a similar verbal ambiguity, though its logical form is different.” Given that the passage
gives two opposites to σώφρων, he should also have cited the ‘one thing/one opposite principle’
at Prt. 333c8–9.
229
 See Irwin, Plato, Gorgias, 219 (on 506d–e).
230
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 333 (on 506c5–507a3).
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 283

sophrosunē, so understood, to dikaiosunē, if that is taken to include concern for

other people’s interests.231

This objection draws the line in the right place, especially since this move
not only occurs in what follows, but more importantly—as Thompson had
already noted in 1871—in the move from Gorgias to Republic.
With respect to criticism, Thompson is perhaps too succinct,232 but his
positive remarks about the significance of this passage as a whole—“most
important as determining the scope of the entire dialogue”233—demon-
strate that his commentary should not be regarded as altogether obso-
lete. He writes the following in the commentary’s Introduction: “order
or Harmony is the germinal idea of the Republic, as it gives unity and
coherence to the parts, otherwise ill-connected, of the present dialogue
[sc. Gorgias].”234 Despite the fact that Dodds objects to it,235 Irwin would
confirm Thompson’s important point,236 and the relevant passage in his
commentary must be quoted:

This passage, taken together with the context, clearly identifies σωφροσύνη with
ἡ σύμπασα ἀρετή. ‘Temperance’ is that capital virtue which includes all others,
as courage, justice, and piety. It is, in a word, the right state of the soul, in which
all the parts of our complex nature are kept in due subordination, and so orga-
nized as to form a harmonious whole. This pre-eminence, as is well known, is
in the Republic assigned to δικαιοσύνη, the sister virtue; Sophrosyne being there
relegated to a subordinate province in the moral economy. But if this theory is
less mature than that in the Republic, it is an advance upon the speculations pur-
sued in the Charmides, where Socrates is made to arrive at the merely negative
conclusion that σωφροσύνη is not a mode of ἐπιστήμη.237

Thompson is unfamiliar with the devices that will later be used to revise the
apparently negative result of Charmides on the basis of KGB. More impor-
tantly, and precisely because he is writing in a pre-Socratist environment,
Thompson can unabashedly describe the move from Gorgias to Republic in

231
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 312n18. Cf. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, 273–274.
232
 Thompson, Gorgias of Plato, 130 (on εἰ ἡ σώφρων ἀγαθή): “We cannot in Eng. give the antithesis
between σώφρων and ἄφρων, which even in Greek is a false one, for the true antitheta are ἄφρων
and ἔμφρων.”
233
 Thompson, Gorgias of Plato, 129 (on Ἀλλὰ μὲν δὴ ἥ γε ἀρετή), i.e., 506d5.
234
 Thompson, Gorgias of Plato, viii.
235
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 335: “This last [sc. ‘in the Republic he (Socrates) subordinates all (virtues)
to δικαιοσύνη. This does not mean (as Thompson thought) that the Republic is ‘more mature’ than
the Gorgias: it means that in the system of mutual implication [i.e., of the virtues] the part always
implies the whole [thus upholding UV], wherever you choose to start.”
236
 Cf. Irwin, Plato, Gorgias, 221 (on 507a–b): “The recognition of non-rational desires (contrary to
the Socratic Paradox; cf. W. H. Thompson, viii f.) has made temperance the basic virtue.”
237
 Thompson, Gorgias of Plato, 130 (on Ἡ ἄρα σώφρων ψυχὴ ἀγαθή); abbreviation expanded.
284 Chapter 3

terms of Plato’s progress: Plato is outgrowing his “Socratic prejudices,”238

and SP in particular.239 But Thompson is likewise writing before both Prich-
ard and Sachs,240 and fails to see that δικαιοσύνη in Republic—when, that
is, the Shorter Way is taken to be its doctrine—suffers from the same prob-
lem that σωφροσύνη does in Gorgias: it cannot motivate, let alone require,
Irwin’s “concern for other people’s interests” or indeed action of any kind.241
Although Thompson is right to regard the advent or rather restoration of
σωφροσύνη as self-control as improving upon Charmides,242 he is wrong to
assume that the Shorter Way improves upon Gorgias. It is rather that Gorgias
prepares us to detect more easily the flaw at the heart of the Shorter Way, and
it does so precisely because an inactive, self-concerned, internally ordered,
harmonious, and apolitical quiescence is far more appropriate to σωφροσύνη
than it is to δικαιοσύνη.
The effectiveness of basanistic pedagogy ultimately depends on the read-
er’s willingness to cry: “foul.” Socrates must be interrupted, exactly as Crito
interrupts him in Euthydemus (Euthd. 290e1–2): Cleinias did not say the
things that Socrates says that he said. Plato not only models the kind of inter-
ruption he expects from us but has been making it possible even for a child to
see through Socrates from the start, for it is not Socrates’ pesky neighbor who
continually badgers him in Hippias Major (Hp. Ma. 286c5–d2). Most impor-
tantly, Plato can place things in the mouth of Socrates that earlier dialogues
in the ROPD have already trained us to recognize as problematic, just as he
did with εὖ πράττειν in the First Protreptic (see §3). And since he has recently
given us a refresher course on the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy in Charmides (see
§6), it stands to reason that he will use it again in Gorgias, since the stakes
are incomparably higher now: those who fail to recognize the deliberate
inadequacy of the Shorter Way will not receive from Plato’s hands the torch
of Justice, and he counts on 506c5–507c7 to prepare us for this recognition.
But it is not only or even primarily the content of 506c5–507c7 that Plato uses
to help us to recognize its inadequacy: it is its unusual form. To begin with, he
has just challenged the reader to enter into dialogue with Socrates at the moment
that Callicles threatens to withdraw from it with the plaintive “who else wishes
to?” (505d6), and between that question and the beginning of the speech at
506c5, he twice finds a way to challenge us to decide if what he is about to say is

238
 Thompson, Gorgias of Plato, viii: “Not indeed that Plato affirms this dogma, that Virtue is Knowl-
edge, in the Gorgias. It was one of those Socratic prejudices from which he gradually emancipated
himself, as his Ethical views matured; and in the present dialogue he proposes a theory of Virtue
substantially the same with that which is more fully developed in the Republic.”
239
 Thompson, Gorgias of Plato, vii–viii.
240
 See Plato the Teacher, 217–218.
241
 See Plato the Teacher, 145–149.
242
 The parallels between Chrm. and R. serve to destabilize the Shorter Way’s City in the same way
that Grg. destabilizes its Man.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 285

true or not (505e3–506a5 and 506b6–c1); he renews that doubled challenge after
the speech is over (507c8–9 and 508a8–b3). And then there is the elephant in the
room: the speech under consideration—hereafter “the Feigned Dialogue”—is
one of the most remarkable in the dialogues, ridiculing as it does Socratic dia-
logue itself. Since Callicles has (temporarily) withdrawn—note that he wavers
in response to the Ad hominem Speech only later—Socrates plays the roles of
both questioner and respondent, contributing on his own the kind of perfunctory
πάνυ γε responses (e.g., 507a7) that we have long since grown tired of seeing
him effortlessly extort from others.243 The Feigned Dialogue in Gorgias marks
an important turning point that deserves some retrospective comment.
Thanks to the outsize role that “[the Socratic] Elenchus” (ἔλεγχος) plays
in his account of Socratism, Vlastos claimed that Hippias Major, Lysis, and
Euthydemus were written after Gorgias and immediately before the “transi-
tional” Meno.244 His comment on Euthydemus in “The Demise of the Elen-
chus in Euthydemus, Lysis, and Hippias Major” is particularly important:
“Prevented by the eristic clowning of the two sophists from using elenctic
refutation against them, Socrates does the serious business of the dialogue
in a protreptic discourse to young Cleinias.”245 In §3, I made the case that
“the serious business” of Euthydemus is to teach the reader to recognize
the use of fallacy, and that the misattribution of words that leads to Crito’s
Interruption,246 “the eristic clowning of the two sophists,” and the “protreptic
discourse to young Cleinias” all advance that project. For Vlastos, the latter
represents “the demise of the elenchus”; I see it rather as its transfer to and
rebirth in the reader. Having shown us Socrates refuting others, it is now
our turn to refute Socrates (and others) when, that is, Plato shows him “not
to speak beautifully [μὴ καλῶς λέγειν]” (506b8–c1), and thus provokes us to
ask ourselves “what is false [τί ψεῦδος]” (505e5) amidst the many true things
he is saying. In that sense, Vlastos inadvertently proves that Plato is more
Socratic in Euthydemus than his own Socrates:

A further way in which Socrates now breaks with the modalities of elenctic
argument [sc. in Euthydemus] is to ground his doctrine in a proposition—the
universal desire for happiness—which he presents as uncontestable in principle:
to question it, he says, would be ‘ridiculous’ and ‘senseless’ (278e4–5). Such a
move is never made in a preceding dialogue: there everything is contestable.247

243
 Typical is White, “The Good in Plato’s Gorgias”; the passage is analyzed on 122–127 but without
mention of its most disconcerting feature.
244
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 29–33.
245
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 30.
246
 Cf. Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 30: “Cleinias, a teenager, is docility itself. When he does contribute
something of his own (to everyone’s surprise), it is to anticipate the very thing that is needed to
round out Socrates’ thought (290b–d).”
247
 Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 30.
286 Chapter 3

And so it remains on my account, with this proposition in particular—

thanks to the Fallacy at its heart—remaining paradigmatically contestable:
“all human beings wish to εὖ πράττειν” (Euthd. 278e3). As the founding
father of Socratism, Vlastos is more interested in its methodology than
in its truth.248 He therefore fails to acknowledge what Irwin aptly called
“the importance of Euthydemus,”249 and thus the anti-Socratist implica-
tions of his importantly Socratist claim: the eudaemonist first principle of
systematic Socratism is incompatible with the paradigmatically “Socratic
Elenchus.” The error, as I have been trying to show, is basic. It was never
Plato’s purpose to offer a historically accurate portrait of Socrates nor was
he writing dialogues to mark the evolving course of his own intellectual
development. The purpose of the Academy and thus of the eternal curricu-
lum preserved in the dialogues is always the student’s academic progress,
and even when Plato uses Callicles to reveal his own development in Gor-
gias, his end is ours.
Despite the chronological and physical proximity to Plato, it is the spiri-
tual gulf between Aristotle and his teacher that determines the interpretive
value of his testimony, and it is because he never accepted the Idea at the
curriculum’s dead center—that is, the GoodT—that he postulated the divi-
sion between the Socrates of the pre-Republic dialogues and Plato speaking
through Socrates in Republic. Failing to embrace Plato’s ethical and onto-
logical end, Aristotle could only be an unsatisfactory guide to his teacher’s
frequently comical pedagogical means. With a musician’s genius and a true
Socratic’s irrepressible sense of ironical humor, Plato is always using his
“Socrates,” and all his other characters, to educate us by creating a form of
writing that demands the reader’s active participation: his dialogues are not
subject to the critique of writing in Phaedrus precisely because the pedagogy
they embody is basanistic, and thus designed to test us by means of deliberate
fallacy, soul-repelling moral ugliness, and methodological inadequacy. If this
is cheating, then Plato cheats.250 But it would better honor Vlastos to say that
Plato kept the Elenchus alive. Not even in Timaeus, the Eleatic Dyad, or in
the ponderous Laws is the ἔλεγχος dead: the topology of its employment has
merely shifted to the dialogue between student and text, or rather between
Plato the Teacher and you.
In Gorgias, Plato is intent on preparing us to read the kind of text that
I am calling “basanistic.” As proof, consider the first and longest of the two
passages in which Socrates, who now realizes that the refusal of Callicles to

248
 First announced in his 1956 “Introduction” to Prt. in the context of SP.
249
 Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 52.
250
 See Vlastos, Socrates, 132–156.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 287

answer his questions will require him to play both parts, warns the reader
about what is to come in the Feigned Dialogue:

Socrates: Still, if we are going to do this, for my part I [ἔγωγε] think it is neces-
sary for all of us [πάντες ἡμεῖς] to be competitive [φιλονίκῶς ἔχειν] in relation
to knowing [τὸ εἰδέναι] the truth, what it is [τὸ ἀληθὲς τί ἐστιν], concerning the
things of which we are speaking and what is false [τὶ ψεῦδος]; for it is a common
good [κοινὸν ἀγαθόν] to all for this to become clear. I [ἐγώ] will go through
with the argument [ὁ λόγος] as it seems to me to be, but if to any of you [τις
ὑμῶν] I seem to be confirming to myself things that aren’t so [μὴ τὰ ὄντα], it
is necessary [sc. for τις ὑμῶν] to take hold of for the purpose of finding fault,
[to] reprehend, [to] attack [LSJ on ἀντιλαμβάνεσθαι] and to refute [ἐλέγχειν].251

All readers will recognize one of this book’s epigraphs but sympathetic read-
ers will understand why my translation has preserved the emphatic use of ἐγώ
and ἔγωγε: Plato is speaking to all of us (πάντες ἡμεῖς), and more specifically
to that one among you (τις ὑμῶν) whose competitive passion for knowing the
truth—and what could be more sublime than this τὸ ἀληθὲς τί ἐστιν—will
prompt her to reprehend and to refute. Naturally Vlastos could find plenty of
what he called “Elenchus” in the exchanges between Socrates ant the trio of
Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles, and indeed his favorite text (508e6–509a7)—at
least the one that I heard him quote most frequently252—is found shortly after
the Feigned Dialogue; in his honor, I will hereafter refer to it as “the Vlastos
Passage.” But strong though “adamant and steel” may be, they are trumped in
moral strength by the purest gold, and Plato expects to find the same βάσανος
in τις ὑμῶν that Socrates had found in Callicles. By depicting Socrates giv-
ing pro forma responses to his own questions, the Feigned Dialogue offers
us a parody of Socratic dialectic for the first time but not for the last. Plato
will require readers who are still prepared to φιλονίκῶς ἔχειν when Timaeus,
the Eleatic, and Athenian Strangers offer them other parodies, no longer so
clearly marked as this one is. Even after offering us nuggets that are true—in
Gorgias, the claim that it is baser to do an injustice than to suffer one stands
out—they will not be true because they are bound by arguments of adamant
and steel but because we have confirmed them; until then, Socrates does not
know. We must test what is golden in Plato’s dialogues.
The juxtaposition of “you” and “I” in this passage explains why Plato felt
the need to introduce himself in Charmides-Gorgias: we can only look Plato
the Teacher in the eye when we recognize that he is addressing us directly for
the first time in the dialogues (R. 520b5–c5), challenging us, and giving birth

251
 505e3–506a3
252
 See Vlastos, Socrates, 84, and especially Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 137.
288 Chapter 3

in the beautiful through us.253 When Callicles enters the dialogue, he asks:
“Is Socrates serious about these things or is he kidding around?” (481b6–7).
This was the question that made Plato Socrates’ best student: he realized
that the correct answer could only be a humorous and musical “Yes.” As he
says here, we must be filled with competitive zeal for knowing (τὸ εἰδέναι)
what is true and what is false, and Plato will hereafter be mixing the two
with great frequency and ever increasing degree of difficulty. The Feigned
Dialogue is easy precisely because it is merely a feigned dialogue. But even
though Socratic dialogue is here made to look staged and artificial, the need to
ἐλέγχειν remains stronger than ever, and by concluding this Golden Passage
by pairing ἐλέγχειν with ἀντιλαμβάνεσθαι—which suggests that we too have
our role to play, and must take up our own elenctic task in response—Plato
reminds us that it will take some θύμος to think for oneself, and thus to ask,
when confronted by his own apparently authoritative discourses: τὸ ἀληθὲς,
τί ἐστιν? Only when we challenge those discourses, as he wants us to do, will
we once more discover him.
And with that said, it is now time to turn back to the Feigned Dialogue and
more specifically to the SW-3 portion of it, which will culminate, as it must,
with the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy. The basis of that necessity must be clearly
understood: the shortcut at the center of the Shorter Way is the claim that by
doing well we will fare well.

When does a man live well? Socrates’ answer is evidently (e.g., Euthydemus
279a2–3 with c5–8, e1–2, 280c6–8, 281b2–4, 282a1–7 [all, of course, from the
First Protreptic]; and see also Republic 1.353e10 with 354a1): (V2) A man lives
well = he is happy = he does well = he does good acts.254

It is harmless and even salutary to persuade most of your students that the
reason to do the right thing is that it secures their own happiness, and thus
that morality is in their self-interest. But the immoral element in this means/
end argument must eventually come to light, and the most radical Socratists
have inadvertently performed a great service to Plato by celebrating it. On the
other hand, Plato has done no great service to those who ground their position
in the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy,255 as Penner has just done.

253
 The need to establish personal contact with Plato also explains the close connection between
Letters and R., especially between the Third Wave of Paradox in book 5 and the story of Plato’s
disastrous “Sicilian expedition.” See Plato the Teacher, §24.
254
 Penner, “Socrates on Virtue and Motivation,” 141.
255
 So too Brickhouse and Smith, “Socrates on Goods,” 13–14, including 13n17: “logic requires them
[sc. ‘doing well’ and happiness] to be used as synonyms.” Quite apart from what logic requires,
Brickhouse and Smith require it to resolve the difference between 8 and 11 (on 27)—the first is
based on the active, the second depends on the passive sense of εὖ πράττειν—in 12 (“living or
doing well, and thus of being happy”).
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 289

The reason that Ascent to the Beautiful precedes Ascent to the Good is
because the GB Equation is no more true than the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy
(when, that is, “the Good” in question is merely the GoodE), and that is why
Penner must affirm it as well: “(V3) A man does good acts = he does fine
acts.”256 The initial truth, already obvious in Alcibiades Major, is that doing
fine acts can get you killed; after showing us that there is nothing finer than
τὸ καλόν in Symposium, disambigating “does good acts” becomes the ongo-
ing project in the dialogues that follow. Moving closer to Plato’s truth is the
Myth; it must emerge in Gorgias for the same reason that the Fallacy has
definitively lost its grip in Charmides (see §6): do the right thing first, and
then eventually, perhaps, you will fare well. But the whole truth is more beau-
tiful and therefore nobler: do the right thing without any regard for whether
or not you will fare well, in this world or the next.
For the present, however, it is the core claim that must be hammered: just
as the Eudaimonist Shortcut affirms the truth of the GB Equation, the Shorter
Way affirms the truth of the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy; as a result, the preparatory
Feigned Dialogue must culminate with it. It is therefore important to keep that
culmination in mind when the verb πράττειν makes its entrance at 507a7–b1.
But even before it does, the verbal adjective πρακτέον (“it must be done”) has
already appeared at 506c8: it is not the Good that must be done for the sake
of the Pleasant but rather the reverse (506c7–9).257 The ground has therefore
been prepared for the Fallacy from the start even though πράττειν appears
closer to the Feigned Dialogue’s end than to its beginning:

Socrates: ‘And further, the temperate man [ὁ σώφρων] would do [πράττειν] the
proper things [τὰ προσήκοντα] as regards both gods and men; for he could not
manifest temperance [σωφρονεῖν] while doing [participial form of πράττειν] the
improper things [τὰ μὴ προσήκοντα].’ ‘These things must necessarily be thus
[ἀνάγκη ταῦτ᾽ εἶναι οὕτω].’258

256
 Penner, “Socrates on Virtue and Motivation,” 141.
257
 Verbal adjectives are likewise hammered in the passage that immediately follows the Feigned
Dialogue: “Socrates: and if these things are true, it is necessary for the man wishing to be happy
[εὐδαίμων εἶναι], as it seems, to pursue [διωκτέον] and practice [ἀσκητέον] temperance while on
the other hand it is necessary to flee [φευκτέον] intemperance as fast as the feet of each of us can;
also it is especially necessary to prepare ourselves [παρασκευαστέον], on the one hand, in no way
to be in need of punishment, but if one should need it—either himself, or someone else of his
intimates, either private citizen or city—it is necessary for the just penalty to be levied [ἐπιθετέον
δίκην] and to be punished [κολαστέον], if he is to be happy [εὐδαίμων εἶναι]” (506c9–d6). Note
the return to the Rhetorical Triad in anticipation of 508e6–509a7.
258
 507a7–b1. Cf. White, “The Good in Plato’s Gorgias,” 126n11: “Such a statement [sc. 507a7–9,
i.e., as far as ‘gods and men’] would be totally baffling if Plato means by temperance something
narrow, such as the internal regulation of desires.” Instead of supplanting what Socrates says with
what Plato means, we would do better to be baffled.
290 Chapter 3

To elucidate by means of boot-camp jargon, τὰ προσήκοντα are the things

“it would behoove you” to πράττειν. But the first thing to note is that when
εὖ πράττειν means “to fare well”—and thus when it can be equated with “to
be happy [εὐδαιμονεῖν],” as in the First Protreptic (Euthd. 280b6)—it takes
no direct object. The earlier (SW-2) portion of the Feigned Dialogue has said
nothing about what ὁ σώφρων would do, let alone what it would behoove him
to do: his τάξις and κόσμος were strictly internal.259 In that context, to trans-
late σωφρονεῖν as “manifesting temperance” is therefore misleading since it
suggests that “to be of sound mind” (a better translation) takes a direct object,
which it doesn’t. Insofar as the verb πράττειν applies to the SW-2 σώφρων,
it involves no external action; this will be confirmed in the case of the just
man on the Shorter Way (R. 443c9–444a2), and it is for this that we are being
prepared by the slide in the meaning of σωφρονεῖν here.
In the Feigned Dialogue, repeatedly giving πράττειν a direct object and
linking σωφρονεῖν with τὰ προσήκοντα are necessary to effect the fallacious
slide from an inactive SW-2 τάξις and κόσμος (as εὖ ἔχειν-εὐεξία) to an
equally inactive SW-3 εὖ πράττειν (as εὐδαιμονεῖν) by means of a strictly
temporary dance with the truth: the virtues require us to do τὰ προσήκοντα
whether or not doing them makes us happy.

Socrates: ‘And again, while doing [participial form of πράττειν] the proper
things [τὰ προσήκοντα] as regards men, he would be doing [πράττειν] just
things, and as regards the gods, pious ones; and he who is doing [participial
form of πράττειν] what is the just and pious things must necessarily [ἀνάγκη]
be just and pious [δίκαιος καὶ ὅσιος].’ ‘That is so.’260

Here the virtues are defined by the things we do (τὰ προσήκοντα) and not,
as the SW-2 portion of the Feigned Dialogue suggested, by how we are (εὖ
ἔχειν). This is appropriate: it is in relation to others—not in relation to the
internal τάξις and κόσμος of our souls—that we are just. Plausible in the case
of temperance, the exclusively internal account of justice we will be offered
in Republic 4 is already being undermined here since we are being warned
that it governs our external actions toward other human beings.
And then there is the question of piety, and of doing τὰ προσήκοντα to
the gods. Beginning in Protagoras, Socrates has suggested that there is a
link between justice and piety (Prt. 330c2–332a1) and this link reappears
in this anomalous pairing of δίκαιος καὶ ὅσιος. It is anomalous because the
usual pair—not surprisingly given that one purpose of Gorgias is to prepare
the reader for Republic 4—consists of justice and temperance (492a8–c1,

259
 In anticipation of the Harmonious Man in Republic 4; see Plato the Teacher, 145–158.
260
 507b1–4.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 291

504d3–e2, 507d8–508b1, and 519a2). By contrast the emphasis on piety

and the gods further destabilizes the Shorter Way, first of all for the obvious
reason that piety will not be included among the four virtues in Republic 4
(SW-5). Why is that? I suggest that it is for the obvious reason that piety can-
not be shown to be a virtue on the Shorter Way.261 Consider the difficulty of
providing a eudaemonist argument for piety: if there are no gods, the “happi-
ness” we gain from serving them is as fallacious as the kind we gain from the
“goods” offered to us by cookery. If, on the other hand, there are gods, they
are necessarily external to us, resembling the Idea of the Good in this regard
(cf. SW-1). If we are still asking ourselves what is true and what is false in the
Feigned Dialogue, we come closest to the former the farther away we move
from SW-2, SW-3, and SW-5.
On the verge of the reappearance of the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy that creates
the link to SW-2, Socrates first revisits Laches:

Socrates: And surely he must necessarily [ἀνάγκη] be brave [ἀνδρεῖος] also: for
indeed it is not [the part] of a temperate man [οὐ σώφρονος ἀνδρός ἐστιν] either
to pursue or to flee [οὔτε διώκειν οὔτε φεύγειν] the things that are not proper
[ἃ μὴ προσήκει] but what it is necessary to flee and to pursue [φεύγειν καὶ
διώκειν]—both things and people and pleasures and pains—even while remain-
ing [ὑπομένειν] wherever it is necessary to endure [καρτερεῖν].262

The obvious point is that Socrates is using the words of Laches to describe
courage (ὑπομένειν and καρτερεῖν are paired at La. 193a9) rather than invok-
ing the apparently Socratic approach of Critias, based on KGB.
The reason this distinction is important is because KGB is the Socratist
basis for UV. In their pre-Socratist commentaries, both Thompson and Dodds
assume that this passage is upholding UV,263 so it is only the Socratist Irwin
who grasps—with crystal clarity—the crucial point, and he therefore must be
quoted at length:

The attitude of the passage [sc. 507a7–c7] to UV is interesting. Socrates claims

that a single taxis of the soul will be necessary and sufficient for all the virtues—
it assumes the role filled by knowledge in earlier dialogues. But the G. shows
how to distinguish the virtues; sophrosune is linked to kosmos (507a1; cf. Ch.
159b3) and courage to endurance (507b8; cf. La. 192b9). It is striking that these
distinguishing features are exactly the non-cognitive components of the virtues
which were eliminated from the discussion in the La. and Ch. and were ignored

261
 Cf. Vlastos, Socrates, 176 (emphasis in the original): “Piety is doing god’s work to benefit human
beings.” Vlastos’s reliance on texts from Ap. and Euthpr. at the conclusion of “Socratic Piety”
(172–178) is additional indirect evidence for regarding them as post-Republic dialogues.
262
 507b4–8.
263
 Cf. Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 335 with Thompson, viii–ix and 130 (on ἡ σύμπασα ἀρετή).
292 Chapter 3

in the Pr.—for the good reason that they were irrelevant if KSV [sc. ‘Knowl-
edge is Sufficient for Virtue’] was true (see III.14.1). The reappearance of these
non-cognitive components in the G. is associated with the treatment of virtue as
a taxis of the soul—dubiously compatible with KSV. The view hinted at here
is fully developed in the R., where Plato has the account of the soul he needs to
justify and explain this talk of psychic order.264

It is impossible to improve on this analysis: Irwin has anatomized the link

between the Feigned Dialogue and the Shorter Way while showing the gulf
between both of them and a KGB-based (i.e., Socratist) justification of UV.265
Of course this analysis depends entirely on a Socratist reading of Protagoras,
Laches,266 and Charmides.267 In §6, I called the soundness of that reading
into question. But I never denied that Plato is tempting (some of) his readers
with it, and as representative of those, Irwin is here confirming his “mixed-
message” interpretation of Gorgias, and to that extent it is perfect.
The problem arises because he assumes that one of the two incompatible
positions must be true:

The Gorgias first claims that whoever has learnt justice is just, implying the
truth of KSV and the rejection of good-independent desires. It claims later that
justice is psychic harmony, implying the existence of good-independent desires
and the falsity of KSV. Socrates must reject at least one claim; but he can reject
neither without serious damage to his position. He tells Callicles that to avoid
unjust action we need a craft which will tell us how to avoid it (509d7–e7); but
he does not explain how a craft will produce psychic order. His argument has
not supported the CA, but undermined it.268

As already indicated, the most radical Socratists will cleave to what “the Gor-
gias first claims,” and in his steadfast refusal to accept that path—as editor of
a commentary on the dialogue he could hardly have done otherwise—Irwin
demonstrates his intellectual integrity. But as for his “serious damage” claim,

264
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 312n18.
265
 For the link between Irwin’s “KSV” and KGB, see Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 104 (on Prt.):
“Socrates defends KSV; he expects that an examination of the many’s reasons for denying KSV
will help them to decide about UV ([Prt.] 351bl–3). He is right; if KSV is true, then each of the
virtues includes the same knowledge of good and evil [sc. KGB], and nothing more—they are all
the same virtue.”
266
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 86.
267
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 128: “Elsewhere [i.e., before Grg.], however, Socrates has assumed
or argued that there are no non-rational good-independent desires to conflict with desires resting
on belief about the good; and if there are none, we need not control them. On this view, the central
element in the Gorgias’s account of virtue, self-control, must be unnecessary. That is why the
Charmides ignores self-control; the one apparent example of psychic conflict (155c–e) is never
discussed in the dialogue.”
268
 Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, 128.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 293

that all depends on what we take “his position” to be. Precisely because Irwin
sees significant problems for both of his either/or alternatives, he inadver-
tently points to the proper solution, which in German is described as keine
von beiden.
Nor is it difficult to show why this “neither of either” is appropriate: the
operative “his” for Irwin is Socrates. But who is this Socrates, or better: on
how many problematic assumptions, including the corollary that there is a
thing we can meaningfully call “his position,” does the existence of Irwin’s
(non-Platonic) Socrates depend? However many there may be, the place to
begin counting them is not with Vlastos but with Aristotle: he is the fons et
origo of Plato’s Ethics. There is, of course, no such book as Plato’s Ethics to
range alongside Aristotle’s Ethics nor would Plato have been Plato if there
were one; the less savory corollary of this claim is that a book called Plato’s
Ethics cannot really be about Plato. Irwin writes there: “Socrates assumes
that happiness provides a self-explanatory end and that every other end must
be explained by reference to happiness.”269 While it is true that this couldn’t
have been written without Protagoras, Lysis, and of course Euthydemus, it
is not really a meaningful statement about Plato, and not simply because it
makes the hermeneutic error of reading Plato’s dialogues as if Socrates were
an independent agent who never gives us good reason to wonder when he
is being serious and when his playing around (cf. 481b6–7) or wants us to
decide if he’s speaking the truth (see epigraphs).
The words just quoted from Irwin’s Plato’s Ethics are only a sentence
fragment, and he completes it as follows: “but if incontinence is pos-
sible, this eudaemonist claim about explanation is false.”270 Since by “this
eudaemonist claim” Irwin means the claim of something like “the Socrates
of Plato’s early Socratic dialogues,” it can be allowed to stand as true in
context, but both Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics show that incon-
tinence is perfectly compatible with someone else’s “eudaemonist claim.”
The real problem here is that Socratists, following Aristotle, have not only
drawn a line between Plato and his Socrates—and any such line would
be difficult to defend—but have drawn the wrong one. What makes the
Feigned Dialogue in Gorgias so significant is that it anticipates the “reha-
bilitation” of incontinence in Republic 4 (SW-2) while linking it to the fal-
lacy behind the supposedly Socratic assumption “that happiness provides
a self-explanatory end” (SW-3).271 It is a case of keine von beiden because

269
 Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 114.
270
 Irwin, Plato’s Ethics, 114.
271
 Cf. White, “The Good in Plato’s Gorgias,” 127: “if Socrates were intending to convey that good-
ness is distinct from happiness and the cause of happiness, he would be introducing a bold and
novel step into his argument without attempting to justify it.” Similar in spirit is Segvic, “No One
Errs Willingly,” 21–22n24 (quoted in §1).
294 Chapter 3

both the Shorter Way’s tripartite psychology and Socratist intellectualism

are equally based on “the eudaemonist claim,” and thus crippling dam-
age may be done to both of them without doing any damage whatsoever
to Plato’s own position, which places not TEA at its center but rather the
Idea of the Good.

Socrates: ‘As a result it is fully necessary [πολλὴ ἀνάγκη], Callicles, for the
temperate man [ὁ σώφρων], as we have described him—being just and brave
and pious—to be a completely good man [ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα εἶναι τελέως], and
for the good man to do both beautifully and well [εὖ τε καὶ καλῶς πράττειν]
whatever he does [πράττειν; i.e., ἃ ἂν πράττῃ]; and for the man doing well [par-
ticipial form of εὖ πράττειν] to be both blessed and happy [εὐδαίμων] and for
the wicked—even while doing badly [participial form of κακῶς πράττειν]—[to
be] wretched. And this would be the man being opposite [participial form of
ἐναντίως ἔχειν] to the temperate man, the intemperate man [ὁ ἀκόλαστος] whom
you’ve been praising.’ I [ἐγώ], for my part [μέν], then, posit [τιθέναι] these
things to be thus, and assert these things to be true.272

Thanks to the phrase ἃ ἂν πράττῃ, this passage exposes the Εὖ Πράττειν

Fallacy even more clearly than Charmides did (see §6). Beginning with
the first meantion of τὰ προσήκοντα (507a8) and as late as εὖ τε καὶ καλῶς
πράττειν (507c3), the verb πράττειν has been given a direct object, marked
in the final (pre-Fallacy) case by that tiny ἅ, meaning “the things” that he
does. Although the active,273 passive, and middle analysis in §3 had its uses,
Plato’s is simpler: the εὖ πράττειν of the εὐδαίμων takes no direct object
while the derivation of the other virtues from the ὁ σώφρων depended on the
claim—the true claim in this passage on my reading of it—that what makes
him virtuous is that he will πράττειν τὰ προσήκοντα.274
Introducing the Fallacy with πολλὴ ἀνάγκη—it was Socrates as respon-
dent who first used ἀνάγκη to confirm what Socrates as questioner had asked
“him” (507b1)—and following it with the emphatic claim that the things
he (ἐγώ) just said are true, this passage serves to draw a better line than
­Aristotle’s by forcing every reader to decide if Plato is deliberately placing
a fallacious argument in Socrates’ mouth or not. Naturally I claim that he
is, and that both the form of the Feigned Dialogue and the warning that pre-
cedes it are intended to help us see that he is. For those who still need help in
making up their minds, the extended comments of Dodds on “the convenient
ambiguity of εὖ πράττειν” are worth revisiting.275

272
 506b8–c9.
273
 Cf. Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 335.
274
 Cf. σωφροσύνη as ἡ τῶν ἀγαθῶν πρᾶξις at Chrm. 163e10.
275
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 335–336.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 295

For those who have decided to take Socrates at his word when he said:
“it is necessary for all of us to be competitive in relation to knowing what is
the truth concerning the things of which we are speaking and what is false”
(505e4–5), however, it is the phrase εὖ τε καὶ καλῶς πράττειν (507c3) that
stands out. Although εὖ πράττειν can slide into an intransitive sense, it really
is a case of πολλὴ ἀνάγκη that he who does beautifully (καλῶς πράττειν)
necessarily does “the things he does [ἃ ἂν πράττῃ]” beautifully. It is this dif-
ference—the fact that καλῶς πράττειν cannot be parted from doing τά καλά,
no matter how difficult or even deadly doing them may be—that explains
why Plato the Teacher oversees our ascent to the Beautiful before asking us
to ascend to the Good.
From the start, Plato has let us know what it means to καλῶς πράττειν: it
means incurring wounds and death while coming to the aid of your friends in
war (Alc. 116a6–b2). For those who agree with Alcibiades that death through
courage is preferable to life as a coward (Alc. 115d7), the slide from καλῶς
πράττειν to εὖ πράττειν (Alc. 116b2–3) and then from “those doing well
[οἱ εὖ πράττοντες]” to “the happy [οἱ ευδαίμονες]” (Alc. 116b5) has long
since been recognized as a trick, and once recognized as such becomes the
first indication—outside of the originally baffling Protagoras (Prt. 333d7–8
and 344e7–345a2 will be considered in §11)—that there must be something
wrong with the GB and GP Equations since they entail the BP Equation (Prt.
359e1–360a6).
Dodds is probably correct to cite the use of εὖ πράττειν in Plato’s Letters
as a further indication that “it is not easy to suppose that here [507c3–5] and
in the passages just quoted [Charmides 172a1 and 173d3, Euthydemus 281c1,
Republic 353e-354a, and Alcibiades Major 116b] Plato was unaware of what
he was doing,”276 but the roots of the SW-3 element in the Feigned Dialogue
reach even deeper. Although the slide from καλῶς πράττειν to εὖ πράττειν
is particularly valuable for detecting the Fallacy, its plausibility depends on
the GB Equation, hammered in both Protagoras (358b5–7 and 359e5–6)
and Alcibiades Major (116a3 and 116c1–2). Indeed the first example in the
ROPD of the kind of argumentation that will eventually emerge in the Shorter
Way is the passage in Alcibiades Major where the GB Equation, the slide,
and the Fallacy are combined in the service of the proposition that the just
things are the advantageous ones (Alc. 114e7–116e1). And the reason that
this passage not only combines but must combine the Equation, the slide, and
the Fallacy is that Alcibiades initially rejects the GB Equation (Alc. 115a11–
16): he believes that doing just things necessarily means doing beautiful ones,
but that some beautiful things—like those that lead to wounds and death in

276
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 336.
296 Chapter 3

war for the benefit of others—are not good (Alc. 115a6–b4). As already men-
tioned in §8, Polus agrees: he does not equate what is beautiful with what is
good (474c4–d2).
In his classic article “Was Polus Refuted?,” Vlastos explained the opera-
tive fallacy by Polus’ failure to raise the following question: “More painful
for whom?”277 Just as the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy boils down to the question of
the accusative—the active form takes one, the happiness version doesn’t—
the difference between the Beautiful and the Good boils down to the dative.
Consider the oft-repeated claim that the Good is ὠφέλιμον: until we specify
“for whom” it is beneficial, it is productive of fallacy. The Beautiful is differ-
ent, and the reason that Socrates proposes that what is beautiful must be either
pleasant or useful or both (474d3–e7) is because, unlike καλόν itself, both
are incomplete without the dative. Rachel Barney has made the crucial point:

In traditional Greek usage, kalon and agathon are the two most central and pow-
erful terms of approbation, and the overlap between them is considerable. But
there is one striking contrast between the two. This is that while it is common
to speak of what is agathon for someone, using the dative of interest, the same
construction is awkward and rare, if not impossible, with kalon. This is because
what is good is standardly so by being good for somebody or other; but what is
fine, generally speaking, is just plain fine.278

The reason that both Alcibiades and Polus are right to resist the GB Equa-
tion is that “the Good” may mean nothing more beautiful than “what is good
for me.”279 And by pointing out that Polus is refuted for want of the dative
of interest, Vlastos puts his finger on one of Plato’s tricks, but alas only his
pinky.
The real reason that Vlastos is right—for Polus’ refutation does depend
on fallacy—is because Gorgias follows Symposium in the ROPD. To begin
with, Barney’s “just plain fine” explains why Symposium precedes Republic.
Thanks to the grammatical autonomy of καλόν, everyday language makes
what is simply beautiful, noble, and admirable more like a Platonic Idea. Par-
adoxically, what makes the ascent to the Beautiful easier than the ascent to
the Good is that everyone knows—thanks to the proverbial χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά—
that truly beautiful things are more difficult, and this means that they cannot

277
 Vlastos, “Was Polus Refuted?,” 457.
278
 Barney, “Notes,” 367. For a parallel attempt to distinguish καλός and ἀγαθός culminating with
associating the former with “a third-person point of view” and the latter with “the point of view
of the agent,” see R. M. Dancy, Plato’s Introduction of the Forms (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 32–33.
279
 Cf. Stemmer, “Unrecht Tun,” 521: “Der Entwurf einer Moral, die das καλόν, das, was wir tun
sollen, als ein ἀγαθόν, als etwas, was wir tun wollen, zu erweisen intendiert, bleibt im Gorgias
ohne Durchführung.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 297

so readily be equated with what is advantageous, useful, beneficial, pleasant,

or good for me.280 Plato requires his students to undergo advanced gymnas-
tic practice in the use and detection of fallacy and deliberate ambiguity in
Lysis-Euthydemus because the more difficult ascent to the Good will demand
it. Until the Good becomes as grammatically autonomous from the slippery
dative of interest as the Beautiful—and that means until it becomes the Idea
of the Good—we are lost in a maze of eudaemonist self-interest where, for all
we know, even the Pleasant might be the Good, as it is in Protagoras.
Thanks to the ascent to the Beautiful, Symposium reaches a mountaintop
but it also points forward to the hard work that remains. As Barney puts it:
“This is one reason it is hard for Socrates, when interrogated by Diotima, to
say what beautiful things will do for their possessor, whereas he is clear that
good things will produce happiness (Symp. 204e–205a).”281 From the start,
I have emphasized that the Eudaemonist Shortcut that begins at Symposium
204e1–7 anticipates the Shorter Way, and in this section I have showed how
the Feigned Dialogue, thanks to the added presence of SW-2 elements, does
so even more directly. But apart from the equally pervasive importance of
the SW-3 element, nothing has been said of the specific connection between
Symposium and Gorgias.
The locus of contact is the refutation of Polus, and more specifically
the way Socrates defines τὰ καλά there. Despite the fact that the Diotima-
Discourse leaves bodies behind (Smp. 210a4–b6), Socrates hammers the con-
nection between beautiful things and τὰ σώματα (three times at 474d3–e1; cf.
Smp. 211c4–5 and 211e2) throwing in references to colors (474d4 and 474e2;
cf. Smp. 211e2); just in case we missed the ironic connection, he then adds
“institutions [ἐπιτηδεύματα]” (474d4 and 474e6; cf. Smp. 210c3, 211c5–6),
laws (474e6; cf. Smp. 210c4), and “studies [μαθήματα]” (475a1–2; cf. Smp.
211c6) before allowing Polus to applaud as καλῶς Socrates’ way of defining
τὸ καλόν (475a2–4).
Polus falls into Socrates’ trap because he, unlike us, has not read Plato’s
Symposium. He has not even read Hippias Major,282 where Socrates has

280
 Cf. Barney, “Notes,” 369: “What is good is so by virtue of its effects on some subject: ‘good’ is
thus a causal concept, closely tied to the ‘beneficial’ (ōphelimon) or ‘advantageous’ (sumpheron),
and the appropriateness (or not) of predicating it depends on the presence (or absence) of the
relevant effects. Thus in the Meno and Euthydemus, Socrates takes good as tantamount to synony-
mous with ‘beneficial’; and he takes benefit to consist in the promotion of happiness.”
281
 Barney, “Notes,” 369.
282
 Vlastos, “Was Polus Refuted?,” 460: “He [sc. Plato] had come within sight of this [sc. the differ-
ence between ‘pleasant’ and ‘pleasant to the beholder’] when he wrote the Hippias Major. There
he noted how absurd it would be to say that an action was beautiful merely because it was pleas-
ant, citing eating, drinking, and sexual intercourse as examples, remarking about the latter that
‘all would contend with us that, while it is most pleasant, if we are to do it, we should not do it in
anyone’s sight, for it is ugliest to view (ὡς αἴσχιστον ὃν ὁρᾶσθαι)’ (299a5–6).” The sentences that
immediately follow are quoted in the text below.
298 Chapter 3

already rendered the connection between the visually beautiful and τὸ καλόν
suspect.283 In order to refute Polus, Socrates must backtrack in Gorgias: τὸ
καλόν is relativized to the spectator as the visually pleasing,284 thus becom-
ing manifestly incompatible with the Idea of Beauty. It is relativized in this
way in order to make it compatible with a necessarily relativized “use” (χρεία
at 474d6), “useful” (χρήσιμον at 474d7), “benefit” (ὠφελία at 474e3 and
475a7), “beneficial” (ὠφέλιμα at 474e7), and finally—thanks to the hapless
Polus himself—“good” (ἀγαθόν at 475a3). It is almost as if we are descend-
ing Diotima’s ladder.
In any case, given our recent training in doubled four-part analogies (see
§8), it is easy to see that just as τὸ καλόν: (a) the Idea of Beauty :: τὸ ἀγαθόν :
(b) the Idea of the Good, so too are τὰ καλὰ : (c) the visually beautiful (i.e., to
the spectator) :: τὰ ἀγαθά : (d) the useful/beneficial (i.e., for the agent). There
are therefore four possible “equations” of “the good” and “the beautiful” of
which only the one equating “(a)” and “(b)” is ultimately Platonic.285 Once we
have read Symposium, the burning question becomes the relationship between
“(a)” and “(d).” Hippias Major has already taken a giant step in helping us
to distinguish “(a)” from “(c),” Gorgias now does the same for “(b)” and
“(d).” Socrates reverts to “(c)” while refuting Polus to make it easier for us
to transcend “(d),” and thus the memory of “(a)” helps us to make the ascent
to “(b).”
It is therefore the equation of “(c)” and “(d)” that is most relevant to
Socrates’ refutation of Polus. Untouched by contact with any Idea, this pair
is vitiated by the two different datives involved, the point that Vlastos made
with respect to the relationship between doing injustice and pleasure: “He [sc.
Plato] could have been led towards the essential point from just this example
if he had analyzed the difference as that between what pleases the agent, on
one hand, the spectator, on the other. But he did not.”286 How can Vlastos be
so sure of that? His answer deserves to be quoted at length:

Did Plato, when he wrote the Gorgias, realize how hollow was the victory
Socrates won in this debate? I do not think so. The mood of this dialogue is
solemn, even tragic. Its hero is in dead earnest. He [note the Socratist shift of

283
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §9.
284
 In preparation, that is, for Republic 5; cf. R. 479a1–5.
285
 I introduced the term “the Trinity” to describe the relationship between the Idea of the Good,
Beauty, and Justice in Guardians in Action, 199; it first appears in the ROPD at 459d1–5.
286
 Vlastos, “Was Polus Refuted?,” 460. The example to which he refers is in Hp. Ma.; see n292
above. Kahn’s pronounced antipathy to Hp. Ma.—cf. Charles H. Kahn, “The Beautiful and the
Genuine: A Discussion of Paul Woodruff’s Plato, Hippias Major.” Oxford Studies in Ancient
Philosophy 2 (1985), 261–287, and Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 118—should appear in a
new light thanks to Kahn’s comments on the GB Equation in “Drama and Dialectic,” 93n33 (cf.
93–94). Incidentally, Kahn revisits “Was Polus Refuted?” on 84–92.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 299

agency] would have scorned an ad hominem triumph. Plato makes him sum up
the outcome as a vindication of the truth—‘So I spoke the truth that neither I
nor you nor other man would prefer to do wrong than to suffer it’ (475e) [cf.
the claim at the end of the Feigned Dialogue]—with Polus himself now forced
to ‘witness’ this truth and ‘vote’ for it (476a). It would have been a mockery of
Socrates to put such words into his mouth if Plato had not thought them war-
ranted by the facts. So Plato himself misjudged the facts which he depicted. He
thought Socrates’ dialectic had refuted Polus’ doctrine, when all it had done was
to refute the man.287

Here then is the point at issue: when I find Socrates—along with the humor-
less characters who dominate several of the later dialogues288—making errors
of this kind, I assume that Plato has done so deliberately, and for our edifica-
tion; as for what Vlastos assumes, this passage makes that obvious.
Consider the as yet unquoted beginning of the Feigned Dialogue and its
relation to Protagoras, to which it is now time to return:

Socrates: Hear then from the beginning with me taking up [ἀνα-λαμβάνειν] the
discourse [ὁ λόγος]. ‘Are the Pleasant and the Good are the same?’ ‘Not the
same,’ as Callicles and I have agreed.289

While making the argumentative methods of Socrates appear transparently

mechanical and contrived, the purpose of the Feigned Dialogue is not to make
“a mockery of Socrates” but rather to provoke the reader to ἀντιλαμβάνεσθαι
and ἐλέγχειν (where appropriate) the λόγος that Socrates “takes up” there.
This is what Plato’s basanistic pedagogy is training us to do, and among all
of his λόγοι, it is the λόγος he is about to offer us in the Shorter Way—the
one that will make many of his readers imagine that his Republic has some
other purpose than to persuade the philosophic few to transcend self-interest
and return to the Cave—is the one his Guardians most need to challenge and
transcend.
The Shorter Way has its purposes, of course, and we could do considerably
worse than assume that it reflects what Plato believed, but we could also do
better. Likewise, the fact that the Feigned Dialogue begins by Socrates con-
tradicting what he said in Protagoras does not retroactively make Protagoras
“a mockery of Socrates,” or worse, show it to be the product of an outgrown
stage of “Plato’s Development.” Plato knows what he is doing and he does it
deliberately; when his hero offers an ostentatiously fallacious interpretation
of Simonides’ poem, it is not “a mockery of Socrates” that he has in view.

287
 Vlastos, “Was Polus Refuted?,” 459.
288
 I won’t deny that Plato is making a mockery of them.
289
 506c5–7.
300 Chapter 3

Plato is rather showing that it is possible to make a deceptive discourse will-

ingly, not least of all when that discourse asserts that none of the wise believe
that anyone would do anything of the kind (Prt. 345d9–e4).

§11. PROTAGORAS REVISITED

The problems that require a return to Protagoras at this point are many,
beginning with the GP Equation. The retraction of this Equation at the begin-
ning of the Feigned Dialogue (505c6–7), along with the subordination of
the Pleasant to the Good that follows it (505c7–8), summarizes, confirms,
and broadens the results of the dialogue between Socrates and Callicles that
could be said to have originated in the latter’s claim that it is only those who
are unable to maximize their pleasures who praise temperance and justice
(492a8–b1) if, that is, Socrates had not described ὁ σώφρων as the one who
is in control (ἐγκρατής) of himself, and of the pleasures and desires in him
(491d10–e1; cf. Prt. 352d4–e4).
The problems that this version of temperance create for SP figured largely
in the last section, and as Irwin has shown, Gorgias likewise creates problems
for other aspects of Socratism as presented in (or extracted from) Protagoras,
including K, CA, and UV.290 But it is the devaluation of Pleasure that creates
the starkest textual contrast between the two dialogues, not least of all because
there are noticeable similarities between the two that serve to highlight their
differences.291 Nor does the devaluation of Pleasure arise only in the context
of refuting Callicles: beginning with rhetoric (462b10–e1), the four spuri-
ous “arts” in the doubled four-part analogies Socrates offers Gorgias all aim
for what is most pleasant (464c3–d3), and Socrates could not have made
even a pretense of refuting Polus if Pleasure were the same as the (useful-
beneficial) Good or if Pain could be equated with the Bad (474d5–475c7; cf.
Prt. 355b3–c1).
Beginning with the obvious expedient of “Plato’s Development,” the
proposed solutions to these problems are predictable, and when the Order
of Composition paradigm is combined with the hypothesis that Plato’s early
Socratic phase gives way to a more properly Platonic one, the result can be
staged as either progress or decline. Irwin’s approach has been emphasized
because it is both exceptional and exceptionally honest, and one sign of that
honesty is that he deals with the two (incompatible) dialogues back-to-back

290
 See Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory, chapter 5 (especially 116, 122, and 127) and Irwin, Plato’s Eth-
ics, chapter 8 (especially §77–79).
291
 See Irwin, Plato, Gorgias, 8. For more similarities, see Alessandra Fussi, “Why Is the Gorgias so
Bitter?” Philosophy & Rhetoric 33, no. 1 (2000), 39–58, on 41–51.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 301

(with Protagoras first) in both of his books, and never suggests (as Dodds put
it): “that the Gorgias is considerably later than the Protagoras.”292
English scholars, some of whom seem to have more at stake, have
shown—in contrast to Irwin—a pronounced weakness for “harmonization,”
papering over the differences on the question of hedonism that arise from the
rejection of the GP Equation.293 This approach has a spiritual affinity with
readings that aim for what might be called “the re-Socratization of Gorgias,”
and as suggested in the previous section, Penner and Rowe champion this
project. But “the de-Socratization of Protagoras” has also attracted renewed
interest,294 for it is equally noteworthy and surprising that both Vlastos and
Dodds found it necessary in the 1950s to defend the view that Socrates is
endorsing hedonism in Protagoras.295 The rise of Socratism, particularly in its
PTI form, has made this move seem both unnecessary and quaint.
As indicated in the Preface, the Reading Order paradigm on offer here
locates an introductory or initiatory Protagoras at a considerable distance
from Gorgias, and places the latter in the orbit of the central Republic.
Since the pedagogical centrality of Republic is a guiding principle of this
reconstruction as a whole (see Preface, principle §5), my primary goal
with respect to Gorgias is to show how it—consistently with the dialogues
that precede it—is effectively preparatory for what follows. Since the
ROPD gives the curriculum a center, it revolves as well around a self-
conscious Plato with a clear pedagogical purpose, and must therefore
explain the differences between Protagoras and Gorgias296—rising to the
level of flat contradiction in the case of the GP Equation—in relation to
that central purpose.
The general strategy I am using to achieve this result is now obvious: a
TEA-based Socratism is what the reader must overcome in order to complete
the ascent to (the Idea of) the Good. But in accordance with the (SW-4)
approach to the Shorter Way I am defending throughout, this “must” has

292
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 21.
293
 See Gosling and Taylor, Greeks on Pleasure, chapter 4, and Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy
4, 302–305. For a recent reconsideration of the problem and prescient remarks on methods of
reconciliation, see J. Clerk Shaw, Plato’s Anti-Hedonism and the Protagoras (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 13.
294
 See J. P. Sullivan, “The Hedonism in Plato’s Protagoras.” Phronesis 6, no. 1 (1961), 10–28,
Michael J. O’Brien, The Socratic Paradoxes and the Greek Mind (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1967), 138–40n22, Donald J. Zeyl, “Socrates and Hedonism: Protagoras
351b–358d.” Phronesis 25, no. 3 (1980), 250–269, Roslyn Weiss, The Socratic Paradox and
Its Enemies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), chapter 2, and Charles H. Kahn,
“Socrates and Hedonism” in Lindsay Judson and Vassilis Karasmanis (eds.), Remembering
Socrates: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006) , 50–57.
295
 See Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 21–22n3, and Vlastos, “Introduction,” xln50.
296
 See Johannes Geffcken, “Studien zu Platons Gorgias.” Hermes 65, no. 1 (January 1930), 14–37,
on 31–33n2.
302 Chapter 3

positive as well as ultimately negative consequences for Socratism: since the

ascent to the Good cannot be made without it, it is a necessary moment in the
pedagogical process, and must consequently be firmly in place before it can
be transcended. Because Protagoras is placed at the beginning of the ROPD,
this “springboard” approach therefore makes it unnecessary to de-Socratize it,
especially since the PTI Socratists in particular have identified what Socrates
says in Protagoras as crucial to their case. This is not to say that the basis
for a de-Socratized reading of Protagoras is absent from the dialogue itself,
however, and despite the fact that it provides the basis for crucial components
of PTI Socratism, it is fair to say that a “cold” reading of the dialogue—which
is what placing it first in the ROPD requires it to receive—has negative con-
sequences for the Socratist reading of it as well as the obvious positive ones.
The most important of these, as indicated by the last sentence of the previous
section, relates to the veridical status of a deadpan reading of SP.
When Plato’s audience has not already learned from Aristotle’s Ethics that
(the historical) Socrates denied the possibility of ἀκρασία, their first exposure
to that denial is in the Simonides interlude, a λόγος—as I have shown in §4 of
Ascent to the Beautiful—that goes out of its way to make itself problematic.
And if, as I argued there and have just suggested here, Socrates’ own com-
mitment to the claim that no one errs willingly (οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἐξαμαρτάνει)297
is rendered questionable by the deliberately deceptive context in which he
initially pronounces it—to say nothing of the sophistic milieu that constitutes
its larger context298—an introductory or initiatory Protagoras effectively
accomplishes the proleptic task (see Preface, principle §4) that I am claiming
Plato intended it to perform: it confuses the reader in a useful manner, and
makes Socrates, and in particular the problem of what he really believes, an
object of wonder from the start.
In Ascent to the Beautiful, I considered Protagoras in connection with the
dialogues that follow it as far as Symposium, but even though those connec-
tions are often close and significant, the connections between Protagoras
and the post-Symposium dialogues—those being considered in this book, and
Gorgias in particular—are arguably even more important and complex, and
therefore deserve the further consideration they are about to receive here.
But in addition to the connections themselves, it is the fact of them that also
deserves explanation. More specifically, how can a dialogue encountered so
early in the ROPD continue to interact in such complex and interesting ways

297
 See Guido Calogero, “Gorgias and the Socratic Principle Nemo Sua Sponte Peccat.” Journal of
Hellenic Studies 77, part 1 (1957), 12–17, on 12: “this principle is clearly presupposed in the Hel-
ena and in the Palamedes.” Cf. Rachel Barney, “Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen” in Eric Schliesser
(ed.), Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy, 1–25 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017),
19–20.
298
 See Barney, “Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen,” 24–25.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 303

with dialogues the reader encounters so much later? This question becomes
all the more pressing because this kind of interaction continues in the post-
Republic dialogues through Theaetetus—where we will meet Protagoras
again—all the way to Phaedo. Given the fact that Protagoras is so closely
connected to so many later dialogues, and given that it is by no means easy to
understand, how can its early placement in the ROPD be justified?
Although this justification was provided in §1 of Ascent to the Beautiful,
the extraordinary degree of overlap with Gorgias demands that it must be
revisited and not simply reviewed. This distinction is necessary because the
dialogues between Symposium and Republic help to flesh out and expand
the justification in the earlier book; it must not only be summarized but also
extended. But first things first: it is above all the dramatic priority of Pro-
tagoras to Alcibiades Major that required me to revise the ancient estimate
that it was the latter that constituted the most suitable introduction to the
dialogues. Starting with its dramatic priority to what would otherwise be the
obvious place to begin the ROPD—for it is, of course, an ancient paradigm
that is being revived here—other obvious features of Protagoras led to an
explanation of why it made sense to place such a complex dialogue in a posi-
tion where Plato could not reasonably expect that his young students would
understand it. Before listing those features and revisiting that explanation,
however, let me state a new claim that explains the present predicament: the
need to revisit Protagoras arises from the fact that we will understand it dif-
ferently after reading Gorgias than we understood it before doing so. So this,
then, is the first feature to consider: precisely because of its connections with
many “later” dialogues—for example, Theaetetus in one sense of “later,” and
both Theaetetus and Phaedo in another—our understanding of Protagoras
necessarily evolves.
Having emphasized the theatrical elements of Protagoras in the first
section of Ascent to the Beautiful,299 I suggested in its Epilogue that Plato
intended his beginners to encounter this brilliant but confusing dialogue for
the first time as a play to be seen, not as a text to be studied. Based on a pas-
sage by Guthrie,300 this explanation rests on the following obvious features of
the dialogue: its title includes the word for “first,” it begins at dawn, its topic
is whether virtue can be taught (and here I am assuming that virtue is what
Plato’s students have come to the Academy to learn from him), it is highly

299
 On Ryle, Plato’s Progress, Thesleff’s, and other theories about the performance of Plato’s dia-
logues, see Nikos Charalabopoulos, “Three Hypotheses on the Performance of Plato’s Dialogues.”
Philosophy Study 3, no. 9 (September 2013), 888–94.
300
 Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy 4, 235: “If we look to the Protagoras for philosophical les-
sons, it may seem an irritating patchwork of niggling argument, irrelevant digressions, false starts
and downright fallacy. Read as a play in which the most outstanding minds of a brilliant period meet
and engage in a battle of wits, it will give a different impression. That is how it should be read.”
304 Chapter 3

dramatic, has a choral scene, has numerous named characters, many speak-
ing parts, is at least as amusing as it is complex, is staged around the kind
of contest that youngsters—Plato’s contemporaries included—love to watch,
and effectively stimulates our wonder about crucial issues, especially what
Socrates actually holds to be true, without resolving them.
In this section, I will build on the suggestion broached in the Epilogue
and show how the hypothesis of repeat performances (hereafter “RPT” for
“Repeat-Performance Theory”) offers a plausible mechanical explanation
for the fact that our understanding of Protagoras evolves. The most obvious
case of this evolving understanding, and the one already explored in Ascent
to the Beautiful, revolves around Symposium, which I take to be the culminat-
ing dialogue of the first Academic “year.” Those who have already gotten to
know Alcibiades, Phaedrus, Eryximachus, Pausanias, and Agathon in Sympo-
sium will see things in a second performance of Protagoras they missed the
first time,301 especially with regard to the Play of Character.
The need to revisit Protagoras in Ascent to the Good arises from the
exponentially expanded evolution of understanding that would occur when a
student who has just read Laches, Charmides, Gorgias, and Meno sees it per-
formed a third time: here it is not only a question of the Play of Character, but
of serious philosophical content, especially the veridical status of the hedonic
calculus. In fact, so greatly expanded would this understanding be that I am
offering here an expansion of the RPT: the students who performed Protago-
ras had just completed their second “year” in the Academy, and had therefore
not only recently read it for the first time—having merely seen it twice before
that—but had studied, rehearsed, recited, and danced it in tandem with their
study of Laches, Gorgias, and Meno. Following the hint in Republic 7 that
five years would be allotted to training the Guardians in dialectic (R. 539d9–
e2), the culminating dialogues of each year would then be the following five,
all of which are particularly closely connected to Protagoras in a thematic
sense: Symposium, Meno,302 Republic, Theaetetus, and Phaedo. The fact that
Gorgias is not on that list is the principal support for the hypothesis that it
was second-year students who performed Protagoras.
The reader should imagine the previous paragraph—with its speculations
about incoming classes, academic years, and student performances—as having

301
 In addition to Dorothea Frede, “The Impossibility of Perfection: Socrates’ Criticism of Simonides’
Poem in the Protagoras.” Review of Metaphysics 39, no. 4 (June 1986), 729–753, on 743–745 and
748, see Erler, Sinn der Aporien, 276–277.
302
 See Plato. Protagoras and Meno. Translated by Adam Beresford with an Introduction by Leslie
Brown (London: Penguin, 2005), iii, and Plato, “Protagoras” and “Meno.” Translated, with Notes
and Interpretive Essays by Robert C. Bartlett (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press,
2004), viii: “It is then the presence in both dialogues of the all-important question concerning
virtue and its teachability that speaks in favor of reading them together.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 305

been written with its author’s head covered, imitating Socrates in Phaedrus
(Phdr. 237a4–5 and 243b4–7). Defense of such speculations is bootless, but
an analogy may be useful. In his two-volume Platon (1919),303 Wilamowitz
implemented on a grand scale a biographical approach to the interpretation
of the dialogues that continued to guide his student Friedländer,304 and both
before and after this efflorescence, many scholars have attempted to inte-
grate the external details of Plato’s life with historical information about his
times in order to better understand his writings. The results of this historicist
approach are comparable in veridical value to those that arise from mine,
which combines an exclusive focus on the dialogues with some not altogether
implausible assumptions about what any school must be. The speculations
that arise from combining these assumptions with the initial hypothesis
that his dialogues are what Plato taught in the Academy may therefore be
broadly described or dismissed as “musical,” and among them the prettiest
consequence of the RPT is that it was in their own evolving understanding of
Protagoras that each student possessed the requisite basis for giving the lie to
the critique of writing in Phaedrus (see especially Phdr. 275d9).
Unlike the speculative structures I have proposed for explaining why there
should be so many connections between Protagoras and the dialogues con-
sidered in Ascent to the Good, those connections themselves don’t depend
on speculation. The first post-Symposium dialogue that directly revisits the
themes of Protagoras, thanks to the prominent role of courage in both,
is Laches.305 In addition to the presence of both Critias and Charmides in
Protagoras (cf. Prt. 315a1 and 316a5), the chronological proximity of their
dramatic settings has recently been used to connect it thematically to Char-
mides.306 The connection between Protagoras and Meno is even more signifi-
cant: the possibility that virtue might be acquired through Recollection forces
us to reconsider whether Socrates still believes, as he seemed to believe in
Protagoras, that it cannot be taught; indeed the failure to secure a unitary
account of ἀρετή in Meno forces us to reconsider the status of UV as well.
As for Republic, whether there is one master virtue that unifies the others, and
whether there are four or five virtues to be unified or not, connect the puzzles
of Protagoras to the basic structure of the Shorter Way.
But it is in relation to Gorgias that those connections become most conspicu-
ous, and there is a passage in it—found between Socrates’ mention of ὁ τῶν
κιναίδων βίος (494e4) and the first entrance of εὖ πράττειν (495e2–5)—that

303
 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Platon, second edition, two volumes (Berlin: Weidmann,
1920).
304
 On the relationship between Friedländer’s Plato and Wilamowitz, see E. N. Tigerstedt, Interpret-
ing Plato (Stockholm: Alquist & Wiksell, 1977), 40–44 and 47–50.
305
 In addition to §6 on TAL, see Hobbs, Plato and the Hero, chapters 3–4.
306
 See Lampert, How Philosophy Became Socratic, 10–11.
306 Chapter 3

applies directly to the contradictory views on pleasure that Socrates has

endorsed in Protagoras. When Callicles asks if Socrates is not ashamed to bring
this kind of sexual pleasure into the discussion (494e7–8), the latter answers the
question with another (494e9–495a2), and then another (495a2–4):

Socrates: Is it then I [ἐγώ] who am leading it there, noble sir, or that man
[ἐκεῖνος] who says outright that those who enjoy themselves [οἱ χαίροντες],
with whatever kind of enjoyment, are happy [εὐδαίμονες], and draws no distinc-
tion between the good and bad sorts of pleasure? But come, try again now and
tell me whether you say that pleasant and good are the same thing [τὸ αὐτὸ ἡδὺ
καὶ ἀγαθόν], or that there is some pleasure which is not good.307

The second question establishes the connection to Protagoras: initially

unwilling to accept it, Protagoras calls τὸ αὐτὸ ἡδὺ τε καὶ ἀγαθόν “the
subject of investigation” (τὸ σκέμμα at Prt. 351e5),308 and is shamed into
embracing it (αἰχρόν ἐμοί at Prt. 352d1) as a result of the speech (352a1–c7)
which Aristotle famously quotes (cf. Prt. 352b3–c2 and Nicomachean Ethics,
1145b23–27) in describing what Vlastos will call “that most perplexing of the
consequences of a reductively intellectualist psychology.”309
But it is the first question, reread in the context of the second, which proves to
be more interesting. To begin with, it links Pleasure to Happiness by identifying
οἱ χαίροντες as εὐδαίμονες; one suspects that this link is behind one of the two
alternatives Socrates proposes in Republic 6 (R. 505b5–6), or even better, behind
the conjunction of Pleasure and measuring mind.310 As for the indeterminate
ἐκεῖνος, it would be unnatural to imagine that Socrates is referring to anyone
other than Callicles. But what if Plato stands behind that emphatic ἐγώ and the
ἐκεῖνος in question is the Socrates of Protagoras? What happens next shows that
this is not a ridiculous question:

Callicles: Then, so that my statement may not be inconsistent through my

saying they are different, I say they are the same [τὸ αὐτό]. Socrates: You are
spoiling [διαφθείρειν] your first statements [οἱ πρῶτοι λόγοι], Callicles, and you
can no longer be a fit partner with me in probing the things that are [τὰ ὄντα],
if you are going to speak against the things that seem to be [παρὰ τὰ δοκοῦντα]
for you. Callicles: Why, you do the same, Socrates [καὶ γὰρ σύ, ὦ Σώκρατες].311

307
 494e9–495a4 (Lamb modified).
308
 The most useful discussion of the meaning of this σκέμμα is Taylor, Protagoras, 164–170 (see
below).
309
 Vlastos, Socrates, 96.
310
 Especially in relation to Phlb., where Plato will depict (a young?) Socrates tempting us to construe
the (human) Good not as the GoodT but as a reasonable and moderate blending of ἡδονή and νοῦς
once having derived the latter from an Anaxagoras-influenced cosmology (Phlb. 30a5–c8).
311
 495a5–b1 (Lamb modified). Cf. Prt. 331c4–d1 and 333c5–7.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 307

In the already Protagoras-charged context of whether the Good and the Pleasant
are τὸ αὐτό, and with the “first” in its title appearing in οἱ πρῶτοι λόγοι, Socrates
makes another reference to the dialogue with the verb διαφθείρειν.312
And then there is Callicles’ response, his enigmatic version of et tu [καὶ
σύ] Brute. What do these words mean? Thompson, Dodds, and Irwin have
nothing to contribute,313 so some speculation will not be out of place: Plato is
using Callicles to refer to Protagoras for at least the third time in this passage,
which I will call: “the Protagoras Moment [in the Gorgias].” Callicles is
right: Socrates has done the same thing, and we know where. But his καὶ γὰρ
σύ, ὦ Σώκρατες has neither verb nor object, and is thus is doubly closer to
“you too” than W. R. M. Lamb’s “you do the same.” Both appear in Socrates’
even more enigmatic response, likewise passed over by the commentators:

Socrates: Then I am not doing rightly [οὐ τοίνυν ὀρθῶς ποιῶ], neither I [οὔτ᾽
ἐγώ], if indeed I am doing this [εἴπερ ποιῶ τοῦτο], nor you [οὔτε σύ].314

In context, Socrates’ τοῦτο must refer to his earlier charge that Callicles is
destroying οἱ πρῶτοι λόγοι by threatening to speak παρὰ τὰ δοκοῦντα in
the present. Why then does Socrates countenance and indeed emphasize the
possibility that if he is presently doing so—note that the doubled ποιῶ (from
ποιεῖν, “to make or do”) is present tense—then he is not doing so ὀρθῶς?
Protagoras lays the foundation for trapping Socrates with the poem of
Simonides by asking from him whether it has been made ὀρθῶς and καλῶς:
Socrates confirms without hesitation the “rightly” (Prt. 339b8). “Does it seem
to you to have been made [πεποιῆσθαι is the perfect passive of ποιεῖν] beau-
tifully [καλῶς] if he—the poet [ὁ ποιητής]—himself speaks opposite things
to himself [ἐναντία λέγει αὐτὸς αὑτῷ]” (Prt. 339b9–10). Naturally Socrates
replies it would not have been made καλῶς, and in Gorgias, he confirms as
well that if he were contradicting himself, he would not be doing ὀρθῶς, or
rather—to preserve the far simpler grammar in play here—he confirms that
“If I am presently doing this,” I am not doing so ὀρθῶς. The hypothesis that
second-year students are simultaneously rehearsing Protagoras while studying
Gorgias explains how the two instances of ποιῶ in the former’s Protagoras
Moment refer to what Socrates is presently doing through the interaction of
both. In any case, the premise of Protagoras’ trap is erroneous: when ὁ ποιητής is
skillful enough to contradict himself deliberately, and when his poems can only

312
 Cf. Prt. 333c6 and 360a5–6 (Lamb): “Socrates: ‘Well, if we admit that too,’ he [sc. Protagoras]
replied, ‘we shall undo [διαφθείρειν] our previous admissions.’” Note that the question Socrates
has just posed is based on the GP, GB, and BP Equations (360a4–5).
313
 Cf. Dalfen, Gorgias, Plato, 381 (on 495b): “Kallikles gibt den Vorwurf an Sokrates zurück. Polus
had dem Sokrates auch vorgeworfen, dass er nicht sagt, was er wirklich denkt, 471d–e, 474b.”
This comparison is interesting but scarcely apt.
314
 495b2–3 (Lamb modified).
308 Chapter 3

secure their desired effect because ἐναντία λέγει αὐτὸς αὑτῷ—for only in this
way can the dialogue be transferred, living, into the minds of his readers, and the
poet’s words written in their souls—they must have been made both beautifully
and rightly. Such a poet is Plato. The Protagoras Moment is his palinode, for
the Pleasant was never the Good.
Of the three members of the club Vlastos called “PTI,” it is C. C. W.
Taylor, its middle member, who has thus far received the least attention, but
revisiting Protagoras now creates the opportunity to make good on that omis-
sion. Naturally Taylor takes the GP Equation seriously, and he is, along with
Gosling, the leading exponent of the view that “the alleged inconsistency
between the Protagoras and the Gorgias is illusory.”315 In defense of this
claim, Gosling and Taylor must discover in Protagoras a nuanced, attractive,
and anachronistic form of hedonism316 that is compatible with (1) a belief in
life after death, (2) the view that a courageous death can be defended on a
hedonistic basis, and (3) that overcoming the fear of death makes life more
pleasant.317 Although the word θάνατος (i.e., ‘death’) appears in the dialogue,
all three uses are found in the Great Speech of Protagoras (Prt. 325b7–c1);318
as a result, it is hardly “a deadpan reading” of the dialogue that Taylor and
Gosling offer us in The Greeks on Pleasure, and in defense of the consis-
tency this kind of hedonism makes possible—quite apart from the fact that it
must be imported into the dialogue319—it must be admitted that if Plato had
thought that Gorgias had completed the reversal of Protagoras, he wouldn’t
have bothered to use Phaedo to put the final nail in the coffin that contains
the corpse of a deadpan reading of it.320
But it is not Gosling and Taylor but only Taylor himself, in his radically
Socratist commentary on Protagoras,321 who will play an important role in

315
 Gosling and Taylor, Greeks on Pleasure, 76–77.
316
 See Panos Dimas, “Good and Pleasure in the Protagoras.” Ancient Philosophy 28 (2008),
253–284, 257n10 on the relationship between “the brand of hedonism” and “refuting the same-
ness thesis.”
317
 Gosling and Taylor, Greeks on Pleasure, 63–64. For discussion, see Shaw, Plato’s Anti-Hedo-
nism, 34–37 on “(1)” and 32–34 on “(2).”
318
 This crucial omission in quickly set right in Alcibiades Major (Alc. 115b1–c1 and 115d10–13);
it is here that “the reversal of Protagoras” (see below) begins; see Ascent to the Beautiful, §6.
319
 Cf. Gosling and Taylor, Greeks on Pleasure, 64: “The example of sacrificing one’s life is only an
obvious objection to an egoistic hedonist.”
320
 Cf. Crombie, Examination, 246–249, starting with: “To the reader of the Protagoras it may come
as something of a shock to turn to the Gorgias and Phaedo” and ending with: “The whole feeling
of the passage in the Phaedo [sc. ‘the anti-hedonist passage in the Phaedo (68–69)’] is incompat-
ible with the Protagoras.”
321
 Cf. Taylor, Protagoras, 210 and 226, on the question of Socratic hedonism before and after Gos-
ling and Taylor, Greeks on Pleasure.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 309

this section, and thanks primarily to a long and important note on 351c1–2,322
he will do so in the context of the crucial problem that divides Ascent to
the Beautiful from Ascent to the Good: the relationship between καλόν and
ἀγαθόν. The passage in question relates to “the Hesitation of Protagoras:”323
the famous sophist’s initial and praiseworthy reluctance to accept the
GP Equation by stipulating that the pleasantly lived life (τὸ ἡδέως ζῆν at
351b7–c1) is good “provided one takes pleasure in nothing but praiseworthy
things,”324 i.e., in τὰ καλά. Taylor comments:

Socrates’ assessment of pleasure and unpleasantness has lacked moral implica-

tions (see above, p. 164); a pleasant life is something good (agathon) in the
sense of something worth having from the point of view of the person who has
it, an unpleasant life is something bad (kakon) in the sense of undesirable from
that point of view.325

From the start, then, Protagoras (and here Protagoras) is preparing us for the
ascent to the Good, that is, the kind of ἀγαθόν that is good not only “in the sense
of something worth having from the point of view of the person who has it,” but
the absolutely and intrinsically GoodT. But the route to the Idea of the Good in
Republic runs through the Beautiful in Symposium, and Taylor shows why that
prior ascent is more relevant to the Hesitation of Protagoras:

Protagoras’ caveat introduces a further dimension of assessment; he suggests

that a life is a good one for the agent only provided that its pleasures are kala,

322
 There are of course many other notes that deserve consideration, and in connection with Socrates’
attitude toward death in Cri. at 47e7–48d6 (see Taylor, Greeks on Pleasure, 64n6), especially
important is Taylor, Protagoras, 164 (on 351b4), where he writes of εὖ ζῆν (cf. Cri. 48b5 and
Prt. 351b5): “‘live well’: equivalent to ‘have a satisfactory, worthwhile life,’ without the specific
implication of ‘live a morally good life.’” Albeit with an ultimately anti-Platonic intent (see Plato
the Teacher, 213–215), the reversal that a fully Socratic εὖ ζῆν in Crito performs on Taylor’s gloss
is recognized in Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, 255–256.
323
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §2.
324
 Taylor, Protagoras, 165: “351c–2: Though the form of Protagoras’ caveat is as translated [cf.
45: ‘provided one takes pleasure in praiseworthy things’], it must be understood as ‘provided one
takes pleasure in nothing but praiseworthy things.’” Between the text and my notes, the whole of
Taylor’s note will be quoted in what follows with no omissions.
325
 Taylor, Protagoras, 165. This passage is followed by: “These are the ordinary implications of the
terms, see e.g. Meno 77b–78b,” a passage that will be considered in §14. But even in the present
context, what Taylor has to say about this passage is worth quoting; see C. C. W. Taylor, “Plato,
Hare and Davidson on Akrasia.” Mind (n.s.) 89, no. 356 (October 1980), 499–518, on 508: “The
first point to note is that the distinction between what is fine or honorable (kalon) and what is good
(agathon), which was essential to Polus’s position, is completely ignored in this argument, in that
Socrates and Meno move [misleading; Socrates ‘moves’ Meno or rather distorts his definition at
Meno 77b6–7] immediately from ‘desiring fine things’ to ‘desiring good things’ and thereafter
conduct the discussion wholly in terms of good and bad, finally substituting ‘the ability to acquire
good things’ for Meno’s ‘being able to get fine things.’”
310 Chapter 3

i.e., praiseworthy, honorable, noble, as opposed to aischra, i.e., shameful

undignified, dishonorable. This pair of terms [sc. καλόν and αἴσχρον] provides
a range of assessment, ranging from the aesthetic via the area of social propriety
to the more specifically moral, which is less loosely tied to considerations of the
advantage and disadvantage of the agent.326

This fascinating passage suggests what it means to revisit Protagoras

after having reached Symposium. As the textual basis of Taylor’s “range
of assessment,” we should be able to see Diotima’s ladder, culminating in
the vision of Beauty, that is, the actual source of τὰ καλά. And by the time
we reach the crisis of the Republic, we will be forced to choose between
“a life that is a good one for the agent” and one that is “praiseworthy, hon-
orable, noble.” Taylor’s own proclivities are nevertheless clear: by using
“the area of social propriety” to mediate the physically beautiful and the
morally fine, he paves the way for a nature vs. convention contrast between
the natural goodness of self-benefit as opposed to a merely socially con-
ditioned conception of what is conventionally admirable.327 It is also a
considerable understatement to say that τὸ καλόν is merely “less loosely
tied to considerations of the advantage and disadvantage of the agent.”328
Nevertheless, the fundamental direction of Plato’s pre-Republic pedagogy
is visible here: whatever we thought of the GP Equation the first time we
encountered Protagoras, and even if we were skeptical of the BP Equa-
tion that follows from the combination of it and the GB Equation (Prt.
360a3),329 the fundamental problem with the latter—the distance between
the GoodE and a morally sublime Beautiful—is visible from the start before
being further developed in Alcibiades Major, Hippias Major (see below),
and Symposium. Taylor’s note continues:

Thus while there can be no question that an agent should, in his own interest,
avoid what is kakon, there can be a genuine question of whether he should avoid

326
 Taylor, Protagoras, 165. Cf. (a) and (c) on 298 above.
327
 For the roots of this move, see Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, 31 and 187–189. Cf. 143n71
above.
328
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §16.
329
 Taylor, Protagoras, 208 (on 360a2–3): “Going to war is, obviously, far from immediately pleas-
ant.” Cf. Christopher Rowe, “Review of Plato: Protagoras, by C. C. W. Taylor.” Philosophical
Quarterly 27, no. 109 (October 1977), 353–354, on 354: “The difficulty is that whereas at 358b3
the praiseworthiness of an action derives from its goodness and pleasantness, the move at 359e4 ff.
only makes sense if the fact that going to war is praiseworthy can be known independently of the
fact that it is good (beneficial) and pleasant. It is clear, I think, that ‘praiseworthy’ (kalon) in 359e5
is understood by both Socrates and Protagoras in the conventional sense of ‘morally admirable.’
If that is so, then Plato’s argument rests on an equivocation, for the point about the goodness (and
pleasantness) of going to war is of course integral to it. (Taylor seems to imply a different view
of 358b3–6, and not to give any clear indication of how he takes 359e4).” This useful observation
suggests the presence of a pre-Pennerite Rowe.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 311

what is aischron (e.g. where he can gain some great advantage by an undetected
fraud).330

Taylor hits the mark here, and justifies Plato’s motives for including “the
Table of Opposites” in Protagoras (Prt. 332c3–6). If the Good is only the
GoodE, it understates the case to say that “there can be a genuine question”
about whether pursuing the (morally) Beautiful and avoiding the (morally)
base is in the agent’s “own interest,” for this is the fundamental question
that leads Plato’s chosen reader from the Beautiful to the GoodT. The task
set for the post-Symposium dialogues is to overcome the kind of “good”
that even the basest men pursue as a matter of course, and as Socrates’
ability to maneuver “Meno the Thessalian” into accepting SP at Meno
77b-78b will soon enough prove (see §14), an exclusive appeal to what is
in the agent’s own interest scarcely guarantees that said agent will there-
after refrain from desiring “some great advantage by an undetected fraud,”
or indeed even by open fraud. But as Taylor points out, we need not wait
until Meno:

At times Plato makes a clear distinction between the two pairs of terms [sc.
the Table of Opposites: καλόν vs. αἴσχρον and ἀγαθόν vs. κακόν] e.g. Gorg.
474c-d, where Polus maintains that while it is indeed more shameful (aischion)
to wrong someone than to be wronged oneself, it is worse to be wronged and
consequently one ought to do what is more shameful rather than suffer what is
worse.331

Excluding Socrates’ own inability to answer Diotima’s question at Sympo-

sium 204d10–11,332 Polus will be the third interlocutor who initially attempts
to uphold the morally uplifting distinction between καλόν and ἀγαθόν, and
like the previous two—Protagoras here (Prt. 351c1–2), and Alcibiades in
Alcibiades Major (Alc. 115a6–16)—he will eventually back down in response
to Socrates’ use of the GB Equation. In Protagoras, the GB Equation medi-
ates between the GP Equation, unique to that dialogue, and its culminating
use of the BP Equation (Prt. 359e3–360a3) to fallaciously configure incurring
wounds and death in war as pleasant; Alcibiades Major will revisit this con-
figuration (Alc. 115b1–c2) revealing its connection to the Εὖ Πράττειν Fal-
lacy (Alc. 116a6–b5). Beginning in Protagoras, then, it is the GB Equation
that creates the battleground over which the gymnastic dialogues between

330
 Taylor, Protagoras, 165.
331
 Taylor, Protagoras, 165.
332
 Since Socrates can easily answer the parallel question about τὰ ἀγαθά (Smp. 204e6–7), the prob-
lematic character of the GB Equation is dramatized; in addition to §1 above, see Ascent to the
Beautiful, §17 for further discussion.
312 Chapter 3

Symposium and Cleitophon are fought, and when we revisit it there, we can-
not but see it in a different light.
This is especially clear in the case of Gorgias, and not only because of
Socrates’ formal retraction of the GP Equation: thanks to PP-1, where doing
injustice can only be shown to be κακόν (for the agent) by devices like the
Final Myth (see §12), it will revealingly move the discussion to the level of
the αἴσχρον, as Taylor points out.333 But the road to Republic 7 and Meno,
passing through Gorgias, Symposium, Hippias Major, and Alcibiades Major,
begins in Protagoras:

Similarly, at Meno 77b Socrates and Meno agree by implication that whatever
is kalon is agathon. So here (c2–3) Socrates takes Protagoras to imply that
some pleasures are bad, whereas someone with a strong sense of the distinction
[emphasis mine] would take him to imply that some pleasures are ignoble, leav-
ing it as a further question whether such pleasures are bad.334

My claim, then, is that the one I just called “Plato’s chosen reader” (311)
is identical with Taylor’s “someone with a strong sense of the distinction.”
In order to leave behind the GoodE, Plato’s chosen reader must rise to the
level of the GoodT that is as fully transcendent and disembodied as Beauty is
in Symposium, for it is a strong sense of the distinction between Beauty and
the GoodE that leads us to the acropolis (cf. Men. 89b4) of Platonism.
Caught up in the exciting ἀγών Plato so beautifully depicts or stages in
Protagoras, its various audiences, both within the dialogue and outside of
it, may, will, and should respond in a variety of ways to the Hesitation of
Protagoras as well as the means by which Socrates overcomes it. It is not
my intent to flatten out that variety for the sake of a unitary reading acces-
sible only to the chosen; indeed the RPT explains and justifies the necessity
of that variety. When seen after Symposium, it is the tragedy implicit in the
dialogue’s halcyon setting that emerges most fully; only after reading Gor-
gias and Meno will we be prepared to see that the GP Equation functions in
Protagoras as a (moveable) Hypothesis.335 But the possible transformation of
our initial response—which must for the overwhelming majority of auditors
be that Socrates not only wins the contest but is “on the level” in accordance

333
 Taylor, Protagoras, 165: “In contrast, both Socrates and Callicles agree that the worst thing i.e. the
most disadvantageous thing, to do is also the most shameful, but disagree on what is worst, Cal-
licles insisting that a man harms himself by self-restraint and benefits himself by self-indulgence,
Socrates maintaining the contrary.”
334
 Taylor, Protagoras, 165.
335
 Cf. Charles H. Kahn, “Review of Plato’s Progress by Gilbert Ryle.” Journal of Philosophy 65,
no. 12 (June 13, 1968), 364–375, on 369: “the conclusion of the argument in question is not that
pleasure is the good; this is the premise or hypothesis, chosen in good dialectical fashion as a
proposition acceptable to most men.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 313

with a deadpan reading—is embedded in the ROPD from the start, and the
more dialogues we have read after our initial encounter with Protagoras, the
more Socrates’ tactics will look questionable,336 unless, that is (and this is the
crucial caveat) we realize that Plato’s purpose in depicting those tactics is to
test the dialogue’s external audience (cf. Prt. 311b1 and Tht. 157c4–6) while
revealing the weakness of Protagoras’ commitment to τὰ καλά.
Alcibiades, the most important person in the dialogue’s internal audience
(cf. Prt. 309a1–2) has a firm sense of that distinction: he commits himself to a
preference for death through courage rather than life as a coward (Alc. 115d7)
and his competitive nature responds in kind to Socrates’ victory over Protago-
ras (cf. Prt. 336e1–2), however achieved. But his readers are always Plato’s
primary concern, and if we are Taylor’s “someone with a strong sense of the
distinction,” Alcibiades Major will begin the process, culminating in Gorgias
and Meno, of undermining our confidence that Socrates fully embraces the
GP Equation in Protagoras. This process will continue in Hippias Major,
where Socrates employs and Hippias eagerly endorses the GB Equation (Hp.
Ma. 297c3–d1). It is to this dialogue that “someone with a strong sense of
the distinction would take him to imply that some pleasures are ignoble” best
applies: τὸ καλόν cannot simply be reduced to pleasant because there are
some pleasures—and those the most intense of them—that are αἴσχρον, and
indeed “most shameful of all to be seen” (Hp. Ma. 298e7–299a6). And since
sex is shameful only by convention, Taylor is not completely off base in
next relegating τὸ καλόν to the level of “socially imposed values” in order to
defend the GP Equation:

Consciousness of the distinction indicates a sense, apparent in the Gorgias, of the

difference between and possible non-coincidence of socially imposed values on the
one hand and values derived from the agent’s desires and interests on the other.337

Between the two poles he mentions, Taylor neither exhausts the possible
responses that “consciousness of the distinction” makes possible, nor dem-
onstrates any awareness of a third and fully Platonic alternative: the moral
superiority of the Beautiful, a transcendent Beauty that is by no means
“socially imposed,” and yet is sharply distinguished from and even antitheti-
cal to a notion of the good that is derived solely from “the agent’s desires
and interests.” The Idea of the Good transcends the nature vs. convention
dyad that is at work in Taylor’s dilemma,338 but for the opponents of Plato

336
 Cf. Vlastos, “Introduction,” xxvn4: “My sympathies are wholly with Protagoras when he replies
[sc. at 360e3–4], ‘It is contentious of you, Socrates, to make me answer.’”
337
 Taylor, Protagoras, 165; cf. 143, 257n129, 262, and 310 above.
338
 Cf. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, chapter 9.
314 Chapter 3

both ancient and modern, the source of one “value-judgment” is made merely
conventional whereas the other will be configured as “the good by nature” or
“the natural good for man.”
Indeed one of the great weaknesses of radical Socratism is that it is a
theory about what motivates all men; Plato, by contrast, is interested in
what motivates philosophers like Socrates to do what’s right, and to inspire
and challenge us to join their ranks, as most any eager young student can.
By configuring the ethical dimension of τὸ καλόν as conventional in contrast
to the natural and therefore universal pursuit of one’s own good, Taylor mis-
construes the Good-based source of Plato’s elitism: it is clever slaves who are
best at maximizing their own happiness, not those who nobly sacrifice their
own pleasure for the good of others, that is, those who preserve a “conscious-
ness of the distinction,” and do so for reasons that Taylor misses entirely.
He continues:

One may disregard the distinction either from a lack of consciousness of the
different kinds of value-judgment, or from the conviction that, while they are
indeed different, they must in fact coincide; there is no evidence for the attribu-
tion of one attitude or the other to the characters in this dialogue.339

The first of Taylor’s two groups are simply the unsophisticated: they
fail to realize that a καλόν distinct from the natural ἀγαθόν of the agent’s
own good, pleasure, or happiness is slavery to “socially imposed values.”
By contrast, I have now suggested that what Plato regards as a slavish
motivation is to be found where the radical Socratists seek “the philosophy
of Socrates” and that a more than conventional Beauty, to be configured or
rather beheld as an Idea in Symposium, is an alternative to the nature vs.
convention dyad as a whole. When we first encounter Protagoras, Taylor
is right to say that “there is no evidence for the attribution of one attitude
or the other” in Socrates’ case: we cannot be sure where Socrates stands
or that he is leading us to the Good that really is Beautiful. But Plato is
already using the inability of Protagoras to sustain the superiority of a
more than conventional τὸ καλόν—like the inability of Hippias to defend
Achilles against Odysseus in Hippias Minor340—to illustrate the moral
bankruptcy of the most sophisticated.
Meanwhile, the other group is smaller but more important, confined as
it is to a plausible image of Plato’s Socrates. Consider in this context R. S.
Bluck’s comment on εὖ πράττειν in his commentary on Meno:

339
 Taylor, Protagoras, 165–166.
340
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §11.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 315

Likewise an argument which is fallacious because of an ambiguity in the use of

εὖ πράττειν is probably intended to suggest that the two senses (‘fare well’ and
‘do good’) amount to much the same thing, since when one sense is applicable,
the other must be also (in Plato’s view).341

What Bluck means is that Socrates or rather Plato through his Socrates will
prove along the Shorter Way that the one who does good also fares well,
the kind of argument we first encounter, as Bluck is aware,342 in Alcibiades
Major. Taylor claims that Socrates does much the same thing with the alleged
but merely apparent difference between the Good and the Beautiful: the
champion of the GB Equation proceeds “from the conviction that, while they
are indeed different, they must in fact coincide.” Although there is clearly
a philosophical issue at stake here, this is primarily a problem of how Plato
should be read; this aspect of the problem will be considered in a moment.
But for now, the important thing is that instead of giving the deliberate ambi-
guity of εὖ πράττειν its full force, and allowing it to undermine the exclu-
sively self-interested good that an ascent to the Idea of the Good demands,
Bluck harmonizes the ambiguity out of existence.343 This is likewise the
meaning of Taylor’s “must in fact coincide.” Nor is this so bad: Plato could
have done worse than persuade the majority of his readers that doing the right
thing is always the best thing to do for you.

It is, however, safe to say that in putting forward this qualification Protagoras
is to be seen as proposing a criterion of value which is not only independent of
pleasantness or unpleasantness, but capable of outweighing pleasantness where
the two criteria conflict.344

These, then, are the last words of Taylor’s revealing note, and for both them
and for it as a whole, he cannot be praised too highly. He therefore ends on
the right note: the Hesitation of Protagoras does indeed point to “a criterion
of value which is not only independent of pleasantness or unpleasantness, but

341
 R. S. Bluck (ed.), Plato, Meno; Edited with Introduction and Commentary (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1961), 257–258 (on 77b5); for the intellectual climate responsible for
this note, consider (257): “The neuters ἀγαθόν and κακόν are non-moral terms and mean simply
‘beneficial’ and ‘harmful’ (cf. A. W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, 31).”
342
 See Bluck, Plato, Meno, 258.
343
 So also Crombie, Examination, 236: “The tactic is to destroy the double meaning [sc. of εὖ
πράττειν] by forcing it out into the open.” On the contrary: the tactic is to undermine arguments
that depend on the Fallacy in order to focus the student’s attention on the greater importance of
“doing” as opposed to “faring well”; οἱ πολλοί seek the latter, only Plato’s extra-textual Guardians
will prefer the former. If the two become one, it is only on the Longer Way, and in order to have
progressed to that point, their unity has become a matter of indifference (see Plato the Teacher,
236n223).
344
 Taylor, Protagoras, 166.
316 Chapter 3

capable of outweighing pleasantness where the two criteria conflict,” a crite-

rion that will take the form of Beauty in Symposium before being revealed as
the Idea of the Good in Republic 6–7.
As for the note as a whole, its value is dialectical,345 and some further dia-
logue with it is apposite. Indeed that dialogue begins in his own text, and does
so despite the fact that Taylor himself tries to resolve the conflict between
Protagoras’ “provided one takes pleasure in nothing but praiseworthy [i.e.,
beautiful] things” with a conception of Socrates based on the GB Equation
that hovers between an endorsement of the Shorter Way (i.e., “they must in
fact coincide”) and a Protagoras-based embrace of a rather more slavish vari-
ation on it. But by mentioning “someone with a strong sense of the distinc-
tion,” he brings to light the decisive pedagogical importance of the difference
between the Beautiful and the kind of “good” that may be plausibly identified
with the agent’s own long-term pleasure. As a charter member of PTI, Taylor
naturally embraces this kind of good but that embrace arises not only from a
philosophical predisposition but also from a way of reading Plato that is best
illustrated by the very next note in his commentary, quoted here as a whole:

“Surely you don’t go along with the majority.” Up to this point Socrates has
not clearly committed himself to any view on the relation between pleasure
and goodness. So far he has elicited from Protagoras acceptance of the theses
that a life is (a) bad if it is unpleasant and (b) good if it is pleasant, without any
indication of whether he too accepts either thesis. With this phrase, however, he
makes it clear that he thinks that Protagoras and the majority are wrong to think
that anything pleasant is bad and anything unpleasant is good, i.e. Socrates here
commits himself to the view that everything pleasant is good and everything
unpleasant is bad.346

As a champion of a deadpan and hedonist reading of Protagoras, Taylor

naturally overlooks the possibility that Socrates is using Protagoras’ sense
of superiority to οἱ πολλοί to entrap him,347 against the better judgment that
accounts for his Hesitation,348 into accepting the GP Equation that will lead
to his final overthrow (beginning at Prt. 358a5–b3). Although this particular
attempt at entrapment fails, Socrates’ praise of knowledge (Prt. 352a8–c7)—
equally capable of snaring Protagoras and persuading Aristotle that he was
hearing the real Socrates349—will soon enough succeed. Despite the fact

345
 See Guardians in Action, 82n295.
346
 Taylor, Protagoras, 166 (on 351c2–3).
347
 Socrates does much the same thing to Cratylus (Cra. 437c5–d8); see Guardians on Trial, §15.
348
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §2; naturally the fact that Plato causes Socrates to make us aware of
such things (cf. Prt. 333b3–4, 335b1–2, and 338e2–5) is relevant to the veridical status of SP in
the dialogue.
349
 See Taylor, Protagoras, 172 at (d) on 352b1–c7.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 317

that Socrates makes very little clear in Protagoras, Taylor is nevertheless

absolutely right about the first response of the overwhelming majority of the
dialogue’s auditors: Plato expects us to begin here. The RPT honors the slow
and laborious process by which we will eventually come to read or hear it
differently. On the other hand, that process is not as slow as all that: with the
practice of Socratic deception made both obvious and hilarious in Hippias
Major (beginning at Hp. Ma. 286c5–d2),350 the theory behind it will soon
enough be revealed in Hippias Minor (Hp. Mi. 365e6–366b7).
Central to the kind of evolving process that the RPT is designed to
explain is the distinction between seeing Protagoras and reading it, and
that difference can perhaps best be illustrated by revisiting the incomplete
argument (Prt. 333b8–334a2) that Protagoras manages to interrupt with his
well-received speech on the relativity of the good (Prt. 334a3–c8).351 When
we merely see Protagoras, our attention cannot be directed at the missing
argument; we are swept along by what follows it. But when Protagoras
is encountered as a text, any part of which we can reread and discuss, the
problem of what Socrates would have said had he been allowed to com-
plete the argument is a theme for the classroom: a discussion-provoking
fill-in-the-blank question.
On the other hand, even in its apparently incomplete state, the “unfin-
ished argument” has already achieved two results that are crucial to
this book’s argument: it draws the student’s attention to (the potentially
immoral deployment of) the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy (Prt. 333d7–8), and
also—precisely because of the way that Protagoras interrupts and side-
tracks it—to the equally intrinsic ambiguity of the dative-less ὠφέλιμον.352
Studied in the context of Euthydemus, Charmides, and Gorgias, Protago-
ras has already been shown to be relevant with respect to the first, while
the importance of the second—already relevant to Gorgias (especially at
474e1–7)—will gain in importance in the Meno Doublet, where ὠφέλιμον
is used thirteen times between 87e1 and 89a2 (see §15). Ours is the deci-
sion: we can “fare well” by securing “goods” that are “beneficial for us,”
or we can “do good” by benefitting others in the light of the GoodT; the
reader is asked to decide which of these two paths Plato is challenging us
follow. The fact that only one of them is difficult should make it easier to
see which of the two is beautiful.

350
 On “the Questioner,” see Woodruff, Plato, Hippias Major, 43–44 and Ascent to the Beautiful, §10.
351
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §5.
352
 Cf. Bluck, Plato, Meno, 257 (on 77b5): “Fallacious arguments elsewhere turn on a similar ambi-
guity in the use of ὠφέλιμον (beneficial to whom? cf. Gorg. 474d sq., 476d sq.). In such cases
Plato appears to be asserting by implication that the ὠφέλιμα under discussion must be ὠφέλιμα
(in some sense) to all concerned.” Bluck’s parallel comments on εὖ πράττειν, quoted above,
immediately follow.
318 Chapter 3

In the light, then, of Plato’s larger purpose in the post-Symposium dia-

logues, it is by no means clear that “an unfinished argument in Plato’s Pro-
tagoras” is best understood as incomplete in any pedagogical sense: just as it
stands, it illuminates two critical ambiguities. It is certainly noteworthy that
Rosamond Kent Sprague can complete the argument in the context-friendly
service of UV—through proving, however fallaciously,353 the identity of
temperance and justice—only by reversing the argument’s initial course in
making good-ὠφέλιμα actions the products of “doing right,”354 that is, by
exploiting now the restoratively moral deployment of εὖ πράττειν in its active
sense. In short, it is only by “revisiting Protagoras” in a literary sense that an
active exploration of its “unfinished argument” becomes possible for those
who have encountered it first as a play, and the foregoing example should
indicate why exploring it in this bookish manner contributes substantively to
our ascent to the Good.
A third and final example of what it means to revisit Protagoras—the
Hesitation of Protagoras being the first—involves the mysterious passage
that immediately follows the introduction of SP. To begin with, the fact that
SP first appears in the midst of Socrates’ obviously playful and fallacy-rife
explication of Simonides is something Socratists generally prefer to ignore;355
the only available expedient is to pretend that what makes the exegesis fal-
lacious is that Socrates imports his own “cardinal doctrine”356—this phrase
will be discussed at considerable length in §15—into the poem,357 thereby
preserving SP’s doctrinal seriousness from any contamination by its palpably
fraudulent importation and the equally fraudulent claim that introduces it.358
Since the Simonides-exegesis is so obviously playful and deceptive, and
since Socrates’ use of fallacy there must be obvious even to a neophyte who
merely observes his performance on the stage, this important passage has
already been considered in Ascent to the Beautiful, with particular attention
to the class of performative self-contradictions. One of the latter deserves
repeating here: in his commentary, Taylor identifies the passage’s serious
purpose as illustrating the impossibility of interpreting poetry in the absence

353
 Cf. Sprague, Plato’s Use of Fallacy, 28n15 and Rosamond Kent Sprague, “An Unfinished Argu-
ment in Plato’s Protagoras.” Apeiron 1, no. 2 (March 1967), 1–4, 2–4.
354
 See Sprague, “Unfinished Argument,” 3, her reconstruction of it.
355
 Especially in the context of this section’s concerns, there is a great deal to be learned about Prt.
345d8–9 from Santas, “Socratic Paradoxes,” 150n12; cf. 147n1.
356
 As in Vlastos, “Socrates and Athenian Democracy,” 502.
357
 Cf. Taylor, Protagoras, 146 (on 345d4): “Socrates’ assimilation of the poet’s thought to one of his
own theses involves a blatant perversion of the plain sense of the poem.”
358
 Cf. Denyer, Protagoras, 166 (on 345e1–2) where the only wise men who endorse Socrates’ claim
that “none of the wise men believe that anyone errs [ἐξαμαρτάνειν] willingly” are the Eleatic and
Athenian Strangers along with Timaeus. Cf. Taylor, Protagoras, 147 (on 345d9–e4): “Socrates’
claim that his thesis is universally accepted by the wise is ironical.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 319

of an author we can interrogate.359 Such an interpretation of Plato’s Pro-

tagoras obviously refutes itself, for if this were the case, no interpretation of
Plato’s own dialogues would be possible. But in Taylor’s defense, the limit of
anybody’s ability to interpret Plato’s dialogues is reached immediately after
the introduction of SP.
The purpose of the passage (Prt. 345e4–346b8) is to justify an interpreta-
tion of the poem that we all know to be false: Socrates claims that instead
of praising those who willingly do nothing base (Prt. 345d3–5), Simonides
willingly praises those who do no bad things (Prt. 345e4–5). In order to make
sense of this, Socrates must demonstrate the possibility—and in the case of
Simonides, the reality—of the alternative, that is, of praising unwillingly
those who do wrong. The passage therefore begins with Socrates’ claim
that Simonides is speaking about himself (Prt. 345e5–6) and ends with an
example (Prt. 346b5–8): as a praise-poet, Simonides was often “not will-
ingly but being compelled [οὐχ ἑκών, ἀλλ᾽ ἀναγκαζόμενος]” (Prt. 346b7–8)
to praise and to create encomia for “either a tyrant or someone else of that
kind” (Prt. 346b6–7), that is, for those who can be accused of wickedness (ἡ
πονηρία at Prt. 346a5) including those by whom the poet himself (and oth-
ers like him) have been wronged (ἀδικηθέντες at Prt. 346b3). Complicating
matters considerably, however, is the fact that the last two citations are found
in a two-part explanatory comparison (Prt. 346a1–b5) that Socrates uses to
describe what he will then show that Simonides has been forced, unwill-
ingly, to do; although this explanatory comparison is particularly difficult to
explain, the words that frame it are troubling in their own right, and will be
considered first.
Insofar as Simonides has been compelled to praise a tyrant, he has done
so unwillingly. In other words, even if a tyrant (or wrong-doers of his kind)
have done bad things—which would make the poet who praises them guilty
of wrongdoing by association—SP remains in force because the poet, in
this case Simonides, is under compulsion to do wrong unwillingly; after all,
“against necessity [ἀνάγκη] not even gods are fighting” (Prt. 345d5). This,
however, suggests that a poet like Simonides could not willingly praise a
wrongdoer without violating SP: it is because the poet is ἀναγκαζόμενος
that his praise for a wrongdoer is not itself an SP-refuting instance of volun-
tary wrongdoing. As a result, much depends on the reality behind the word
ἀναγκαζόμενος: if Simonides is merely persuaded to praise a wrongdoer by

359
 See Taylor, Protagoras, 148 (on 347c3–e7): “It is to be assumed that Plato intends the interpreta-
tion which Socrates has just given to show in an exemplary fashion what he regards as the cardinal
fault in literary interpretation, viz. the impossibility of definitively establishing the writer’s mean-
ing, with its consequent license to factitious ‘interpretations.’” The rest of this interesting note
will be quoted below.
320 Chapter 3

lavish gifts, for example, he can scarcely be said to be being compelled. With
this dynamic in mind, then, consider the way the passage begins:

Socrates: For he [sc. Simonides] considered that a man of sense and honor
[ἄνδρα καλὸν κἀγαθόν] often [πολλάκις] constrains himself [αὑτὸν ἐπ-
αναγκάζειν] to become a friend and approver [ἐπαινέτης] of some person, as
when [οἷον]360

The problems here are many, and it is therefore difficult to know where to
begin.361
First of all, the final οἷον introduces the two-part explanatory comparison;
it will be considered below. And the use of πολλάκις likewise looks forward,
for Socrates will apply it to Simonides, who often (πολλάκις at Prt. 346b5)
found himself compelled to praise a tyrant unwillingly. But compelled by
whom? The most obvious problem in this opening passage is that “the man
both beautiful and good [ἄνδρα καλὸν κἀγαθόν]” is compelling himself to
be the ἐπαινέτης “of some person,” that is, of the person who will eventually
be identified as a tyrant or those like one. The words αὑτὸν ἐπ-αναγκάζειν
are a hornet’s nest all on their own: the same verb that will reappear as the
participle ἀναγκαζόμενος at the end (i.e., ἀναγκάζειν) has not only become
incompatible with the strong and external sense of compulsion that would
justify “unwillingly [οὐχ ἑκών]” (Prt. 346b7) and therefore preserve SP, but
the notion of self-compulsion—which implies that one part of oneself must
be overcome, involuntarily, by another—is antithetical in letter and spirit to
systematic Socratism. But there is no need to look so far afield.
Since Socrates tells us that Simonides believed that a καλὸς κἀγαθός often
compelled himself to praise someone, it is obvious that Socrates’ Simonides
believed there was such a thing as an ἄνδρα καλὸν κἀγαθόν, and this directly
contradicts what Socrates has said just a few moments before: “that it is not
possible to be a good man [ἄνδρα ἀγαθόν]” (Prt. 345c1). What is more, this
problem quickly extends its reach: the reason that the explanatory compari-
son that follows οἷον has two parts is because the wicked (οἱ πονεροί at Prt.
346a3) respond to the need for praising the unworthy differently than the good
(οἱ ἀγαθοί at Prt. 346b1–2). Since the crucial verb ἀναγκάζειν will appear in
the passive in Socrates’ description of the latter (ἀναγκάζεσθαι at Prt. 346b2),
and since the kind of compulsion we find there is closer to the internal (and
problem-spawning) αὑτὸν ἐπ-αναγκάζειν than to the SP-confirming (and
external) ἀναγκαζόμενος, it is in the second part of the explanatory example

360
 Prt. 345e6–346a1 (Lamb).
361
 Most innocuously, the use of ἐπαινέτης here recalls Socrates’ first speech in the dialogue (Prt.
309a6–b2); there he asked if his comrade was an admirer (ἐπαινέτης) of Homer, now it is another
poet who is about to be revealed as the (unwilling and compelled) ἐπαινέτης of a tyrant.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 321

that all of the passage’s problems will come to head, especially since what
“the good” will be compelled to praise is not yet one of Simonides’ tyrants
or “someone else like them [ἢ ἄλλον τινὰ τῶν τοιούτων]” (Prt. 346b6–7):

as when [οἷον] a man chances to have an uncongenial mother or father or coun-

try or other such connection [ἢ ἄλλο τι τῶν τοιούτων].362

Translation aside, this ἢ ἄλλο τι τῶν τοιούτων will be echoed by ἢ ἄλλον

τινὰ τῶν τοιούτων (Prt. 346b6–7), and this parallel serves to make the dis-
tinction between Simonides being compelled to praise a tyrant and a good
man being compelled to praise his mother, father, or country—no matter
how “uncongenial [ἀλλόκοτον]” they may otherwise be—glaring, and delib-
erately so. Despite any familial or patriotic obligations, οἱ πονεροί will not
be compelled to praise either parents or fatherland; Socrates’ description
of them can be confined to a note.363 But his description of the alternative
procedure of οἱ ἀγαθοί, who will be compelled—or rather who will compel
themselves—not only deserves the closest possible attention, but attention
that must be informed by the Golden Sentence (see §9); hence the relevance
of this confusing passage to “revisiting Protagoras” in a chapter on Gorgias.
As a general matter, I will attempt to show that any viable interpretation of
the following passage must begin with the acknowledgment that it needs to
be considered or rather reconsidered in the light of Gorgias, both because of
what it does and does not include:

Socrates: But good men both conceal [ἐπικρύπτεσθαι, with ‘their parents’ or
country’s faults’ being understood] and are compelled [ἀναγκάζεσθαι] to praise,
and if they have any reason to be angered against their parents or country—
having been wronged [ἀδικηθέντες]—they pacify themselves and reconcile
[αὐτοὺς ἑαυτοὺς παραμυθεῖσθαι καὶ διαλλάττεσθαι], compelling themselves
[προσ-αναγκάζοντας ἑαυτοὺς] to love those of their own and to praise them.364

In §9, I tried to show that Plato does exactly the opposite in Gorgias: he
implements the Golden Sentence by calling his city, his family, and friends

362
 Prt. 346a1–3 (Lamb).
363
 Prt. 346a3–b1 (Lamb): “Socrates: Now when this sort of thing befalls the wicked [οἱ πονεροί],
they seem glad to see their parents’ or country’s faults, and complainingly point them out and
inveigh against [κατηγορεῖν] them, in order that their own neglect of them may not be denounced
by their neighbors, who might otherwise reproach them for being so neglectful; and hence they
multiply their complaints and add voluntary to unavoidable feuds.”
364
 Prt. 346b1–5 (Lamb modified). For a thoughtful explication of this passage in the context of
Alcibiades and Thucydides, thus giving proper attention to the importance of KAH, see Reuben
Ramsey, “Plato’s Oblique Response to Issues of Socrates’ Influence on Alcibiades: An Examina-
tion of Protagoras and Gorgias” in Marguerite Johnsonr and Harold Tarrant (eds.). Alcibiades and
the Socratic Lover-Educator, 61–76 (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), on 66–69.
322 Chapter 3

to account for their wrongdoing. But more importantly, however, he calls

himself to account; hence “Plato’s Confession.”
In Protagoras, the good man is simply good, and no confession is therefore
needed or will be forthcoming: as the injured party, he must constrain himself
to pacify his righteous feelings of resentment and reconcile himself to praise—
and to praise unwillingly, if Socrates is to be believed—those by whom he
has been wronged. There is self- compulsion in the Golden Sentence as well:
“to compel [ἀναγκάζειν] both himself and the others not to play the coward”
(480c5), and this must be so: they have committed injustice and must now
compel themselves to pay the penalty. Because all self-accusation is missing
in Socrates’ description of both the wicked and the good in Protagoras, the
self-accusing hero of the Golden Sentence—who “must accuse [κατηγορεῖν]
most of all himself” (480c1–2)—is nowhere to be found. But the combination
of self-compulsion, accusation (cf. Prt. 346a5), parents (cf. γονέων at 480b8
and Prt. 346a5), fatherland (πάτρις at 480b8 and Prt. 346a5), concealment
(ἀποκρύπτεσθαι at 480c3; cf. ἐπικρύπτεσθαι at Prt. 346b2), and of course
injustice throughout, compel us to consider the passages together. And that is
the only thing I take the foregoing discussion to have proved.
On the other hand, anyone who has recognized the significance of the
Golden Sentence will read this difficult and understudied passage—John
Adam is one of the few scholars I have discovered who has said anything
illuminating about it365—in a different light from someone who hasn’t read
Gorgias at all. I will leave it to the reader to see how it, along with Simonides-
exegesis as a whole of which it is part, undermines a deadpan reading of SP,
but it certainly does nothing to support it: the kind of compulsion that leads
a (non-existent) good man (Prt. 345b8–c2) to compel himself to praise his
parents and country even when they are guilty of injustice is very different
from the kind of compulsion that Socrates uses to uphold SP in the case of
Simonides’ involuntary praise of a tyrant. More importantly, the kind of Selb-
stanklage that causes the Golden Sentence to be so striking makes little sense
if all wrongdoing is involuntary. But even if all this is true, it remains even
truer that only a student who comes back to Protagoras after Gorgias would
or could entertain thoughts of this kind.
Thanks to the accumulated weight of the Order of Composition para-
digm, the claim that Plato intended us to revisit this passage in Protagoras
only after having already read Gorgias is easily confused with the claim
that Plato wrote Gorgias before writing Protagoras. As convenient as this

365
 Adam and Adam, Platonis Protagoras, 163 (on ἐπικρύπτεσθαι—ἀναγκάζεσθαι): “Plato is prob-
ably thinking of Socrates after the trial as he depicts him in the Crito.” See also Patrick Coby,
Socrates and the Sophistic Enlightenment: A Commentary on Plato’s Protagoras (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 1987), 122–124.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 323

compositional order might be for the most radical partisans of Socratic hedo-
nism, the case of Charles Kahn proved it to be de-authorizing with respect
to the scholarly mainstream: his insistence on an early Gorgias—he called it
“my heresy”366—gave his critics an easy target. As is the case with many pio-
neers, there is to be sure a tension in Kahn between the far-reaching ramifica-
tions of his path-breaking discovery of proleptic composition—including the
revival of the Reading Order paradigm itself—and the older habits of thought
out of which he emerged, and to the extent that Kahn remained and remains
firmly committed to the Order of Composition paradigm, he brought some of
the criticism on himself.367 But even if he argued for a kind of chronological
or compositional priority for Gorgias, the arguments he used to do so can be
usefully revisited in the context of RPT. Those arguments can be found in
“On the Relative Date of the Gorgias and the Protagoras.”368
By 1988, Kahn had not only written his “Drama and Dialectic in Plato’s
Gorgias,” but had published an article about Protagoras earlier that year that
rejected what he called “the ‘straight’ reading of hedonism in the P.”369 It was
therefore not for any obvious, Socratist, or axe-grinding reason that Kahn
placed Protagoras after Gorgias, but rather because of the close connections
between Gorgias and trial-oriented and paradigmatically early dialogues like
Crito and Apology of Socrates,370 and more importantly because of the con-
nections between Protagoras and what he called “Group II,” claiming that
“the Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Protagoras, and Meno belong together

366
 Kahn, “Did Plato Write Socratic Dialogues?,” 310.
367
 For trenchant criticism of Kahn’s methods, see Mark L. McPherran, “Kahn on the Pre-Middle
Dialogues: Comments on Charles Kahn, ‘On the Relative Date of the Gorgias and the Protago-
ras’.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (1990), 211–236; by McPherran’s standards, mine is
a “hard prolepticism” (224). Of what he calls “deeper theories,” I am claiming Plato had only one
“ready to hand,” i.e., the GoodT and the duty to act in accordance with it, as he did by creating the
Academy and its curriculum.
368
 Charles H. Kahn, “On the Relative Date of the Gorgias and the Protagoras.” Oxford Studies in
Ancient Philosophy 6 (1988), 69–102; see 70n6 for others who share Kahn’s “heresy.” Since Ernst
Kapp was Kahn’s teacher (see Introduction), the relevant footnote (81n30) in his “The Theory of
Ideas in Plato’s Earlier Dialogues (Nach 1942)” in Kapp, Ausgewählte Schriften, edited by Hans
and Inez Diller, 61–150 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), deserves careful consideration: “practically
everything depends on the question whether the Gorgias or the Protagoras preceded in order of
time. Now, both of them are certainly earlier than the Meno, and, whereas the Gorgias simply has
no reference to the problems of the Protagoras, this latter dialogue disregards the views of the
Gorgias concerning ‘good’ and ‘pleasant’ only ostensibly, but cannot be understood and has not
been understood by anyone, who does not take or has not taken just these views of the Gorgias
as the real convictions of the author of the Protagoras.” In other words, a prior Grg. invalidates a
deadpan reading of Prt.; without recourse to the Order of Composition, the RPT makes room for
the student’s progress from an initially (pre-Grg.) deadpan hearing of Prt. to the kind of post-Grg.
reading of Prt.—i.e., one that does not take the GP Equation “as the real convictions of the author
of the Protagoras”—that Kapp is using chronology to validate.
369
 Kahn, “On the Relative Date,” 72n10; see also Kahn, “Plato and Socrates.”
370
 See Kahn, “On the Relative Date,” 73–75.
324 Chapter 3

as links in a unified chain, connected by a set of themes and problems to

which the Gorgias is largely indifferent.”371
In the context of RPT, the most significant thing in Kahn’s approach is
the admirable clarity with which he describes the close links between Pro-
tagoras and Meno,372 the culminating dialogue in Group II. But equally sig-
nificant are the links he discovers between Protagoras and Symposium,373 a
dialogue Kahn regarded as later than both of his “early” Groups. Finally,
since all of his arguments unfold in the liberating atmosphere made pos-
sible by the breakthrough discovery of proleptic composition, he is able
to consider both “Socratic intellectualism”374 and “the implicit moral psy-
chology of the Gorgias”375 in a fresh and thoughtful way. But the crucial
point for now is that the RPT explains many of the remarkable features of
Protagoras that Kahn brings to light: the concerns it shares with Meno, its
close relationship with Lysis, Euthydemus, and Charmides,376 and finally
what can only be a deliberately contrived connection between it and
Symposium.
Thanks to its initial performance, Protagoras can remain among the early
dialogues, while the theory that it was performed again after Symposium and
Meno explains the resemblances Kahn detects; finally, the possibility that
it was performed by students who were progressing through the series of

371
 Kahn, “On the Relative Date,” 73.
372
 Kahn, “On the Relative Date,” 76–77 (UV, K, and the teachability of virtue), 96–98 (UV and K),
and 93: “The procedure followed in the final argument of the Protagoras is nevertheless substan-
tially identical with the later method of hypothesis to this extent, that in order to resolve a difficult
problem (in this case, to explain acrasia and to demonstrate the unity of the virtues in wisdom)
Socrates begins by formulating a proposition or thesis that will be useful for reaching a solution
that can hardly be reached without it (cf. prourgou at Meno 87a2 with P. 355e5–8). But if the
Protagoras practices or foreshadows the method of hypothesis, I think it is sufficientltly clear in
what sense it marks a philosophical advance on the Gorgias.” The fact that MacPherrran, “Kahn
on the Pre-Middle Dialogues” finds a similar use of hypothesis in Grg. (232–33n40) is naturally
grist for my mill as well.
373
 Kahn, “On the Relative Date,” 98–99; in addition to the general overlap in dramatis personae, he
notes the role of Alcibiades and flutegirls at banquets. Particularly noteworthy is 99: “To make
sense of these connections it may help to to think, with Brochard, of the Protagoras, Meno, and
Symposium [relative to its first performance, my order would be Prt., Smp., and Men.; relative to
its third, Smp., Men., and Prt.] devoted to the question [note the existential question of the Acad-
emy:] ‘can virtue be taught’ and how?” See also V. Brochard, Études de philosophie ancienne et
de philosophie modern (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1912), 67–68, 77, 83–84, and 93.
374
 Kahn, “On the Relative Date,” 90: “I want to suggest that Socratic intellectualism is a deliberate
creation of Plato in the dialogues of Group II, a creation which must have some reference to his
memory of the historical Socrates, but which cannot be explained by that reference.”
375
 Kahn, “On the Relative Date,” 89–90; he is forced to admit on 89: “it is undeniable that the
implicit moral psychology is much more like the articulated psychology of the Republic than is
the implicit psychology of any dialogue in my Group II.”
376
 The emphasis in Kahn, “On the Relative Date” is on “literary form” (78–80; i.e., “narrated by
Socrates” on 78), “fixed dramatic date” (78 and 101), and “that playful, teasing note of erotic
flirtation that we know from Charmides and Lysis” (99; cf. “lusciously portrayed gymnasium
atmosphere” on 79).
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 325

dialogues between Symposium and Meno explains the connection of Protago-

ras to Group II. Since he is still working within the Order of Composition
paradigm, Kahn’s central claim must be that Gorgias was written early, but
the same phenomena he uses to sustain that view suggest just as much that
Protagoras was revisited later, and by using the Golden Sentence to analyze
one of its most difficult passages in the context of RPT, I have explained
how it can be prior to Alcibiades Major yet later than Gorgias, how it can
share the same concerns and be roughly contemporaneous with Meno and yet
be closely connected to Symposium, and all without reference to the order
in which these dialogues were written or any doctrinal aspects of “Plato’s
Development.”
Having already invoked the head-covered Socrates of Phaedrus, let me
conclude this section with a palinode of my own. In order to preserve the
ancient view that Alcibiades Major was the first dialogue that Plato’s students
actually read, I have explained its dramatic connection to the far more dif-
ficult Protagoras by hypothesizing that the latter was initially performed as
a play. Like Kahn’s claim that Gorgias was written before so many ostenta-
tiously “early dialogues,” this hypothesis is intractably de-authorizing, and
offers any critic an easy target, with a giant “merely speculative” emblazoned
upon it in scarlet. In order to spare the Reading Order hypothesis from infec-
tion by RPT, then, I will reconsider the place of Protagoras without recourse
to it. The crucial point—one that I reject—is that it would be inconsistent
with the pedagogical generosity that Plato demonstrates in the elementary
pre-­Symposium dialogues, beginning with Alcibiades Major and continuing
through Hippias Major, for him to frustrate them by studying Protagoras at
the start,377 not least of all because it contains the confusing passage I have
been considering. But here’s the palinode: if the place of Protagoras in the
ROPD must be determined exclusively by when it could most profitably be
read, then I would locate it between Laches and Charmides, that is, in the
midst of what Kahn called “Group II.”
Plausibly anchored there as well by the principle of “the snug fit” (see
Preface and 305 above), this placement has some other advantages. It makes
the series of dialogues between Euthydemus and Meno seven in number (see
§5), and since Protagoras and Gorgias are now on either side of a central
Charmides, it makes the use of ring-composition in the series more obvi-
ous. Secondly, it preserves the order in the Sixth Tetralogy of Thrasyllus
(Euthydemus, Protagoras, Gorgias, and Meno), and can be integrated with
the Fifth with the latter taken in reverse order, that is, Lysis with Euthydemus

377
 For the similar problem associated with reading Prm. first because it depicts a young Socrates, see
Guardians in Action, 285n275.
326 Chapter 3

(fourth in the Fifth with first in the Sixth), then Laches with Protagoras,378
Charmides with Gorgias, and Theages with Meno. Finally—since this
short-long pattern can be extended in both directions by adding Menexenus-
Symposium and Cleitophon-Republic to the dialogues of the Fifth and Sixth
Tetralogies—the resulting twelve-dialogue series creates a more natural way
to reach thirty-five379 on a musical basis by dividing the whole into an octave
(twelve to six),380 a fifth (twelve to eight),381 and a fourth (twelve to nine).382
Of these, the first is the most important, especially since it places
Charmides in the middle with Protagoras and Gorgias on either side of
it. In addition to preserving a more natural conception of Reading Order—
while jettisoning the (highly objectionable) RPT—a central Charmides
confirms the use of ring-composition in the series (see §5) by making the
antithesis between Protagoras and Gorgias as prominent as it needs to
be,383 arising as it does from Socrates first proposing and then rejecting the
GP Equation. But the juxtaposition of Gorgias and Protagoras is not the
only advantage that arises from placing Charmides in the center of a series
that precedes Cleitophon, [Thrasymachus], and the rest of Republic. While
the contrast between the Doctor on Trial in Gorgias and the Self-Benefiting
Doctor in Charmides is decisive for linking the two dialogues, even greater
issues are at stake.
For the most radical Socratists, Socrates deserves praise for transcend-
ing mere “moralism” by recognizing that all of us inevitably pursue our
own good. Building on Irwin’s defense of IOV against Vlastos, Penner
(along with his students) and Rowe reconfigure ἀρετή as the post-moral
and exclusively K-based “excellence” that alone explains the differences
between human beings. While all of us inevitably pursue our own real
good, only those with “virtue” do so knowledgeably and effectively: they
know how to benefit themselves, and indeed this knowledge is their ἀρετή.
Unlike the mere moralists who vainly attempt to refute SP—which would
require the impossible: a demonstration that anyone could ever pursue
anything other than their own real good—the consciously self-benefitting

378
 On the connections between La. and Prt., see Hardy, Platon, Laches, 170–190; cf. de Romilly,
“Réflexions,” 322.
379
 Epin. 991a7–b1 (McKirahan): “Stranger: (The means of 6 in relation to 12 are determined by the
ratios 3:2 [τὸ ἡμιόλιον] and 4:3 [τὸ ἐπίτριτον].)” The attached note reads: “The arithmetic mean
of 6 and 12 is 9, the harmonic mean is 8.” See Guardians in Action, 340–341.
380
 The six would be: Alcibiades Major, Alcibiades Minor, Erastai / Hippias Major, Hippias Minor,
and Ion. The set of twelve would then follow.
381
 The eight would begin after Republic: Timaeus, Critias, Phaedrus, Parmenides, Philebus, Craty-
lus, Theaetetus, Euthyphro.
382
 The nine would then be (emphasizing three sets of three): Sophist, Statesman, Apology of Socrates
/ Hipparchus, Minos, Crito / Laws, Epinomis, and Phaedo.
383
 Cf. Irwin, Plato, Gorgias, 8: “These are reasons for placing the G. later than the shorter, ‘Socratic’
dialogues. It is harder to decide its relation to the Pr. They are parallel in important ways.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 327

philosopher, doubtless embodied for the present in Penner himself, is the

only one who knows himself since his self-knowledge consists in knowing
best how to secure his own real good.
Even on its own, Charmides performs a reductio ad tyrannidem on radical
Socratism with its Critias-friendly endorsement of the Self-Benefitting Doc-
tor. But when placed between Protagoras and Gorgias, Plato’s Charmides
elevates that reductio to a central place in the ascent to the Good. As Vlas-
tos recognized from the start, PTI depends on Protagoras; although he had
himself let this particular genie out of the bottle in 1956, he lived and died
in the serene Socratic faith of the Vlastos Passage in Gorgias.384 Thanks to
its connection to the First Platonic Paradox, that Passage was buffer enough
between Vlastos and the fact that we can often augment our happiness by
means of (a small act of undetected) injustice, especially if we can persuade
ourselves it harms neither ourselves (although, according to the Pennerites,
we could not do it if we needed to persuade ourselves of that!) nor others,385
and equally that it would be difficult to reconfigure suffering an injustice as
conducive to our benefit without a merely moralistic myth.
Palinode notwithstanding, I prefer the evolving-understanding RPT that
compels the student to revisit the enigmatic Protagoras after Symposium,
Meno,386 Republic, Theaetetus, and Phaedo, to all of which it is intimately
connected. Albeit at the price of adding an even more speculative theory
to the already speculative RPT, the proposal that sophomores studied Pro-
tagoras (or began preparing to perform it) after reading Laches combines the
advantages of placing Protagoras before Gorgias with the need for a careful
reconsideration of it in the light of Meno. Finally, despite any advantages of a
seven- or twelve-dialogue series, encounteriung Protagoras for the first time
immediately after Laches not only obscures the justification for beginning
with Alcibiades Major (cf. Prt. 309a1–b9), but also makes it all a bit too easy.
When Socrates tells Laches that a good definition of courage must include the
ability to fight not only against pains and fears but desires and pleasures (La.

384
 Just as Penner in all likelihood embodies the virtue-conception of his Socrates—would that the
same were true of me and mine—so too did Vlastos embody the hermeneutic principle he ascribed
to Plato; cf. Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 125: “In my previous book on Socrates I blocked out the
hypothesis on which my whole interpretation of Plato’s dialogues depends: Plato makes Socrates
say in any given dialogue ‘whatever he—Plato—thinks at the time of writing would be the most
reasonable thing for Socrates to be saying just then in expounding and defending his own phi-
losophy.’” As a result, it was just as inconceivable to Vlastos that Plato could have written Prt. in
the knowledge that he would be undermining its “cardinal Socratic doctrine” in Men. as that he
knew while describing the Self-Benefiting Doctor in Chrm. that he would be defining τεχνή as that
which never aims at its practitioner’s benefit in [Thrasymachus].
385
 To substantiate this “nor others”—necessary to avoid alienating the modern freshman—Ap. 25c5–
e5 must be pressed into unlikely service.
386
 See Hardy, Platon, Laches, 191–213, followed by “Ergebnisse der Exkurse zu Protagoras und
Menon” (214–215).
328 Chapter 3

191d6–e1),387 we will respond to the GP Equation far more skeptically than it

seems to me that Plato intended us to do the first time. Encountering Protago-
ras first provokes wonder (Tht. 155d2–4), especially since it introduces prob-
lems to which the student will return again and again (cf. Prt. 340b4–6 and
Tht. 156e9–157b1). Finally, promoting the student’s evolving understanding
of things is an invaluable teaching device, and by making the need to revisit
Protagoras an integral part of the ROPD, the RPT prepares the student for
the Schriftkritik in Phaedrus, yet another performative self-contradiction on
the part of the poet I call “Plato the Teacher.”388

§12. GORGIAS AND THE LONGER WAY

To begin with, there is simply the brute fact of the Final Myth (523a1–524a7),
for modern interpreters an unwelcome intruder in the dialogue.389 It is better
understood as the principal and culminating means by which Plato achieves
a final synthesis of the dialogue’s two most salient themes: it ties the knot
between rhetoric and justice. Plato is too great an artist to make the Final
Myth’s excision possible: in commenting on it, Socrates preserves, heightens,
and reverses the threat of the coming trial with which Callicles had threatened
him (527a1–4; cf. 486b1–c3). Indeed these continuities have been used to the
Myth’s detriment: attempts have been made to reclaim it as ἐλέγχος by other
means,390 rewriting post-mortem punishment as the dialectical refutation of
the living,391 and indeed punishment is particularly problematic for a Socrat-
ist reading of the dialogue.392 But its thematic continuity with the rest of the
dialogue does not make the Myth superfluous: it is the peroration of Socrates’
speech to Callicles, and if its persuasive power presently exerts diminished
effect on moderns like us,393 that is not Plato’s fault.
No competent orator ends a speech with anything less than the best, and it
is the interpreter’s task to show why Plato had sufficient reason to think that

387
 See Crombie, Examination, 235.
388
 Cf. Taylor, Protagoras, 148 (on 347c3–e7).
389
 It is “the red-headed stepchild of Platonic scholarship” in Austin, “Corpses, Self-Defense, and
Immortality,” 48; cf. the opening words of Julia Annas, “Plato’s Myths of Judgment.” Phronesis
27, no. 2 (1982), 119–143; also the attempt “to demythologize the myth” (570; see also 560) in
Daniel C. Russell, “Misunderstanding the Myth in the Gorgias.” Southern Journal of Philosophy
39 (2001), 557–573.
390
 As in Sedley, “Myth, Punishment and Politics,” especially 58–61, and Radcliffe G. Edmonds III,
“Whip Scars on the Naked Soul: Myth and Elenchos in Plato’s Gorgias” in Colleen Collobert,
Pierre Destrée, and Francisco J. Gonzalez (eds.), Platonic Myths: Status, Uses, and Functions,
165–186 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 176–177.
391
 As in Rowe, “A Problem” (see §10); cf. Rowe, Plato and the Art, 147–152.
392
 See Penner, “Socrates,” 164.
393
 Cf. “many modern philosophers” in Penner, “Desire and Power,” 170.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 329

his Socrates had done so. To begin with, it is obvious that while we find his
eschatological myths repellent, Plato did not. In both the Order of Composi-
tion and Reading Order paradigms, Gorgias is the first of Plato’s dialogues to
end with an eschatological myth, but it will not be the last. Encountered first
at the end of his longest dialogue to date—once again equally true in either
paradigm—the Final Myth introduces something new into the dialogues, a
powerful weapon that will reappear in Phaedo and Republic.
But it would be a mistake to join the Myth in Gorgias only with Republic
10. It would be better to begin with Republic 1, where Cephalus sums up the
message of “the myths [οἱ μῦθοι] that are told about the things in Hades” as “it
is necessary for the one who has done injustice here [ἐνθάδε] to pay the penalty
[διδόναι δίκην] there [ἐκεῖ]” (R. 330d7–8). The distinction between ἐνθάδε and
ἐκεῖ has already been used to complete the reversed imagery used in Gorgias: in
the Myth, Callicles will find himself in the same predicament “there” with which
he threatened Socrates “here” (527a1–4). And easy as it would be to compare
the final myths in Gorgias and Phaedo, another link between them, mediated by
Republic, is easily missed: the proximity between “the practice of death” (Phd.
81a2; cf. 64a6, 67d8, and 67e6) and what Cephalus calls “the thinking that one
is about to die [τελευτήσειν]” (R. 330d5–6).394
The Final Myth introduces dualism in a powerful form: in addition to the gov-
erning distinction between ἐνθάδε and ἐκεῖ, the progress made in post-mortem
judgment between the eras of Cronos and Zeus (523b4–e6) is used to heighten
the contrast between soul and body (523d2–4); this gives Plato the chance to
remind the reader of the kind of soul-to-soul self-knowledge introduced in
Alcibiades Major (Alc. 130d8–e6). And then there is the dualism of those that
can be cured and the incurables.395 The latter has caused problems. If wrongdo-
ing is involuntary, and punishment in general is sub-Socratic except when it
comes in the form of refutation, how can a distinctly non-verbal punishment be
applied to those who are past cure?396 To begin with, one would do well to take
an agnostic position on the question of whether the punishment of the incur-
able implies reincarnation; once it is understood as Plato’s first eschatological
myth, the fact that it raises questions without answering them contributes to its
pedagogical power. In any case, those examples are intended to benefit us, and
I suggest that Plato is telling us that they benefited him.397

394
 Cf. Austin, “Corpses, Self-Defense, and Immortality,” 51 (last word).
395
 Cf. Mary Margaret MacKenzie [McCabe], Plato on Punishment (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1981), 186: “The curable/incurable antithesis obviously has its source in the pervasive
body/soul analogy.” Although this is by no means obvious to me—perhaps because I don’t
understand this use of “analogy”—she makes a crucial point, often overlooked, on 187: “Plato
regards some offenses, such as tyranny, as so unspeakable that their very commission indicates
the recalcitrance of their perpetrator.”
396
 Cf. Edmunds, “Whip Scars,” 178.
397
 Cf. Edmunds, “Whip Scars,” 178–179.
330 Chapter 3

The problems created by the incurables, by their use as beneficial

paradigms,398 and by the necessarily painful process—whether here or there
(cf. 525b8 and 525c7)—of the punishment of those who can be cured, must
be reconsidered in the context of the Argument of the Action: the (possible)
conversion of Callicles. It is the reader who must decide whether or not he
can be cured; if he cannot be, Callicles stands as a beneficial example for
us. But if Callicles repents—and my claim is that the Gorgias as a whole is
the product of Plato’s repentance (see §9)—it stands to reason that his fear
of becoming incurable would play a part in his conversion: fire and brim-
stone has a long history of rhetorical effectiveness that it would be silly (or
worse),399 even for those who have outgrown it, to ignore.400
Likewise standing against the view that an appeal to reason alone will be
sufficient to convert Callicles is Socrates’ insistence on the intrinsic painful-
ness of the process: it is not the shame-inducing refutation of the likes of
Polus that instantiates, on a this-worldly basis, the painful process of punish-
ment, but rather Gorgias itself in the light of the Golden Sentence. Plato’s
conversion, achieved through searing criticism of himself, of his relatives,
and of his beloved city, was painful, and it is this pain that makes Gorgias
the powerful and dramatic document that it is. But fear plays a necessary part
in the drama, and it is because of an old man’s fears that justice will return as
a problem in Republic. In short, the end of Gorgias shows why those fears—
what Cephalus more appropriately calls “fear and thoughtful concern [δέος
καὶ φροντίς]” (R. 330d6)—are fully appropriate, and indeed inescapable.
About the future, we just don’t know.
It is, after all, the epistemological opacity of the future that creates the
void into which the Final Myth now intrudes, and more specifically it is our
hopes and fears with respect to our post-mortem future that justifies its place
in Gorgias and the place of Gorgias in the ROPD. Linked to Charmides by
the dangers of tyranny, the role of the doctor, and the need to denounce one’s
own relatives (i.e., the second member of the Rhetorical Triad), Gorgias
culminates with an eschatological myth because courage—and by extension
virtue as a whole—was defined in relation to hopes and fears in Laches.
When Socrates derived KGB from K-F there, Plato was preparing the ground
for the great unknown and indeed the great unknowable vividly described in
Gorgias: our post-mortem future.

398
 See Brickhouse and Smith, Socratic Moral Psychology, 227. On the inconsistencies involved, cf.
222 with MacKenzie, Plato on Punishment, 188.
399
 Cf. Sedley, “Myth, Punishment and Politics,” 55 (quoted on 256 above).
400
 Cf. Austin, Corpses, Self-Defense, and Immortality,” 47: “It might seem strange to some readers
that Socrates switches gears at the end of the dialogue to a story of hellfire, but once one recog-
nizes that a great deal of the discussion has been about fear of death all along, one can argue that
the topic has not substantively changed.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 331

It is because that future depends on the prior distinctions between soul

and body, and between here and there, that the Myth illustrates the limits of
our knowledge while refocusing our attention on the true nature of the Self,
considered apart from the place it presently calls home. By postulating the
continued existence of the soul, still bearing the whip scars of its misdeeds
while embodied, the Myth combines what we prefer not to know with what
we can’t know but nevertheless fear, in order to create a powerful plea for
conversion. Anticipating The Portrait of Dorian Gray with respect to the
revealing ugliness of the tyrant’s soul, “Doctor Socrates”401 forces Callicles to
see himself stripped down (cf. Prt. 352a1–6 and 351d4) to his crimes, along
with those of his family and city, while facing a future of which he, along
with all the rest of us, is entirely ignorant.
But it is not only the post-mortem future in the Final Myth that makes K-F a
problem for a radically Socratist reading of Gorgias. As already indicated (see
§10), Penner’s 1991 article on “the Argument of Gorgias 466A-468E that Ora-
tors and Tyrants Have No Power in the City” is the cornerstone of what Rowe
calls “saving the Gorgias for Socrates.”402 In opposition to the “subjectivism”
of Santas,403 the Pennerite reading of Penner’s Passage (466a-468e)—naturally
revolving around the claim that everyone pursues their own real good404—plays
the same role for the most radical Socratists in Gorgias that the Eudaemonist
Shortcut does for them in Diotima’s Discourse:405 everything else in the dia-
logue must be interpreted in relation to its bedrock validity. But as interpreted
by Penner, his Passage does more than simply save the rest of Gorgias from,
for example, Irwin’s “mixed-message” reading of this one dialogue: it becomes
the bedrock for understanding Socrates in general.406 Under the theory that the
Longer Way cannot be understood apart from what distinguishes it from the
Shorter—and this time, I will not resort to the likes of “LW-1,”and so on—it
may be useful to consider Penner’s contribution on “Socrates,” an easily acces-
sible introduction to “Palmerstonian Platonism” in the prestigious Cambridge
History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (2000).

401
 See Levine, Profound Ignorance; chapter 3 is entitled “Doctor Socrates (155a8–158c4),” and on
68 “Socrates makes his physicianship coincident with his philosophy.”
402
 Rowe, “A Problem,” 36.
403
 See Santas, Philosophy of Socrates, 224–225 and 315–316; his approach is categorized as “subjec-
tivist” in McTighe, “Socrates on Desire for the Good,” 202–203; cf. 209–210. Penner “Desire and
Power,” 174n26, 175, and 197–198, targets what McTighe (but consider 202n28) calls “subjectiv-
ism” in Santas, “Socratic Paradoxes.”
404
 For post-Santas attempts to finesse this use of “real,” see “DG” in McTighe, “Socrates on Desire
for the Good,” “D” (or “s51”) in Wolfsdorf, “Gorgias 466a4–468e5,” and Brickhouse and Smith,
Socratic Moral Psychology, 216–218. The boundary separating a merely Pennerite Socratism
(67n29 and 67n31) from the most radical Socratism of Penner and Rowe is visible in Carone,
“Calculating Machines,” 66–67n29: “That the good universally desired is happiness (rather than,
for example, a Form of the Good that Plato has not yet postulated in this work), seems pretty
straightforward from the text.” Cf. Wolfsdorf on 130, and McTighe on 202n31 and 208.
405
 Cf. McTighe, “Socrates on Desire for the Good,” 211–212.
406
 Cf. Penner, “Desire and Power,” 150.
332 Chapter 3

In order to illustrate “the discontinuity between ‘Socratic’ intellectualism

and ‘mature Platonic’ irrationalism about human behavior,” Penner empha-
sizes the relationship between ends and means: whereas Plato’s tripartite
soul leaves room for the irrational pursuit of an end that is not for our own
good, Socratic intellectualism does not. “Mistakes in action are thus always
due to mistaken beliefs as to what is a means to what, not to good or bad
ends desired.”407 He offers four revealing “clarifications” to mark out the
­perimeters of radical Socratism: (1) the end desired is not the apparent but
“the real good,”408 (2) “the good which Socrates postulates as the end of all
our actions is our own good,”409 (3) when the actions performed (i.e., the
means chosen) to achieve this end fail to do so, “I did not do what I wanted
at all,”410 and (4) unlike all the others, “there is one science at which no one
errs willingly—the science of one’s own good.”411
The discussion of “(3)” requires Penner to overcome two erroneous inter-
pretations of Penner’s Passage, one based on the alleged existence of “a ‘true
self,’” that is, the self that doesn’t really want to do what the agent does, the
other on “some special sense of ‘wants.’”412 Although it will be necessary to
revisit Penner’s emphatic rejection of “the true self” later in this section, it is
his alternative interpretation that is relevant at present (emphasis mine):

But these interpretations represent a failure to work hard enough at how Socrates
in effect uses the means-end distinction to determine the identity of the object
or action desired. It is not enough to say that I wanted to eat this chocolate bar
tout court (Gorg. 468c1–7). Rather, we must bring out the means-end structure
[hereafter: “MES”] embedded in that object or action desired (467e-468d, esp.
468a5–b1, b4–8, b8–c1).413

Although he will have more to say about these “structures” later in

“Socrates,”414 including the role that thinking about them plays in “living a
good life,”415 his comments about MES in “Desire and Power” better illustrate
the role of K-F in Penner’s Socratism.

407
 Penner, “Socrates,” 165.
408
 Penner, “Socrates,” 166.
409
 Penner, “Socrates,” 166; cf. 166n4: “For Socrates and Plato, on the other hand, questions of good
are questions not of value but of what is in fact good (beneficial [note the implied dative], advanta-
geous, happiness-maximizing).”
410
 Penner, “Socrates,” 167.
411
 Penner, “Socrates,” 169. Not the impact of Hp. Mi.
412
 Penner, “Socrates,” 167: “It is as if only my ‘true self’ desired, or only my ‘real desires’ were for,
the real good, while my actual self desired, and my actual desires were for, the apparent good.”
413
 Penner, “Socrates,” 168.
414
 Penner, “Socrates,” 169.
415
 Penner, “Socrates,” 169n14: “no wonder that talking and arguing about these questions every day
is indispensible to living a good life.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 333

The first question is, of course, what does he mean by MES?416

He doesn’t make it particularly easy, but by the end—and not surprisingly
through critical dialogue with Irwin in the final paragraph—his meaning
has become clear:

If the position taken up in this paper is correct, then Irwin simply hasn’t under-
stood Socrates’ argument here. If we insist on the identity of the action wanted
being clear—that is, on the means-end structure of the action being made
clear—then the action x that Irwin says A wants to do [Penner’s emphasis] is
the action x that leads to bad results. (In the examples above, Irwin would have
to say that the tyrant wants the action of killing his chief minister that leads to
the loss of his throne and misery ever after.) But on the account I am offering,
that [sc. ‘the action x that leads to bad results’] is not an action A wants to do.417

Here then is the link between K-F and MES: “the hard work” required for
knowledge of the latter requires us to know whether the means chosen to our
own the real good—as per “(1)” and “(2)” in Penner’s “Socrates”—will or
will not have “bad results.” Earlier he had written:

To know which action the tyrant wanted to do, I argue, one needs to grasp the
entire means-end structure of the action desired—the entire structure of desires
and beliefs relevant to killing one’s chief minister envisaged above in (18), (Sa),
(Sb), and so forth.418

As we only discover at the end, this “and so forth” presupposes K-F, that is,
whether or not the action in question “leads [in the future] to bad results.”
Hence Penner can find the heart to write: “This makes the killing of the chief
minister that results in happiness a different killing of the chief minister from
the one that results in living miserably ever after.”419 Naturally we cannot
know the results of killing our chief minister when we kill him, but to say that
this action is misguided only when it results in a diminution of the real good
for us is worse than misguided.420

416
 The term is first used in Penner, “Desire and Power,” 162–163, where “the science of happiness”
involves “a very complicated means-end structure, involving expertise on care for the soul and
[K-F enters, albeit carefully disguised, here:] on one’s whole life.”
417
 Penner, “Desire and Power,” 201.
418
 Penner, “Desire and Power,” 189 (emphasis mine).
419
 Penner, “Desire and Power,” 189; see “no longer gross paradox” in the sequel.
420
 For a sensible and courageous discussion of Penner’s Passage in context, see Roslyn Weiss, “Kill-
ing, Confiscating, and Banishing at Gorgias 466–468.” Ancient Philosophy, 12, no. 2 (Fall 1992),
299–315, especially on 309–310 where she considers whether the Tyrant’s Triad are—as the radi-
cal Socratist reading demands—“neither good nor bad” (NGNB). Despite Weiss’s cleaving to the
moral high ground, what makes the Pennerite position more instructive is that it forces the student
to find the (ostentatiously and deliberately) missing morality in herself, and not only in the context.
334 Chapter 3

In the Allegory of the Cave, Socrates refers to honors, praise, and prizes
awarded to the one who “sees most sharply the present circumstances [τὰ
παριόντα], and who best remembers their antecedents, consequences that
customarily follow, and coincidences, and from these, who most capably
foretells what is to come [τὸ μέλλον ἥξειν]” (R. 516c8–d2). Although it
is tempting to apply this kind of forecasting to natural science,421 Penner
helps us to see how it applies to Socratism as well. The more adequate
our knowledge of MES, the better grasp will we have on τὸ μέλλον ἥξειν,
and the best English translation for τὰ παριόντα is what Penner calls: “the
particular situation one is in.”422 The latter is important because it is always
in relation to “the particular situation one is in” that we must necessarily
pursue the real good for us. Consider Penner’s example drawn from his
Passage:

The tyrant kills his chief minister; as a result, his throne is preserved in the
best possible way; as a result, he gets more time for gardening; as a result, he
is happier than he would be if he undertook any other action available to him
in the situation he then found himself in. Suppose that the tyrant’s beliefs here
are true. That is, suppose that the scenario the tyrant envisages does in fact
truly describe what will happen. In such a circumstance, Socrates would have
to admit that the tyrant has done what he wished (wanted, willed, desired, or
whatever). For when he did the action that seemed best to him, he did in fact
get what he wished (wanted, willed, desired, or whatever) from the action. So
he did what he wished.423

Opposed to Penner’s happy tyrant in his garden stands Archelaus in the

Final Myth (525d1–6),424 punished as “an example [παράδειγμα] to others, so
that others, seeing him suffer what he suffers, may, through fearing, become
better” (525b2–4). In the Myth, the tyrant’s soul becomes incurable and thus,
by committing extreme acts of injustice (525c1–3), becomes a παράδειγμα
for others. In “Desire and Power in Socrates,” by contrast, it is the MES-
style consequences of killing of his chief minister that will make the tyrant
miserable or not, and thus will determine what he actually wanted to do. It is
therefore a clash of the two futures: the Myth fills in the manifestly unknow-
able post-mortem future, while Penner’s MES—like the redefinition of

421
 See Guardians in Action, 79.
422
 See especially Penner, “Desire and Power,” 152–153.
423
 Penner, “Desire and Power,” 186–187.
424
 Cf. Klosko, “Insufficiency of Reason,” 585: “Archelaus was assassinated in 399 B.C., and so, by
the time the Gorgias was written, Plato’s readers were well aware of the drawbacks to his particu-
lar life of crime. In fact, in the pseudo-Platonic Alcibiades II, Archelaus is cited as someone who
led an unenviable life (Alc2. 141c–e).”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 335

εὐτυχία in the First Protreptic425—does the same with the only less obviously
unknowable future consequences of our present actions. But it is not only the
attempt to divine τὸ μέλλον ἥξειν from the perspective of τὰ παριόντα that
locates Penner’s “future” in the Cave, it is also, and even more importantly,
the difference between the maximum achievable real good for us—whether
that turns out to be pleasure, happiness, the knowledge-virtue that achieves
it, or both of them as indeterminately means and ends of each other—and the
Idea of the Good.
While it would be a mistake to identify the Final Myth with the Longer
Way, it is one of several features in Gorgias that aims at preparing us to
emancipate ourselves from the Shorter. At the root of the Longer Way stands
a choice, instantiated most importantly in the reader’s choice for Justice at
“the crisis of the Republic.”426 Before he forces us to make it, Plato asks us
to consider the dilemma of his Callicles: how will he respond to the rhetoric
Socrates uses to persuade him to choose the path of righteousness?427 This
question, which is really a question about us and not about Callicles, is
made all the more difficult to answer because Socrates is admitting and
arguably boasting throughout that the consequences of that choice—no mat-
ter what those consequences may prove to be ἐκεῖ—will be unpleasant and
even deadly for him, for Callicles, and for us ἐνθάδε. A science of effective
self-preservation is exactly what Socrates expects Callicles to spurn in the
Ad hominem Speech. But when we entertain the possibility that Plato’s Gor-
gias is aimed at us, it turns out that Penner’s radical Socratism, rooted firmly
in our present intellectual and spiritual circumstances (cf. τὰ παριόντα) is
equally useful for provoking us to make the right choice.
It is because Socrates is forcing Callicles to choose that Penner’s remarks
on choice are particularly revealing. In a footnote justifying his use of
the ungrammatical “science of goods and bads,”428 Penner begins with
Nietzsche’s distinction between good and bad—as opposed to good and
evil—in Genealogy of Morals.429 He then broadens the horizon to include
free will:

425
 Cf. Penner, “Desire and Power,” 164n18, 197n39, and 187n32: “Socrates’ point is that if you want
success (at living well—what else?), you will need the science of goods and bads. Justice’s merit
is not its ‘morality’, but its making you happier.”
426
 See Plato the Teacher, §16.
427
 Cf. Rowe, Plato and the Art, 152n23: “That there are incurable criminals in Hades is, I think, itself
part of what Socrates is appropriating—Callicles himself, Socrates suggests, will be persuaded
eventually—see 513c–d [note this rare acknowledgment of the Wavering after the Ad hominem
Speech]; and if Callicles, why not anybody?”
428
 See Penner, “Desire and Power,” 163n17 for a defense of the ungrammatical “bads.”
429
 Penner, “Desire and Power,” 162n17: “I have been told that to use ‘goods and bads’ rather than
‘goods and evils’ is ‘barbarous’. I plead guilty to its being strange; but to its being un-Greek, I
plead innocent. On the contrary, it is talk of ‘evils’ that is un-Greek. The idea of there being good
people and evil people, or good deeds and evil deeds, is absolutely foreign to Socrates.”
336 Chapter 3

The good-evil distinction belongs to Judaeo-Christian and Kantian conceptions

of free will. On these conceptions, human beings, faced with choice, either make
the right choice and show themselves to that extent good persons, or make the
wrong one and show themselves to that extent evil persons.430

Given Nietzsche’s debt to Callicles,431 there can be no doubt that Gorgias

is the proper context for invoking the alleged contrast between Greek and
Judaeo-Christian conceptions:432 Plato is seldom closer to the latter than he
is here, particularly with respect to contrite Selbstanklage as the proper use
of rhetoric. It is therefore interesting that Penner is once again channeling
Nietzsche, who wrote:

Today, as we have entered into the reverse movement and we immoralists

are trying with all our strength to take the concept of guilt and the concept of
punishment out of the world again, and to cleanse psychology, history, nature,
and social institutions and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no more radi-
cal opposition than that of the theologians, who continue with the concept of a
‘moral world-order’ to infect the innocence of becoming by means of ‘punish-
ment’ and ‘guilt.’ Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman.433

Choosing to attack choice is a tricky business, and one might be forgiven

for thinking that the existence of a debate between the proponents of free
will and determinism is enough to settle the issue in favor of the former.
In any case, Penner is certainly welcome to take any position in this debate
he chooses, but what he cannot do is to pretend that he is reviving an ancient
understanding while actually channeling Nietzsche: his reading of Plato is all
too modern. Naturally he has no doubt that it is Socratic, and arguably simply
“Greek” as well:

The idea that people actually aim at evil is one I personally find repugnant.
When people do bad things, I think (as Socrates does: Meno 77a-b) that they
do them because they think those things good things to do—at least good for

430
 Penner, “Desire and Power,” 162–63n17.
431
 As suggested by Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 387–391.
432
 Cf. Cf. Nietzsche, Will to Power, §429: “The Sophists were Greeks: when Socrates and Plato took
up the cause of virtue and justice, they were Jews or I know not what” and Stemmer, “Unrecht
Tun,” 504: “Sokrates teilt mit der sophistischen Aufklärung nicht nur die Frage nach der Motiva-
tion für moralisches Handeln, sondern auch die Überzeugung, daß eine Begründung von Moralität
nur im Rekurs auf das Eigeninteresse des jeweils Handelnden gelingen kann.” But attaining this
point of view requires us to overcome a misunderstanding of Plato’s thought “das eine lange Tra-
dition hat und von ererbten Moralvorstellungen getragen wird” (Stemmer, “Grundriss,” 550); cf.
the discussion of “powerful prejudice” in Altman, The German Stranger, 277–278.
433
 Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung, “Die vier grossen Irrthümer, §7” as translated in Walter
Kaufmann (ed.), The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 500. Cf. the rational
Amoralist in Stemmer, “Unrecht Tun,” 518–519.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 337

them. They do them because they tragically fail to understand something about
what they are doing. But in any case, whatever I personally may or may not
find repugnant, the notions of evil persons and evil deeds is entirely absent from
Socrates (that is, from Plato’s earlier dialogues). Indeed, I would be prepared to
argue it is absent from all of Plato’s dialogues, and also absent from Aristotle.
But that is another matter.434

Since we only do the things that are good for us (on analogy with “economic
man”),435 what we “tragically fail to understand” is nothing more than MES,
i.e., the best means to the end of the real good for us given τὰ παριόντα.
By confining us to the choiceless pursuit of this thoroughly ignoble “good,”436
Penner’s attack on choice proves that he has already made his: “It is to the
science of one’s own good, above all others, that Socrates thinks we should
devote ourselves primarily.”437 Conversion, contrition, repentance, punish-
ment, and thus the dire consequences of making the wrong choice can play
no part in “Desire and Power in Socrates.” Hence Penner’s radical solution to
the problem of the Final Myth: “punishment will never be appropriate, only
dialogue.”438
As this claim shows, SP plays a prominent role in Penner’s Socratism
because “the science of one’s own good” is the only one in which we would
never willingly err.439 If we err, we do so involuntarily, and therefore deserve
instruction, not punishment. Since SP first emerges in Protagoras, a full dis-
cussion of its crucial role in Plato’s thought and pedagogy is found in Ascent
to the Beautiful (§4), but both SP and the broader “Paradox of Socrates” will
receive attention in §14, Meno 77b2–78b2 in §15, and some retrospective
remarks on SP will appear in §17. But as Irwin has made clear, the status of
SP in Gorgias is sufficiently problematic that its role in this process must be
mentioned here, especially because the question of choice is central not only
to the brute fact of painful punishment in its Final Myth but to the drama
at the dialogue’s troubled heart, especially if I am anywhere near right in
claiming that Gorgias is itself a painful confession, a product of Plato’s con-
version through soul-searing repentance, and thus of his agonized awareness
that “Callicles”—under the influence of his city, his kinsmen, and his own

434
 Penner, “Desire and Power,” 163n17.
435
 Penner, “Socrates” 169: “Compare economic man: he too can have an economic motive to err
willingly at any science whatever—except for the science of his own economic good!”
436
 Penner, “Socrates,” 167: “It may seem odd, and even offensive, to think of a good person as a
person good at getting his or her own happiness.”
437
 Penner, “Socrates,” 169.
438
 Penner, “Socrates,” 167n8.
439
 This claim emerges with particular clarity when the subject is Hp. Mi.; see especially Penner,
“Socrates on Virtue,” 139–143.
338 Chapter 3

cruel arrogance—had in his “true self”440 always known better, and thus had
voluntarily chosen to do wrong.
The question of whether or not it is possible to do wrong voluntarily is
posed in a transitional passage (509d7–510a5) to which it is now necessary
to turn. This passage is found between the Feigned Dialogue (506c6–507c9)
and the Ad hominem Speech (511c4–513c3), and constitutes part of the dis-
cussion of the most important proposition in the dialogue: that it is worse to
do injustice than to suffer it. Since this proposition has two parts, the renewed
discussion of it is likewise divided into two, and the Ad hominem Speech
itself belongs to its second part: Callicles can only prevent himself from suf-
fering injustice by allowing the city’s power-center to master his innermost
being (513b3–6). The transition to suffering injustice begins at 510a6, and
the intervening discussion (510a6–511c3) is therefore preparatory to the
Ad hominem Speech that completes the discussion. In the same way, “the
Choice Passage” (as 509d7–510a5 will hereafter be called)441 completes the
discussion of how to avoid doing injustice, and roughly speaking the passage
preceding it prepares for the Choice Passage the same way that 510a6–511c3
prepares for the Ad hominem Speech.
The passage between the Feigned Dialogue and the Choice Passage—that
is, 507c9–509d7—is quite complicated, and in order to consider the latter in
context, some further analysis of it is requisite. Two of its parts have already
been mentioned: there is the purely monologic coda to the Feigned Dialogue
(507c9–508b3) with its proliferation of verbal adjectives (see §10) and then
the Vlastos Passage (508e6–509a7). Between the two (508b3–e6), Socrates
brings the discussion back to the doing/suffering injustice dyad (i.e. PP-1),
and indeed the phrase “in the preceding speeches [ἐν τοῖς πρόσθεν λόγοις]”
at 508e6 in the Vlastos Passage refers to PP-1. Moreover, the intervening
passage begins with another backwards-pointing reference to another one of
the Platonic Paradoxes:

Socrates: Those former results [τὰ πρόσθεν ἐκεῖνα], Callicles, must all fol-
low, on which you asked me if I was speaking in earnest [particial form of
σπουδάζειν] when I said that it would be necessary to accuse [κατηγορητέον]
both himself and his son or his comrade if he do any wrong, and that it is for
this that rhetoric must be used [χρηστέον]; and what you supposed Polus to be
conceding from shame is after all true—that to do wrong is worse, in the same

440
 Cf. Penner, “Desire and Power,” 199: “My account . . . operates without the whole strenuous
Cornford-Gould-Dodds line that Socrates in this passage holds that wish describes what one
‘really’ wants—what some mythical ‘true self’ wants.”
441
 For discussion, see Segvic, “No One Errs Willingly,” 17–19. Despite an awareness of “the playful-
ness with which Socrates takes up the question whether it is δύναμις or βούλησις” (18), she makes
the latter “tremendously difficult to have.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 339

degree as it is baser, than to suffer it, and that whoever means to be the right
sort of rhetorician must really be just and well-informed of the ways of justice,
which again Polus said that Gorgias was only shamed into admitting.442

Before bringing the conversation back to PP-1, then, Socrates employs

σπουδάζειν to recall Callicles’ Question (481b6–7), and he uses the two
verbal adjectives (κατηγορητέον and χρηστέον) to remind us of the Golden
Sentence, i.e. of PP-3. In due time, it will become clear that there is a fourth
paradox at 480e5–481b5, to which Socrates does not refer here, and that it is
actually “PP-4” (for so it will be called) that leads Callicles, quite properly,
to ask Chaerephon (whose presence here creates another link to Charmides)
whether Socrates is in earnest or playing around (παίζειν at 481b7).
For the present, however, the first thing to emphasize is the frequent use of
backwards-pointing references in Gorgias. Not only does the word πρόσθεν
appear in the Vlastos Passage, but it has already been similarly used four
other times in the dialogue (481b4–5, 489b2, 492a6, 504b6 in addition to
508b3 and 508e6); Plato also uses πρότερον seven times for the same pur-
pose (460c7, 460e2–3, 480b3, 487d6, 495a7, 503c3–4, and 515c2–4). Most
frequently, however, it is ἐμπρόσθεν that he uses to direct the reader back
to earlier passages, including “in the earlier discussions [ἐν τοῖς ἐμπρόσθεν
λόγοις]” in the Choice Passage itself (509e4) where it refers back to SP in
Penner’s Passage (467c5–468e5);443 it is used twice in reference to PP-1
(473a4 and 475d2) and there are eight more uses (448e8, 477c8, 480e1–2,
496c6, 497a8, 513e7, 516e9, and 517a3). The unusually high frequency of
these intra-textual references illuminates a crucial aspect of the role Gorgias
plays in Platonic pedagogy: it teaches us how to read and study a long dia-
logue. Instead of imagining Plato exploring ideas in Gorgias that will be more
fully worked out in Republic, we would do better to observe ourselves being
prepared to understand the one by being told how to study the other.
Between the Vlastos and the Choice Passages, Socrates reconsiders PP-2
(509a7–b3) in the context of Callicles’ earlier claim that Socrates would be
unable “to come to the aid [βοηθεῖν]” of himself and others (483a8–b4 and
486b4–c2). If injustice is the greatest of evils to the perpetrator of injustice,
the inability to come to the aid of oneself and one’s friends by ensuring that
they pay the penalty for their injustice (διδόναι δίκην at 509b3) is “even
bigger than the greatest” (509a7–b5). In addition to its paradoxical conse-
quences—for if it benefits a person to secure their punishment, it would harm
them to help them avoid it (cf. PP-4)—the verb βοηθεῖν, which is most appro-
priately applied to others, is of crucial importance in relation to the Socratist

442
 508b3–c1 (Lamb modified).
443
 See Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 343.
340 Chapter 3

claim that virtue aims at SB as opposed to benefitting others.444 In this pas-

sage (509b3–d2), the verb βοηθεῖν is hammered (509b4, 509b7, 509c3, and
509c8), and is joined twice with the related noun βοήθεια (509b4 and 509b7),
the second time where one fails to act in accordance with PP-2: “the aid [ἡ
βοήθεια] that it is most shameful [αἰσχίστη] not to be able [μὴ δύνασθαι] to
help with [βοηθεῖν]” (509b7).
This use of the verb “to be able [δύνασθαι]” (509b7) will allow Socrates
to return to PP-1, and thus to pose the question (or rather questions) at the
heart of the Choice Passage. Moving from δύνασθαι to the adjective “capable
[δυνατός]” (509c3), he next introduces the crucial noun “capacity [δύναμις]”
(509d2), and it becomes the basis for the bifurcated discussion of PP-1 that
follows (509c6–510a10). When asked whether it is by a δύναμις or by a mere
wish, desire, or act of will (βούλησις at 509d3) that one can prevent oneself
from suffering injustice, Callicles does not hesitate: as a practical man, he
knows that volition—as in the mere will to avoid suffering injustice—is
insufficient, and that therefore a δύναμις is required (509d6). In response,
Socrates does not hesitate either, and instead of examining Callicles’ answer,
promptly poses the same question about the other half of PP-1:

Socrates: But what about the doing (of) injustice [τὸ ἀδικεῖν]? Whether
[πότερον] if he should not wish [βούλεσθαι] to do injustice [ἀδικεῖν], this is
sufficient—for he will not do injustice [ἀδικεῖν]—or also in this case it is neces-
sary to provide oneself with a certain capacity [δύναμις] and art [τέχνη] so that
if he should not learn and practice these things, he will do injustice [ἀδικεῖν]?445

Before considering either Callicles’ answer—in fact, his failure to

answer—or our own, it is necessary to show how significant it is that Socrates
glosses the earlier δύναμις with τέχνη. This addition would not have changed
Callicles’ previous response: presumably he, if not Socrates, regards r­ hetoric
as the τέχνη that possesses or secures the δύναμις that would prevent us
from suffering injustice. But quite apart from his initial critique of rhetoric,
Socrates would not agree as proved by what he will say later in the Ad homi-
nem Speech. Referring there to our choice (ἡ αἵρεσις ἡμῖν) for “this power
[δύναμις] in the city” (513a6–7), he rejects the notion that there is any τέχνη
that can make a person powerful (μέγα δύνασθαι) as long as that person
remains dissimilar to the polity itself (513a7–b3). To transfer the terms from
the Choice Passage to §9, Callicles will waver in response to the Ad hominem

444
 Cf. Alcibiades Major, where “running to the aid [βοήθεια]” of one’s friends in war, even if this
results in wounds or death, is καλή (Alc. 115b1–9 and 116a6–8).
445
 509d7–e2.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 341

Speech because he lacks the βούλησις—not the δύναμις or the τέχνη446—to

subordinate his individuality to his love of the people (513c4–d1).447 By see-
ing how Callicles’ quick answer to Socrates’ first question about PP-1 is
eventually examined and proved to be wrong—it will only be by an utterly
ignoble βούλησις, not by any τέχνη that he can avoid suffering injustice—we
are better prepared to rethink (cf. 513c8–d1) his failure to answer the second.
As indicated by its hammered use, Socrates is asking Callicles to consider
what it is to ἀδικεῖν, that is, to ponder the essential nature of τὸ ἀδικεῖν.
And thanks to the verb βούλεσθαι, the terms of the dilemma remain the
same as in the earlier question or rather questions (509d2–5): is it a βούλησις
or a δύναμις that prevents us from committing injustice? It is important to
emphasize “questions” in the plural, as indicated by Irwin’s translation of the
passage just quoted:

Socrates: And what about doing injustice? If [πότερον] a man doesn’t want to
do injustice, will that be enough, because he won’t do injustice? Or [ἤ] for this
too should he equip himself with some power and craft, since if he doesn’t learn
and practice them he’ll do injustice?448

It will be noted that Irwin finds three questions in the same passage where
I translated only two, and since there are no question marks in the ancient
manuscripts, their existence in the text—in this passage as everywhere else—
depends entirely on modern editorial decisions. Irwin chooses to separate one
question beginning with πότερον from another beginning with ἤ, and it is
interesting to note that if he had applied the same logic to the way Socrates
asks about the first part of PP-1, he would have found three questions there,
not two.449 And the question of how many questions there are in the Choice

446
 Interesting in the context of the passage’s relationship to SP is David S. Kaufer, “The Influence
of Plato’s Developing Psychology on his Views of Rhetoric.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 64
(1978), 63–78, on 71; see also Austin, “Corpses, Self-Defense, and Immortality,” 40n14: “The
power or craft necessary for acting justly is unnamed.” Plato has prepared us for this pair and the
problems arising from it at Hp. Mi. 375d8–376a3.
447
 Cf. Stauffer, “Socrates and Callicles,” 648–649: “Similarly, after Socrates follows this exchange
by giving long speech urging Callicles not to worry so much about safety and protection but
to devote his attention to virtue (511b7–513c3), Callicles acknowledges that he is moved by
Socrates’ exhortation but says that he is not entirely persuaded (513c4–6). Since Socrates’ speech
stresses that virtue is risky and vulnerable to attack, we may surmise that what keeps Callicles
from fully embracing Socrates’ advice is fear.” The attached note (649n23) makes the valuable
point that “Callicles’ ‘love of the demos’ looks less like true love than fear-bred conformism”; this
is exactly what Socrates counts on Callicles to overcome.
448
 509d7–e2 in Irwin, Plato, Gorgias, 88.
449
 Irwin, Plato, Gorgias, 87–88 (translating 509d2–5): “Socrates: Does he need power or wish? I’m
saying this. Is it [πότερον] by not wishing to suffer injustice that a man will avoid suffering it, or
[ἤ] by equipping himself with some power for not suffering it?”
342 Chapter 3

Passage is important because of what happens next. Following the editorial

decision of John Burnet, Irwin translates the sequel as follows:

Socrates: Why haven’t you answered [translating ἀπεκρίνω] me that [τοῦτο],

Callicles, whether [πότερον] you think Polus and I were right or not when we
were forced to agree in the previous discussion, when we agreed that no one
wants to do injustice, but all those who do it do it involuntarily?450

Where the comma following “Callicles” stands in both Burnet and Irwin,
I would place a question mark, and follow it by a rest. Apart from the previ-
ously mentioned fact that all question marks in the text depend on editorial
decisions like Burnet’s, the philological reasons for adding one here are as
follows: (1) there have just been two other questions introduced by an initial
πότερον (509d3 and 509d7), (2) whether as the aorist ἀπεκρίνω or the imper-
fect ἀπεκρίνου of the manuscripts, the verb refers to past action, that is, to
what Socrates has already asked Callicles, and (3) the demonstrative τοῦτο is
retrospective, and Plato would have written τόδε if it referred to the question
that follows. And since the imperfect refers to “continued or repeated action
in the past,” the question I am adding—roughly “why haven’t you answered
me that, Callicles?”—validates the well-documented ἀπεκρίνου: Socrates
asks it because Callicles has not only not answered it (for which the aorist
would be adequate, as per Irwin’s translation), but in the pause that precedes
the new question—the silence that makes it necessary for Socrates to ask it—
Plato expects us to hear that Callicles is continuing not to answer it:

Socrates: But what about doing injustice? Whether if he should not wish to do
injustice, this is sufficient, for he will not do injustice, or in this case also is it
necessary to provide oneself with a certain capacity [δύναμις] and art [τέχνη] so
that if he should not learn and practice these things, he will do injustice? Why
haven’t you been answering this very thing [αὐτό γε τοῦτο] for me, O Callicles
[τί οὐκ αὐτό γέ μοι τοῦτο ἀπεκρίνου, ὦ Καλλίκλεις]?451

Beginning in the Introduction, I have used the musician’s mantra—“play

the rests as well as the notes”—to illuminate the difference between a
deadpan reading of the dialogues and the more playful and musical alterna-
tive I am proposing; this passage makes the existence of such “rests” both
obvious and significant. There are two pregnant pauses in this brief passage
as I have translated it: one precedes and the other follows what I will call
“the New Question.” From a philosophical standpoint, the New Question

450
 Irwin, Plato, Gorgias, 88 (translating 509e2–7).
451
 509d7–e3.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 343

is unnecessary, for a sensitive reader can see that even if there is only one
unanswered question here, it deserves an answer from someone. The signifi-
cance of the New Question is primarily pedagogical: Plato is emphasizing the
unanswered question that precedes it—and the combination of αὐτό and γε in
αὐτό γε τοῦτο gives it a doubled emphasis—as unanswered; and I am claim-
ing that he is thereby challenging the reader to answer it, just as Socrates is
challenging Callicles to do so. Callicles won’t, so the question is: will you?
Insofar as you do not do unjust actions, is that because you choose not to
do them or because you have learned and practiced an art or power without
which you would? The Choice Passage is about this very simple choice, and
that means that Plato is doing his best to compel you—the New Question
being as close to this compulsion as he can get as a writer of dialogues—to
make a choice about choice.
At the very least, you need to consider why Callicles does not answer.
Is it, for example, because he would be refuted if he did? Beginning with
Protagoras, this is the usual reason that Socrates’ interlocutors fall silent (cf.
Prt. 360d6) but it is difficult to see that motive in operation here. Is it because
he sees that it would be absurd to answer this question about PP-1 with the
same answer he was so prompt to give in the case of how to prevent suffering
injustice, that is, because it is obvious that it is by choosing not to do injustice
that we don’t do it? Or does he foresee that by answering this question the
same way he answered the other, he will be confirming an SP-basis for the
necessary δύναμις and τέχνη, as the sequel suggests?

Socrates: Whether [πότερον] we seem to you to have been rightly compelled to

agree in the earlier discussions [ἐν τοῖς ἐμπρόσθεν λόγοις], Polus and I, or not,
at the time we agreed that no one is wishing [participial form of βούλεσθαι] to
do injustice [ἀδικεῖν], but that unwilling are all those doing injustice [ἀδικεῖν]?
Callicles: Let it be as you would have it, Socrates, in order that you may come to
a conclusion of your argument. Socrates: Then for this purpose also, as it seems,
a certain power [δύναμις] and art [τέχνη] must be acquired [παρασκευαστέον],
so that we will not do injustice. Callicles: To be sure.452

Without assuming that you have answered the unanswered question either
for yourself or even for Callicles, it is worthwhile to attend to the answer
Dodds attributes to Plato before offering my own:

The answer to Socrates’ question at 509d7 is surely that the good will is not
enough to save us from wrongdoing; if it were, no one would do wrong, since
we all at bottom will the good. We therefore need a δύναμις and a τέχνη. The

452
 509e3–510e5; this brings the Choice Passage to its conclusion.
344 Chapter 3

δύναμις is not a material power but the capacity to understand our true inter-
est; the τέχνη is the Platonic ‘moral science’ which enables us to distinguish
between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ satisfactions (500a6, 503d1). Plato does not in the
Gorgias further expound the content or methods of this τέχνη: it is sufficient for
his purpose to show that a certain kind of τέχνη is required, and that politics, in
the Calliclean sense, is not such a τέχνη.453

Thanks to the systematics of radical Socratism, it would now be necessary to

write that “we all at bottom will the good for ourselves,” and it is this addition
that leaves plenty of leeway for wrongdoing. From this perspective, Dodds
also fails to grasp that the τέχνη in question is not a moral science—although
the quotation marks suggest that he might not think more highly of it if it
were—but rather KGB, the only knowledge that gives us “the capacity to
understand our true interest.” Although this is clearly a pre-Socratist text, it
points forward to Socratism. It is also wrong-headed.
It is one thing to say of a person who has committed an injustice that
they did so involuntarily, displaying an ignorance of the MES necessary to
secure their own real good, but it is quite another to say that what prevents
you, me, or Callicles from doing injustice is that we possess this kind of
knowledge. The principal defect of the Shorter Way’s just man is that he
will not voluntarily return to the Cave or indeed do much of anything else,
but even in his case, there are certain unjust things that Socrates tells us he
will not do: he will not embezzle money, commit sacrilege, steal, betray his
comrades in public or private life, break his oaths, dishonor his agreements,
commit adultery, neglect his parents, or neglect the service of the gods (R.
442e4–443a10). Disappointing in the context of Republic,454 this laundry list
of injustices comes in handy when considering the Choice Passage in Gor-
gias. Insofar as we don’t do such things, we simply choose not to do them
because we believe them to be unjust; by contrast, the person who weighs
whether or not doing any of them would or would not be an effective means
for achieving the real end of their own good—and who therefore, by SP,
could not do them if he knew that they wouldn’t—is already well on the road
to doing them. There is a better reason for a tyrant not to kill his chief min-
ister than that it will diminish his happiness in the long run, starting with the
choice not to be a tyrant in the first place.
I am suggesting that the reason Callicles refuses to answer Socrates’ ques-
tion is because Gorgias is the story of Plato’s conversion. That conversion
required him to make a choice, not simply the choice to refrain from injus-
tice, but the choice to benefit others, starting with his first students in the

453
 Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 343.
454
 As on my account it is intended to be; see Plato the Teacher, 147–148.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 345

Academy, continuing through the readers of his dialogues, and—at least for
the present—ending with you. For the first time in the ROPD, Plato really is
concerned with “Plato’s Development” but even here, as always, only with
an eye to our own academic progress. Along the Longer Way, he is going
to place before us the choice to practice Justice by returning to the Cave; he
prepares us for that choice in Gorgias by compelling us to realize that doing
injustice is likewise a choice. It is the choice that Socrates places before Cal-
licles, and Callicles became Plato because he made the right one, and began
making it in the silences on either side of the New Question. Despite Melos,
being unjust is not a law of nature, and not even for a well-born Athenian—
handsome, tall, and brilliant; a kinsman of Critias and Charmides to boot455—
is it anything but a bad and above all an ugly, base, and lowbred choice.
Staged in the context of PP-1, the Choice Passage asks us to reflect on
whether it is by βούλησις or a δύναμις-τέχνη that we avoid doing injustice.
Thanks to the pause that precedes the New Question, and then by the pause
that follows it, we have therefore already been challenged to think about our
own answer before we encounter the one Socrates proposes when he refers
to SP in Penner’s Passage, an answer that Callicles refuses to challenge.
Of course Callicles was not always so compliant: he breaks into the dialogue
demanding to know whether Socrates has been serious or playing around by
proposing PP-4, the passage to which it is now time to turn. In considering
this passage, my ongoing claim will be that Callicles is right to ask his Ques-
tion because Socrates’ purpose in articulating PP-4 is to provoke exactly the
kind of objection he gets. Socrates is serious about provoking a response but
he provokes it by playing around, that is, by the deliberate and provocative
use of falsehood. In the Choice Passage, Plato applies the same technique to
the reader that Socrates uses to provoke Callicles’ Question.
Socrates provokes Callicles’ Question with a series of claims about the
way one should treat one’s enemy, and a list of those claims leaves no doubt
that their combined purpose is to provoke. One must defend one’s enemy by
word and deed as his lawyer would, helping him to avoid being called into
court or, if charged, helping him to secure acquittal (480e7–481a3). Whatever
one’s enemies have acquired through injustice, one must help them to keep
it and then to spend it on themselves and their friends (481a3–5). Not only
must we do our utmost to help our enemy avoid the death penalty, particu-
larly if he deserves it (481a5–6), but we must—shifting from lawyer to doc-
tor—do everything we can to prolong his life as long as possible. And as if
all that were not enough, we must help him to acquire what only a god can
bestow: immortality (481a6–b1). Immunity from prosecution, untrammeled

455
 See Plato the Teacher, §15, especially 161–162.
346 Chapter 3

enjoyment of riches unjustly gained, and the longest possible life are the
things Socrates claims we must secure for our enemy, but not because we
love him but because we wish to harm him (κακῶς ποιεῖν at 480e6).
Apart from the claims themselves and thus the well-deserved response
they provoke, there are two other good reasons to think that Socrates is
“playing around [παίζων]” while describing PP-4. The first of these can be
famously found in Republic 1 although introduced, less famously, in Cleito-
phon (Clt. 410a7–b3): there, Socrates will claim that a just man should never
harm his enemy or anyone else (R. 335d12–13). In the argument he uses to
establish this claim (R. 335a6–c7), he will identify “to harm” (βλάπτειν at R.
335a9–b5) as making someone more unjust (R. 335c7), whereas the common
purpose of the claims Socrates makes in PP-4 is to harm (i.e., κακῶς ποιεῖν)
one’s enemy by contriving by any available means (παντὶ τρόπῳ at 480e8)
that he remains unjust with impunity for as long as possible.456 Plato makes
it impossible to overlook this contradiction because the critical phrase κακῶς
ποιεῖν that Socrates uses in PP-4 then appears three times in the argument
with Polus in Republic 1 (R. 332d7, 334d4, and 335a8), and in the third of
these, it is made synonymous with βλάπτειν (R. 335a8–9). The important
point, then, is that Socrates tells us in Gorgias how to do what he tells us no
just man ever does in Republic. This is not a case of “Plato’s Development,”
but of his basanistic pedagogy: we are being challenged to object—as Cal-
licles does with his Question—and we don’t need to have read Republic to
realize that there is something amiss with PP-4 even though it will eventually
confirm that there is.
Gorgias itself provides a second reason for regarding PP-4 as an example
of Platonic “play.” The passage reaches an acme of provocative absurdity
with the discussion of immortality, when Socrates claims that in order to
do the utmost harm to one’s enemy, one must ensure that he lives as long
as possible, preferably forever, with an unjust soul. The problem here is not
inter- but intra-textual: in addition to being farcical on its face, the reasoning
behind this particular kind of κακῶς ποιεῖν contradicts the Final Myth. David
Sedley puts it as follows: “Earlier in the dialogue Socrates has in fact indi-
cated his assumption that the sufferings of the incurably bad end with their
death [the attached note cites 480e5–481b1], an assumption which seems
flatly incompatible with the eschatological myth of the Gorgias.”457 While

456
 Cf. Babut, “ΟΥΤΟΣΙ ΑΝΗΡ,” 74.
457
 Sedley, “Myth, Punishment and Politics,” 68; the passage continues in the next note. See also
George Kimball Plochmann and Franklin E. Robinson, A Friendly Commentary to Plato’s Gorgias
(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 369–70n18.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 347

Sedley reaches an appropriately open-minded conclusion about the myth,458

Rowe has an axe to grind:

After all, at 481a-b he [sc. Socrates] seems to have shown that he thinks
injustice dies with its possessor—which is precisely what the myth suggests it
doesn’t do. (Socrates was arguing back then, however jocularly, that if you are
going to do harm to anyone, one of the things you should do is to make sure, if
they are unjust, that they will live as long as possible.)459

Even though he fails to give it the weight it deserves, Rowe’s “however

jocularly” is right on the money: Socrates is παίζων. And if PP-4 is the best
evidence in Gorgias that Plato does not expect us to take Sedley’s “afterlife
punishment” seriously, that is a good reason to think that he does.
At the very least, he expects us, once again in Sedley’s words, to “face a
choice.” Plato does this by forcing us to compare PP-4 with the Final Myth in
the usual way: by the repetition of a remarkable word or phrase:

Socrates: in every way it must be provided, both by acting and speaking, how he
[sc. the enemy] should not pay the penalty nor come before the judge [ὁ δικαστής],
or if he does, it must be contrived [μηχανητέον] how the enemy should not pay the
penalty, or if he has stolen much gold, he must not return it, but keeping it, he must
disburse it, unjustly and godlessly [ἀδίκως καὶ ἀθέως], to himself and to those who
are his, and if once again he has done injustice worthy of death, how he shall not
die, preferably never; rather he will be immortal, being villainous, but if not, how
he will live the longest time, being of such a kind.460

Naturally the word δικαστής appears in the Final Myth, and does so repeat-
edly (523b4, 523d1, and 524d8). But the unusual phrase ἀδίκως καὶ ἀθέως
appears there only once (immediately before the return of δικασταί at 523b4),
the only other time it appears in Gorgias:

Socrates: This, then, was a law concerning human beings under Kronos, and
always, even now it is among gods: that whoever among humans, on the one
hand [μέν], justly [δικαίως] having passed his and piously [ὁσίως], when he
would die, departed for islands of the blessed to dwell in complete happiness
[ἐν πάσῃ εὐδαιμονίᾳ] beyond evils [ἐκτὸς κακῶν], but [δέ] the one having done

458
 Sedley, “Myth, Punishment and Politics,” 68: “Readers thus face a choice. They can if they wish
take that same assumption to be in play, and thus interpret the description of afterlife punishment
and reward as purely symbolic. Alternatively, looking ahead to Plato’s later dialogues, they can
take the earlier assumption to be not superseded by the myth, so that afterlife punishment and
reward has become part of the myth’s true content. The choice between these two options is, it
seems to me, underdetermined by the text.”
459
 Rowe, “A Problem,” 35; cf. Plato and the Art, 152.
460
 480e8–481b5.
348 Chapter 3

so unjustly and godlessly [ἀδίκως καὶ ἀθέως] goes to the prison of both punish-
ment and justice [τὸ τῆς τίσεώς τε καὶ δίκης δεσμωτήριον] which indeed they
call “Tartarus.”461

Here then is a flat contradiction in both letter and spirit, and my claim is that
Plato is forcing us to choose between the ostentatious absurdity and moral
bankruptcy of PP-4, on the one hand, and the unknowability of what awaits us
after death—fear-inspiring if we have chosen not to live δικαίως and ὁσίως—
brought vividly to life in the Myth, on the other.
And morally bankrupt PP-4 unquestionably is, and intentionally so, prefig-
uring through antithesis the choice for Justice we will be asked to make on
the Longer Way:

Socrates: And then again having turned it round in reverse [τοὐναντίον δέ

γε αὖ μεταβαλόντα], if any person it is then necessary to treat badly [κακῶς
ποιεῖν], whether an enemy [ἐχθρός] or anyone else, if only it is not oneself
[αὐτός] suffering injustice [ἀδικεῖσθαι] by that enemy [ὁ ἐχθρός]—for of this,
on the one hand [μέν], it is necessary to beware [εὐλαβητέον]—but [δέ] if the
enemy [ὁ ἐχθρός] is doing an injustice [ἀδικεῖν] to someone else, in every way
[παντὶ τρόπῳ] it must be provided [παρασκευαστέον], both by acting and speak-
ing [πράττων καὶ λέγων] how he should not pay the penalty [διδόναι δίκην] nor
come before the judge [ὁ δικαστής], or if he does, it must be contrived [μηχανη-
τέον] how the enemy [ὁ ἐχθρός] should not pay the penalty [διδόναι δίκην], or if
he has stolen much gold, he must not return it, but keeping it, he must disburse
it, unjustly and godlessly [ἀδίκως καὶ ἀθέως], to himself and to those who are
his, and if once again he has done injustice [ἀδικεῖν] worthy of death, how he
shall not die, preferably never [μάλιστα μὲν μηδέποτε]; rather he will be immor-
tal, being villainous [πονηρός], but [δέ] if not, how he will live the longest time,
being of such a kind [τοιοῦτος].462

Almost as long as the Golden Sentence, and separated from it only by 480d6–
e4, what makes PP-4 remarkable is how objectionable Plato expects us to find
it. It is not only that no just man would harm another (from κακῶς ποιεῖν to
βλάπτειν), as per Republic 1, or even that no action of ours can prevent an
unjust man from coming face to face—or rather soul to soul (523e2–6)—with
either one δικαστής or two (cf. 523e8–524a7) if the Myth is anything like
true. What makes PP-4 morally bankrupt is that it negates the choice Plato

461
 523a5–b4.
462
 480e5–481b5. L. P. Gerson, “Platonic Dualism.” Monist 69, no. 3 (July 1986), 352–369, situates
this passage in the context of a univocal vs. a dative-bound “good” on 357–358, beginning with:
“The crucial premise in this argument is the conflation of ‘good’ and ‘good for someone.’ Why
does Plato believe that if an action such as punishment is good then it is good for the person who
happens to experience it? If ‘good’ names a Form, then for Plato ‘good’ is univocal.”
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 349

wants us to make with respect to others. When Socrates distinguishes how

we should respond to an enemy harming us from their harming another, and
then states that it is necessary to beware of the former—that is, to take care
to prevent it—but to expedite any obstacles to their continuing unjust treat-
ment of someone else, Plato forces the reader to make a far more important
choice than he does by juxtaposing the Final Myth with PP-4 or in the Choice
Passage.
In the latter, we are asked to consider why it is that we refrain from injus-
tice when we do so, and are given the choice between answering that our
mere choosing not to do so is sufficient, or whether some capacity or art,
predicated on SP, is necessary. Regardless of how we answer it, the ques-
tion is about refraining from unjust acts as opposed to doing just ones, and
the controversy generated by Sachs in 1963 would be sufficient evidence
of the longevity of the resulting problem if it were not for the fact that it
has ancient origins. In Cicero’s De Officiis, he makes a distinction between
refraining from committing unjust acts oneself and actively preventing oth-
ers from suffering injustice, taking Plato to task for neglecting the latter.463
For reasons developed in more detail elsewhere, Cicero’s critique of Plato is
better understood as a critique of the Shorter Way—the selfishness of which
is anticipated in PP-4—by a true Platonist who lived and died in accordance
with the Longer.
The trial and death of Socrates is prefigured in Gorgias for the first time in
the ROPD for the same reason that PP-4 is used there to provoke Callicles’
Question. Socrates was not put to death because, as a just man, he chose to
refrain from harming others by making them unjust, but because—like a doc-
tor, well aware of the consequences his practice of “medicine” entailed—he
actively attempted to benefit others at some cost to himself, shielding them
from the sweet but harmful wares of the pastry-chefs while exposing himself
to their life-threatening hatred. His first priority was never to take care that
he suffered no injustice, and indeed the persuasive bite of the Ad hominem
Speech is that preserving one’s own life, shielding oneself from injury or
death, is unworthy of the higher aspirations of Callicles. It is not enough to
emphasize that PP-4 begins with an “if,”464 or to acknowledge its jocular-
ity: only if we recoil in righteous indignation from the claim that if we want
to harm our enemy, we must prevent him from paying the penalty of his
injustice only when someone else is suffering injustice at his hands, will we
understand why Callicles became the touchstone of Socrates.

463
 On Cicero, De officiis, 1.28, see Altman, Cicero’s Revival of Platonism, 84–87; cf. Sachs, “A
Fallacy,” 142–144.
464
 Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 117n20.
350 Chapter 3

Consider PP-1 in the relation to the Good and the Beautiful. With respect
to ἀδικεῖν, Socrates’ position is clear, and he states it succinctly while antici-
pating his trial and death: it will be a villain (πονηρός at 521b5) killing a
good man unjustly, “and if unjustly [ἀδίκως], basely [αἰσχρῶς], and if basely,
badly [κακῶς]” (521c1–2). The ascent to the Beautiful precedes the ascent
to the Good in the ROPD for reasons that Plato allows first Alcibiades and
then Polemarchus to illustrate: even if “good” is construed as what benefits
me, there is no way that committing injustice is beautiful (474c7–8; cf. Alc.
115a6–10). As for the one who refrains from acting unjustly (ἀδίκως), we
can hardly claim that he does so either εὖ—unless the passive sense of εὖ
πράττειν, which requires us to do nothing, is deemed adequately “just”—or
καλῶς, but certainly the latter does not apply.
But what are we to say about ἀδικεῖσθαι, the second half of PP-1? To suffer
injustice cannot be a good thing for us, but can it ever be noble? The answer,
made conspicuous by its negation in PP-4, is obvious: the one who suffers
injustice for the benefit of others acts καλῶς. As for the Good, it is what
breaks us free from the αὐτός we are basanistically enjoined to protect by
εὐλαβητέον in PP-4 (480e6–7), inspiring us to ascend from what is merely
good for us—as suffering injustice can never be shown to be—to the Idea of
the Good, in the light of which we see that the one who acts καλῶς likewise
acts δικαίως, and that only those who do so can be said to εὖ πράττειν.
Given the role εὖ πράττειν plays in Platonic pedagogy, it is important to
make my response to its various meanings absolutely clear. In general, the
difference between the passive and active uses of εὖ πράττειν prepares the
reader for distinguishing the Shorter from the Longer Way. In the eudae-
monist Shorter Way, εὖ πράττειν (passive) is identified as the end in accor-
dance with TEA; right action is the means to securing happiness (“faring
well”), and by exploiting the active/passive ambiguity of the phrase, “doing”
and “faring well” can be made to seem the same.465 But as “right action” or
“doing well,” εὖ πράττειν (active) need not be moral—the great service of
the most radical Socratists is their insistence on just this point—that means
it can only be equated with καλῶς πράττειν by means of deliberate fallacy
(Alc. 116a6–b5).
Introduced in Alcibiades Major as the correct descriptor for courage as
noble-beautiful-admirable (ἀνδρεία as καλή at Alc. 115b5–7) and made vis-
ible there as coming to the aid of friends in war even when that results in

465
 Cf. Laszlo Versényi, Socratic Humanism, 81: “It is important to hold on to this identification of
the good with what leads to long-term satisfaction, well-being, or happiness because this gives us
an empirical criterion of the good and because this alone [N. B.] explains the fundamental Socratic
conviction concerning the inseparability of well-doing and well-being (eupraxia in both senses of
the word).” The contextual references to both Smp. and Christianity (80–81) are revealing.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 351

wounds and death, καλῶς πράττειν will ultimately supplant “happiness as

end” in the Longer Way. It is not, however, because καλῶς πράττειν sup-
plants εὖ πράττειν (passive) as end, but because the GoodT does so, or rather
will do so in Republic 7. Once the GoodE is removed from the center of the
moral universe,466 καλῶς πράττειν—now reconfigured as δικαίως πράττειν
and made visible by Socrates’ initial κατέβην (R. 327a1; cf. Cri. 48b7–8)—
becomes the true and thus moral meaning of εὖ πράττειν (active), and in the
process, εὖ πράττειν (passive) will be relegated to or reserved for the afterlife
as “complete happiness apart from evils [ἐν πάσῃ εὐδαιμονίᾳ ἐκτὸς κακῶν]”
(523b2).467
Incurring evils for the sake of others is noble, and the positive cause of
Callicles’ conversion—the negative cause was his painful awareness that he
had chosen to do injustice voluntarily, and for that crime he needed to con-
fess—was the inspiring nobility of Socrates’ example. Plato should be taken
literally when he wrote in Letters about “a Socrates having become beautiful
[καλός] and new” (Ep. 314c4). It is not because of his bodily beauty that
Socrates becomes ὁ καλός, but because of his spiritual nobility. That nobility
only became fully visible after his Heldentod, for it was the way he died and
the actions that led to his dying that proved that Socrates was the noblest of
men.468 Reborn afresh for Plato in the light of his beautiful end,469 Socrates in
the dialogues is “new” because all of them are written with that end already
in view, and all are designed to help us discern and imitate the maxim of the
actions that led to it.
Gorgias is a turning point in that process. The cause of Plato’s admiration,
Callicles’ conversion, and Socrates’ nobility become one when the reader
recognizes that if it is uglier to do injustice than to suffer it, it is more beau-
tiful to suffer injustice for the benefit of others than to refrain from doing
injustice for the benefit of oneself. Plato thinks that everyone has the capac-
ity (δύναμις) to recognize this without a τέχνη and without being taught it in
so many words, and the reason that he never states it openly is because he
is in possession of a pedagogical τέχνη (R. 518d3–7) that can provoke and

466
 If, that is, a universe whose center is “happiness as the good for us” can in fact be called “moral,”
the Shorter Way indicates Plato’s refusal to assert that this is the case.
467
 It is the relegation or reservation that helps underwrite the metamorphosis of death; in Alcibiades
Major, Socrates leaves unchallenged the claim that death is κακόν so that incurring death for the
sake of friends can be καλή (Alc. 115e6–7).
468
 Cf. Simonides’ epitaph for the soldiers who saved Hellas at Plataea in the Greek Anthology
(7.253): “If to die nobly [τὸ καλῶς θνήσκειν] is the greatest part of virtue, then to us, beyond all
others, chance has allotted this.” Cf. ὁ δὲ [Plato is referring to Dion] πειθόμενος τέθνηκεν καλῶς
(Ep. 334e1) followed by (Ep. 334e1–3): “Thus the striving for the noblest things, both for himself
and for his city, suffering [πάσχειν] whatever he may suffer, is completely right and noble [τὸ
γὰρ τῶν καλλίστων ἐφιέμενον, αὑτῷ τε καὶ πόλει, πάσχειν ὅτι ἂν πάσχῃ, πᾶν ὀρθὸν καὶ καλόν].”
469
 Cf. Kahn, “Unity of Virtue,” 34: “It is the philosophic virtue of Socrates that Plato has in mind
throughout, from the Protagoras to the Republic.”
352 Chapter 3

inspire us to recollect it for ourselves. This is why Meno will mediate the path
between Gorgias and Republic.470
Indirectly in PP-4, Plato challenges us to remove “self” from the center of
the moral universe more directly in Gorgias by redefining political activity
as making others better:

Socrates: Is this then what it is necessary for us to attempt [ἐπιχειρητέον ἡμῖν]:

to tend [θεραπεύειν] our city and its citizens, to make those citizens as best as
possible? For without this, you see, as we found in our former argument [ὡς
ἐν τοῖς ἔμπροσθεν], there is no use in offering any other service [οὐδὲν ὄφελος
ἄλλην εὐεργεσίαν οὐδεμίαν προσφέρειν], unless the intention of those who are
going to acquire either great wealth or special authority or any other sort of
power be fair and honorable [καλὴ κἀγαθὴ]. Are we to grant that? Callicles:
Certainly, if it is more pleasant for you.471

Just as Meno will explain the theoretical basis of the kind of pedagogy Plato
is using in Gorgias, so too will it justify Socrates’ claim that he may well
be the only one in Athens “to put my hand [ἐπιχειρεῖν] truly to the political
art [πολιτικὴ τέχνη] and to do the political things [πράττειν τὰ πολιτικά]”472
when he explains there that the only πολιτικός worthy of the name is the
one who is able to make another a πολιτικός (Men. 100a2), and that means
a statesman willing to serve (θεραπεύειν) others, to perform a good deed
(εὐεργεσία) that bestows a benefit (ὄφελος) on them.
In Gorgias, Plato tells the story of how he became a πολιτικός, and thus of
how Socrates made him better. And when read as a school-text, as I am claim-
ing that all the dialogues should be, Gorgias has the same purpose relative to
us that its Socrates has to Callicles, The erotic dimension of Platonic peda-
gogy is never more intimate than when we realize that just as Callicles was

470
 In commenting on the refutation of Polus (473d3–475e6), a similar point is made eloquently by
Richard McKim, “Shame and Truth in Plato’s Gorgias” in Charles L. Griswold Jr. (ed.), Platonic
Writings, Platonic Readings, 34–48 (New York: Routledge, 1988), on 48 (last word): “Thus
Plato throws down the gauntlet: of course you can detect logical flaws in the argument—I, Plato,
planted them there for detection—but can you honestly contend that you need logical arguments
for Socrates’ beliefs? Can you honestly deny that, like his answerers, you already share them so
deeply that they beggar the power of logic? Like his protagonist, Plato is certain that we cannot,
and he deploys his dramatic powers to imbue us with the belief that Socratic morality is grounded
so deeply in us that its truth is beyond argument.”
471
 513e5–514a3 (Lamb modified).
472
 521d6–8; on the translation of ἐπιχειρεῖν, see David Levy, “Technē and the Problem of Socratic
Philosophy in the Gorgias.” Apeiron 38, no. 4 (December 2005), 185–227, on 220–221, and Shaw,
“Socrates and the True Political Craft,” 188–189. On my account, the obvious and literal meaning
of ἐπιχειρεῖν is fully justified: since Plato is the proof that Socrates is the true πολιτικός by the
Meno-standard, “to attempt” will only cease to be appropriate when we are sure that Socrates has
been successful in the case of Callicles, the very thing of which Plato’s eloquent Socrates must
remain unsure in Grg.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 353

the touchstone of Socrates, so too are you now Plato’s touchstone. Regard-
less, however, of whether you will allow yourself to benefitted and chastened,
as Socrates challenged Callicles to be (505c3–4), to πράττειν τὰ πολιτικά in
the Socratic sense means benefiting others in contempt of the implications
this practice has for the politician’s own “pursuit of happiness.”

Socrates: And now, O best of men, since you are yourself just beginning to do
the city’s business [πράττειν τὰ τῆς πόλεως πράγματα] and you are summon-
ing [παρακαλεῖν] me and reproaching me because I am not doing it [πράττειν],
will we not examine one another, as in: who has Callicles already made better
[βελτίω ποιεῖν] among the citizens? Does there exist someone who was previ-
ously villainous [πονηρός], unjust, licentious, and senseless, who through Cal-
licles has become admirable and good [καλός τε κἀγαθός], whether stranger or
citizen, bond or free?473

The verb παρακαλεῖν appears twelve times in Gorgias, two of them in

its last sentence, where the life to which Callicles is summoning Socrates is
contrasted with the one that Socrates is exhorting Callicles to join with him
in summoning others (527e5–7). In the context of its first use at 500c4, one
would imagine that the two ways of life—the political life to which Callicles
is summoning Socrates (500c4–7) and “the life in philosophy” (500c7–8)—
are antithetical.474 But by making the prerequisite for πράττειν τὰ τῆς πόλεως
πράγματα the ability to produce evidence that Callicles (or anyone else)
has the capacity to make a fellow-citizen better (βελτίω ποιεῖν), Socrates is
pointing to the “higher unity” that will be achieved by Plato, of whose mes-
sage Gorgias is the medium. Although Callicles cannot, Plato can and will
produce such evidence, beginning with himself and ending with you. Having
given an unblinking self-portrait of himself as “villainous, unjust, licentious,
and senseless”—not, mind you from any lack of intelligence, but rather from
a more serious deficit of justice, courage, temperance, wisdom, and piety—
Plato emerges as the Socratized Callicles: a καλός τε κἀγαθός capable of
using rhetoric and the proper practice of the political art for the purpose of
summoning you to become one too.
But until the butterfly will emerge from its self-serving chrysalis, Callicles
can say nothing, eloquent or otherwise:

Socrates: Tell me, if someone examines you in these terms, Callicles, what
will you say? What human being will you claim to have made better [βελτίω
ποιεῖν] by your intercourse [τῇ συνουσίᾳ τῇ σῇ]? Do you shrink from answer-
ing, if there really is some accomplishment of yours [τι ἔργον σὸν] while still in

473
 515a1–7 (Lamb modified).
474
 Plato introduces the combination of the two with the frontiersman of Euthd. 305c6–d2; see §7.
354 Chapter 3

private life before undertaking [ἐπιχειρεῖν] to do public service [δημοσιεύειν]?

Callicles: You are contentious [φιλόνικος], Socrates!475

Callicles is right: Socrates is competitive (cf. Prt. 360e3), and he is intent on

winning over Callicles by any means possible; if he were not so, there would
have been no Plato and no Gorgias. Combined as one, the remade Callicles
who is writing this dialogue is Socrates’ answer to his own questions: he is τι
ἔργον σὸν made better by τῇ συνουσίᾳ τῇ σῇ. The other-benefiting criterion
is hammered for the very good reason that Socrates is in the process of mak-
ing Callicles better, and we are being allowed to witness what βελτίω ποιεῖν
means. For the present, however, Callicles cannot answer, for he remains
in the inarticulate thrall of the unanswerable that has already produced the
silence following the New Question.
But even while speechless, Callicles also remains φιλόνικος, just as
Socrates knows and requires that he will. Glossing the earlier πράττειν τὰ
τῆς πόλεως πράγματα as δημοσιεύειν, and once again insisting that a proven
capacity to βελτίω ποιεῖν is their prerequisite, Socrates is showing Callicles
that the only way to win is by becoming Plato. Gorgias is not the record of its
author’s rejection of the political life but the first indication of how philoso-
phy will restore the καλὸς κἀγαθός in Republic as “the political man” who
returns to the Cave for the purpose of making others better:

Socrates: But it is not from contentiousness [φιλονικία] that I ask you this, rather
as truly wishing to know in what manner you think it is necessary to engage in
politics [πολιτεύεσθαι] among us. Or is it, then, from a concern for anything
else regarding us that you are entering upon the city’s business [τὰ τῆς πόλεως
πράγματα] than how we citizens might be the best possible [ὅτι βέλτιστοι οἱ
πολῖται ὦμεν]? Have we not already agreed many times that this is what it is
necessary for the political man [ὁ πολιτικὸς ἀνήρ] to do [πράττειν]? Have we
admitted it or not? Answer [ἀποκρίνου]! We have: I will answer for you.476

Socrates here uses πολιτεύεσθαι as a third way to describe the life to which
Callicles is ostensibly summoning him, that is, to πράττειν τὰ τῆς πόλεως
πράγματα. My claim is that beginning with Protagoras,477 this is the life
which the πολιτικὸς ἀνήρ I call “Plato the Teacher” has been preparing his
students to lead, albeit on the condition that they no longer regard leading
that life as a means to their own good. The philosopher’s life is better than
the active political life, and if we are guided solely by our own pursuit of the
GoodE—seeking to dwell ἐν πάσῃ εὐδαιμονίᾳ ἐκτὸς κακῶν—we would never

475
 515a7–b5 (Lamb modified).
476
 515b6–c4 (Lamb modified).
477
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §1.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 355

undertake the dangerous task of doing our utmost best to see that οἱ πολῖται
are ὅτι βέλτιστοι.
“‘For the fact is, dear friend,’ said I, ‘if you can discover a better way of
life than office-holding for your future rulers, a well-governed city becomes
a possibility’” (R. 520e4–521a2). Plato’s solution to the problem of which
of these two lives it is necessary to live (500d2–4) is a synthesis of Socrates
and Callicles, and the philosophical evidence for CPH—Gorgias contains the
literary evidence for it by revealing ὁ πολιτικὸς ἀνήρ as Socrates’ ἔργον—is
this great sound-bite from Plato’s Republic. Honoring the φιλονικία of both,
the synthetic solution of the just philosopher’s return to the Cave of political
life—only possible for those whose ascent to the GoodT has allowed them
to transcend the GoodE—allows both Socrates and Callicles to win, and the
violet-crowned city where the helmeted goddess of wisdom holds aloft a war-
rior’s spear therefore wins as well. Whether we too will win depends entirely
on us, but if at the end of Gorgias we are certain that Callicles will remain
obstinate in his unpersuaded and paleo-Nietzschean silence, then Plato,
Socrates, and Athens will have lost along with us.
Not surprisingly, the terms of the win-win compact between Socrates and
Callicles that will produce Plato the Teacher are spelled out most clearly in
the dialogue’s peroration. Accomplished orators reserve for the conclusion
their most compelling arguments, and particularly when we know in advance
that a speech has succeeded, we owe its last words especial scrutiny. The fact
of its success is its existence; such is the interpretive fruit of CPH. While
reviewing the four “Platonic Paradoxes” and explaining what makes the Final
Myth a λόγος, the last page of Gorgias—once again under the aegis of “the
medium is the message”—reveals how Socrates succeeded, and likewise
what his success still means for us.
Since the speech that begins with κατέβην will naturally be his greatest, it
is therefore in the peroration of Plato’s second greatest political speech that
rhetoric is redeemed, and placed in the service of Justice. The capital “J” of
the Longer Way is necessary because it is Justice that resolves the differences
between Callicles and Socrates, not the internal, inactive, and self-absorbed
harmony of the Shorter Way’s justice, anticipated in the Feigned Dialogue.
Justice succeeds in placing the φιλονικία and ἔρως of the one in the active
service of the other. By making philosophy the necessary prerequisite for
πράττειν τὰ τῆς πόλεως πράγματα and thus preparing the reader for the sub-
lime moral of the Cave—that the political life must be chosen in the light of
the GoodT precisely because it is not to the advantage of the philosopher who
chooses it, and therefore does not conduce to SB or securing for oneself the
GoodE—it is in the peroration of Plato’s Gorgias that rhetoric and Justice
become one, and it is in the silence that follows it that Callicles became Plato.
356 Chapter 3

Socrates concludes the Final Myth by turning the tables on him: in

the hereafter someone will perhaps bespatter him with mud there—
προπηλακίζειν is its last word at 527a4—just as he had earlier claimed that
a slave for whom death is preferable to life, who cannot come to the aid
of himself or a person he cares for, will suffer injustice and be bespattered
with mud here (483a8–b4). This remarkable verb will appear a third time
in the peroration (527c7). Commenting on what he has just said, Socrates
hammers another verb that will reappear alongside προπηλακίζειν at 527c7
when he predicts that Callicles will “show contempt for [καταφρονεῖν at
527a6–7]” the recently concluded λόγος he will probably dismiss as a
μῦθος (527a5; cf. 523a1–3). Reminding us of the three interlocutors in
Gorgias (527a9–b1)—“you who are the wisest among the Greeks of today”
(527a8–9)—Socrates states that none of them has been able “to demon-
strate that it is necessary to live any other life than this one, which even
in that place [καὶ ἐκεῖσε] seems advantageous [συμφέρων]” (527b1–2).
An exegesis of the peroration in relation to the Longer Way appropriately
begins only after this claim, for it is profoundly misleading to suggest
that the life Socrates is asking Callicles to choose—and that he chose—is
συμφέρων “even there.”
It would be closer to the truth to say that the life Socrates is recommend-
ing cannot be shown to be advantageous unless we take into account what
happens ἐκεῖσε, not even when we do, and if the moral universe of Gorgias
revolved around advantage, its Myth would be necessary.478 To be sure
Socrates will be able to defend justice without recourse to the afterlife in the
Shorter Way, but that is precisely why he will not be defending Justice there.
Justice first comes to light in Gorgias, made vivid by the trial of the Doctor
who knows full well the deadly results of making us better, and who does not
seek to be benefited while benefiting others.
By contrast, it requires some kind of shortcut to prove that “the just
things” (τὰ δίκαια) are συμφέροντα (Alc. 116d3), and the Εὖ Πράττειν
Fallacy accomplishes the same result in Alcibiades Major that the Myth
does in Gorgias and the Shorter Way’s internal and inactive justice does in
Republic. With the word συμφέρων (527b2), Socrates’ peroration begins,
leaving shortcuts behind: this is the source of its rhetorical power. As for
the Myth, if we eventually “fare well” there as a result of “doing well” here
(cf. 527a2–3), well and good, but what transformed Callicles into Plato
was neither the fear of punishment—for his transformation was painful
punishment enough—nor the promise of self-preservation and advantage,
in contempt of which his soul for the first time soared free. The source
of that freedom, and of all his speeches, is the ἔρως for giving birth in

478
 Cf. Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 385.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 357

the Beautiful that Socrates ὁ καλός kindled in him by living and dying in
accordance with Justice.479
Of the six sentences between συμφέρων and Socrates’ final ὦ Καλλίκλεις
(527e7), the first is the longest, and for purposes of discussion it will be
divided into five parts. But despite its complexity, this sentence has a single
purpose—to remind us of all four “Platonic Paradoxes”—and it is worth
quoting it first as a whole in order to make that purpose plain:

Socrates: But among the many statements we have made, while all the rest are
refuted this one alone is unshaken—that doing wrong is to be more carefully
shunned [εὐλαβητέον; cf. PP-4] than suffering it [i.e., PP-1]; and above all for a
man it is necessary to take care not to seem to be good but to be so both in pri-
vate and in public; that if one becomes bad in any respect one must be corrected;
that this is good in the second place, next to being just, to become so and to be
corrected by paying the penalty [i.e., PP-2]; and that every kind of flattery, with
regard either to oneself or to others, to few or to many, it is necessary to flee;
and it is necessary thus to make use of [χρηστέον; cf. PP-3] rhetoric and every
other practice as well: toward the just always.480

While the references to PP-1 and PP-2 are obvious, the allusions to PP-3
and PP-4 are subtler, depending on the two verbal adjectives εὐλαβητέον
and χρηστέον, both appearing here for only the second time in the dialogue.
The latter appeared after the coda to the Feigned Dialogue at 508b7, when
Socrates referred back to what had provoked Callicles’ Question, combin-
ing a claim about how “it is necessary to use” rhetoric with κατηγορητέον,
another verbal adjective meaning “it is necessary to accuse” (508b3–7;
quoted above). The verb χρῆσθαι is also used in PP-3 itself (480d4).
The link between εὐλαβητέον and PP-4 is more direct since 480e7 is the
only other place where is appears. But if more direct, the allusion is also sub-
tler, since it is used to make the opposite point, a contrast that supports my
claim that Plato expected us to recognize the deliberate falsehood to which
it was attached the first time. There, Socrates claimed that suffering injustice
“must be carefully shunned” when oneself (αὐτός at 480e6) is the victim; in
the peroration, it is used in connection with PP-1:

Socrates: But among the many statements [ἐν τοσούτοις λόγοις] we have made,
while all the rest are refuted this one [ὁ λόγος] alone is unshaken—that the

479
 Note that it is ἔρως that uniquely connects Socrates and Callicles (481c5–d5), and thus not the
universal desire for happiness that emerges in the Eudaemonist Shortcut (Smp. 205a5–b3); cf.
Thomas L. Pangle, “Plato’s Gorgias as a Vindication of Socratic Education.” Polis 10 (1991),
3–21, on 19: “Socrates makes it clear from the outset that he and Callicles are kindred spirits inas-
much as both are erotic men.” Plato has prepared us to recognize the pedagogigical significance
of ἔρως; cf. Am. 133a1–b6 and Euthd. 300c1–d7.
480
 527b2–c4.
358 Chapter 3

doing of injustice [τὸ ἀδικεῖν] is to be more carefully shunned [εὐλαβητέον]

than the suffering of injustice [τὸ ἀδικεῖσθαι];481

Singling out PP-1 as the single unshakeable (or at the very least, the first and
most important) λόγος among such a large number of other λόγοι, and sol-
emnizing its two components with the definite article (τὸ), Socrates reverses
the application of εὐλαβητέον: linked to ἀδικεῖσθαι in PP-4 (480e7), it is now
applied to τὸ ἀδικεῖν. This reversal signals the transition between the Shorter
and the Longer Ways, that is, between advantageous self-regard and a life-
threatening regard for others. This is the first time self-protection as an end in
itself is rejected in the peroration, albeit at first only implicitly. The sentence
continues:

Socrates (cont.): and above all for a man it is necessary to take care [μελετητέον]
not to seem to be good [οὐ τὸ δοκεῖν εἶναι ἀγαθὸν] but to be so [τὸ εἶναι] both in
private and in public [καὶ ἰδίᾳ καὶ δημοσίᾳ];482

The second part of the long first sentence uses μελετητέον to break new
ground: here Plato is not pointing back to what has occurred in Gorgias but
pointing forward to Republic. To be sure there was a hint of the crucial dis-
tinction between “what is” and “what [merely] seems to be” in the run-up to
the doubled four-part analogies (464a3–4), but here, once again solemnized
by the direct article, τὸ εἶναι and τὸ δοκεῖν not only introduce the dyad
around which Republic 1 is constructed,483 but provide the first indication of
Parmenides’ ontology since Symposium.484 More obviously, however, this
passage prepares for the quotation from Aeschylus in Republic 2, where
Glaucon and Adeimantus will withhold the Myth-dependent rewards of the
afterlife (R. 363d6–e3) from the “simple and well-bred man” who would
rather be good than seem to be so (R. 361b5–8). Indeed the claim that we
should choose to be just even though seeming to be unjust, in preference to
seeming to be just while actually being unjust (R. 361c1–d3) might well be
added as a fifth Platonic Paradox.
This man, who will face a formidable array of disadvantageous evils in
Glaucon’s vivid account (R. 361e4–362a2), is the philosopher who returns
to the Cave, already imaged in both Charmides and Gorgias as Doctor
Socrates, shouted down and condemned to death in the latter by his juvenile

481
 527b2–5 (Lamb modified).
482
 527b5–6 (Lamb modified).
483
 Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, 342–343; cf. 69. See also Charles H. Kahn, Essays on
Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 197, on Prt. and Smp.
484
 Cf. John Palmer, Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 334.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 359

δικασταί (522a6–7; cf. 522d8–e1). But apart from the fact that the doctor will
be hauled into the court (δικαστήριον at 522b4) and a passing reference to
“speaking bitter words in either private or public capacity [ἢ ἰδίᾳ ἢ δημοσίᾳ]”
(522b8–9), there is no indication that he is anything but a private citizen; the
way that phrase is modified here (καὶ ἰδίᾳ καὶ δημοσίᾳ) is the first indication
in the peroration that the return to the Cave will require the philosopher to
live the (infinitely inferior) political or public life. As already indicated, it
is the stern requirements of Justice that will create the win-win synthesis of
Socrates and Callicles.

Socrates (cont.): that if one becomes bad in any respect one must be corrected
[κολαστέον]; that this is good in the second place, next to being just [τὸ εἶναι
δίκαιον], to become so [τὸ γίγνεσθαι] and to be corrected by paying the penalty
[διδόναι δίκην];485

The third part of the first sentence returns to the familiar ground of PP-2
but nevertheless continues to point the way forward to Republic. Not since
the discussion of Simonides in Protagoras has there been so clear an allusion
to the difference between Being and Becoming, here suggested (and once
again solemnized) as τὸ γίγνεσθαι and τὸ εἶναι (cf. Prt. 340b4–5). By join-
ing διδόναι δίκην with what it is to be just (τὸ εἶναι δίκαιον), the reader is
prepared for Republic 1, where the subject of justice arises from Cephalus’
myth-inspired fears. But what Cephalus fears will happen there, Socrates
claims must happen here: hence κολαστέον, the third of five verbal adjectives
in the sentence. The fourth (φευκτέον) quickly follows:

Socrates (cont.): and that every kind of flattery [κολακεία], with regard either
to oneself or to others, to few or to many, it is necessary to flee [φευκτέον];486

Although it is because of the fifth verbal adjective (χρηστέον at 527c3) that

we can be sure Socrates is alluding to PP-3, the presence of the Rhetorical
Triad here already indicates it. The “others” take the place of friends and
kinsmen, and the reconfiguration of the city as “few and many” suggests
political involvement for the second time.
But the mere avoidance of flattery—the mention of κολακεία is intended
to recall the doubled analogy (463b1)—is an insufficient replacement for
the missing element of self-accusation at the heart of PP-3, and this lacuna
deserves some comment. It is because the peroration represents the synthesis
of rhetoric and Justice, and because Justice constitutes the touchstone-tested

485
 527b7–c1 (Lamb).
486
 527c1–3 (Lamb modified).
360 Chapter 3

agreement of Callicles and Socrates (487d7–e3; cf. 486e5–6), that we can

be sure that Plato’s Selbstanklage has already done its work. It could not be
otherwise: precisely because it is not σύμφερον, Justice requires us to have
already put ourselves in our proper place. Just as self-defense drops out of
PP-4, so too does self-accusation fade from view once it has done its work,
and the transformation of Callicles into Plato is its ἔργον. Bear in mind
that for most readers of Gorgias, Callicles will forever remain one of the
incurables;487 Plato leaves it to us to see that Doctor Socrates has persuaded
him to take his medicine, and as a result of making the message of PP-3 his
own, he has accused himself, his relatives, and his city in Gorgias. Only with
that transformation accomplished can Justice begin to shine forth, first and
foremost as the τέλος of rhetoric:

Socrates (cont.): and it is necessary thus to make use of [χρηστέον] [the practice
of] rhetoric—to point to the just always [ἐπὶ τὸ δίκαιον ἀεί]—and every other
action [πρᾶξις] as well [καὶ τῇ ῥητορικῇ οὕτω χρηστέον ἐπὶ τὸ δίκαιον ἀεί, καὶ
τῇ ἄλλῃ πάσῃ πράξει].488

With χρηστέον as its fifth verbal adjective, the sentence comes to its trium-
phant end, pointing to τὸ δίκαιον as the τέλος not only of rhetoric, but also
of every other πρᾶξις. In the beautiful phrase “toward the just forever [ἐπὶ τὸ
δίκαιον ἀεί],” Plato has created a manifesto, a credo, and a memorable sound
bite, but he is best understood as making use of rhetoric in order to put rheto-
ric in its proper place. The fact that Socrates’ account of justice in Republic
4 will be developed step-by-step, by process of elimination, magisterially,
systematically, and without any ostentatious use of rhetoric, does not give it
greater authority than what we find in Gorgias but rather less. It is because
Justice is both Beautiful and Good—with the latter now beginning the ascent
to its post-eudaemonist form or Idea—that rhetoric must necessarily become
its handmaiden, and that for three reasons. If rhetoric had not been applied to
us, we could not have been persuaded to subordinate self-protection and self-
interest to Justice, and without mastering it ourselves, we could never per-
suade anyone else to do so. And finally, since Justice is political, philosophers
will need rhetoric in the Cave. Gorgias is closer to Justice than the Shorter
Way precisely because its message is mixed, but in ἐπὶ τὸ δίκαιον ἀεί, Plato
is finally giving it to us straight.

Socrates: Persuaded by me, therefore [ἐμοὶ οὖν πειθόμενος], follow me [ἀκολ­

ούθησον] thither, whither having reached [ἐνταῦθα οἷ ἀφικόμενος], you will be

487
 As in Edmunds, “Whips and Scars,” 178.
488
 527c3–4 (Lamb modified).
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 361

happy [future of εὐδαιμονεῖν] both living and having died, as this account [ὁ
λόγος] signifies.489

Having made the proper use of persuasion obvious with ἐμοὶ οὖν
πειθόμενος, Plato now leads us to dizzying heights, filling us with confusion
and wonder. For where is the ἐνταῦθα that we have just now reached, and
to what discourse does ὁ λόγος refer? The context suggests that Socrates is
referring back to the previous sentence, where he used ὁ λόγος to review the
Platonic Paradoxes. But the reference to posthumous happiness suggests that
ὁ λόγος here includes the Myth, and if so, are we then to understand ἐνταῦθα
in terms of the “here/there [ἐνθάδε/ἐκεῖ]” distinction, with the future of
εὐδαιμονεῖν pointing to the latter as well? One thing is clear: Plato is no lon-
ger using verbal adjectives to express “what must be done”; with ἀκολούθη-
σον, he shifts to the imperative. Hoping that we will understand where we
now are, let’s first do as he says:

Socrates: And allow [καὶ ἔασον] whoever it might be [τις] to condemn you
[καταφρονεῖν] as a fool and to bespatter you with filth [προπηλακίζειν] if he
chooses; yes, by Zeus, and with you, sir, undaunted [σύ γε θαρρῶν], to smite
you [πατάσσειν] with that dishonorable stroke, for you will suffer [future of
πάσχειν] nothing terrible if in reality [τῷ ὄντι] you should be noble and good
[καλὸς κἀγαθός], practicing virtue [ἀσκεῖν ἀρετήν].490

In response to these riches, the first point to make is perfectly pedestrian: the
presence of ἔασον, a second imperative to match the previous ἀκολούθησον,
coupled with the fact that it follows the conjunction καί, suggests that this is
not, pace Burnet, a separate sentence but rather the continuation of the previ-
ous one. Making this editorial change has the advantage that it allows us to
explicate the meaning of the prior ἐνταῦθα and ὁ λόγος in relation to what is
found here.
As already indicated, the verb προπηλακίζειν is found in the concluding
sentence of the Myth (526e1–527a4), where it is now Callicles who may
well suffer ἐκεῖ the same kind of mistreatment at the hands of some name-
less τις to which Callicles had earlier claimed that Socrates has exposed
himself ἐνθάδε.491 Where does that leave us then? With the future of πάσχειν
now matching the future of εὐδαιμονεῖν, Plato seems to be telling us that
we will be happy there even if we are on the receiving end of καταφρονεῖν,
προπηλακίζειν, and πατάσσειν here, and if so, this commits us to the Myth as
ὁ λόγος, glossing the previous ἐνταῦθα as ἐκεῖ. I propose a sterner alternative,

489
 527c4–6 (Lamb modified).
490
 527c6–d2
491
 Although the verb πατάσσειν is new, it is obviously a synonym for τύπτειν at 527a3.
362 Chapter 3

justifying Plato’s sublime σύ γε θαρρῶν: it is not even if you suffer, but

because you do—with courage undaunted—that you are καλὸς κἀγαθός, and
it is because you truly are (τῷ ὄντι) “noble and good” that you will ἀσκεῖν
ἀρετήν in complete indifference to whether you will εὐδαιμονεῖν here, there,
or in both places.492 It is to the spiritual ἐνταῦθα of this “complete indiffer-
ence,” first glimpsed in Symposium, that Plato is commanding us to follow
him, and to which the whole of his ὁ λόγος, soon to reach its highest peak in
Republic, has been leading us.

Socrates: And after thus having practiced [sc. ἀρετή] together [κοινῇ ἀσκεῖν],
then at last [τότε ἤδη], if it should seem to be requisite [ἐὰν δοκῇ χρῆναι], we
will apply ourselves to political things [ἐπιθησόμεθα τοῖς πολιτικοῖς], or what-
ever kind of thing seems [best] to us, then [τότε] we will consult, being better
[able] to consult than now [ἢ νῦν].493

Having used the future tense to describe the consequences of obeying his
two imperatives in the previous sentence(s), Plato now uses a single future
verb to point us forward to the Longer Way. Replacing and indeed reversing
the sequence of an abuse-ridden ἐνθάδε with a placid and rewarding ἐκεῖ,
this sentence perfectly describes the relationship between the Academy and
the political life it is preparing us to lead. Starting from a νῦν of ill-educated
ignorance, we enter Plato’s school in order to ἀσκεῖν ἀρετήν; having done
so—and reading his gymnastic dialogues is how we are presently doing
so—we reach a τότε that will allow us to make the decision at “the crisis of
the Republic,” that is, whether or not “we will apply ourselves to political
things [ἐπιθησόμεθα τοῖς πολιτικοῖς].” In Plato’s sequence, the joyful ἔρως
of philosophy precedes the harder part, and the “then” we have reached at
the end of his ὁ λόγος—that is, the ROPD as a whole—is the ἐνταῦθα from
which we will decide for ourselves, ἐὰν δοκῇ χρῆναι, to return to the Cave.
In Republic, he will show his students why it is necessary to do so, and some
will. But when they do so, it is only because “Plato” has become the Socra-
tized Callicles, and the word κοινῇ is the sign of their synthesis, soon to be
replicated in the union of Plato and his students, “practicing virtue together
[κοινῇ]” in the Academy.
But for Plato himself, embracing the joy of philosophy by making the
Socratic life his own was by no means painless, for it was preceded by a
proud man’s self-accusation, confession, and repentance. Callicles’ ideal of
the politically active καλὸς κἀγαθός will be preserved in Platonic Justice,
where even rhetoric is redeemed ἐπὶ τὸ δίκαιον ἀεί, but Gorgias leaves no

492
 Cf. Plato the Teacher, 226n233.
493
 527d2–5.
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 363

doubt that Socrates is the senior partner in their “higher unity.” To make this
point clear, Plato reverts to the νῦν of the pre-Socratic Callicles—and also of
his own students in the Academy—in the first part of the peroration’s penul-
timate sentence:

Socrates: For it is disgraceful [αἰσχρόν] for those in such a condition as we now

appear to be in [ὡς νῦν φαινόμεθα ἔχειν], after giving way to youthful inso-
lence [νεανιεύεσθαι] as though being something [grand; ὄντες τι], to whom the
same things never seem [to be the case] about the same things, and these things
being the greatest ones—to so great a lack of education [ἀπαιδευσία] have we
reached—494

With νεανιεύεσθαι (LSJ: “to be a youth”), Socrates is once again using

another of Callicles’ own words against him (cf. 482c4),495 but its applica-
tion is obviously wider (LSJ II: “act like a hot-headed youth, willfully or
wantonly, swagger”), and it makes sense that it should be a sign of their
ἀπαιδευσία that Plato’s youthful students imagine themselves as ὄντες τι.
But apart from those in relative clauses, the only verb in the sentence follows
this pitch for the Academy, and it takes us back to familiar ground:

Socrates: as a guide, then, let us use [χρησώμεθα] the account [ὁ λόγος] that has
now shown forth [παραφαίνειν], which signifies for us that this is the best way
of life [ὁ τρόπος ἄριστος τοῦ βίου]: both to live and to die practicing [ἀσκεῖν]
both justice [ἡ δικαιοσύνη] and the rest of virtue [ἡ ἄλλη ἀρετή].496

From the string of five verbal adjectives in the first sentence—including

χρηστέον (527c3), where ἡ ῥητορική is what must be used—through the
imperatives of the second and third, and the single future indicative in the cru-
cial fourth, Plato turns at last to a hortatory subjunctive with χρησώμεθα; he
will use two more of them in the final sentence of the peroration. By doing so,
Plato makes it obvious once again that he is using rhetoric for the sake of Jus-
tice, creating the unified σκόπος he expects us to find in his Gorgias. But this
time he is not stating that it is necessary to use rhetoric ἐπὶ τὸ δίκαιον ἀεί, he
is exhorting us to use his λόγος to integrate the proper use of rhetoric with ὁ
τρόπος ἄριστος τοῦ βίου. The difficulty of identifying exactly what he means
by ὁ λόγος is suggested here by παρα-φαίνειν, the prefix of which suggests a
certain indirection or obliquity. On my account, this makes sense: although
it is easy to imagine that Gorgias is simply opposing philosophy to rhetoric,

494
 527d5–e1.
495
 Cf. Alessandra Fussi, “The Myth of the Last Judgment in the Gorgias.” Review of Metaphysics
54, no. 3 (March 2001), 529–552, on 550.
496
 527e1–5.
364 Chapter 3

Plato’s ὁ λόγος as a whole is more complex, and if we are persuaded to use

it as our guide, it will be because it is using rhetoric to persuade us to put
rhetoric into the service of Justice on the grounds that doing so—once having
been practiced in virtue thanks to philosophy—is ὁ τρόπος ἄριστος τοῦ βίου.
Since this is the third time it is used in the peroration (527d2, 527d3, and
527e4), the verb ἀσκεῖν can no longer be ignored. Plato hammers it for the
same reason that Lysis, Euthydemus, Laches, and Charmides take place in
gymnasia: we are in the gymnastic phase of our education, training for “the
long race”—more like the ἡμερο- than the δολιχοδρόμος (cf. Prt. 335e4)—of
the ten-book Republic. In that training program, the lengthy and complex Gor-
gias plays the single most important role, and it is here that Plato introduces
the phrase ἀσκεῖν ἀρετήν as a result. The verb ἀσκεῖν will connect Gorgias to
Theages and Meno (see §13), and in the latter, it will be the only alternative
mentioned in Meno’s opening question (Men. 70a1–4) that is never discussed
in the dialogue,497 but that scarcely means it no longer applies. In fact, “prac-
ticing virtue” is what Plato intends the experience of reading every one of his
dialogues to be, and my earlier claim about the spiritual ἐνταῦθα to which ὁ
λόγος is leading us—that it is the complete indifference of the καλὸς κἀγαθός
to self-protection and SB, imaged by the Trial of the (Other-Regarding as
opposed to Self-Benefitting) Doctor—indicates exactly what that means. It is
because this indifference is the basis of every virtue that Justice will only be
made visible in the light of the Idea of the Good, and why finding it between
the lines of Gorgias is itself to ἀσκεῖν ἀρετήν.
I wrote “between the lines” because Plato never says directly that self-
protection is rejected in his Gorgias: Socrates endorses it in PP-4, ridicules
it in the Ad hominem Speech, and reverses the meaning of εὐλαβητέον in
the peroration. Of these three, the most important is the first—the other two
merely confirm that he is rejecting it—and that is because it immediately pre-
cedes Callicles’ Question. Socrates is “playing around” when he claims that
it is necessary to resist an enemy when he is doing injustice to you, but that
in order to do him the most harm, you must expedite the obstacles that pre-
vent him from further harming others. Asking us to recognize for ourselves
that no καλὸς κἀγαθός would do this is a pedagogical exercise in virtue,498
and the theoretical basis of this kind of pedagogy will be revealed through

497
 See Eric Snider, “The Conclusion of Meno: Socrates on the Genesis of Ἀρετή.” Ancient Philoso-
phy 12 (1992), 73–86, especially 78n8.
498
 Cf. Stemmer, “Unrecht Tun,” 522 (last word): “Gelingt er nicht, scheitert der Versuch, zu zeigen,
daß Unrecht Leiden nicht nur unter moralischen Gesichtspunkten, sondern auch unter solchen
des eigenen Wohls dem Unrecht Tun vorzuziehen ist, bleibt also das Ideal der καλοκαγαθία ohne
argumentatives Fundament.” It is this ideal that drives us forward to Thg. and Men. (see follow-
ing note).
 Plato and Gorgias: Socrates’ Touchstone 365

Recollection in Meno.499 Pedagogy of this kind does not prove to be effec-

tive for every student; Theages will provide a Socratic explanation for the
resulting unpredictability of its effectiveness. Nor would Plato be surprised
to discover that many more have found a Socratic protreptic to philosophy in
Euthydemus than in Gorgias,500 despite the exhortation with which he ends it:

Socrates: This then let us follow [ἑπώμεθα], and to this let us summon [παρα-
καλῶμεν] the others; not that to which you trust yourself and summon me [παρα-
καλεῖν], for it is worth nothing, O Callicles.501

By replacing the imperative ἀκολούθησον with the hortatory ἑπώμεθα,

Plato recalls what Diotima says at the beginning of the final ascent to Beauty:
“Try to follow [ἑπέσθαι] if you are able” (Smp. 210a4). The mountain-peak
from which we first saw the whole ocean of Beauty (Smp. 210d3–4) was
always the ἐνταῦθα to which ὁ λόγος was leading us, for it is only by going
up that we can go back down. And the hortatory παρακαλῶμεν, should we
decide to be persuaded by it, will lead us “to giving birth in the Beautiful,”
offering other youngsters the same exhortation to ἡ δικαιοσύνη that Plato has
just offered us in Gorgias, the effectiveness of which he is himself the born-
again proof. Since he knows how he got there, he can help us to get there
too, but it will require practice. If the verb ἀσκεῖν points forward to Meno,
παρακαλεῖν points even further, to Cleitophon, nor is this surprising: start-
ing with Charmides,502 all of the intervening dialogues will feel the mighty
Republic’s gravitational pull. It is there that our gymnastic exercises will pay
off, and if we use our training well, we will receive the torch of Justice (R.
435a2–3; cf. Ep. 341c7–d1), passed to us on the understanding that we will
pass it on to others (R. 328a3–4), not for Plato’s benefit, nor for ours, but for
theirs, a project conceived in the Beautiful and lit by the transcendent Good.

499
 Cf. Stemmer, “Unrecht Tun,” 520: “im Gorgias finden wir nicht einmal Andeutungen einer
Anamnesislehre.”
500
 Cf. Jyl Gentzler, “The Sophistic Cross-Examination of Callicles in the Gorgias.” Ancient Philoso-
phy 15, no. 1 (Spring 1995), 17–43, on 29–30.
501
 527e5–7 (Lamb modified).
502
 Thanks to the Happy City and the introduction of Plato’s kinsmen in Chrm., the gravitational pull
of R. is first exerted on that dialogue; the gravitational pull of Smp., indicated by Socrates’ heroics
at Delium, extends through the erotic setting of both Ly. and Euthd. as far as La.
 Chapter 4

Theages and Meno

Socratic Paradoxes

§13. DIVINE DISPENSATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Starting from the premise that Socrates fails to persuade Callicles, “the
insufficiency of reason in Plato’s Gorgias” has become an interpretive
focal point in the Anglo-American reception of this remarkable dialogue.1
A recurrent theme or even commonplace among such interpretations has
linked this (alleged) failure to the emergence of “good-independent” desires
in Plato’s thought, a development that leads, more or less seamlessly, to the
tripartite soul, and thus the abandonment of “Socrates’ moral psychology.”2
There are obviously a number of questionable assumptions built into expla-
nations of this kind, beginning with the radical Socratism of Penner’s Pas-
sage and ending with the possible non-existence of the initial problem they
are designed to explain. Joining the two is the observation that a reformed
Plato could never have depicted Callicles as not only un-persuaded but
un-persuadable—not only unrepentant but incurable, and thus worthy of
eternal punishment—if his wrongdoing had been involuntary, and thus
“exempt from blame.”3

1
 The reference is Klosko, “Insufficiency of Reason,” first in the list of articles devoted to “the intrac-
tability of Callicles” in Trivigno, “Paratragedy,” 73n2.
2
 See McTighe, “Socrates on Desire for the Good,” 217n55. Cf. Klosko, “Insufficiency of Reason,”
581nn6–7, Scott, “Platonic Pessimism” 29, and Austin, “Corpses, Self-Defense, and Immortality,”
34n3.
3
 For criticism of this conception of “involuntary” in McTigue, “Socrates on Desire for the Good,”
230–31, see Roslyn Weiss, “Ignorance, Involuntariness, and Innocence: A Reply to McTighe.”
Phronesis 30, no. 3 (1985), 314–322.

367
368 Chapter 4

Amidst the proliferation of such explanations, the most promising begins

with psychological conflict in Callicles,4 working forward from his internal
disharmony5—as mirrored in his theoretical inconsistency6—to the Harmoni-
ous Man of Republic 4. Although sympathetic to interpretations that connect
Gorgias to the Shorter Way, and happy to see the self-contradictory aspects of
Callicles’ position brought to light,7 I reject the initial premise of “the intrac-
tability of Callicles” not least of all because his position is self-contradictory,8
and therefore tractable to reason and Socratic persuasion in principle.9 This
means that I am resistant to attempts, however musical, to configure Gorgias
as “the tragedy of philosophy,”10 that is, as the bitter cri de coeur of “Platonic
pessimism,”11 whereby (e.g.) a post-Sicily Plato is finally disabused of his
sunnily Socratic confidence in rationalism. But since Euripides in particular
has left an unmistakable mark on the dialogue,12 there is one element of dis-
tinctively Euripidean tragedy that is fully compatible with the conversion of
Callicles and which will become one of Plato’s central concerns in Theages
and Meno: the deus ex machina.13
In this section, I will show that Theages and Meno provide an alternative
explanation that combines an “insufficiency of reason” reading of Gorgias

4
 This is the great merit of the “Conflict Reading” (42) in Austin, “Corpses, Self-Defense, and
Immortality.”
5
 See Raphael Woolf, “Callicles and Socrates: Psychic (Dis)Harmony in the Gorgias.” Oxford Stud-
ies in Ancient Philosophy 18, 1–40, especially the distinction between “Callicles I” and “Callicles
II” (2–6).
6
 See Kahn, “Drama and Dialectic,” 100 and 107, Saxonhouse, “Unspoken Theme,” 159–162, Kam-
tekar, “Profession of Friendship,” 37, Carone, “Calculating Machines,” and especially Buzzetti,
“Injustice of Callicles,” 31–33.
7
 Cf. Stemmer, “Unrecht Tun,” 513–515.
8
 Cf. Woolf, “Callicles and Socrates,” 26–27, Jenks, “The Power of Shame,” 380–381, and Tushar
Irani, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus (Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 76: “The conflict in his position on my reading
is not between his beliefs, actual and expressed, but within his whole way of life” (emphasis in the
original). Cf. Jenks, “Sounds of Silence,” 208: “The only way he can salvage his position, remain
true to himself, is by refusing to speak.”
9
 For the claim that “Socrates and Callicles cannot in the end make dialectical contact” (96), see
James Doyle, “The Fundamental Conflict in Plato’s Gorgias.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philoso-
phy 30 (Summer 2006), 87–100; for criticism of it, see Schofield, “Callicles’ Return,” 28–29.
10
 Cf. Klosko, “Insufficiency of Reason,” 593; also “the failure of philosophy” on 582; also Trivigno,
“Paratragedy,” 87 and 93–97.
11
 See Scott, “Platonic Pessimism” and Fussi, “Why Is the Gorgias so Bitter.”
12
 Building on Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue, is Trivigno, “Paratragedy,” 77–85; see also Franco
V. Trivigno, “Is Good Tragedy Possible? The Argument of Plato’s Gorgias 502b–503b.” Oxford
Studies in Ancient Philosophy 41 (Winter 2011), 115–138. For illuminating remarks about Socrates
and Euripides, see also Christian Wildberg, “Socrates and Euripides” in Sara Ahbel-Rappe and
Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), A Companion to Socrates (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 21–35.
13
 See Trivigno, “Good Tragedy,” 133–134, Trivigno, “Paratragedy,” and 85–87, and especially
Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue, 85; although she anticipates Trivigno’s identification of the Final
Myth as a deus ex machina on 86, the crucial insight is that Socrates’ encounter with Callicles is
in itself an ἕρμαιον (cf. Grg. 486e3), especially if CPH is true.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 369

with Socrates’ success in converting Callicles. When “Plato’s Confession”

is considered in the context of the ROPD, the words “by divine dispensation
[θείᾳ μοίρᾳ]” (128d2) are the most important in Plato’s Theages,14 flagging as
both significant and necessary their reappearance at the end of Meno (99e6):

Socrates: But now, if [εἰ] we’ve both investigated and were speaking beautifully
[καλῶς] in all of this discourse [πᾶς ὁ λόγος οὗτος], virtue would be neither
natural [φύσει] nor taught [διδάκτον], but comes into being [παραγίγνεσθαι] by
a divine dispensation [θείᾳ μοίρᾳ] without mind [ἄνευ νοῦ] in those for whom
it comes into being [παραγίγνεσθαι], unless [εἰ μή] there should be somebody
among the statesmen [οἱ πολιτικοὶ ἀνδρές] capable of making a another a states-
man [πολιτικός]. And if [εἰ] there should be any such, he might fairly be said
to be among the living what Homer says Teiresias was among the dead—‘He
alone has comprehension; the rest are flitting shades [σκιαί].’ In the same way,
such a one would here [ἐνθάδε] be a true thing among shadows [σκιαί] in rela-
tion to virtue.15

Given that Meno introduces the hypothetical method (see §15), the three
uses of “if [εἰ]” in this passage invite the following three observations: (1) if
Socrates has just made Callicles into a πολιτικός in Gorgias in accordance
with CPH (see §9), then (2) it makes sense that he will soon enough be
revealed as Teiresias,16 intrepid and insightful among the shadows of the
Cave (cf. σκιαί at. R. 515a7 and 515d1). But since we are entitled to doubt
that everything in Meno (i.e., in πᾶς ὁ λόγος οὗτος) has been investigated
and was discussed καλῶς, we can also safely dismiss as strictly hypothetical
(or ironic)17 what Plato knows that most of us are likely to find objectionable
here: (3) virtue’s alleged dependence on θείᾳ μοίρᾳ ἄνευ νοῦ. A genuine
Theages complicates the dismissal of “(3)” while adding support for the
first two.18

14
 The connection is discussed in Melanie A. B. Mineo, “Socratic Virtue as Divine ΔΥΝΑΜΙΣ in
the Meno and Theages” in Jay A. Bregman and Mineo (eds.), Platonic Traditions in American
Thoughts, 1–16 (New Orleans, LA: University Press of the South, 2008). Hereafter, all otherwise
unidentified citations in this section will be to Thg.
15
 Men. 99e4–100a7 (Lamb modified).
16
 Cf. Dominic Scott, Recollection and Experience: Plato’s Theory of Learning and its Successors
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 49–50. For valuable bibliography, see
Franco Ferrari, “Tiresia, Socrate e il vero politico: A proposito della conclusion del Menone” in
Aleš Havlíček, Chrisoph Horn and Jakub Jinek (eds.), Nous-Polis-Nomos: Festschrift Francisco L.
Lisi, 123–132 (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2016).
17
 See Scott, Recollection and Experience, 43–46. Dominic Scott, Plato’s Meno (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 192–93 is an improvement. For a useful review of this book,
see Daniel T. Devereux, Meno Re-Examined.” Philosophical Quarterly 58, no. 233 (October
2008), 702–710.
18
 Cf. the absence of Theages in Scott, Recollection and Experience, 49n25.
370 Chapter 4

Following the pattern of Laches (see §5), a father concerned about his son’s
education consults in Theages with Socrates, who determines after interview-
ing the boy that he desires to become wise with respect to τὰ πολιτικά (126a10,
126c3, 126c5–6, and 127a3). Anticipating Anytus in Meno (92e4), Socrates
first directs Theages to “the good and the noble [οἱ καλοὶ κἀγαθοί]” (127a3),
but the boy, seconded by his father, seeks the company (συνουσία) of Socrates
himself—not of Protagoras, which Hippocrates sought in Protagoras (Prt.
318a2–3)—rather than that of “the political men [οἱ πολιτικοὶ ἀνδρές]” (126d2
and 127e5–6; cf. 126c5) who cannot even educate their own sons (126d1–7; cf.
Prt. 319d7–320a3). Anticipating his later response to Anytus (Men. 91a6–b8),
Socrates points now to the sophists (127d2–128b6), mentioning both Gor-
gias and Polus (127e8–128a1)—decisive indication of Reading Order on my
account—but the boy is persistent. He tells Socrates—in whose company he
knows that others have become better (128b7–c4)—that “if you wish [ἐὰν σὺ
βούλῃ]” (128c7), the same could happen to him.
With that claim, Theages moves from an inverted version of Protagoras
to Alcibiades Major, where ἐὰν σὺ βούλῃ has already been replaced by “if
god wishes it [ἐὰν θεὸς ἐθέλῃ]” (Alc. 135d3–6). Socrates fulfills an earlier
promise (Alc. 103a6) by then embarking on the fullest account of the Divine
Sign in the dialogues, starting with these words: “For there is a demonic
something [τι δαιμόνιον] by divine dispensation [θείᾳ μοίρᾳ], following me,
beginning from childhood” (128d2–3). After telling some other stories about
it (128d7–129d8), Socrates uses the story of Aristides and Thucydides—
already familiar to us from Laches—to make his apotreptic point: given the
Sign’s omnipotence (τὸ ἃπαν δύναται at 129e3), any future progress Theages
might make thanks to συνουσία with Socrates is, in comparison with those
who are in control of the benefit they provide (130e7–10), a matter of chance
(τύχη at 130e10):

Socrates: This, then, Theages, is what our company [ἡ ἡμετέρα συνουσία] is

like: if it should be dear to the god [τῷ θεῷ φίλον], you will progress very much
and quickly, but if not, you won’t.19

Since the apparent purpose of Socrates’ speeches is to persuade the boy to

seek wisdom about τὰ πολιτικά elsewhere, the fact that Theages remains
adamant proves that Socrates has failed.
In the context of the ROPD, I want to suggest that Socrates fails in Theages
because he has just succeeded in Gorgias, a success for which Plato—who
ought to know—has no exclusively rational explanation, least of all one that

19
 130e5–7. Cf. Smp. 212a6.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 371

redounds to his personal credit. Revisiting the Meno passage with this context
in mind, the repetition of θείᾳ μοίρᾳ shows how all three hypotheses apply to
Socrates: he could be the equivalent of Teiresias, doing τὰ πολιτικά in accor-
dance with “the true political art” (Grg. 521d6–8), and thus be the only one
who could even attempt to make another a πολιτικός—successfully in Plato’s
case—while still being dependent on “divine dispensation” in doing so.20
But if the all-powerful Sign interrupts the educational process (129e3–4; cf.
Tht. 151a3–4)—or more mysteriously, fails to promote it (συλλαμβάνεσθαι
at 129e7)—Socrates is powerless, and any potential student, as he assures
Theages, is subject to τύχη or, as he puts in in Meno, to θεία μοῖρα ἄνευ νοῦ.
In the context of Gorgias, this means that Socrates cannot take credit for the
alleged conversion of Callicles (with or without CPH) because it was neither
the result of rational argument nor the fear-inducing rhetoric of the Final
Myth.21
If Socrates can only educate through Recollection—which would seem to
split the difference between knowledge-virtue as διδάκτον (cf. Men. 87b7–
c1) and as already present φύσει (cf. Men. 81c9–d5)—we are under no obli-
gation to dismiss as either hypothetical or ironic the reference to θεία μοῖρα
even if we decide that we cannot accept πᾶς ὁ λόγος οὗτος in its entirety.
But even without Theages, Plato makes it difficult to ignore θεία μορα, ham-
mering it in the dialogue’s last speech: “Therefore from this calculation,
Meno, it is by divine dispensation [to us; translating θείᾳ μοίρᾳ ἡμῖν] that
it appears [to us; translating ἡμῖν φαίνεται] that virtue [ἀρετή] comes into
being [παραγίγνεσθαι] for those it comes into being [παραγίγνεσθαι]” (Men.
100b2–4), and when Socrates uncharacteristically interrupts the discussion
to go elsewhere instead of returning once again to the question of ἀρετή,22
a recent reader of Theages could be forgiven for thinking that Socrates has
just heard the voice of his Sign. In any case, the curious hammering of
παραγίγνεσθαι in the context of ἀρετή (five times between Men. 99e6 and
100b4) recalls Laches (La. 189e3–190b5; cf. Prt. 323c6–7), and Theages
helps us to understand what Plato is doing.

20
 See Shaw, “Socrates and the True Political Craft,” and in particular 197–98 for a surprising willing-
ness to connect the missing δύναμις of Grg. 509d8–e2 to divine dispensation.
21
 Cf. Snider, “The Conclusion of Meno,” 73.
22
 For the continuation of the passage just quoted in the text, see Men. 100b4–c2 (Lamb modified):
“Socrates: but the certainty of this we shall only know when, before asking in what way virtue
comes to be [παραγίγνεσθαι] for mankind, we earlier set about inquiring what virtue is, in and by
itself. But now it is time now for me to go somewhere [νῦν δ᾽ ἐμοὶ μὲν ὥρα ποι ἰέναι], but do you
persuade our friend Anytus of that whereof you are now yourself persuaded, so as to put him in a
gentler mood; for if you can persuade him, you will do a good turn to the people of Athens also.”
Cf. Thompson, Meno of Plato, 231: “It is rare for Socrates to make any excuse for breaking off a
colloquy.”
372 Chapter 4

With their sons taking the lead in Laches, and their grandsons figuring
prominently in Socrates’ last and most important Sign-story in Theages,
Aristides and Thucydides reappear in Meno, replacing Miltiades and Cimon
in its version of the Athens Quartet from Gorgias. Dominic Scott relies on the
difference between the two Quartets to place a more pessimistic Gorgias after
a more positive Meno,23 and he is right that Plato uses connections of this
kind to help us determine the ROPD. Since he naturally ignores Theages in
making his case, Scott overlooks the reason for the substitution, which begins
to emerge when the Gorgias Quartet reappears there as a trio, with Socrates
having deleted Miltiades from the list of “storied men” whose skill in τὰ
πολιτικά has allowed them to rule over willing citizens, and not by force,
as tyrants do (126a5–11). Why has Socrates deleted Miltiades while keep-
ing Themistocles, Pericles, and Cimon? For the same reason that the Meno
Quartet—which Socrates uses to illustrate the inability of the great Athenian
statesmen to pass their virtue along to their sons (Men. 93b2–94e2)—will
drop both Miltiades and Cimon, and since the latter was also Miltiades’ son,
this weakens or rather explodes the point.
Between Gorgias and Meno stands Theages. Just as we have heard and
read Protagoras and Alcibiades Major, so too has Theages already “heard”
Socrates make his point about fathers and sons, and the presence of Miltia-
des at 126a10 would spoil the point the boy is about to make at 126d1–3.
Plato therefore causes Socrates to delete him. But the failure of Aristides
and Thucydides to pass their wisdom along to their sons, first brought to our
attention in Laches, reappears in Theages where their grandsons are identified
with an unusual double patronymic as “Aristides the son of Lysimachus the
son of Aristides” (130a4–5) and “Thucydides the son of Melesias the son of
Thucydides” (130a8–b1). Reintroduced in Theages, they are now ripe for a
proper place in the Meno version of the Athens Quartet.
In short, however apposite Cimon and his father Miltiades may be to
Socrates’ point in Gorgias, they are incompatible with his point in Meno, and
however appropriate may be Aristides’ presence in Meno—and it is worth
noting that his example has prompted his son to seek out Socrates for the sake
of virtue—his laudable resistance to the abuse of power (see §7) would have
made him out of place in the Gorgias Quartet. Just as Miltiades disproves
Socrates’ point about fathers and sons in Meno, Aristides does the same in
Gorgias, and it is no accident that the principal justification for returning
Theages to its rightful place among the dialogues of Plato should be found
somewhere between politics and θεία μοῖρα, snugly situated between Gorgias
and Meno.

23
 For a harmonizing solution, see Brian Calvert, “The Politicians of Athens in the Gorgias and
Meno.” History of Political Thought 5, no. 1 (Spring 1984), 1–15.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 373

This section will not follow the conventions of a traditional authenticity

argument24 for the simple reason that the principal justification for returning
Theages to its rightful place has been offered elsewhere, and will therefore
only be summarized here. In Republic 6, immediately after mentioning the
fact that physical infirmity prevented Theages from abandoning philosophy
for τὰ πολιτικά (R. 496b6–c3), Socrates mentions that what prevented him
from doing so was “the demonic sign [τὸ δαιμόνιον σημεῖον]” (R. 496c3–5).25
The back-to-back references, first to Theages and then to the Sign, are best
understood as a backward-pointing allusion (hereafter, “BPA”) to the previ-
ously read Theages, and more specifically to what Socrates says there about
his δαιμόνιον τι after mentioning θεία μοῖρα and the fact that it has followed
him since childhood: “And this is voice [φωνή], which when it happens,
always signifies [σημαίνειν] for me, whatever I am about to do [ὃ ἂν μέλλω
πράττειν], its rejection [ἀποτροπή], but it never projects [προτρέπειν]”
(128d3–5). For a reading of Plato the that places the philosopher’s voluntary
Return to the Cave at the center of his Republic and Republic at the center
of his dialogues, the fact that the voice signified its ἀποτροπή when Socrates
was about to τὰ πολιτικά πράττειν (Ap. 31d5) is of obvious significance,
and so important is Theages to Republic that the interested reader must be
directed to Plato the Teacher, §20.26
Naturally nothing like a BPA can exist for those who regard Theages as
spurious. Despite the fact that Theages 128d2–5 says nothing about the Sign
forestalling Socrates’ decision to πράττειν τὰ πολιτικά, and that Apology of
Socrates 31d2–5 does not link the Sign to θεία μοῖρα, the two passages are
otherwise essentially identical, and this has led to the conventional assump-
tion that “the author of Theages” was copying the parallel passage in Apol-
ogy. The same applies to a dialogue that bulks larger in the authenticity
debate than Apology does, and for the present it is enough to mention that
young Aristides will appear for a third and final time in Theaetetus, and
is once again linked there to the Sign (Tht. 150e8–151a5). Naturally those
who deny the authenticity of Theages are inclined to assume that it was
written after Theaetetus;27 agnostic on this question, I will nevertheless be
interpreting Theages as if Plato expected it to be read before (reading) either

24
 For its application to both Thg. and Clt., see Hans Leisegang, “Platon.” Paulys Realencyclopädie
der classichen Altertumschaft, volume 20, part 2, columns 2342–2537 (Stuttgart: Alfred Drucken-
müller, 1950), on 2366–2367.
25
 Cf. John M. Rist, “Plotinus and the Daimonion of Socrates.” Phoenix 17, no. 1 (Spring, 1963),
13–24, on 18.
26
 See also Altman, “Reading Order and Authenticity,” sections §2 and §3.
27
 See Jacques Bailly, The Socratic Theages; Introduction, English Translation, Greek Text and Com-
mentary (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2004), 272–279.
374 Chapter 4

Theaetetus or Apology.28 Complicating matters is that I will also be claiming

that to fully appreciate it, Theages must be reread after reading them as well,
for unquestionably it is a riddle, and it is our collective failure to solve “the
Riddle of Theages” that accounts for its excision.
Naturally the dialogues that precede Theages in the ROPD must be consid-
ered first. The first of these is Alcibiades Major, where the Sign is mentioned
in its second sentence (Alc. 103a4–6). So close is the relationship between
these two dialogues that the authenticity of either strengthens considerably
the case for the authenticity of both. In this sense, Alcibiades Major corre-
sponds most closely to Theaetetus, while Apology of Socrates—in compari-
son with which the Sign’s power (δύναμις at 129e1; cf. Alc. 103a6) is much
enhanced—might be usefully compared in interpretive significance to Sym-
posium, which sheds light on some aspects of that enhancement. Although
Plato never mentions the Sign in Symposium, the crucial word δαιμόνιον does
appear (Smp. 202d13–e2), as does an anticipation of the most controversial
passage in Theages (cf. 130d4–e4 and Smp. 175c6–d7).29 But instead of
using Phaedrus to strengthen a Symposium-based link between the Sign and
ἔρως—an interpretive move characteristic of the Straussians30—the Reading
Order approach increases the interpretive value of the earlier Euthydemus.31
This is not to say that only these dialogues are relevant to interpreting
Theages; its place in the ROPD must be justified, as I have already suggested,
primarily in relation to Gorgias and Meno—its immediate neighbors—as
well as Republic, the τέλος of the series of which it is part. But not even
this list is sufficient, and the place to begin supplementing it is earlier, with
Laches and Charmides. With respect to the latter, there is an obvious con-
nection: Socrates’ first Sign-story gives us a glimpse of his post-Charmides

28
 Although Phdr. has played a less important role in the authenticity debate thanks to an interven-
tion of the Sign (Phdr. 242b8–d2), it too belongs to the reader’s as yet unknown future in relation
to Thg.
29
 See Kurt Lampe, “Rationality, Eros, and Daemonic Influence in the Platonic Theages and the
Academy of Polemo and Crates.” American Journal of Philology 134, no. 3 (Fall 2013), 383–424,
on 395–396.
30
 Three sets of teachers and students have grappled with this problem, and they do so by naturalizing
the Sign as ἔρως, with Strauss in particular suggesting that it is the absence of any erotic attraction
to the boy on Socrates’ part that explains his discouraging diffidence; see Leo Strauss, Studies in
Platonic Political Philosophy, with an Introduction by Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago, IL: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1983), 46–47. The documents related to these pairs—Strauss-Benardete,
Benardete-Davis, and Davis-Grewal—are Seth Gabrielito Benardete, “The Daimonion of Socrates:
A Study of Plato’s Theages (M.A. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1952) and Michael Davis
and Gwenda-lin Kaur Grewal, “The Daimonic Soul: On Plato’s Theages” in Christopher Dustin
and Denise Schaeffer (eds.), Socratic Philosophy and its Others, 35–50 (Lanham, MD: Lexington,
2013); for the second pair, see 50n10.
31
 See Hermann Gundert, “Platon und das Daimonion des Sokrates; Aus der Festschrift für Max
Pohlenz zum 80. Geburtstag am 30. Juli 1952.” Gymnasium 61 (1954), 513–534, especially
517–520 (on Phdr.), 522–523 (on Euthd.), and 530n16 (on Thg. and Alc.).
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 375

relationship with Charmides, leaving us in no doubt that the (physically)

beautiful youth will refuse to follow his doctor’s orders even in the case of
physical activity (128d8–129a1; cf. Chrm. 176b9–c6). And the last Sign-
story, as already mentioned, gives us a glimpse of the post-Laches relation-
ship between Socrates and the sons of Melesias and Lysimachus. Both stories
are of significant interpretive value, and the second crucially so, particularly
when reread in the light of Theaetetus.
But first things first: the principal reason that Theages mediates between
Gorgias and Meno is that just as the λόγος about the soul’s future in Gorgias
and the λόγος about its past in Meno destabilize KGB-based claims about our
possible knowledge of the past and future, so too does the Sign destabilize
our epistemic relationship to the present. It intrudes, it interrupts, it pre-
vents Socrates from doing what he is about to do; it invades the part of time
that seems most knowable, and is therefore most in our control. Naturally
Socrates’ demonic Sign, the most distinctively Socratic thing about him, must
tend to vanish in the writings of the Socratists. But by completing a temporal
trifecta that connects it to the λόγοι in Gorgias and Meno with which Soc-
ratists are already uncomfortable, it is a safe bet that Theages will never be
restored to its rightful place as long as they dominate the Anglo-American
reception of Plato’s dialogues.32
Consider in this context the words of Vlastos: “Once we set aside the
Theages (except as a monument to the level of credulity to which some of
Socrates’ superstitious admirers could sink after his death), our source of
information about the daimonion falls between Plato and Xenophon.”33 In his
Socrates, Vlastos’s Sign-based arguments against its authenticity precede this
prounouncement: only in Xenophon (and Theages) but “never encountered
in Plato” is the Sign “an occult prognosticator” that is “put to work for the
benefit of Socrates’ friends.”34 In Theages, by contrast, its “treatment as a
divine being in its own right becomes explicit,” and Vlastos proves this claim
is as follows:

Young Theages speaks of it as a full-fledged divinity which they should ‘propiti-

ate by prayers and sacrifices and by any other means the diviners may describe.’
The youth’s father [sc. Demodocus] endorses the suggestion and Socrates goes
along: ‘if it seems that we should do so, let us do it.’35

32
 Which is not to say that it would make a comeback in some other world; see Martin Heidegger,
Parmenides, trans. A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992),
40 (translation modified): “No Greek god is a god that commands.” This text (with translation
modified by the authors) is the epigraph of Jeff Love and Michael Meng, “Heidegger’s Radical
Antisemitism.” Philosophy and Social Criticism (2017), 1–21.
33
 Vlastos, Socrates, 282.
34
 See Rist, “Plotinus and the Daimonion,” 16–17, for a valuable overview of Xenophon’s testimony.
35
 Vlastos, Socrates, 282.
376 Chapter 4

Any musical reader of Plato will immediately grasp the problem with this
kind of argument: what Theages or Demodocus say or imply about the Sign
is no indication of what either Plato or his Socrates regard as true.36 More-
over, the if-dependent quotation from Socrates is doubly hypothetical since
Theages is only saying what he thinks they should do if the Sign should
block, as at this point it has not, further intercourse with him. As we know
from Republic, it didn’t, and as we know from Theages, Socrates wouldn’t
have sought to evade it if it had: he obeys the Sign.
But Vlastos forges on, and here the interpretive errors are subtler and more
pernicious:

The mentality of the writer of this curious work is indicated by the fact that a young
man [sc. Aristides as quoted by Socrates] is supposed to make moral progress
simply by being in the same house with Socrates and ‘much greater if {he} sat at
Socrates’ side and most of all when he was sitting next to Socrates, touching him.’37

To begin with, there is nothing in Socrates’ Aristides story (130a4–e4) that

justifies Vlastos’ use of the word “moral,” and one of the principal ways that
Plato alerts us to the inadequacy of Aristides’ notion of “progress” is precisely
that it is never said, by either him or Socrates, to have any connection to
morality. It is rather measured, on his own account, by his—possibly eristic,
possibly moral, but in any case completely unspecified—ability “to converse
[διαλέγεσθαι] and to appear worse than nobody in his discourses [λόγοι]”
(130c2–3). As for the infamous remark about touching that Vlastos quotes, he
neglects to tell us that Socrates is not telling us what he regards as the truth
but merely quoting Aristides (130e1–3),38 a young man who at this stage may
well understand the δύναμις of Socrates as little as Theages and Demodocus
presently understand the δύναμις of his Sign.39
I have quoted Vlastos not because he is the critic of Theages to be reckoned
with—this honor falls to Mark Joyal (see below)—but because he is right
about several important matters. Theages is by any standard a “curious work,”
it does contain information about the Sign, possibly false and unquestionably
revised in Theaetetus and Apology of Socrates, that is “never encountered
[elsewhere] in Plato,” and interpreting it will require us to revisit the rela-
tionship between Plato and Xenophon, a matter of particular importance in

36
 See Vlastos, Socrates, 282n143.
37
 Vlastos, Socrates, 282.
38
 So too Dorothy Tarrant, “The Touch of Socrates.” Classical Quarterly 8, no. 1/2 (May 1958),
95–98, on 98 (last word).
39
 I will leave it to someone else to connect the δύναμις of the Sign to the Choice Passage in Grg.ͅ
For proper emphasis on “il punto di vista di Aristide” (346), see Bruno Centrone, “Il Daimonion di
Socrate nello pseudoplatonico Teage” in Gabriele Giannnantoni and Michel Narcy (eds.), Lezioni
socratiche, 331–348 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1997).
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 377

considering the imminent arrival of “Meno the Thessalian” (see §14). But if
Theages is a genuine work of Plato, Vlastos has made egregious but unfor-
tunately characteristic interpretive errors that call into question his ability to
appreciate “the mentality of the writer of this curious work.”
The primary justification for turning first to Vlastos therefore has little
direct connection to Theages; considered in context, the passage just quoted
is nothing more than a brush-clearing operation in an appendix or “addi-
tional note” (“Socrates’ Daimonion”) to a chapter on “Socratic Piety” in his
Socrates. But there is an indirect connection: Socrates cannot be adequately
understood without reference to his Sign, and as should already be evident,
Vlastos is going to discount or rather ignore the testimony of both Xeno-
phon and Theages in discussing it and its (crucial) part in “Socratic Piety.”
And there is an even more important indirect connection as well: since Vlas-
tos is the founding father of Socratism, his views on Socrates and therefore on
“Socrates’ Daimonion” have been very influential, and discussion of Theages
must always revolve around Socrates’ Sign. Having already identified Joyal
as the foremost critic of Plato’s Theages, this indirect connection can best be
illustrated by quoting the opening words of the lengthy section on the Sign
in the Introduction to his magisterial The Platonic Theages (2000): “Gregory
Vlastos once described Socrates’ divine sign as ‘the gravest of difficulties we
all have to face in our effort to make sense of Socrates,’ and added that ‘Noth-
ing in Socrates has been more perplexing to posterity than his daimonion.’”40
It will turn out that the Sign perplexes Vlastos considerably less than it
should, and as a result, “the gravest of difficulties” tend to melt away in
the warm light of his amiable if grimly persistent rationalism. There are, of
course, grave difficulties with Vlastos’ attempt “to make sense of Socrates”
while dismissing the testimony of Xenophon,41 valorizing the testimony
of Aristotle, and relying on only a few dialogues of Plato, brushing aside
not only the Platonic Meno and the spurious Theages, but even putatively
“Socratic dialogues” like Hippias Major, Lysis, and Euthydemus where the
ἔλεγχος is no longer prominent. But more importantly, it is by no means
clear—even when we restrict ourselves to Plato’s dialogues or indeed to any
one of them—that “to make sense of Socrates” is a primary or even proper
goal. If Vlastos is right that nothing has been more perplexing to poster-
ity than Socrates’ Sign, it once again demonstrates his limited appreciation

40
 Mark Joyal, The Platonic Theages; An Introduction, Commentary and Critical Edition (Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner, 2000), 65.
41
 It was on this issue that I crossed swords with him in a 1978 seminar paper at the University of
Toronto; when I referred to his SocratesE as “that curious invention,” the amiable Vlastos com-
mented: “I would advise you not to try similar sarcasm on your other teachers: being less fond
of you, they might take offense.” Others have subsequently made many of the same points better,
and certainly more temperately; see Donald Morrison, “Professor Vlastos’s Xenophon.” Ancient
Philosophy 7 (1988), 9–22, and Dorion, “Rise and Fall,” 14–16.
378 Chapter 4

for “the mentality of the writer” to think that Plato did not intend us to be
­perplexed by his Socrates, beginning with Protagoras. Even after excising
the Riddle of Theages, there remains plenty of perplexing information about
the Sign in Plato, starting with the brute fact that Socrates repeatedly heard
the voice of such a thing. If pre-Socratic philosophy began with wonder,
Socratic philosophy begins with wondering about Socrates.
The key words in Vlastos’ attempt to tame the Sign are “hunch,” “inter-
pretation,” and “trump.” With respect to the first, Vlastos points to two
passages, one in Theaetetus, and the other in Euthydemus.42 Of Theaetetus
150e1–151a5, where the Sign either forbids, or by its silence allows contin-
ued συνουσία with returning students who thereupon make progress, Vlastos
writes: “He [sc. Socrates] is acting, as we all do often enough in life, on
a ‘hunch’—on grounds we cannot articulate explicitly at the moment, but
which seem nonetheless convincing enough to justify action.”43 Vlastos takes
the same approach to Euthydemus 272e3–4:

He [sc. Socrates] was alone in the palaestra, sitting, and was about to get up,
when ‘the customary divine sign’ checked him so that he sat down. He acted on
just a ‘hunch’ that he had best sit a little longer and he did.44

In addition to suppressing Socrates’ emphasis on the divine by failing to

consider this passage in context,45 Vlastos’ approach makes the encounter
between Socrates and his Sign little more than a conflict of hunches: if he sat
back down on a hunch, his decision to stand up in the first place, along with a
host of “quite trivial, unreflective actions,”46 was based on nothing more than
a hunch as well.47
What is at stake for Vlastos is nothing less that Socrates’ rationality:
unquestioning obedience to the Sign, even when it is only a matter of whether
or not he will stand up and leave the gymnasium in Euthydemus, would be
“absolutely alien to the spirit of Socratic rationalism.”48 Vlastos cannot deny

42
 On Vlastos’ third example (Phdr. 242b–c on 1991, 285), see Roslyn Weiss, “For Whom the Dai-
monion Tolls.” Apeiron 38, no. 2 (June 2005), 81–96.
43
 Vlastos, Socrates, 284.
44
 Vlastos, Socrates, 285.
45
 Cf. Euthd. 272e1–4, beginning with κατὰ θεὸν γάρ τινα ἔτυχον.
46
 Cf. Gregory Vlastos, “Letter to the Editor,” Times Literary Supplement (January 19–25, 1990), 63:
“the daimonion sometimes vetoes quite trivial, unreflective, actions. Thus when he [sc. Socrates]
is about to stand up in the palaestra the ‘voice’ says ‘Sit’ [importantly false; it sounds—Plato never
implies it speaks in words—when Socrates has decided to stand and is about to do so], and sit he
does. But neither here is there any trumping of rational argument: there is no rational argument
to trump.”
47
 See Letter of Vlastos to [Tom] Brickhouse August 27, 1989) in Nicholas D. Smith and Paul B.
Woodruff (eds.), Reason and Religion in Socratic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 196–97.
48
 Vlastos to Brickhouse (August 27, 1989) in Smith and Woodruff, Reason and Religion, 197.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 379

the textually-warranted fact of the (god-given) Sign, but makes a distinction

between the Sign itself and Socrates’ (subsequent and rational) interpretation
of it:

Socrates explicitly recognizes [sc. in the case of the dream in Phd. 60d8–61b2]
that the interpretation he puts on the surface-content of a supernatural sign at a
given time may be in need of revision at a subsequent time, thereby acknowl-
edging the possibility that at the earlier time he may have put the wrong inter-
pretation on its message. There is no reason to suppose it would be different in
the case of the daimonion. What the voice brings him is a message. For the true
interpretation of that message he must rely on his own, highly fallible, human
resources.49

Although the Phaedo dream does sanction the interpretive revision Vlastos
employs here, Socrates’ decision to make music in the popular sense comes at
the expense of his rational and therefore presumably unshakable commitment
to philosophize (Phd. 61a3–8). But the real problem with Vlastos’ attempt to
reclaim the Sign for “Socratic rationalism” by means of “interpretation” is
that it does not speak in the riddling words of an oracle. Instead, its meaning
is transparent and necessarily self-evident to the person who receives it: don’t
do what you were just now having it in mind to do.50
In retrospect, of course, the Sign’s prohibitions can be rationalized, and
this is what happens in the crucial case at Apology of Socrates 31d2–e1:

Socrates: This began when I was a child. A certain voice happens, and when
it happens, it always turns me away from the thing I am about to do [ἀεὶ
ἀποτρέπειν τοῦτο ὃ ἂν μέλλω πράττειν], but it never encourages me [προτρέπ-
ειν] to do anything. This is what opposes me taking part in public affairs [τοῦτ’
ἔστιν ὅ μοι ἐναντιοῦται τὰ πολιτικὰ πράττειν] and I think it was quite right to
oppose [ἐναντιοῦσθαι] me. Be sure, gentlemen of the jury, that if I had long ago
attempted to take part in politics [πράττειν τὰ πολιτικὰ πράγματα], I should have
died long ago, and benefitted [ὠφελεῖν] neither you nor myself.51

And Vlastos responds to this passage with characteristic vigor, playing down
the relevance of τοῦτο twice: the this he intends, decides, resolves, and tries to
do is τὰ πολιτικὰ πράττειν, and the this that opposes him doing so is the Sign:

Does Socrates say he had decided to go into politics, had resolved to do so, and
had tried to do so? No. Not a word to indicate that he had done any of these

49
 Vlastos, Socrates, 283.
50
 Unduly complicated in Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, Socrates on Trial (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 251.
51
 Ap. 31d2–e1(Grube modified).
380 Chapter 4

things. All he says is that the daimonion ‘opposes my engaging in politics’

(31d5) and that he sees good reason for its doing so (31d6–e2). When the text
is closely read all we learn from it is that his ‘sign’ opposes his going into
politics, and that so does his reason. ‘Sign’ and reason are in accord. There is
no trumping.52

Behind this reference to “trumping” stands a fascinating chapter in intel-

lectual history,53 but before turning to it, it is necessary, having already
explained what is at stake for Vlastos, to make equally clear what is at stake
here for me. Consider the crucial verbs προτρέπειν and ἀποτρέπειν. By hav-
ing the Sign and nothing but the Sign turn Socrates away (ἀποτρέπειν) from
politics, Plato can still use him to turn us (προτρέπειν) toward returning to
the Cave.54 It is therefore Plato’s positive teaching that is at stake. Because
of the Sign, Socrates need not practice what Plato preaches through him: he
has the leisure to benefit us so that we may benefit others. This doubled use
of ὠφελεῖν is matched by the doubled use of προτρέπειν, exhorting us first
to philosophize ourselves out of the Cave and then to πράττειν τὰ πολιτικὰ
πράγματα, but only after we have fallen in love with the Beautiful and return
to it not for our own good but for the sake of Justice in the light of the Idea
of the Good. Although the theoretical basis of this προτρέπειν can be derived
from Apology of Socrates, we need not wait so long: between the καταβατέον
in Republic 7 and the whispered κατέβην of Republic 1, Plato can fashion
Socrates into a protreptic version of the Sign in Republic 6 (R. 496c2–5) but
only if we have already read Theages. Incidentally, anyone who has decided
against giving some coins to a beggar can see how easily ἀποτρέπειν could
become something that looks very much like προτρέπειν.55
The intellectual history behind “trumping” begins with a moving tribute to
Vlastos by Alexander Mourelatos.56 There, Thomas Brickhouse and Nicholas
Smith are not found among the impressive list of scholars who earned their

52
 Vlastos, Socrates, 286.
53
 See Vlastos, Socrates, 286.
54
 Unfortunately, the Sign is construed as intrinsically anti-political in Pierre Destrée, “The Dai-
monion and the Philosophical Mission—Should the Divine Sign Remain Unique to Socrates?”
Apeiron 38, no. 2 (June 2005), 63–79, on 79, and Roslyn Weiss, “For Whom the Daimonion Tolls.”
Apeiron 38, no. 2 (June 2005), 81–96, on 95–96.
55
 Cf. Mark L. McPherran, “Introducing a New God: Socrates and His Daimonion.” Apeiron 38, no.
2 (June 2005), 13–30, on 29–30.
56
 Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, “Gregory Vlastos.” Gnomon 65, no. 4 (1993), 378–382, concluding
with: “In person and in his published writings, Vlastos upheld a superlative standard of intellectual
toughness but also of civility, fairmindedness, and authentic dialogue.”
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 381

doctorates under Vlastos’s supervision,57 but thanks to a 1983 NEH seminar

on “The Philosophy of Socrates,”58 they were his students as well. In 1989,
they published their first book, Socrates on Trial, and in his review of it,
Vlastos first used the word “trump” in the same passage from which Joyal
quoted (see above).59 Although Mourelatos justly praises Vlastos for his civil-
ity and fairness in his published work, it was elsewhere—in careful notes on
student papers, in personal correspondence, and of course in person—that he
distinguished himself as a first-class human being. It is therefore fitting that it
should be in a series of published letters between Vlastos, Brickhouse, Smith,
and Mark L. McPherran that even those who never knew him can get a sense
of what made him lovable.60 In addition to the personal and sentimental value
of this correspondence, a particularly important passage can be found in a
letter from Vlastos to Smith:

Let me add a personal comment. If I believed, as you say you do, that whatever
rational reasons Socrates might have for doing (or not doing) X, a sign from
the daimonion could ‘trump’ them, my respect for Socrates would plummet. I
would then have to think of him as a superstitious man who puts higher trust in
the subjective suggestions he gets from signs received through the daimonion
than in reflective rational judgment.61

Although this personal comment speaks for itself, some additional historical
background is required before giving my own response.
The publication of Vlastos’s review of Socrates on Trial had led to a
response from Brickhouse and Smith; there followed an exchange of letters to
the editor comparable to the one between Vlastos and Irwin arising from the
former’s review of Plato’s Moral Theory, likewise appearing in The Times
Literary Supplement (see §1). From the start, the crucial passage from

57
 Mourelatos, “Gregory Vlastos,” 382: “Some of today’s most talented and accomplished scholars
in ancient philosophy in North America are Vlastos’ former PhD students: Terence Irwin of Cor-
nell University; David Keyt of the University of Washington; Richard Kraut of the University of
Illinois, Chicago; Edward N. Lee of the University of California, San Diego; Frank Lewis, of the
University of Southern California; Alexander Nehamas of Princeton University; Sandra Peterson
of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Gerasimos Santas of the University of California,
Irvine; Paul Woodruff of The University of Texas at Austin.”
58
 Smith and Woodruff, Reason and Religion, 179.
59
 Gregory Vlastos, “Brickhouse and Smith’s Socrates on Trial.” Times Literary Supplement (Decem-
ber 15, 1989), 1393.
60
 See “Socrates and His Daimonion: Correspondence among the Authors” in Smith and Woodruff,
Reason and Religion, 176–204.
61
 Vlastos to Smith (September 5, 1989) in Smith and Woodruff, Reason and Religion, 200. Even
without access to this letter, Centrone strikes exactly the right note in “Il Daimonion di Socrate,”
344n12.
382 Chapter 4

Apology of Socrates about the Sign and active politics figured prominently in
the debate,62 prompting Vlastos to use “so there is no trumping” in the same
context that it would appear a year later in his 1991 Socrates.63 To this Brick-
house and Smith responded forcefully, and they must be quoted at length:

Apology 31c-d counts decisively in our favor, however, precisely because it is

perfectly obvious that the daimonion could not have ‘turned {Socrates} away’
from political activity unless Socrates had already decided to engage in such
activity. It would follow from Vlastos’s view that this decision could only have
been on impulse and not by rational deliberation, for otherwise the daimonion’s
opposition would have nullified the deliberation. We find it wholly implausible
that Socrates could have made such a morally significant decision purely on
impulse. Socrates’ account, therefore, in the same passage, of why it was best
for him to have abstained from politics—to which Vlastos refers—can only pro-
vide the rational grounds Socrates hypothesized in response to the daimonion’s
opposition.64

In his brief response, Vlastos gave no ground, repeating “there is no trump-

ing,” and identifying Brickhouse and Smith’s mistake as “supposing (on no
textual evidence whatever) that Socrates had first decided on rational grounds
that he should get into politics, and then the ‘sign’ supervened to oppose the
decision.”65
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Vlastos’s position is that just a few
years earlier (1984), he taken Socrates to task for staying out of politics while
reviewing Richard Kraut’s Socrates and the State,66 once again in the Times
Literary Supplement:

Athens’ best arguer, stayed on principle out of the debates through which public
policy was formed, fateful decisions, sometimes monstrous ones, were reached.
When it was moved in the Assembly that genocide was the right penalty for

62
 See Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, “Letter to the Editor.” Times Literary Supple-
ment (January 5–11, 1990), 21.
63
 Vlastos, “Letter” (January 19–25, 1990), 63.
64
 Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, “Letter to the Editor.” Times Literary Supple-
ment (January 26–February 1, 1990), 80. It deserves mentioning that Socratic rationalism will be
combined with obedience to the Sign in Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, “Socrates’
Daimonion and Rationality.”Apeiron 38, no. 2 (June 2005), 43–62, on 60; they call this “empiricist
interpretation” (58–61) “reliabilist” on 59. So also A. A. Long, “How Does Socrates’ Divine Sign
Communicate witth Him?” in Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), A Companion to
Socrates, 63–74 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), on 73: “its reliability for him made it rational.”
65
 Vlastos, “Letter to the Editor” (“The Trial of Socrates”). Times Literary Supplement (February
23–March 1, 1990), 197.
66
 Richard Kraut, Socrates and the State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 383

Mytilene, and then again for Scione, and for Melos (the decision was ‘No’ in the
first, ‘Yes’ in that of the other two), where was Socrates then?67

The answer to this critical question is, of course, that Socrates was obeying
the Sign, for it was not “on principle” but rather in opposition to whatever
principles had persuaded him “on rational grounds that he should get into
politics”68 that he did not πράττειν τὰ πολιτικά. Without mentioning the Sign,
Vlastos quotes Socrates’ justification of its prohibition (Ap. 31d5–e1) before
posing yet another damning question:

But if it is his [sc. Socrates’] special gift [cf. θείᾳ μοίρᾳ?] to enlighten us on our
moral duties, dare he forget that if we did as he did, denying our voice to the
Assembly, our service to the lawcourts and the magistracies, we should be ‘good
for nothing’ and the city would be nothing?69

With this question, Vlastos (1) justifies the philosopher’s return to the Cave,
(2) explains the rational basis for Socrates’ deliberate decision to πράττειν τὰ
πολιτικά, and (3) illustrates the disastrous implications of his own misunder-
standing of the δαιμόνιον. It is only because he denies the Sign the power to
prevent Socrates from doing what he had already decided to do (cf. 128d4
and Ap. 31d4) that Vlastos can criticize him in this way.
Vlastos therefore leaves Socrates in an impossible situation. As indicated
by his poignant “my respect for Socrates would plummet,” he would have
found obedience to the Sign likewise reprehensible, and on the verge of pub-
lishing the culminating book of his distinguished career,70 the noble Vlastos
(1907–1991) simply could not admit the obvious sequence of events that
Plato is describing. In Apology, as distinct from Theages, the Sign could only
block what Socrates himself was about to do, and precisely because he could
give such good reasons for its opposition post facto (Ap. 31d5–e1), it could

67
 Gregory Vlastos, “Reasons for Dissidence.” Times Literary Supplement (August 24, 1984), 931–
932, on 932. On Melos and Mytilene in R., see Plato the Teacher, 49–50 and §4, especially 57–58,
61n69, and 63–65; with “the quarries of Syracuse,” cf. the second question Vlastos poses immedi-
ately after the one quoted in the text: “Where was he [sc. Socrates] when the Assembly debated that
expedition to Syracuse, whose colossal folly was to cost Athens more lives and treasure than any
of its public acts before or since?” Once again, the answer implicates the Sign; see Thg. 129c8–d2.
68
 Although Brickhouse and Smith, “Socrates on Goods” (1987) cites Vlastos, “Reasons for Dis-
sidence” on 15n21, they don’t use it to validate their position on the Sign.
69
 Vlastos, “Reasons for Dissidence,” 932.
70
 Cf. Alexander Nehamas, “Voices of Silence: On Gregory Vlastos’s Socrates” (1992) in Nehamas,
Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates, 83–107 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1999), 103: “In pursuing these two traits [sc. ‘the ancients’ fascination with Socrates’ virtue
with the moderns’ concern with his rationality’] it [sc. Vlastos’s Socrates: Ironist and Moral Phi-
losopher] succeeds in exhibiting them itself.”
384 Chapter 4

not, or better, can never be an easy decision for anyone to make; if it were,
we would need to repeal χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά and forget Achilles (Ap. 28b6–d9).71
Nobody knows the rational and eudaemonist basis for avoiding politics
better than Plato.72 And it is precisely because of that knowledge that he
awarded the crown of Justice to those alone who return to the Cave, allow-
ing his brother Glaucon to say of the requirement that the Guardians must
do so: “we will be enjoining just things on the just” (R. 520e1) after offering
the reader the most vivid description of what it really means to return to the
Cave in Republic 2 (361c1–362a2). But Vlastos’s mistake is not primarily
a mistake about Socrates: it is because of the difficult choice that Plato is
provoking us to make for ourselves that the Sign prevents his Socrates from
going into politics. Apart from Socrates’ regrettable failure to speak out
against Athenian wrongdoing during the Peloponnesian War,73 Vlastos may
safely rest in peace with his respect for his Socrates intact; it is rather Plato
whom the author of Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher misunderstands.
My ongoing claim is that any attempt to discover “the philosophy of
Socrates” from some subset of Plato’s dialogues rests on the same kind of
misunderstanding. Since “no one has done more than Gregory Vlastos to
contribute to the robustness of the entire field of Socratic studies,”74 it is easy
to put the blame on him, especially given the narrow subset of dialogues
with which he was working. Excluding “the middle-period” dialogues on
the basis of Aristotle’s testimony, excluding Theages, et al., on the basis
of post-Schleiermacher criticism, and excluding Hippias Major, Lysis, and
Euthydemus on the basis of his own passion for the ἔλεγχος, Vlastos made it
easy for any critic to object that he was tailoring his data-set to yield a pre-
determined outcome, especially since his curt dismissal of Xenophon made it
obvious that “the philosophy of [his] Socrates” rested exclusively on a certain
severely circumscribed conception of Plato’s.
But despite the important points that Brickhouse and Smith scored against
Vlastos in their review of Socrates—on the Sign,75 of course, but also on

71
 Or at least to misconstrue him, as in Gómez-Lobo, Foundations of Socratic Ethics, 34–35, where
it is a conventionally heroic τιμή—never mentioned in the passage (Ap. 28c1–d9)—not doing what
is best (Ap. 28d6) and avoiding what is base (τὸ αἰσχρόν at Ap. 28c4 and 28e9) that are “requiring
the hero to give up his own life.”
72
 Cf. the passage from Aristotle, Politics, 2.5 quoted in the Introduction.
73
 Cf. Theodor Ebert, “Studien zur griechischen Philosophie von Gregory Vlastos.” Philosophische
Rundschau 44, no. 4 (1997), 271–287, on 272: “Bei allem Engagement in der akademischen Welt
war V. im übrigen keineswegs ein Mann nur des akademischen Diskurses; er tritt während des
spanischen Bürgerkrieges öffentlich für die Republik ein und gehört spatter zu den ausdrück-
lichsten Kritikern des Vietnamkrieges.”
74
 Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, “Review of Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philoso-
pher.” Ancient Philosophy 13 (1993), 395–410 on 409.
75
 See Brickhouse and Smith, “Review of Socrates,” 405–407.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 385

Socrates’ use of deliberate fallacy76—they showed just how widely shared his
misunderstanding had become when they wrote: “Socrates, all scholars agree,
identifies happiness with the good.”77 Since Plato’s Socrates takes the lead in
Republic 7 (cf. R. 516d4–e2) as well as Euthydemus, there is no Plato-based
reason to accept an identification that deletes the Idea of the Good no matter
how widely shared it may have come to be.78 But although those who share it
may well be under his influence, Vlastos is by no means the fons et origo of
this misunderstanding. As indicated in the Introduction, that dubious honor
belongs to Aristotle.79
In turning at last to Joyal’s arguments against an authentic Theages, it is
useful to begin by pointing out that one of the genuine problems any reader
must face with respect to the dialogue, regardless of its authenticity, is why
Socrates goes to such great lengths—especially in the culminating story of
Aristides—to persuade the boy to seek συνουσία elsewhere.80 As already
suggested, another comparison with Protagoras is also useful: when Socrates
reports that Hippocrates “would gladly discover what will happen to him
if he should consort [συνεῖναι; verbal form of συνουσία] with you” (Prt.
318a3–4), Protagoras claims that (“if you consort [συνεῖναι] with me” is
repeated at Prt. 318a7), each day the youth will consistently (ἀεί) “make
progress [ἐπιδιδόναι] to the better” (Prt. 318a9; cf. 318c2–4; and 318d3–4).
It is precisely this kind of guarantee that Socrates withholds in Theages,
recommending those—like Protagoras in Protagoras, but represented here
by Prodicus, Gorgias, and Polus (127e8–128a1), the latter for the purpose
of establishing Reading Order—“who themselves are in control [ἐγκρατεῖς]
of the benefit by which they benefit people rather than doing this by chance
[τύχῃ] through me” (130e8–10).

76
 See Brickhouse and Smith, “Review of Socrates,” 397–401, especially on the Simonides-episode
in Prt. (399).
77
 Brickhouse and Smith, “Review of Socrates,” 408; cf. Stemmer, Platons Dialektik, 156n16 on
Brickhouse and Smith, “Socrates on Goods,” 26: “A thing is good only in so far as it is conducive
to happiness.”
78
 With respect to that consensus, it might be useful to contemplate a possible world—one in which
Germany didn’t lose the First or even the Second World War—in which one could truthfully write:
“Plato, all scholars agree, identifies the Good with the One.”
79
 Not least of all as a reader of Plato’s dialogues, as in Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 7.14; 1247b15
(J. Soloman translation): “as Socrates [Σωκράτης] said—all the sciences would have been kinds of
good luck [εὐτυχίαι].” On D23, see Deman, Le témoignage, 67.
80
 For a good way to approach this problem, especially in the context of Prt., see John I. Beare, “A
New Clue to the Order of the Platonic Dialogues” in E. C. Quiggan (ed.), Essays and Studies Pre-
sented to William Ridgeway on his Sixtieth Birthday (6 August 1913), 27–61 (Cambridge, UK: At
the University Press, 1913), on 45–46: “Not only can Socrates not teach what Theages desires to
learn, but there are not, he thinks, and never have neen, any persons able to teach it [the attached
note cites 128d]. Here we find Plato dealing directly with the peculiar paradox of the Socratic defi-
nition [sc. of virtue, i.e., K]. If ἀρετή=ἐπιστήμη, why cannot Socrates, who so defines—why can no
one—teach it?” For his programmatic statement on K (“a mixture of truth and falsehood”), see 31.
386 Chapter 4

Since Socrates clearly does not think this kind of sophistic guarantee is
appropriate, we must ask why he makes it sound as if those who profess to
be educationally ἐγκρατεῖς (cf. Grg. 449b2–3)—who guarantee that their stu-
dents are going to επιδιδόναι—are preferable to him. But this is not the kind
of question that Joyal asks but rather the kind he sidesteps in order to get to
what he regards as the right question:

Now, it may be that in this dialogue Socratic association is considered to be sim-

ply an inferior alternative in association with one who can really claim knowl-
edge in the true art of politics. This, however, is never stated, though Socrates
does caution Theages about the arbitrary nature of the progress that may be
achieved in his company (130e5–10). What we find instead is that, both by the
sheer length of the section on the divine sign and, in particular, by the story
about Aristides, the author recommends only one thing, namely the benefit that
can be derived from an educational contact that is essentially characterized by
τύχη. Is this a position that can reasonably ascribed to the Platonic Socrates?81

To begin with, note the conspicuous absence of the possibility that Socrates
is being ironic in praising the educational hucksters in preference to him,
precisely the kind of irony he will use again at the beginning of Meno
(70c3–71a1) and later in the conversation with Anytus (Men. 91a6–b8).
But the real problem is in Joyal’s description of what “the author recom-
mends,” and more generally in his assumption that he can derive it from what
Socrates quotes Aristides as having said. If “this author’s” Socrates is not
being ironic, he is earnestly recommending the hucksters, and if he is being
ironic, that is, the kind of thing “that can reasonably ascribed to the Platonic
Socrates,” he is, for example, testing the commitment of Theages to the kind
of συνουσία he can offer—dependent as it is on τύχῃ and/or θεία μοῖρα—
by making it sound like “an inferior alternative,” which of course it is not.
But Joyal has posed his question, and now must answer it:

I think it is unlikely: for it is precisely the vicissitudes of τύχη that he [sc. ‘the
Platonic Socrates’] persistently abhors and seeks to eradicate from the lives of
men by advocating the pre-eminence of τέχνη. ‘Virtue is knowledge’ implies
as much, and the superiority of τέχνη is responsible for the value attached
to the hedonistic calculus in Prt. [note 8]; in one striking instance (Euthd.
279c4–280b3) Socrates argues that good fortune (εὐτυχία) is nothing other than
σοφία, and that when one possesses the latter there is no need for the former
(cf. Lg. 709b1–d4) [note 9]. Ultimately this desire to remove contingency and
change leads to the theory of forms.82

81
 Joyal, Platonic Theages, 109. The passage that follows will be quoted continuously in what
follows.
82
 Joyal, Platonic Theages, 109.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 387

In note 8, Joyal cites Martha Nussbaum “on the hedonistic calculus as a

doctrine which Socrates seriously holds,”83 and in note 9 he cites the passage
from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics quoted in an earlier note.
About this passage there is a great deal that could be said, but I will be
brief, responding to the deadpan reading of the First Protreptic (see §5), the
hedonistic calculus, and the Socratic bedrock of ‘virtue is knowledge’ with
the observation that Theages, if it is genuine, stands in the ROPD between
Gorgias, where the axiomatic equation of the hedonistic calculus will be
rejected, and Meno, where K is treated not as bedrock but as a hypothesis.84
More remarkable is his perspective on “the theory of forms,” which by means
of a τέχνη (cf. R. 517c4–d7) that points the student to a realm beyond “contin-
gency and change,” surrenders Becoming to the chance passing of shadows
in the Cave. Between these two responses, one based on Gorgias-Meno, the
other on Republic 7, stands a mediating third: it is because of the progress we
have already made in our ascent to the Good that Theages cannot be read-
ily squared with a Socratist reading of Protagoras and Euthydemus, and we
won’t make it all the way to the top and back down again without θεία μοῖρα,
especially if we are living in an intellectual climate dominated by the Socrat-
ist reception of Plato’s dialogues.
The foregoing provides a general sense of how Joyal is reading both Plato
and “the author of Theages,”85 but more detailed criticism targets his treat-
ment of Alcibiades Major.86 Consider first the tacit reference to it in the fol-
lowing: “Socrates’ sign is designated as ὁ θεός [‘the god’] by both the author
of Theages and Xenophon (Thg. 130e6, X. Mem. 4.8.5–6), but never is this
done in the certainly genuine dialogues of Plato.”87 First of all, this claim is
problematic even in the limited universe of “the certainly genuine dialogues
of Plato,” and for that reason Joyal must devote several closely argued pages
to explaining why the reference to ὁ θεός compelling Socrates to practice
midwifery and forbidding (ἀποκώλυειν; cf. Tht. 151a4) him “to bring forth”
(Tht. 150c8) cannot be a reference to the Sign.88 Here is the key passage:

Several items here, though otherwise unparalleled elsewhere in the certainly

genuine works of the Platonic Corpus [sc. apart from Alc.], are coherent with
details in Thg. and are worth drawing attention to: the identification of τὸ

83
 Joyal, Platonic Theages, 109n8, which also cites Irwin’s Plato’s Moral Theory, and Crombie,
Plato’s Doctrines.
84
 As for the passage Joyal cites from Laws, the Stranger’s response to chance will lead him to request
a tyrannized city later on the same page (Lg. 709e6).
85
 Joyal, Platonic Theages,, 32, 60, 72, 89, 92–93, etc.; more commonly “our author.”
86
 See Walther Janell, “Ueber die Echtheit und Abfassungszeit des Theages.” Hermes 36, no. 3
(1901), 427–439, on 430, 437n1, and 439.
87
 Joyal, Platonic Theages, 72.
88
 Joyal, Platonic Theages, 83–87.
388 Chapter 4

δαιμόνιον and ὁ θεός [after having cited Alc. 105d5, 105e5, and 105e6–106a1
in the previous paragraph, the attached note cites 127e5–7, and on its basis Joyal
could also have cited 135d6]; the participatory role of the divine sign (cf. 105e5
μετὰ τοῦ θεοῦ, 106a1 ἐφῆκεν {sc. ὁ θεός}); and the use of the noun δύναμις in
connection with the sign (103a6).89

Since Joyal is proving that Theages cannot be Plato, he must provide it with
a plausible alternative provenance, and he will explain the parallels between
it and Alcibiades Major by the suggestion that both are (later) “products of
a similar philosophical atmosphere.”90 While admitting that “the authenticity
of Alc. I is still hotly debated,” Joyal’s suggestion that his findings constitute
“further evidence against Platonic authorship”91 is an example of circular rea-
soning: it is only on the basis of an initial assumption that Alcibiades Major
is not among “the certainly genuine dialogues of Plato” that he can show
that Theages is exceptional in the cases he regards as crucial for assessing its
authenticity.
Joyal’s pages on the relationship between τὸ δαιμόνιον and ὁ θεός in The-
aetetus must therefore be closely reasoned because disjoining them is crucial
to that assessment:

The importance of this question [sc. ‘but if ὁ θεός is different from τὸ δαιμόνιον,
wherein does the difference lie?’] cannot be overestimated, for if it can be
shown that the author of Thg., who speaks only of τὸ δαιμόνιον in 129d1–130e4,
has manifestly misunderstood the structure of the Tht. passage [sc. ‘the famous
μαιευτική passage in Tht. (esp. Tht. 150c7–151a5, 151b1–6’ on 82] and its refer-
ences to and ὁ θεός and τὸ δαιμόνιον, this must go a very long way towards set-
tling the question of authenticity, which will itself be formally taken up later.92

This proves to be a comparatively mild statement of the relationship between

Theages and Theaetetus since “the latter instead represents a distortion of

89
 Joyal, Platonic Theages, 98.
90
 Joyal, Platonic Theages, 99. In the description of this “atmosphere,” the word “hagiographical”
plays the dominant role: in addition to 95 and 102–103, see Mark Joyal, “Tradition and Innovation
in the Transformation of Socrates’ Divine Sign” in Lewis Ayres (ed.), The Passionate Intellect:
Essays on the Transformation of Classical Traditions; Presented to Professor I.G. Kidd (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995), 39–56.
91
 Joyal, Platonic Theages, 99; the note attached to the sentence that includes both of the quoted
phrases in my text sends the reader to 154–155, especially: “Although the evidence is not totally
compelling, I think it is very likely that our author wrote with a knowledge of Alc. I [even this ‘very
likely’ is far too cautious]; at any rate, both dialogues show signs of having been composed within
the same philosophical and literary milieu.” But on the same page (154), he does raise the crucial
question (cf. Ascent to the Beautiful, Introduction) as a question: “Was Plato the author of Alc. I?”
92
 Joyal, Platonic Theages, 84; the bracketed question spans 83–84. Although I will focus on Joyal
in this connection, see also Klaus Döring, [Platon], Theages; Übersetzung und Kommentar (Göt-
tingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 57–67.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 389

the former,”93 “Tht.—misunderstood, amplified, and improvised upon by the

author of Thg.,”94 “if our author could distort the μαιευτική passage in Tht., as
he clearly did,”95 and finally this rather more programmatic statement:

We must conclude that Thg. 129e1–130a5, while drawing directly upon its cor-
responding passage in Tht., is at fundamental variance with it, and that in all
probability it stands apart from Tht. because of a misunderstanding or disregard
of Plato’s meaning and intention. The consequences of this for assessing the
authenticity of Thg. should be clear enough and will be fully drawn out later.96

With Joyal having made Theaetetus 150c7–151a5 crucial to his case, my

plan is now to leave his arguments to speak for themselves while preserving
his emphasis on this passage, switching over now to a positive defense of
Theages. This defense will focus on the only sentence in the crucial passage
of Theaetetus that mentions both Aristides and the Sign (Tht. 150e8–151a5),
and I will show that it depends on our prior familiarity with—and in turn
deepens our understanding of—Theages 130a4–e5 (hereafter “the Aristides
Story”) that Socrates uses to illustrate the claims made in 129e1–130a4,
claims that Joyal can only prove are unacceptably objectionable on the basis
of “the certainly genuine dialogues of Plato.”
Naturally the Reading Order paradigm is crucial to my case: while Joyal is
claiming that “the author of Theages” misunderstood and distorted Theaete-
tus, I am claiming that Plato’s readers come to Theaetetus only after having
already read his Theages. Moreover, I am more than open to the possibility
that the passage in the later dialogue clarifies and revises the earlier one, just
as Apology of Socrates 31d2–4 clarifies, and even more obviously revises
Theages 128d2–130a4 while nevertheless leaving intact the information
that proves to be crucial to Plato’s project (128d2–5; cf. Ap. 31d4–5; and R.
496c3–5). But that is not all: I am further claiming that the BPA to Theages
in Theaetetus—for such I will show Tht. 150e8–151a5 to be (hereafter “the
Theaetetus Sentence”)—prompts or rather forces the reader to look back to
the earlier dialogue and revise their understanding of it. Indeed this revision
will take the form of finally solving the Riddle of Theages on a more satisfac-
tory basis than by crudely excising it from the canon.
In addition to the Theaetetus Sentence, there are two other BPA’s to Theages
in the dialogues that follow it. The others use the mention of Theages himself
to refer to Theages, with the most famous and most obvious one being in Apol-
ogy (Ap. 34a1), where we learn that he is dead. As should by now be obvious,

93
 Joyal, Platonic Theages, 88; cf. 92, especially “deliberate or not.”
94
 Joyal, Platonic Theages, 92.
95
 Joyal, Platonic Theages, 93.
96
 Joyal, Platonic Theages, 89.
390 Chapter 4

discussion of Theages zeroes in on the Sign, and it is easy to forgot that—as

one of its defenders points out97—more than half of the dialogue is taken up
with discussion of something else. If more scholars accepted this curious
work as genuine, there might well arise the usual debate about “the Unity of
Theages,” and if this were to occur, the clinching argument would be that it is
Apology of Socrates that demonstrates its unity: Demodocus comes to Socrates
precisely because he does not want the youth—in the person of his son—to
be corrupted (διαφθείρειν at 122a5 and 127c2), and the concluding discussion
of the Sign, especially if critics like Joyal are correct that Socrates (uncharac-
teristically) displays in his comments a respect for conventional religiosity, it
likewise refutes the charge of impiety. Indeed one might be tempted to digest
the unifying theme of Theages in terms of the charge against Socrates:98 it is
the hucksters, by their impious guarantee of progress, who corrupt the youth.
In retrospect, then, Theages proves that Socrates was innocent.
The second BPA is in Republic 6, and its importance for establishing the
authenticity of Theages has already been described. But it has a deeper sig-
nificance as well: until we learn about Theages’ sickly body in Republic,99 we
can only rely on what his words tell us about his soul in Theages. If he seri-
ously wants to be a tyrant (125e5–126a2) or even a god (126a2–3), Socrates
might easily and fittingly have decided he was dangerously ambitious.
Theages is certainly well read, and notably more familiar with Anacreon than
any of us (125d10–e4), but if he is serious about propitiating the Sign if it
objects to Socrates’ decision to grant him συνουσία (131a1–7), he’s never-
theless a dope. How do we hear his words? We might just as well ask: how
do we read a Platonic dialogue? To narrow the focus somewhat: what is the
philosophical significance of the fact that Plato makes us wonder about the
character of Socrates’ many interlocutors, especially whether they are cor-
rigible or incurable, good guys or bad ones?100

97
 See William S. Cobb, “Plato’s Theages.” Ancient Philosophy 12 (1992), 267–284.
98
 Cf. Kevin Robb, “Asebeia and Sunousia: The Issues Behind the Indictment of Socrates” in Gerald
A. Press (ed.), Plato’s Dialogues: New Studies and Interpretations, 77–106 (Lanham, MD: Row-
man & Littlefield, 1993).
99
 If it is true, as the critics of Thg. insist, that its author hunted through the authentic dialogues for
bits and snippets to pillage in order to lend his work the appearance of authenticity, it seems very
strange that he made no reference to the youth’s νοσοτροφία (R. 496c2), i.e., the fact that Theages
is sickly. The reason he did not do so is because “our author” is Plato, and because his dialogues
constitute the ROPD. In this case, he expects his readers, having reached Republic, to reread
Theages in a new way, imagining the boy as dis- or rather differently-abled, taking the imaginary
form of an ancient version of Stephen Hawking perhaps. In my own case, I see in him as a ninth-
grader with muscular dystrophy I taught many years ago in Vermont: a bright and ambitious young
man who dreamed of being “master of the universe” while physically confined to a sophisticated
wheelchair, the motions of which he controlled with his teeth.
100
 RPT (see §11) explains why questions concerning the Play of Character multiply in both number
and significance among the post-Smp. dialogues: when we see Prt. again after having read Smp.,
Phaedrus, Eryximachus, Pausanias, and Agathon are no longer mere names, and the linking of the
first pair with Hippias, the second with Prodicus, likewise becomes significant.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 391

In Theages, we encounter all the big questions regarding character. Is the

young man a second Alcibiades? Is he closer to Callicles or to Meno? Is he
a would-be tyrant and a fool, or is he better understood as the young man
who refused, wisely and courageously, to accept any substitute for συνουσία
with Socrates,101 the only man he aptly deemed worthy of his company in
Athens, the famous city dedicated to the goddess of wisdom? It was Cal-
licles who castigated philosophers for knowing nothing about the charac-
ters of men (Grg. 486d6–7), and by raising questions such as these, Plato
is meeting that charge. Since he expects those of us who are (physically)
healthier than Theages to return to the Cave of political activity—for no
Sign will prevent us from doing so, nor do we share Xenophon’s exile (cf.
R. 496b1–2)—we will need the character-reading skill that Callicles claims
philosophers lack. In the light of Callicles’ just complaint, Plato has made
the character of Theages a mystery because Theages stands between Gor-
gias and Meno in the ROPD.
In Theages’ case, the second BPA reveals the truth: the Sign cooperated
by not interfering, no propitiations were necessary, Theages did not backslide
from philosophy (R. 496c1–2), he became Socrates’ comrade, and he died as
such. And yet we are invited to see him as odious and foolish in Theages.
Why? For the same reason that we are invited to imagine that Lysis is more
promising than the eristic Menexenus, or that Charmides is not the coquet­tish
boy-toy of the supposedly Socratic Critias. Will we be surprised when we
meet Menexenus and Ctesippus as Socrates’ loyal companions in Phaedo, or
see Charmides stripped down to his character in Theages (128e6–8)? As these
examples indicate, interlocutors are not always what they seem to be in in
the gymnastic dialogues of Plato: some look good naked (cf. Prt. 352a4–b2),
others don’t.
Theages continues with these gymnastic exercises: confronted with another
matched set in Aristides and Thucydides, we readily assume that the latter,
so angry with Socrates yesterday (130b1–2) must be less promising than
Aristides, who is so friendly and honest with him today (130b8–c1). We have
already met infatuated imitators and Socratic groupies like Chaerephon and
Aristodemus, and are tempted to see them—along with Nicias and Critias—
as more Socratic than Callicles could ever be, and I am trying to show that
this turns out to be a profound and self-revealing error. Plato is handing us a
series of carefully crafted Rorschach inkblots, inviting us to imagine that we
are passing judgment on his characters and on him. Instead, we are stripping
ourselves naked, revealing not our bodies, but our souls, and inadvertently

101
 Cf. Thomas L. Pangle, “On the Theages” in Pangle (ed.), The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten
Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, Translated with Interpretive Studies, 147–174 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1987), 167, where Theages is “a headstrong and very unpromising student.”
392 Chapter 4

passing judgment on ourselves, and especially by pronouncing Plato’s own

Callicles “incurable,” we prove that we are. We are tempted to underestimate
Crito and Glaucon and to overestimate Protagoras and Gorgias. Standing
between two giants—that is, Gorgias and Meno—and now on the verge of
the mighty Republic, Theages needed to be a difficult dialogue, and it is one.
But exorcising this little demon is not the properly Platonic response to the
difficult test it contains (cf. 131a2).
The third BPA is also the last of three times that young Aristides appears
in the dialogues, and those appearances—in Laches, Theages, and Theaete-
tus—are arranged in chronological order in the ROPD, with the Theaetetus
Sentence pointing forward to what happened after the Aristides Story in
Theages. Although the latter is told in the context of the Sign, it makes no
reference to it, and merely illustrates the fact that some of those who had
managed to progress “very wondrously [θαυμάσιον]” when they were with
Socrates (130a2–3), lost that capacity (δύναμις at 130c8) after departing
from him. By contrast, the Theaetetus Sentence does refer to the Sign, but
does so in relation to what happened after someone who had departed from
Socrates returned to him seeking renewed συνουσία, as we know already
from Theages that Aristides did. In the Aristides Story, however, we never
get that far: we are listening to nothing more than Aristides’ bid for renewed
συνουσία with no sense that the story’s punch line—from the perspective of
the Theaetetus Sentence, that is—is withheld, that is, how the Sign responded
to that bid. We do not sense this absence while reading Theages because the
Aristides Story has an unforgettable punch line of its own: that Aristides had
made the most progress before departing when he was “holding and embrac-
ing [ἐχόμενος καὶ ἁπτόμενος]” (130e3) Socrates, but that now all that capac-
ity has “flowed away” (from the verb ἐκ-ρεῖν at 130e4).
This stunning denouement, principally responsible for the excision of
Theages in the first place, has been widely and accurately recognized as
an allusion to the passage in Symposium where Socrates corrects Agathon:
wisdom is not the kind of thing that can be transferred by touch (ἁπτόμενος
at Smp. 175c8) or poured out from one vessel into another (cf. ἅπτεσθαι
and ῥεῖν at Smp. 175d5). Although this, like all allusions, is “backwards-
pointing,” it is not what I am calling a “BPA” because it does not cause us
to revise our sense of what is occurring at Agathon’s. Instead, the allusion
serves to destabilize our confidence in Aristides’ understanding of Socratic
συνουσία,102 or rather it would have done so if modern readers, following

102
 See Döring, [Platon], Theages, 63: “Was Aristeides berichtet, ist in der Tat ‘schwer zu glauben.’
Es ist daher nicht weiter verwunderlich, daß wohl nichts in dem ganzen Dialog die Interpre-
ten so sehr irritiert hat wie dieser Bericht und daß die Deutungen, die er gefunden hat, weit
auseinandergehen.”
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 393

Plutarch’s example,103 were more interested in reading Theages as a Platonic

dialogue than in proving—by assuming that Socrates endorses what his Aris-
tides is saying, and that what he says is what “our author” thinks—that it is
inauthentic, and based on an utterly debased conception of Socrates as a mage
or Wundermann.104 The Theaetetus Sentence therefore adds a third compo-
nent to a passage in Theages that has already been enriched by the presence
of Symposium. This confluence make the denouement of the Aristides Story,
when reread in the light of the Theaetetus Sentence, not only one of the most
amazing passages in Plato, but also mirabile dictu the opposite of what it has
long appeared to be: it is the proof that Theages is genuine because it contains
a solvable riddle.
Since the opening words of the Theaetetus Sentence are: “one of these was
Aristides the son of Lysimachus” (Tht. 150e8–151a1), some context is neces-
sary, and this passage provides it:

Socrates: But the delivery is due to the god and me. And the proof of it is
this: many before now, being ignorant of this fact and thinking that they were
themselves the cause of their success, but despising me, have gone away from
me sooner than they ought, whether of their own accord or because others
persuaded them to do so, and after they have gone away, they have miscarried
thenceforth on account of evil companionship, and the offspring which they had
brought forth through my assistance they have reared so badly that they have
lost it; they have considered impostures and images of more importance than
the truth, and at last it was evident to themselves, as well as to others, that they
were ignorant.105

If we were to apply this passage to Aristides, it adds information that presents

him in a less congenial light than the way Socrates, by quoting him without
comment, had presented him in Theages, and although the salient facts are
clear there as well—that Aristides went away and that his own incompetence
ultimately became clear to him—we are only compelled to apply this passage
to Aristides by “the Theaetetus Sentence” that immediately follows:

Socrates: One of these has been Aristides the son of Lysimachus and there
are a great many others: when they come back [πάλιν], seeking my company
[δεόμενοι τῆς ἐμῆς συνουσίας] and doing amazing things [καὶ θαυμαστὰ
δρῶντες], to some of them [μέν] the demonic thing that happens to me [τὸ
γιγνόμενόν μοι δαιμόνιον] prevents [ἀποκωλύειν with us/me understood] to

103
 In addition to Plutarch, De Genio Socratis, see Jan Opsomer, “Plutarch’s Defense of the Theages,
in Defense of Socratic Philosophy?” Philologus 141, no. 1 (1997), 114–136, written in response to
Mark A. Joyal, “A Lost Plutarchean Philosophical Work.” Philologus 137, no. 1 (1993), 92–103.
104
 J. Pavlu, “Der psedoplatonische Dialog Theages.” Wiener Studien 31 (1909), 13–37.
105
 Tht. 150d8–e8 (H. N. Fowler translation).
394 Chapter 4

converse [συνεῖναι; cf. συνουσία], but [δέ] to some it allows, and these again
[πάλιν] make progress [ἐπιδιδόναι].106

It may well be the case that Plato does not use technical vocabulary,107 but
he uses his non-technical vocabulary in a remarkably technical way. As if
the naming of Aristides and the δαιμόνιον were not sufficient for sending
the reader back to Theages, the hammering of συνουσία/συνεῖναι (cf. 120e7)
and πάλιν (cf. 130a3), as well as the use of ἐπιδιδόναι (129e9, 130a3, 130a6,
130d5, and 130e3) and possibly θαυμαστά (cf. 130a2–3) make it certain that
“our author” wished to make the connection between these two passages
obvious, inescapable, and compelling. But amidst all the words that echo the
Aristides Story, there is information provided here that forces us to reexam-
ine that story in a new light, beginning with the phrase δεόμενοι τῆς ἐμῆς
συνουσίας. It is this phrase that confirms my earlier claim that the Story—
when read in the light of the Sentence—depicts Aristides “making a bid” for
renewed συνουσία with Socrates; it didn’t really seem that way in Theages.
But then again it did not seem then that Aristides was one of those who
had “gone away from me sooner than they ought,” “thinking that they were
themselves the cause of their success, but despising me,” who “miscarried
thenceforth on account of evil companionship,” and therefore “considered
impostures and images of more importance than the truth.”
If all of this is true of Aristides—as we now learn that it is, since he
was “one of these”—the participle δεόμενοι also applies: what Socrates
reports Aristides saying in the Story replicates the Argument of the Action
of Theages as a whole, and this explains its important position there. Just
as Demodocus and Theages are attempting to persuade Socrates to συνεῖναι
with the boy, so too Aristides is doing the same, although the double use of
πάλιν (in two different senses) shows that it is now the renewal or restora-
tion of συνουσία that he seeks. But we now can see that if anyone is seeking,
persuading, requiring or even seducing Socrates into granting him συνουσία
with debased motives, it is Aristides, not Theages. We know from Republic
that the Sign did not forbid Socrates to συνεῖναι with Theages, but we do
not know, from either Theages or Theaetetus, what the Sign will signify in
Aristides’ case. Plato has deliberately withheld the punch line, as always
because it is for us to supply it, but we can only learn of its absence when
we look back on Theages from the perspective of a BPA in Theaetetus.
And that’s only the beginning.

106
 Tht. 150e8–151a5.
107
 It is characteristic of Plato’s humor that the passage always cited to prove this point (R. 533d6–9)
should implicate the word διάνοια (cf. R. 511d3, 511d5, 511d8, 533d6 with Prm. 135b8, 143a7,
158c2, 165a8, 165b6), the closest thing to a technical term in the dialogues.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 395

Like Gorgias and Laches, Theages is a direct dialogue, but while narrating
the Aristides Story, Socrates once again becomes the kind of narrator that he
was in Charmides, Euthydemus, and Lysis. Or does he? If he does, he doesn’t
avail himself of his previous tricks: he makes no revealing observations or
comments, describes no action, and ascribes no motives to either Aristides or
himself. Instead, he merely narrates the words of both in a dialogue—after
the establishment of visual contact, a greeting and some discussion we are not
allowed to hear (130b2–3)—consisting of five exchanges and the notorious
speech with which the Story ends, beginning with “I will tell you, Socrates,
something unbelievable [ἄπιστον], by the gods, but true.”108 It is this denuded
form of narrated dialogue that makes the most important phrase in the The-
aetetus Sentence not δεόμενοι τῆς ἐμῆς συνουσίας, but rather καὶ θαυμαστὰ
δρῶντες. To be sure Aristides says some amazing things, indeed the things
he says are sufficiently amazing that they have brought Theages as a whole
under an authenticity-annihilating suspicion; if the phrase in question were
“and saying amazing things [καὶ θαυμαστὰ λεγόντες],” there would be no
problem. But for the reasons I have mentioned, we are not allowed to see
Aristides doing any amazing things because, despite the Sentence, Plato
doesn’t allow Socrates to describe him doing anything. Or does he?
Mark Joyal is an admirable scholar, and reading his work has been a
delight. In his most recent article, he was kind enough to take critical notice
of my own work, and corrected me on what proves in retrospect to be the
crucial point: I had cited Ion 535a3–5 to show that “holding [ἅπτεσθαι]” need
not be physical; he politely reminded me that it is not Socrates but Aristides
who is doing the holding.109 Having shown that the participle δεόμενοι from
the Sentence helps us to read the Aristides Story in a new light, now consider
how the participle δρῶντες affects the way you visualize what is happening
while, as Socrates reports, Aristides is saying this:

Socrates (quoting Aristides): ‘For I never learned anything from you, as you
know yourself: but I made progress, whenever I was with you, if I was merely
in the same house, without being in the same room, but more progress, when I
was in the same room, and I was seeming to me [to be] much more whenever
I was in the same room, and looked at you as you were speaking, than when I
turned my eyes elsewhere: but most of all and especially was I making progress
whenever next to you yourself I would sit, holding you, and touching you [πολὺ
δὲ μάλιστα καὶ πλεῖστον ἐπεδίδουν ὁπότε παρ᾽ αὐτόν σε καθοίμην ἐχόμενός σου
καὶ ἁπτόμενος]. Now, however,’ he said, ‘all that condition [πᾶσα ἐκείνη ἡ ἕξις]
has flowed out [ἐκ-ῥεῖν].’110

108
 How many hapless defenders of Thg. have wished that it were false!
109
 See Mark Joyal, “Problems and Interpretation in the Platonic Theages.” Wiener Studien 129
(2016), 93–154, on 128n52.
110
 130d4–e4.
396 Chapter 4

What amazing things (θαυμαστά) was Aristides doing while he was say-
ing these things? Was he looking into Socrates’ eyes? Did his gaze waver?
Was there the sound of coquetry in his voice when he said πολὺ δὲ μάλιστα
καὶ πλεῖστον ἐπεδίδουν, as in Lysis, when Socrates tells us that Lysis was
speaking “very flirtatiously and affectionately [μάλα παιδικῶς καὶ φιλικῶς]”
(Ly. 211a3)? Was he not already sitting next to Socrates? And did he not
move even closer, close enough to touch, when he said ὁπότε παρ᾽ αὐτόν σε
καθοίμην? Was he not touching Socrates with his hand as well when he said
ἐχόμενός σου? And in the Era of Trump, are we not entitled to wonder just
how wondrous was the part of Socrates Aristides was touching when he said
ἁπτόμενος?
To a fake dialogue pawned off on Plato by a credulous hagiographer, I am
opposing a corrupt flirt and a boy in a wheelchair. On the basis of the repeated
use of ἁπτόμενος, παρ’ ἐμέ/παρὰ σοί/παρὰ σοῦ, and ῥεῖν at Symposium
175c6–e2, we were already in a position to affirm the truth of Aristides’ most
important claim the first time we read it: “I never learned anything from you”
(130d4). And it is on the basis of Symposium 219b3–d2—where Alcibiades
tells us about “throwing his hands around this truly demonic [δαιμόνιος] and
wondrous man” (Smp. 219b7–c1)—that we are prepared to see what Plato
wants us to imagine when we return to Theages after the BPA in Theaetetus.
Plato’s students are interested in sex, and he repeatedly uses that interest to
his advantage (cf. κίναιδος at Grg. 494e4 and ὁ σὸς ἐραστής at Men. 70b4–5).
In discussing Charmides (see §4), I suggested that Plato is trying to teach
us Socrates’ erotic art, that is, the ability to detect both the lover and the
beloved. He has set himself a similar goal in Theages with respect to the
δαιμόνιον: we don’t need to hear the voice ourselves—or even to be told
that Socrates had heard it (cf. Men. 100b7)—to know that Socrates had no
further συνουσία with Aristides. But we can only know he didn’t because of
three apparently unnecessary words in Theaetetus: καὶ θαυμαστὰ δρῶντες.
For what could those words possibly mean without Theages? Not since
Ion has Plato offered us anything as musical, inspiring in his lovers both the
need and the capacity to discover “many and fine things [πολλὰ καὶ καλά]”
(cf. Tht. 150d7–8 and Ion 534b8, 530d3). By contrast, our characteristically
modern and profoundly unmusical decision to solve the Riddle of Theages
with a wrecking ball reveals a lack of literary imagination as well as a radical
discontent with θεία μοῖρα, especially when it comes to interpreting and prop-
erly praising an inspired writer like Plato (cf. Ion 536b4–d3). It also suggests
a sovereign contempt for both Socrates—except when cut to our own cloth—
and his god (Tht. 150d8), the one who not only stopped him, but who thereby
allowed him to help us (cf. συλλαμβάνεσθαι at 129e7 and παρείκειν at Tht.
150d5). After all, how much could Socrates have benefited any of us if the
Sign had not prevented him from sailing off to Sicily as a battled-hardened
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 397

hoplite and youth-steadying veteran in 415,111 when Plato was the same age
as Theages, and Xenophon not much older?

§14. “MENO THE THESSALIAN” AND THE

SOCRATIC PARADOX REVISITED

Near the end of his “How to Read a Platonic Prologue: Lysis 203a-207d,”
Francisco J. Gonzalez mentions “the abrupt beginning” of Plato’s Meno:
“Not all [sc. Platonic dialogues] have prologues as rich and complex as that
of the Lysis, and some seem to have no prologue whatsoever: the Meno is
the notorious example (though its abrupt beginning is itself a kind of pro-
logue that needs to be explained).”112 Gonzalez is right: the opening of Meno
“needs to be explained” no less than its equally abrupt ending (see §13), and
my explanation of the former is that thanks to Xenophon’s portrait of “Meno
the Thessalian” in his Anabasis,113 Plato’s Meno actually does have a pro-
logue.114 Although the scoundrel Xenophon describes does not make himself
audible in his opening words—the complex question he poses (70a1–4)115
might invite us to imagine him as a sincere seeker after truth—Plato permits
Socrates to waste no time informing us that Meno is a Thessalian (70a5–b2),
thus establishing the vital link.
The question, then, is whether Plato intended his original readers to find
the missing prologue of his Meno in Xenophon’s Anabasis, or whether it is
only readers like us who can or rather must do so. For one thing is certain:
“from this day forward to the ending of the world” not one scholar will ever
produce a commentary on either Charmides or Meno that does not quote
or cite evidence from Xenophon, just as the testimony of Thucydides will
always figure prominently in scholarly comment on Charmides, Laches, and
Symposium. How much longer, then, is Plato to be the only “expert on Plato”
from whom we withhold the privilege of being intimately familiar with the
immortal works of an older fellow Athenian who predeceased him? Through-
out this study, I have been trying to show the sense in which we are Plato’s
intended readers, and in the chapter devoted to Laches and Charmides, both
Xenophon and Thucydides have played their parts.

111
 Bearing witness to the importance of 129c8–d2 are Plutarch, De Genio Socratis, 581d, Life of
Alcibiades, 17.5, and Life of Nicias, 13.9. Cf. Mark Joyal, “Socrates and the Sicilian Expedition.”
L’Antiquite classique 63 (1994), 21–33, and Altman, “Reading Order,” 23n54. For Socrates as
both “battle-hardened veteran” and model soldier, see Monoson, “Socrates in Combat,” 153.
112
 Gonzalez, “How to Read,” 44.
113
 Xenophon, Anabasis, 2.6.21–29.
114
 A number of intertextual connections between Meno and Xenophon’s writings are discussed in
Robert G. Hoerber, “Plato’s Meno.” Phronesis 5, no. 2 (1960), 78–102; see especially 99n1.
115
 All otherwise unidentified citations in the rest of this chapter are to Meno.
398 Chapter 4

The testimony of both historians is presupposed in Theages as well: while

Thucydides is our source for the disastrous Sicilian Expedition (Thg. 129c8–
d2), it is from Xenophon that we know of the expedition of Thrasyllus to
Ephesus and Ionia (Thg. 129d4–6).116 And there is also a third military expe-
dition to be considered: the στρατεία τις that merely “happened” to Aristides
(Thg. 130a6–7). Thanks to Theaetetus, where the implication is that “either
on his own or persuaded by others” young Aristides left Socrates earlier than
he should have (Tht. 150e3–4),117 it is difficult not to think of Xenophon’s
own decision to participate in the Expedition of the young Cyrus, espe-
cially since the story Socrates tells about Charmides—who practices for the
Nemean games despite the sounding of the Sign (Thg. 128d8–129a1)—bears
an even stronger resemblance to the story Xenophon tells about himself in
Anabasis: just as Charmides sidesteps the Socratic prohibition by distinguish-
ing between winning and practicing (Thg. 128e6–8), so too does Xenophon
ask the oracle at Delphi not whether he should go, but rather how he should
do so safely.118 In the context of the ROPD, then, we have already been pre-
pared to apply what we have learned from Xenophon’s Anabasis to Meno by
what we have just encountered in Theages.
In accordance with the governing prejudices of the current Anglo-Amer-
ican reception of Plato, the remainder of this chapter is going to focus on
77b2–78b2 (in this section) and 87c5–89c5 (in §15) for these two passages are
of most interest to that particular reception. To begin with—and quite apart
from Xenophon—this restrictive focus is made under protest and duress; it
is clearly Recollection (81a5–86c7) that should engross the Platonist’s first
attention where this brilliant dialogue is concerned.119 But Socratism has done
its work well, and like Plato, his Meno has been divided against itself. As a
result, this chapter will take that division seriously, and will do so by placing
the dialogue’s two most ostensibly “Socratic” passages in a larger context.
In this section, emphasis will fall on SP, a paradigmatically Socratic “doc-
trine,” appearing here in in the form: “nobody wants [βούλεσθαι] bad things
[ουδεὶς βούλεσθαι τὰ κακά]” (78a4–b2). And my claim is that the context of
this doctrine, at least where Meno is concerned, includes what Xenophon says
about “Meno the Thessalian” in Anabasis, beginning with the first sentence
he devoted to him:

116
 Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.2.6–11.
117
 Cf. Burnyeat, “Socratic Midwifery,” 16n20.
118
 Xenophon, Anabasis 3.1.5–8; cf. ἐκπλεῖν at 3.1.8 with Thg. 130a7 and 130c2.
119
 Providing much needed relief amidst this duress is Michel Narcy, “Enseignement et dialectique
dans le Ménon.” Revue international de Philosophie 23, no. 90 (1969), 474–494. Programmatic
in this regard is Denis O’Brien, “Le paradoxe de Ménon et l’école d’Oxford; Réponse à Dominic
Scott.” Revue philosophique 4 (1991), 643–658, on 652n14: “Pour une approche différente (et à
mes yeux bien plus subtile et bien plus éclairante), voir M. Narcy.”
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 399

Meno the Thessalian was clearly [δῆλος ἦν] desiring [ἐπιθυμεῖν] to be terribly
rich, desiring [ἐπιθυμεῖν] to rule in order that he might get as much as possible,
desiring [ἐπιθυμεῖν] to be honored so that he might maximally profit; he wished
[βούλεσθαι] to be a friend to those capable of most [οἱ μέγιστα δυνάσθαι] so
that in committing injustice [ἀδικεῖν] he would not pay the penalty [διδόναι
δίκην].120

Consider the following facts: the hammered verb ἐπιθυμεῖν reappears in

Meno’s most important definition of ἀρετή (77b2–5), and the substitution of
βούλεσθαι for ἐπιθυμεῖν by Socrates (78a6–b2) marks an important turning
point in the discussion of that definition. The words οἱ μέγιστα δυνάσθαι
recall Penner’s Passage in Gorgias.121 Finally, the interplay of ἀδικεῖν and
διδόναι δίκην is essential throughout the whole of that dialogue. As for the
basis of these facts, I regard it as downright senseless to deprive ourselves
of an interpretive tool for the exclusion of which there is no hard evidence.
The interpretive tool to which I refer—providing in this case an explana-
tion for the abrupt opening of Meno—is using the works of Xenophon to
illuminate the masterpieces of Plato, as I am claiming Plato intended that
we should. In the present case, although the young scoundrel clearly desires
(ἐπιθυμεῖν) τὰ κακά—in the paradigmatic form of planning how (βούλεσθαι)
to ἀδικεῖν while taking MES-type steps to avoid the need to διδόναι δίκην—
Socrates will nevertheless trap him into denying that he or anyone else wants
(βούλεσθαι) τὰ κακά (78b1–2).
This conclusion marks the end of the (apparently) crucial SP-oriented pas-
sage emphasized in this section, but in context it represents only the refutation
of the first part of Meno’s (third) definition of virtue, that is, (as he had tried
to put it): “desiring the beautiful things [ἐπιθυμῶν τὰ καλά]” (77b4). After
Socrates has shown that since nobody wants bad things, the desire for good
ones is universal (78b4–6), he turns to the task of destroying the second part
of Meno’s definition, that is, the capacity to attain them, beginning at 78b7.
Since Socrates does not appear to regard Meno as the incurable scoundrel that
Plato, thanks to Xenophon, knows that he really is, we are there treated to the
following exchange:

Socrates: Let us see, then, if this thing you are saying is true, for perhaps you
may be speaking well [εὖ λέγειν]. You are saying that virtue is being able to
provide oneself with the good things [τἀγαθά]? Meno. I do. Socrates: And are
you not calling ‘good’ things like both health and wealth [πλοῦτον]? Meno: And
gold I am calling [good] and acquiring silver and honors [τιμαί] in the city and
leadership positions [ἀρχαί].122

120
 Xenophon, Anabasis, 2.6.21.
121
 Beginning with μέγιστον δυνάσθαι at Grg. 466b4; τὸ μέγα δυνάσθαι appears at Grg. 466e3.
122
 78c3–7.
400 Chapter 4

With this in mind, let us reexamine what Plato found in the first part of the
first sentence that Xenophon wrote about Meno, using the participial form of
ἐπιθυμεῖν, as it stands in the text—cf. ἐπιθυμῶν τὰ καλά—and bracketing the
Greek infinitives used for the three things Meno desired:

Meno the Thessalian was clearly desiring [ἐπιθυμῶν] to be rich [πλουτεῖν],

excessively so, desiring [ἐπιθυμῶν] to rule [ἄρχειν] in order that he might get
as much as possible, desiring [ἐπιθυμῶν] to be honored [τιμᾶσθαι] so that he
might maximally profit.123

The parallels between the two passages are unmistakable. The primary and
revealing difference is that while Plato preserves what Xenophon informed
him were the objects of Meno’s desire, he suppresses his motives, and to that
extent he makes him look better. But if he presupposes that all of us know
those motives as a result of the Anabasis, he doesn’t need to mention them,
and just in case we miss the crucial point, that is, that he can both follow
and surpass his predecessor, he adds a new blemish to the already damning
portrait Xenophon has painted:

Socrates: But are you calling [just] these the good things [τἀγαθά] rather than
things of this kind? Meno: No, it is all things of this kind I am calling so.
Socrates: So be it. Gold indeed, then, and silver—to provide oneself with these
is virtue, so says Meno the ancestral guest-friend [πατρικὸς ξένος] of the Great
King.124

Aware that the Thessalians supported the Great King in the Persian Wars
thanks to Herodotus, and that Meno made war on the Great King by sup-
porting his younger brother in a failed coup thanks to Xenophon, Plato adds
betrayal to the litany of Meno’s crimes while tipping his hat to his fellow
Athenian by offering an explanation of the special treatment that Xenophon
tells us that the Great King reserved for his traitorous ξένος:

Now when his fellow-generals were put to death for joining Cyrus in his expedi-
tion against the King, he [sc. Meno], who had done the same thing, was not so
treated, but it was after the execution of the other generals that the King visited
the punishment of death upon him; and he was not, like Clearchus and the rest
of the generals, beheaded—a manner of death which is counted speediest—but,
report says, was tortured alive for a year and so met the death of a scoundrel
[πονερός].125

123
 Xenophon, Anabasis, 2.6.21.
124
 78c7–d3.
125
 Xenophon, Anabasis, 2.6.29 (Carleton L. Brownson translation).
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 401

Plato has already used the same technique in Laches-Charmides: he invents

an imaginary prequel to well-known historical events. But the only evidence
that Meno even visited Athens—let alone that he met Socrates—is Plato’s
Meno, and the only visit he made to Athena’s city that we can document was
posthumous, when the handsome and utterly corrupt Thessalian arrived there
along with the rest of Xenophon’s Anabasis. Although we don’t know when
that was, we are no better informed as to when Plato wrote his Meno. Be that
as it may, Debra Nails compares their evidence in a revealing way:

Both Plato (76b) and Xenophon (2.6.28) remark on Meno’s physical beauty in
the bloom of his youth, and on his several lovers, both noting in particular that
Meno is the beloved of Aristippus of Larissa. Xenophon adds what he regards as
a curiosity, that the beardless Meno had a bearded beloved, Tharypus. The Meno
is set in early 402, when Meno visits Athens and stays with Anytus before leav-
ing for Persia on the campaign chronicled in Xenophon’s Anabasis from March
401. Plato represents Meno as a wealthy and outspoken young man, attended by
several slaves (82a), and as recently having been under the influence of Gorgias
(70b, 71c), whom Thessaly had especially welcomed.

Naturally Nails doesn’t say that Plato knows about Meno only through
Xenophon, and therefore doesn’t distinguish what he does from the three
pieces additional pieces of information that will persuade some that he
didn’t: Meno’s relationship to the Great King, his patronymic (76e6), and
his teacher. The last is the crucial one: by equipping Xenophon’s Meno with
Gorgianic influence, he once again adds color to the use of “tyrant-teacher
[τυραννοδιδάσκολος]” (Thg. 125a2) while signposting the priority of Gor-
gias to Meno in the ROPD. But it is only because of information supplied by
Xenophon in Hellenica that Nails can equip Meno with a probable dramatic
date,126 and it is from Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates (29–31) that Plato’s
readers would know, even if they had not yet encountered his own Apology of
Socrates in the ROPD, that Anytus was one of Socrates’ accusers.127
Having quoted its beginning and end, there is something to be said for
quoting and commenting on the whole of Xenophon’s Meno passage in
Anabasis 2.6, not only because it was (on my account) in Plato’s mind when
he wrote Meno, but even more importantly because he expected it to be in
his readers’ minds when they read it. But since what is so very obvious to
me seems heretical or even damning to so many others, I will mention only
the salient points. When Xenophon emphasizes with δῆλος ἦν that Meno
was clearly desirous of wealth, honors, and rule, he sounds the Leitmotiv of

126
 Nails, People of Plato, 319; cf. 37–38, especially the references to Xenophon.
127
 Cf. Hoerber, Plato’s Meno,” 99n2: “Xenophon’s remarks on Anytus in his Apologia Socratis
(29–31) are interesting and may be pertinent to Anytus’ thesis in the Meno.”
402 Chapter 4

the passage, echoed in what follows not only by ἔνδηλος and φανερός (as
in “plain” or “manifest”),128 but also by the amazing “to pride oneself in”
(ἀγάλλεσθαι).129 These words make it obvious that Meno reveled in making
obvious his open and highly visible antics, wicked as they were. This open-
ness allows Xenophon to reveal what Meno must really have kept secret, for
example that it was easier to take advantage of friends than enemies, inad-
vertently confirming the proverbial χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά by taking as his implicit
motto “base things are easiest [ῥᾷστα τὰ αἴσχρα].”130 But the following sen-
tence must be considered more carefully:

Honored [τιμᾶσθαι] and served he deserved to be by demonstrating

[ἐνδείκνυσθαι] that most of all was he able [δυνάσθαι] and wishing [ἐθέλειν] to
do injustice [ἀδικεῖν].131

Within the domain of what is called “the philosophy of Socrates,” is it

possible to ἐθέλειν ἀδικεῖν, that is, to desire to be unjust? In reading Meno,
we must never lose sight of the question that flows directly from Xenophon’s
remarkable description: if the words “to be able and willing to do injustice
[ἐθέλειν ἀδικεῖν]” are true of Meno the Thessalian, does that make it false
to say, as Socrates says and Meno himself confirms, that “nobody wants bad
things?”

Socrates: Then is there anyone who wants to be [βούλεσθαι εἶναι] miserable and
unhappy [κακαδαίμων]? Meno: It does not seem so to me, Socrates. Socrates:
No one, then, Meno, wants bad things, if no one wants to be such an one:
for what is being miserable but both to desire bad things and to obtain them
[ἐπιθυμεῖν τε τῶν κακῶν καὶ κτᾶσθαι]? Meno: You are quite possibly speaking
the truth, Socrates, and nobody wants bad things [οὐδεὶς βούλεσθαι τὰ κακά].132

To restate the operative question in this context: if Meno, as Xenophon tells

us that he did, (openly) wishes to do injustice (ἐθέλειν ἀδικεῖν), does the verb
ἀδικεῖν deserve a place among τὰ κακά that Plato tells us that nobody wants?

128
 Xenophon, Anabasis, 2.6.23 (Brownson): “Affection he clearly [ἔνδηλος] felt for nobody, and if
he said that he was a friend to anyone, it would become plain [φανερός] that this man was the one
he was plotting against.”
129
 Xenophon, Anabasis, 2.6.26: “And just as a man prides himself [ἀγάλλεσθαι] upon piety, truthful-
ness, and justice, so Menon prided himself [ἀγάλλεσθαι] upon ability to deceive, the fabrication
of lies, and the mocking of friends.”
130
 Xenophon, Anabasis, 2.6.24: “Neither would he devise schemes against his enemies’ property,
for he saw difficulty [χαλεπόν] in getting hold of the possessions of people who were on their
guard; but he thought he was the only one who knew that it was easiest [ῥᾷστον] to get hold of the
property of friends—just because it was unguarded.”
131
 2.6.27.
132
 78a6–b2
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 403

One might think that such a place is reserved for nouns, but it would seem
not: it is not bad things like the year of torture climaxing with the wretched
Meno’s death at the hands of the Great King that Socrates is claiming nobody
wants, but rather simply “to be [εἶναι] wretched and κακαδαίμων.”133
So what has really happened here? Has Socrates proved once again—in
the teeth of Xenophon’s Meno—that nobody, Meno included, does bad
things willingly (SP), or has he merely proved that nobody wants bad things
to happen to him? To riff on Plato’s improvement of Xenophon—that is,
that Meno’s family connections made him the πατρικὸς ξένος of the Great
King, and thus that he had personally wronged Artaxerxes, and therefore
deserved what he got—are we to imagine that the painful year Meno
devoted to διδόναι δίκην made him, in accordance with PP-2, not more but
less κακαδαίμων (cf. Grg. 473d7–e1)? Certainly Socrates has not proved—
nor has Meno confirmed—that to ἀδικεῖν belongs among τὰ κακά, let alone
that it is worse (κακίον), in accordance with PP-1, to ἀδικεῖν rather than
to suffer it (ἀδικεῖσθαι). Which is not to say that Socrates can’t play “the
justice card” recently brought into the foreground by Gorgias when circum-
stances demand it, as they do when he lays the foundation for destroying the
second part of Meno’s definition:

Socrates: Gold and silver, then—to provide oneself [πορίζεσθαι] with these is
virtue, so says Meno the ancestral guest-friend [πατρικὸς ξένος] of the Great
King. But are you adding to this provisioning [πόρος], dear Meno, a ‘justly
[δικαίως]’ or ‘piously,’ or does it make no difference to you, so that even if
someone provisions himself [πορίζεσθαι] with them unjustly [ἀδίκως], all the
same you are calling them ‘virtue’? Meno: Of course not, Socrates. Socrates:
But rather ‘badness [κακία]’? Meno: Absolutely [πάντως δήπου].134

Meno is rejecting acquiring good things unjustly, and it therefore seems

that Xenophon was exaggerating when he began his account with δῆλος ἦν.
But if this passage is taken to prove that Plato’s Meno is less of a scoundrel
than Xenophon’s, it is difficult to avoid the possibility that his Socrates is
more of one.135 After all, Meno should be a Socratist’s dream: by making it
famously clear that he is seeking a unitary definition of virtue (72a6–74a10)
and by using a lengthy discussion of “shape” to illustrate the requisite unity

133
 I have translated κακαδαίμων as “unhappy” to make this passage as consistent with TEA as
possible.
134
 78d1–7.
135
 Cf. Boyarin, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, 16: “I have felt that (Plato’s) Socrates’ ways of dealing
with his interlocutors involve a great deal of bad faith, of manipulation and exercise of intellectual
power, to mislead those who were not as clever or as quick on their feet as he is.” He goes on to
pose the right question on 17: “how can I criticize Plato for seeming to turn a blind eye to the ethi-
cal flaws of his hero Socrates himself if my own clear vision of those flaws is provided by Plato?”
404 Chapter 4

of the definiendum (74b2–76a7),136 Socrates is—at least so it would seem—

upholding UV throughout. And yet it is Socrates who now goes on to mention
justice, temperance, and piety (cf. Prt. 325a1) “or any other part of virtue”
(78d8–e1), playing the parts of virtue off against the whole. After suggesting
that it is Meno who is playing around with him (79a7–8), Socrates uses the
lesson learned from defining “shape” (79d1–e4; cf. 75c5–d6) to drive his hap-
less interlocutor into a corner, pretending that he wants him to answer again
from the beginning (79e5–6); not without reason, Meno responds by com-
paring Socrates to a Sting-Ray (79e7–80a8). Between this and Recollection
stands little more than Socrates’ comical response to the image (80b1–d1)
and Meno’s eristic response to the proposal for renewed search (80d1–8).
Before returning to the possibility that Meno has seen the light by discover-
ing between 77b2 and 78b2 that nobody, himself included, wants bad things,
and that Xenophon’s damning description was therefore too harsh, let’s
examine two aspects of the foregoing summary in the context of the ROPD.
Looking backward to Theages, consider the fact that Meno’s claim that he
“repeatedly delivered thousands of discourses about virtue, and very well, as
indeed I seemed to myself” (80b2–3)137 before he met Socrates is sandwiched
between the his description of the narcotic touch (participial form of ἅπτεσθαι
at 80a7) of the Socratic Sting-Ray and his friendly advice to Socrates not “to
sail away [ἐκπλεῖν]” (80b5). Aristides, by contrast, claimed to make his best
speeches in closest contact with Socrates (Thg. 130c1–4 and 130d5–e3), and
lost the ability to do so after deciding—whether on his own or having been
persuaded by others (Tht. 150e3)—to ἐκπλεῖν (Thg. 130a7 and 130c2). Over
and above what this connection tells us about the ROPD, the obvious point is
that just as Meno overestimates his progress before meeting Socrates, Aris-
tides overestimates his before leaving him.
In looking forward, the case is more complex. Since there are three major
passages that highlight geometry in Meno—the “shape” paradigm, the Slave
Boy diagram, and what might be called “the Geometrical Problem” (86e4–
b2)138—it is easy to overlook the fact that Plato is now building on Protago-
ras (cf. Prt. 325a1–3, 329c4–6, and 329e4) using the virtues to introduce
us to the Problem of the One and the Many.139 Once the Problem and its

136
 For discussion, see Vassilis Karasmanis, “Definition in Plato’s Meno” in Lindsay Judson and
Vassilis Karasmanis (eds.), Remembering Socrates: Philosophical Essays, 129–141 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2006), especially 136–139.
137
 In addition to the parallels mentioned in the text, cf. the lack of infinitives for ἐμαυτῷ ἐδόκουν here
and ἔμοιγε ἐδόκουν at Thg. 130d7. See Bailly, Socratic Theages, 121–124.
138
 On all three, see Konrad Gaiser, “Platons Menon und die Akademie.” Philosophy and Phenom-
enological Research 24, no. 4 (June 1964), 241–292.
139
 Cf. Kahn, “Plato and Socrates,” 41: “The problem of the unity of virtue is the early or ‘Socratic’
version of the problem of the one-over-many, the problem which in the later dialogues takes on
metaphysical implications.” Cf. Gaiser, “Platons Menon,” 257n27.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 405

Solution have been clarified in the arithmetic section of Republic 7,140 both
will be presupposed and carefully tested in the post-Republic dialogues from
Timaeus straight through to Phaedo,141 especially in Parmenides and Phile-
bus.142 As far as the present is concerned, however, the way Socrates exploits
the Problem in Meno recalls Callicles’ critique, based on nature and conven-
tion, in Gorgias (Grg. 482e2–483a4): whenever Meno gives a definition that
makes virtue One—for example, “the capacity to provision oneself with good
things” (78c1–5)—Socrates promptly refutes him on the basis of the Many
(in this case, the different parts of virtue at 78d4–79a6)143 but when Meno
offers him “a swarm” of virtues (72a6–7; cf. 74a6–10) Socrates famously
objects on the basis of the One.144
Since one of the dialogue’s most important statements about the Problem
(77a5–b1) appears just before the SP-oriented passage (beginning at 77b2), it
must be considered in context. But consider first the interpretive implications
of this juxtaposition: the passage that looks forward to the later dialogues
receives little attention in the current Anglo-American reception while the
one that looks back to the early ones has engrossed that attention. To which
one can only say: what Plato has so obviously joined together, let no man put
asunder, neither on the basis of Anglo-American nor Continental prejudices.
After all, the great problem with Socratism is that it separates (some form
of) Socrates from his biographer, while the partisans of Tübingen downplay
the sheer wonder of Socrates in their pursuit of the archeological One. These
are the Introduction’s two center-crushing bookends, both using Aristotle to
squeeze Plato out of existence from either side, and the current reception of
Meno falls prey to this bifurcation. So even though I’m putting SP at the center
of this section (and “the Meno Doublet” of the First Protreptic at the center of
the next one), my protest is ongoing: this one-sidedness is a scandal.

Socrates: But come, then, you as well: try to fulfill your obligation [ἡ ὑπόσχεσις]
to me, speaking of virtue—what it is—as a whole, and stop making many things

140
 Prior attention—beginning in Plato the Teacher, sections §13 and §28 (see also the following two
notes)—must excuse the shorthand being used here, but roughly the Problem (of the One and the
Many) is that if the One had (many) parts it would not be One, and therefore the Solution (to the
Problem of the One and the Many) is an atomic One that cannot be split. The fact that no physi-
cal thing is “One” in this sense is what makes the Problem and the Solution of great pedagogical
importance to Plato: the indivisible and insensible One leads the student to the Ideas.
141
 On the latter, see Guardians on Trial, §16. Cf. Lg. 963c5–d2, 964a3–5, and 965b7–e2 for parallel
confirmation based on Order of Composition.
142
 See Guardians in Action, §11.
143
 Cf. Ferejohn, “Socratic Thought-Experiments,” 108–109.
144
 Cf. Paul Woodruff, “Socrates on the Parts of Virtue.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 6, supple-
mentary volume 2 (1976), 101–116, on 103: “My strategy [in squaring Men. with Prt.] is to intro-
duce a distinction between essence and accident that allows Socrates to hold without contradiction
that the various virtues are both one and many.”
406 Chapter 4

out of the one [πολλὰ ποιῶν ἐκ τοῦ ἑνός, i.e.], which is what the jokesters say
those shattering a thing always do [ὅπερ φασὶ τοὺς συντρίβοντάς τι ἑκάστοτε
οἱ σκώπτοντες], but having kept it whole and hearty, say what virtue is, having
received from me these very models [τὰ δέ γε παραδείγματα].145

Since Meno will straightaway respond with his definition, the juxtaposi-
tion couldn’t be closer. The plural τὰ παραδείγματα is justified not only by
“shape” but also by the pre-Socratic account of color (76c4–e2) that Socrates,
under protest and duress (76a9–c2; 76e3–77a5), gives to the pretty boy as
well. As for the joke, there has been debate about it,146 but I’ve taken my
best shot: if what those who are shattering (οἱ συμτριβόντες at 77a8) were
trying to shatter really was the One (τὸ ἕν at 77a7), they could not do so,
because the single and unitary thing that the One must be (if it actually is
One) precludes it from being (broken into) Many (R. 525d9–e3; cf. 79a9–10).
But even more laughable than making Many out of the One—which is better
done physically, in accordance with the jokesters, than mentally (cf. τῷ λόγῳ
at R. 525d9–e1)—is the far more pervasive, insidious, and ultimately sub-
Platonic error of making a One out of Many (cf. R. 443e1–2; Ti. 68d2–7; Lg.
965b7–c3; and Epin. 992b6–7), the highly addictive narcotic swallowed by so
many philosophers, ancient and modern.147 For this is the Problem that Plato
solved: since there is no One that the Many can be—let alone that all things
can be,148 as Heraclitus and the long train dialectical monists who followed in
his wake would claim—the Solution is the absolutely part-less, indivisible,
atomic One that experts in arithmetic will not let you divide (R. 525d8–e3),149
that is, the first and most important thing that the Guardians need to master in
the five-subject curriculum described in Republic 7.
The joke-generating impossibility of πολλὰ ποιῶν ἐκ τοῦ ἑνός is not the only
or even the principal contribution Meno makes toward preparing the student for
the Shorter Way, and the following section will take up the task of showing how
it does so, and thus (by SW-1) for the Longer Way as well (see §10). But even
though it does not play the principal role—the discussion of the hypothetical
method (86e1–89c6), including the Meno Doublet does that—it is important
to emphasize that the Many-excluding One, the only thing (τι at 77a8) that is
exempt from Socrates’ joke, will ultimately prove to be the principal ἀρχή of
the Second Part of the Divided Line and thus, by SW-4, a critical part of that

145
 77a5–b1.
146
 Beginning with an ancient scholiast; see Green, Scholia Platonica, 221 (on R. 422e; cf. 422d8–e6);
cf. Thompson, Meno of Plato, 99–100 (on 77a8) and Bluck, Plato’s Meno, 255–256 (on 77a7).
147
 See references to Drang nach Einheit in Plato the Teacher, Guardians in Action, and Guardians
on Trial.
148
 Heraclitus B50 (DKS): “it is wise to agree that all things are one [ἓν πάντα εἶναι].”
149
 Cf. κερματίζειν at R. 524e2 with 79a10 and κατακερματίζειν at 79c2.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 407

preparation.150 Suffice it to say for now that the good news as well as the bad
news about this Many-excluding One—condition for the possibility of Number,
and yet not a Number itself—is that it does not exist as we measure existence,
and hence it leads our souls upwards and away from Becoming toward Becom-
ing (R. 522e5–523a3; 524e5–525a3; 525b1–4; 525d5–8; and 526e7–9). Along
with geometry, the study of this utterly simple aspect of arithmetic “contributes
to seeing more easily the Idea of the Good” (R. 526e2) and “compels the soul to
turn itself toward that place in which is Being’s happiest” (R. 526e3–5). On the
cusp, then, of one of the dialogue’s two Socratist passages, we have crossed an
important threshold in the ascent to the Good.

Meno: Then it seems to me, Socrates that virtue is as the poet says: χαίρειν τε
καλοῖσι καὶ δύνασθαι (‘Both to rejoice in beauties [whether these are beautiful
things, people, or actions is unclear] and to be able [presumably either ‘to get’ or
‘to do them’]). And I say this is virtue: [while] desiring the beautiful [ἐπιθυμῶν
τῶν καλῶν], to be able to provide yourself with them.151

It would avoid difficulty to construe the first part of Meno’s definition as

ἐπιθυμῶν τὰ καλά (i.e., desiring the beautiful things) because τῶν καλῶν is
ambiguous, and in context could also mean “beautiful [young] men.” We will
encounter this ambiguity again in Phaedrus (Phdr. 249e3–4)152 and Socrates
has just introduced it to us while acceding to Meno’s outrageous request that,
after using “shape” to model a proper definition, he now define “color” as
well (76a8): “I am overcome/defeated by the beautiful [ἥττων τῶν καλῶν]”
(76c1–2). This phrase (ἥττων τῶν καλῶν) suggests intemperance or rather
(in its classic form as introduced in Protagoras) “weakness of will,” that is,
“the condition of being worsted/overcome by pleasure [τὸ πάθημα ἡδονῆς
ἡττᾶσθαι]” (Prt. 353a5; cf. 352d4–353c8). And in support of construing
Meno’s τῶν καλῶν as “beautiful young men”—those who are “playing tyrant
while in their prime” as Socrates will say (76b8)—there is Xenophon’s men-
tion of the beardless boy-toy’s boy-toy to be considered.153 At any rate, it is by

150
 Meno is the first giant step toward that ἀρχή since Hp. Ma., where Hippias confirmed, errone-
ously, that “one” is odd (Hp. Ma. 302a4–5) which it could only be if it were a number: although
the ἀρχή of Number, One is not itself included among “the Odd and the Even” (cf. Grg. 451c1–5,
453e2–454a1) except as the condition of their possibility.
151
 76b2–5.
152
 See Guardians in Action, 186; cf. Smp. 216d2–3.
153
 Xenophon, Anabasis, 2.6.28 (Brownson): “From Aristippus [cf. 70b2–5] he secured, while still in
the bloom of youth [ὡραῖος; cf. ἐν ὥρᾳ at 76b8], an appointment as general of his mercenaries;
with Ariaeus, who was a barbarian, he became extremely intimate for the reason that Ariaeus was
fond of beautiful youths [μεικακίοις καλοῖς ἥδεσθαι]; and, lastly, he himself, while still beardless,
had a bearded favorite named Tharypas.” In other words, while prostituting himself for positions
of authority (the ἀρχαί of 78c7; cf. ἄρχειν at 2.6.21), Meno also “took pleasure” in οἰ καλοί,
nominative of Plato’s deliberately ambiguous τῶν καλῶν at 77b4. Naturally I regard all of this
as further proof that Plato wrote Meno for readers who had Anabasis in mind, and therefore must
have had it in his while writing it.
408 Chapter 4

no means clear that Meno is saying the same thing the poet is: his definition of
virtue might be nothing more beautiful than “lusting after good-looking boys
and gaining their sexual favors” while the poet’s might be “taking delight in
beautiful actions and being able to do them yourself,” which to my ears has
the ring of truth to it.
In addition, then, to the emerging Problem of the One and the Many that
bookends it (and which leads to Meno’s eristic question, Recollection, and
beyond) the passage under consideration—let’s call it “Penner and Rowe’s
Meno Passage” in honor of the fact that they linked it to Penner’s (Gorgias)
Passage in their first collaboration (1994)154—has an even broader context,
unfolding as it does in Xenophon’s shadow as well. Finally, and most impor-
tantly, there is a retrospective Platonic context as well as a Problem-based
prospective one, indicated by Socrates first response:

Socrates: Are you saying that the one desiring beautiful things [ὁ ἐπιθυμῶν τῶν
καλῶν] is a desirer [ἐπιθυμητής] of good ones [ἀγαθά]? Meno: Most of all, in
deed.155

The difference between an ἐπιθυμητής and ὁ ἐπιθυμῶν is eye-wash, meant to

divert Meno from the characteristically Socratic bait-and-switch: by getting
him to agree to the GB Equation at the start, the terms of the conversation are
set, and there is no longer any possibility that its purpose will be to lead Meno
to the truth, that is, that virtue really is “taking delight in beautiful actions and
being able to do them yourself,” or more simply τὸ καλῶς πράττειν (cf. Alc.
116b2–3). And even though it will be difficult to explain how the three levels
of context—the Problem, Xenophon’s Meno, and the Equation—are related,
it is worth a try.
To summarize, then, we ascend to the Beautiful before ascending to the
Good because the latter, thanks to the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy, can easily be
converted to the beneficial, the advantageous, and the good for us. Having
revealed the GB Equation to depend on fallacy in Alcibiades Major and
creating the Eudaemonist Shortcut in Symposium, Plato reaches the tran-
scendent Beautiful at the end of the Diotima Discourse, a sunlit peak that
towers above the darkling realm where the GoodE casts its long shadow.
In the dialogues between Symposium and Republic, Plato is training us to

154
 Terry Penner and C. J. Rowe, “The Desire for Good: Is the Meno Inconsistent with the Gorgias?”
Phronesis 39, no. 1 (1994), 1–25. For critical discussion, see Mariana Anagnostopoulos, “Desire
for Good in the Meno” in Naomi Reshotko (ed.), Desire, Identity and Existence: Essays in Honor
of T. M. Penner, 171–191 (Kelowna: Academic Printing and Publishing, 2003).
155
 77b6–7.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 409

do to the easily deformable and dative-bound “Good” what he has already

done to the Beautiful: we must emancipate it from the shadows by catching
sight of the Idea of the Good, that is, ascending to the GoodT.156 In this way,
an Image-dependent and Hypothesis-based mode of thinking—typified by
the Problem-transcending One, the ἀρχή of Number—will now serve as our
springboard to this Good, for in order to make the ethical leap that Justice
demands, we must transcend the centrality of our own good, benefit, or
advantage.157
Xenophon’s Meno enters the picture so that Socrates can persuade a scoun-
drel who plainly desires to do no good that all men desire good things, but
not to do them, and that they desire only such things as what they conceive to
conduce to their own happiness and personal good. All of this comes together
in Meno because of Recollection. Plato knows that everyone knows what the
sophisticates have tried to make us forget: that to perform beautiful actions
for the benefit of others is to live well, nobly and justly (Cri. 48a5–b9), even
when it leads to the kind of death that Socrates suffered unjustly but that
Meno richly deserved.

Socrates: Is it then [a case] of some who are actually desire bad things [τὰ κακά]
and others good ones? Don’t all, o best of men [ὤριστε], seem to you to desire
good things? Meno: Not to me.158
The negative form will prove to be crucial: the argument’s conclusion
will be that nobody wants bad things—like what will happen to Meno at
the hands of the Great King—to happen to them, and that is true. But it
is not true that it is beyond human nature to advance into bad things (Prt.
358d1–2), nor that, when heroes do so, the good things they prefer must
be good for them, even though in such cases it is for the sake of the Good,
the Just, and the Beautiful.
But why speak of heroes? Meno’s moral compass points to an alternative
North, and Penner’s Passage in Gorgias applies well to him: given how things
turned out, he did not want to join the expedition of Cyrus, and in seeking

156
 Cf. 765–766 in Terence Irwin, “Recollection and Plato’s Moral Theory.” Review of Metaphysics
27, no. 4 (June 1974), 752–772.
157
 And thus of a conception of virtue based on CA; hence the important passage from Irwin, “Recol-
lection” cited in the previous note begins (765): “like the theory of recollection, the ascent theory
offers an alternative to the Socratic view of knowledge and rational choice embodied in the craft
analogy” (765) and ends on 766 with: “The craft analogy relies on the pattern of rational choice
illustrated in the Lysis; it cannot survive if the Symposium’s view of desire is right. If we have
rightly understood the Meno and Symposium, they reject two aspects of the same Socratic doctrine
of virtue and knowledge.”
158
 77b7–c2.
410 Chapter 4

his own good—through his IOV-type of CA virtue—he demonstrated a sub-

Socratic and K-defacing ignorance of MES.159 And leaving aside that modern
vocabulary, the reason that Plato has chosen to revisit SP in a Socratic dia-
logue with “Meno the Thessalian” is that his readers know—thanks to Xeno-
phon, his biographer—that he wished to do injustice (ἐθέλειν ἀδικεῖν) and
therefore did it, all the while desiring good things and provisioning himself
with them. We therefore know that “the good things” Meno desires—since
nobody desires bad ones, like dying miserably after enduring a year of tor-
ture—cannot be doing good things (for others) but only securing them for
himself. And we further know that to ἀδικεῖν cannot be found among the bad
things that Socrates can prove that Meno does not desire: his goal is to avoid
equally the need to διδόναι δίκην and to suffer ἀδικεῖσθαι.
This is why Meno, at least at first, will insist that there are some men—and
he naturally has himself in mind—who desire bad things, that is, to do bad
things. And this is the most interesting aspect of the argument, precisely
because the most obvious way to refute SP is to make the confession that
Protagoras claims, not entirely without cause, that nobody is willing to make
(Prt. 323b2–7): “I do injustice willingly, have done it before, am doing it
now, and will do it again.” And of course the people who could admit, if only
privately, that this is what they do, are doing injustice because they do not
think doing bad things is bad for them, but rather conduces to their own good,
as the tyrant thinks when he murders his minister. Plato therefore borrows
Xenophon’s Meno because Xenophon has created a character who is itching
to say openly (δῆλος ἦν) what others conceal: he is ready, able, and willing
to do injustice, and he does it well.160 Hence this crucial exchange:

Socrates: But there are some [who are desirous] of bad things [τὰ κακά]? Meno:
Yes. Socrates: Thinking the bad things [τὰ κακά] are good, do you say, or even
knowing that they are bad but all the same they desire them: Meno: Both, they
seem to me [to desire]. Socrates: Then there is someone [τις] who seems to you,
O Meno, while knowing [γιγνώσκων] that the bad things [τὰ κακά] are bad, all
the same desires them? Meno: Most of all.161

At the risk of beating a dead Thessalian horse (cf. 70a6), Meno is resist-
ing Socrates because he is thinking of τὰ κακά not as things that are bad

159
 There are, of course, many connections between Men. and Grg., but few are more important than
the connection between PP-4 (Grg. 480e5–7) and his first definition at 71e2–5: “Meno: this is a
man’s ἀρετή: to be capable to do the things of the city, and while doing them, to treat well ones
friends, and badly [κακῶς (ποιεῖν)] one’s enemies, and to be careful [εὐλαβεῖσθαι] lest suffering
such a thing oneself.” The connection is then hammered at 94e3–5, where εὐλαβεῖσθαι is linked
to κακῶς λέγειν.
160
 Cf. Xenophon, Anabasis, 2.6.27: ἐπιδεικνύμενος ὅτι πλεῖστα δύναιτο καὶ ἐθέλοι ἂν ἀδικεῖν.
161
 77c2–7.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 411

for him,162 but as things that are simply bad or rather things that it is bad,
base, and ignoble to desire—at least by the conventional standards used by
fools163—but which he, “knowing ” (γιγνώσκων) that he is able and willing
to do injustice, has made it clear (thanks to Xenophon) that he was doing so
γιγνώσκων, and was ignorant only to the extent that by doing so, he was, is,
and will be desiring things that are harmful, that is, bad for him.
Plato’s strategy here stands at the center of this book. If he is going to
emancipate our souls from the GoodE and lead us to the Idea of the Good,
that is, the GoodT, he will first show us someone whom all of us recognize
and indeed know only as a notorious criminal, ready and willing to do things
that are actually bad, but who embraces an argument proving that not even
he desires things that are bad for him. By the time that Plato is through with
us, he will have turned all this on its head: it would be unjust for philosophers
to place what is good for them above what Justice demands from them: that
they go back down into the Cave and share with others the love that Plato
the Teacher has showered on us, even if that leads to undeserved torture (cf.
R. 361e1–362a2) in Meno’s well-deserved prison cell. For nothing less is
required from those who would rather be than merely seem to be good (R.
361b7–8), and no less than Meno are Socrates and Plato in search of gold
(Grg. 486d2–4), albeit in the form of golden souls (cf. R. 521a3–4), that is,
those who are still capable of remembering what all of us already know.
In the case of Callicles, Plato created a character he knew better than any-
one else, and tempted the rest of us to find him incorrigible by dramatizing
his (initial) resistance to the eloquent Socrates. Those of us whose souls are
insufficient to play gold-testing βάσανος to Plato’s—as Callicles’ soul played
βάσανος to Socrates’ (Grg. 486d4–487a3)—will project our own incorrigibil-
ity onto him, revealing our sympathy for his pre-Nietzschean trans-valuation
of values. These same readers will now, for much the same reason, prove
more sympathetic to Meno. By borrowing the Thessalian scoundrel from his
friend Xenophon, Plato now uses a character that everybody should know is
and was incorrigible, and shows that he is amenable to semi-Socratic correc-
tion: he will eventually give up his claim that there exists anybody (τις) who
wants bad things, that is, wants to be wretched and κακοδαίμων (78a4–b2).

162
 Cf. David Wolfsdorf, “Desire for Good in Meno 77B2–78B6.” Classical Quarterly 56, no. 1 (May
2006), 77–92, on 82: “It is, of course, a question why Meno commits to (c) [sc. ‘some people
desire things that are bad and recognize that these things are bad’]. The answer, simply, seems
to be that at this point in the argument Meno fails to observe that desiring something bad de re
implies desiring something harmful to oneself.” This is at best half of the reason that Meno so
commits.
163
 Xenophon, Anabasis, 2.6.22 (Brownson): “Again, for the accomplishment of the objects upon
which his heart was set, he imagined that the shortest route was by way of perjury and falsehood
and deception, while he counted straightforwardness and truth the same thing as folly.”
412 Chapter 4

Plato can take no credit when one of us realizes that it is Meno and not Cal-
licles who is incorrigible. If we have what it takes to accept the argument that
Socrates applies to Callicles, we will know that he could have done the same,
and this acceptance will transform us, allowing us to look our teacher in the
eye even while he turns our lives upside down (Grg. 481c1–4). But we can
accept the argument Socrates applies to Meno at no cost to ourselves whatso-
ever, and if we accept it as paradigmatically Socratic, we prove that we have
learned little about Socrates, less about virtue, and nothing about Plato.164
Among so many ways of proving the latter, excising Theages from the canon
comes to mind, since Plato knows that what divides these two kinds of read-
ers depends entirely on θεία μοῖρα,165 and he wrote three dialogues—joined
just as they are in the ROPD—to prove it.

Socrates: What do you mean by ‘to desire [ἐπιθυμεῖν]’? Is it not ‘to come into
being for him (who desires it) [γενέσθαι αὐτῷ]’? Meno: To come into being; for
what else (could I mean/be saying) [γενέσθαι· τί γὰρ ἄλλο;]? Socrates: Whether
believing the bad things to benefit [ὠφελεῖν] the one for whom they come into
being, or knowing of the bad things that they harm [βλάπτειν] the one for whom
they are present? Meno: There are some [εἰσὶ μὲν οἳ] believing the bad things to
be beneficial [ὠφελεῖν], but [δέ] there are also those knowing that they harm.166

Since Meno knows very well that he does bad things willingly, he contin-
ues to resist SP, so Socrates needs to change the terms of the question. By get-
ting Meno to accept γενέσθαι αὐτῷ as a translation of ἐπιθυμεῖν,167 Socrates
shifts the emphasis from “the bad things” that Meno clearly wants to do, to
what he will derive from experiencing τὰ κακά as they “come into being for
him.” But he can’t get there directly because Meno continues to make room
for himself in the μέν-clause. The real obstacle for Socrates is that Meno is
thinking of himself, although it would be more accurate to say that since Plato
has purposely borrowed a character (i.e., Xenophon’s “Meno the Thessalian”)

164
 As in Stemmer, “Grundriss,” 541: “Platon akzeptiert den motivationstheoretischen Grundsatz der
Sophisten: Man hat nur Gründe, das zu tun, was letztlich fur einen selbst gut ist [note 34].” Before
citing Prichard and Adkins for support, sidestepping the post-eudaemonist interpretation of the
return to the Cave (“Ich halte diese Argumentation nicht für richtig”), and reviewing pertinent
comment by Kraut, Cooper, Irwin, and White, this valuable footnote (541n34) begins: “Vgl. z. B.
die Argumentation in Men. 77b6–78b2.”
165
 Cf. Dover, Plato, Symposium, 164 (on Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.12–48): “an interesting
admission that argument can influence action only when addressed to those who are well disposed
to its presuppositions [unlike Critias and Alcibiades], and that although Socrates had the power to
enthrall and inspire he did not have the power to keep those who did not wish to stay.”
166
 77c7–d4. For a less literal translation of the first exchange (77c7–8), see Lamb’s: “Socrates: What
do you mean by ‘desires’? Desires the possession of it? Meno: Yes; what else could it be?”
167
 As the crucial words γενέσθαι αὐτῷ suggest (cf. γενέσθαι αὑτῷ at Smp. 204d7), this “Socratic”
discussion in Meno does not unroll in an interpretive vacuum quite apart from Xenophon’s
Anabasis.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 413

who disproves SP, he is helping us see—with unparalleled clarity for the first
time—the argumentative base of that “doctrine,” enshrined as such by Aris-
totle (see Introduction). It is therefore because Meno thinks or even knows
that doing bad things is going to benefit (ὠφελεῖν) him that Socrates needs
to force him to acknowledge that bad things in general—not the bad things
Meno has it in mind to do, but those that would harm (βλάπτειν) him if they
“came into being” for him—are simply harmful, and that nobody wants to be
harmed. Socrates therefore needs to make Meno to forget about himself just
for a moment, and he does so by exploiting the commonsense connections
that link good things to benefit and bad ones to harm, for who does not know
that bad things are harmful?

Socrates: Then do they seem to you to know of the bad things that they are bad,
those believing that the bad things benefit [ὠφελεῖν]? Meno: Not completely
does this very thing seem so to me [οὐ πάνυ μοι δοκεῖ τοῦτό γε].168

With Meno’s response, the fever breaks: he refuses to deny that he knows
bad things are bad, and that bad things are harmful for the same general
reason that good ones are beneficial. As much as he wants to demonstrate
(δῆλος ἦν) that he wishes to do injustice (ἐθέλειν ἀδικεῖν) because he thinks
doing it will benefit him—and we know that this is so because we’ve read
Xenophon’s Anabasis—he dreads even more to show himself up as ignorant,
especially since nobody knows better than he does that the bad things he is
able and wishes to do really are bad, and that they will harm those to whom
Meno does them. But it is equally true—as Socrates is about to prove—that
Meno does them because he thinks they are good, that is, good for him:

Socrates: Well then, it’s clear that these people {whatever we may go on to say
about the others: μέν} don’t desire τὰ κακά, the people who don’t know them
{i.e., that they are κακά]. Instead {ἀλλά: strongly adversative}, they desire those
things which {we agree} they think good. But these very things {ταῦτά γε} in
fact are {position of ἔστιν} κακά. So, then, {this first group,} those who don’t
know them {τὰ κακά}, and think that they are ἀγαθά, clearly desire τὰ ἀγαθά.
Meno: These indeed probably do so.169

Even if Meno thinks τὰ κακά will benefit him (which of course he does), and
even if those things are really bad (which he knows that they are), he still
desires the good (which he certainly does) and not what is harmful or bad

168
 77c4–7.
169
 77d7–e4 as translated in Penner and Rowe, “Desire for the Good,” 18–19; the translation of
Meno’s response, however, is mine; they don’t bother with it.
414 Chapter 4

for himself (which he certainly doesn’t), and thus what he desires ever and
always—no matter how bad it really is—is the good, “the real good” for him.
I have used Penner and Rowe’s “Alternative Reading of the Crucial
Passage”170 to illustrate the moral bankruptcy of Socratism in its most radical
form. Engaged in a battle with Santas,171 who thinks desire is for the merely
apparent good, and even with Naomi Reshotko,172 whose Pennerite assimila-
tion of Santas’ position doesn’t preserve the full force of Penner’s own rejec-
tion of it,173 Penner and Rowe argue that the objects of desire, benefit and
happiness, are “real goods.”174 While enough has already been said about the
relationship between MES and K-F to let the passage found in the last note
speak for itself, a footnote to it deserves a place in the text:

We note that our suggestion that the Meno takes desire for something as desire
to possess that thing, and to possess it as a means to benefit and ultimately to
happiness, is well confirmed outside of the Meno and even aside from the Gor-
gias. See Symposium 204e2–205a3 and Euthydemus 280b5–8 with dl-e2. The
Meno, the Euthydemus and the Symposium all construe desire for something in
terms of means-ends hierarchies [the predecessor of MES] of the form: desire
to possess as a means to benefit as a means to happiness.175

Thanks to its Meno Doublet, further comment on the First Protreptic (of
which “Euthydemus 280b5–8 with dl-e2” is a part) can be delayed until §15,
but given the way this book began, a response to the Symposium connection
mentioned here must not be.
The key phrase, used to gloss ἐπιθυμεῖν ατ 77c8, is γενέσθαι αὐτῷ, a clear
and unmistakable echo of γενέσθαι αὑτῷ at Symposium 204d7, marking the
beginning of the Eudaemonist Shortcut. Penner and Rowe’s “the Meno takes
desire for something as desire to possess that thing” is based on 77c8, with
γενέσθαι αὐτῷ translated in terms of possession, as in “to be in the possession
of.” As for “to possess it as a means to benefit and ultimately to happiness,”
this comes from the Shortcut: the substitution of the easy τἀγαθά for the more
difficult τὰ καλά occurs at Symposium 204e1–2. But as we might expect,
Penner and Rowe make no reference to the unanswered question that leads to
the Shortcut, that is, the parallel question about τὰ καλά that Diotima answers
only at the very end. It is only there that she will finally tell us what comes
into being for the one who catches sight of the Beautiful thanks to climbing

170
 Penner and Rowe, “Desire for the Good,” 18.
171
 See Santas, “Socratic Paradoxes.”
172
 See Naomi Reshotko, “The Socratic Theory of Motivation.” Apeiron 25, no. 3 (September 1992),
145–169, on 150n7.
173
 Penner and Rowe, “Desire for the Good,” 24–25.
174
 See Penner and Rowe, “Desire for the Good,” 22.
175
 Penner and Rowe, “Desire for the Good,” 22n33.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 415

the ladder of τὰ καλά: where what γενέσθαι αὐτῷ is not a possession—for

love is more than the universal desire to possess happiness, that is, something
good or beneficial for oneself (Smp. 205a5–8)—but rather a vision that allows
the one who have seen it with that faculty by which alone it can be seen, to
give birth in the Beautiful to discourses about true virtue:

‘Or do you not recognize,’ she said, ‘what there will come into being only for
the one [cf. γενέσθαι αὐτῷ] who sees by that which renders the Beautiful vis-
ible: to give birth [τίκτειν] not to false images of virtue [εἴδωλα ἀρετῆς], not
holding on [ἐφάπτεσθαι] to an image false [εἴδωλον] but true, since to the one
holding on [ἐφάπτεσθαι] to the truth; and having brought forth [τίκτειν] true
virtue, and having nourished it, to that one it belongs to become [i.e., γενέσθαι
αὐτῷ] god-loved, and—if indeed to any among mankind—immortal.’176

Penner and Rowe are therefore right on the mark: there is a connection
between “the crucial passage” in Meno and the Eudaemonist Shortcut in
Symposium, clearly flagged by Plato as such. But by ignoring the fact that the
latter is precisely a shortcut—a Shorter (easier, and less satisfactory) Way to
sidestep the as yet unanswered question about τὰ καλά (Smp. 204d4–11)—the
result can only be a false image of virtue, conceived in forgetfulness that the
real object of Plato’s Anabasis is the Beautiful, and therefore of what comes
into being for the one who catches sight of it, just as Xenophon’s Greeks once
caught sight of the Sea. The conclusion reached by Penner and Rowe is con-
genial to Meno, but not to the writer of both Meno and Symposium: “Could
Meno really have intended to suggest that virtue is desire for, and ability to
get, apparently good things? Surely it is clear here too that it is the really
good which is intended.”177 And the note attached to this answer illustrates
perfectly what Diotima called an εἴδωλον ἀρετῆς, flagged as such by Meno’s
approval of it:

Of course, it may be said that Meno is a silly fellow. But Plato surely has a
purpose in having Meno put forward this particular account of virtue [sc. ‘desir-
ing good things and being able to (δύνασθαι, having the power to) get them’ on
10]. Penner has suggested elsewhere that Socrates himself thinks that virtue is
the ability (power, or knowledge) to get good things—even though he refutes
Meno when Meno defends that view (given that Meno thinks that wealth and
high office are good things). If so, then Plato must want us to be considering the
ability to get really good things, not just apparently good things.178

176
 Smp. 212a2–7
177
 Penner and Rowe, “Desire for the Good,” 16.
178
 Penner and Rowe, “Desire for the Good,” 16n21.
416 Chapter 4

In a dialogue about virtue with a scoundrel—“a silly fellow” doesn’t cut it, to
say nothing of a “Meno may be”—Plato introduces the notion that learning
is Recollection, and illustrates directly and indirectly how we will be able
to remember what we have forgotten by means of the proper provocation.
In Penner and Rowe’s “crucial passage”—as well as what precedes and now
in what follows it—Plato uses his Socrates to help us learn in just this way:

Socrates: What then [τί δέ;]? Do those who, as you say, are desiring the bad
things [τὰ κακά], and are believing that bad things harm that man for whom they
come to be [ᾧ ἂν γίγνεσθαι; cf. γενέσθαι αὐτῷ], know that they will be harmed
by them? Meno: Necessarily [ἀνάγκη]. Socrates: But do they not think that
those who are harmed are miserable [ἄθλιος] in proportion [καθ’ ὅσον] to the
harm they suffer? Meno: This too necessarily [ἀνάγκη]. Socrates: And the mis-
erable, are they not unhappy [κακοδαίμονες]? Meno: I indeed think so. Socrates:
And does there exist anyone who [purposively] plans [βούλεσθαι] to be miser-
able and unhappy [κακοδαίμων]? Meno: It does not seem so to me, Socrates.179

I have suggested that βούλεσθαι should be translated as “purposively

plans” to honor the efforts of those who have tried to explain what goes
wrong here with the distinction between ἐπιθυμεῖν and βούλεσθαι. Devel-
oped in detail by Roslyn Weiss,180 this strategy is adopted by Brickhouse and
Smith,181 whose brief section on Meno in their Socratic Moral Psychology
includes the claim: “So what seals Meno’s defeat is his admission that no one
wishes to be miserable and unhappy.”182 But the fever has broken before the
passage just quoted even begins: we are now in the company of “Meno the
Socratic.” His opposition to Socrates has vanished, and the doubled use of
ἀνάγκη marks the shift. But there has been no conversion. Meno has learned
nothing from Socrates, neither has he changed. He can now agree because
Socrates’ shift from ἐπιθυμεῖν to γενέσθαι αὐτῷ (77c7–8), once coupled with
the “bad things harm/good things benefit” synonymies, yields the sum: “bad
things harm the one for whom they come to be,” and those are clearly not the
kind of “bad things” that Meno was so intent on demonstrating that he know-
ingly desired (and continues to desire) to do.
Far more important in the long run, however, is the other synthesis that
converts “good things benefit” into “GTBM,” that is, “good things benefit
me.” When Socrates introduces the Idea of the Good in Republic 6, he will
say that “you have heard many times that by it both just things and the other

179
 77e5–78a5.
180
 Weiss, Socratic Paradox and its Enemies, 157–161.
181
 Brickhouse and Smith, Socratic Moral Psychology, 65–70. See also Kamtekar, “Plato on the
Attribution of Conative Attitudes,” which does not cite Weiss.
182
 Brickhouse and Smith, Socratic Moral Psychology, 66.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 417

appurtenances [προσχρησάμενα] become useful and beneficial [ὠφέλιμα]”

(R. 505a3–4), but he does not say to whom they become so; on the other hand,
when he adds: “and if we do not know but are without it [sc. the Idea of the
Good], if to the greatest possible extent we know [all] the other things, you
know that [knowing them] would be of no benefit to us [οὐδεν ἡμῖν ὄφελος],
just as neither [would it be any advantage to us] if we obtained anything,
without the Good?” (R. 505a6–b1).183 It is true that “what you have heard
many times” is GTBM,184 but what makes Republic 7 the dead center of
Plato’s writings and the Allegory of the Cave the single most famous passage
in them is that in the Guardian’s Just decision to forego their own happiness
(R. 520e1; cf. εὖ πράττειν at R. 519e2) we will hear something new and
exceptional,185 but not for that reason discountable.186 The Idea of the Good
requires no “ethical dative” and will brook none, especially since the addition
of “M” to GTB is better understood, in the light of the Good and Justice, as an
“un-Ethical Dative” or a “Dative of (Self-)Interest” and can therefore convert
even “Meno the Thessalian” to radical Socratism.
And this is why the radical Socratists play such a large role in this book.
In discussing the post-Republic dialogues, I used the names of two nine-
teenth century English scholars who clashed over Timaeus: John Cook Wil-
son blamed Plato for any contradictions in Timaeus’ discourse while R. D.
Archer-Hind denied that any such contradictions exist, and therefore seemed
to be Plato’s defender.187 The same dynamic reappeared in the quarrel between
revisionists and unitarians, with the former pointing out inter-dialogue con-
tradictions that showed Plato changing his views—and more specifically,
as abandoning (“middle-period”) Platonism—and the latter resolving such
contradictions by defending the continuity and unity of Plato’s thought. Since
my claim is that Plato contradicts himself deliberately, and that the unity of
his thought—centered on the Idea of the Good, the return to the Cave, and

183
 See the last word of Penner and Rowe, “Desire for the Good,” 25.
184
 To preserve “the ethical dative,” GTBM should equally be glossed: “good things are beneficial
to/for me.”
185
 Cf. Mary Margaret Mackenzie, Journal of Medical Ethics 11, no. 2 (June 1985), 88–91, on 90:
“Plato’s own argument [sc. in R.] does not show how his own benevolent action might be reason-
able on his own terms—how it might be in his own interests. Nor does he allow any other impera-
tive to benevolence. He cannot easily demonstrate how the philosopher can be required to return
to the world of politics, and rule, given that to do so is against his own interests. Plato’s rationalist
egoism cannot justify benevolence.”
186
 See Penner, “The Forms,” 226n11 (the second of Penner’s golden footnotes): “I discount here
the ace in the hole of all those who argue that the Republic’s ethics is not based on even an
enlarged self-interest, not even availing themselves of Irwin’s awkward compromise (see next
note) in which we build morality into the very meaning of ‘happiness.’ I refer here to a detail of
Plato’s construction of the ideal state, wherein he speaks of forcing the guardians to abandon their
happiness-producing contemplation of the Forms in order to go back down into the cave, and then
says they do it willingly since they recognize that this compulsion is just.”
187
 See Guardians in Action, 27–29.
418 Chapter 4

the propaedeutic value of Beauty and mathematics—is thoroughly dialectical,

I triangulate between Revisionism and Unitarianism, agreeing with the latter
in spirit yet repeatedly rejecting readings that tend to soften Platonism for
the sake of continuity, while at the same time accepting or even radicalizing
revisionist readings while systematically rejecting the anti-Platonist end to
which those readings are consistently put.
In the pre-Republic dialogues, the Socratists correspond to the revisionists,
only in reverse: now it is Plato who is revising “the philosophy of Socrates.”
To the extent that (καθ’ ὅσον) Socratists are radical, they tend to valorize the
Socratism and “Socratic intellectualism” (hereafter “SI”)188 at the expense of
(“middle-period”) Platonism, and of the most radical, Penner is their trail-
blazing chief. But Rowe is even more radical than Penner in the sense that
he is ready, able, and willing to plant the banner of Socratism in the citadels
of Platonism, as in the paradigmatic case—thanks to the Eudaemonist Short-
cut—of Symposium (see §1). Unlike the post-Republic revisionists, then,
Rowe requires no further radicalization: he is not only embracing the Penne-
rite form of SI but extending its reach forwards, much as the most radical
revisionists sometimes question whether Plato ever embraced “the Theory
of Ideas.”189
In the Socratist universe, Brickhouse and Smith correspond to the unitar-
ians, and to make this clearer, Rowe’s 2012 review of Socratic Moral Psy-
chology is useful. Here, Rowe distinguishes between two forms of SI before
commenting on the new kind that Brickhouse and Smith will champion:

The difference between these two versions of intellectualism cannot be over-

stated. In particular, in the first case, A, the desire that leads to action will be
desire for what the agent happens to think good (the ‘apparent’ good), whereas
in the second case, B, it will be for the real good—insofar as what we desire
is our good, and Plato’s Socrates frequently takes it as read, and/or receives
immediate confirmation from his interlocutors, that no one wants what is actu-
ally bad for him or her.190

As should now be clear, I am reading Meno 77b2–78b2 in accordance with B,

and it is useful to quote Rowe when he identifies the proponents of both A and
B: “Interpretation A is, or has been, favored, for example, by Jerry Santas,

188
 The fact that “SI” might just as plausibly denominate “Socratic Ignorance” as “Socratic Intel-
lectualism” should give us pause; cf. Penner, “What Laches and Nicias Miss,” 22–26, and Rowe,
Plato and the Art, 37–39 and 128–129n24.
189
 See Guardians on Trial, 403–405, including 405n237.
190
 Christopher Rowe, “Socrates on Reason, Appetite and Passion: A Response to Thomas C. Brick-
house and Nicholas D. Smith, Socratic Moral Psychology.” Journal of Ethics 16, no. 3 (September
2012), 305–324 on 306.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 419

Terry Irwin and John Cooper; interpretation B is favored, for example, by

Terry Penner, Christopher Taylor and myself.”191
Since I have placed the memory of Vlastos at the beginning of this book,
Rowe’s description of the split among PTI—with Penner and Taylor on one
side, Irwin on the other—is notable, as is his comparative assessment: “B is
considerably more sophisticated, and better resourced, than A.”192 In this
assessment I concur. It is for the same reason that the revisionists prove more
useful than the unitarians in interpreting the post-Republic dialogues that the
most radical Socratists do the same with respect to the pre-Republic ones. It is
not only that the Good to which Plato is helping us climb is not “our good,”
but that we can only reach the one by overcoming the other. Once we have
done so, the post-Republic dialogues repeatedly contradict Platonism not
because Plato has changed his mind, but because Plato is applying a touch-
stone to our souls, testing whether or not they are truly golden. Just as we
needed to fight our way up to the GoodT, so too, having reached it, must we
now prove our ability to defend it “as if in battle.”
For the present, however, we remain on the near side of “the crisis of the
Republic,” and the pre-Republic dialogues—especially Protagoras, to which
Plato knows that many of his students will attempt to remain loyal—consti-
tute an ongoing deconstruction of SI in its Pennerite form, whereas Brick-
house and Smith, despite indications to the contrary,193 so soften its sharp
edges that SI is sacrificed to “the unity of Plato’s thought.”194 Since the larger
context of Meno 77b2–78b2 is SP, and since a 1964 article by Santas has
set the terms for discussion of SP, it is significant that he belongs in Rowe’s
group A; indeed Penner and Rowe’s first collaboration is an ongoing attack
on Santas’s reading of “the crucial passage” in Meno. And albeit in a strictly
dialectical sense, my sympathies in this struggle are with B. Leaving Santas’s
A-based treatment of SP to shift for itself, including his distinction between
“moral” and “prudential” forms of “The Socratic Paradoxes,” I will conclude
this section with some discussion of how many of these there really are.
Up to this point, I have tried to show that Plato uses Xenophon’s Meno
to reveal that he was never sufficiently “Socratist” to embrace SP in its
B form (hereafter “SI-B”) This should not surprise anyone: in the version
of SP that supports or grounds SI-B—as Penner delights in pointing out ad
nauseam—there is no “moral” element whatsoever, and our inevitable pursuit
of “the good for us” functions for him as a refreshing alternative to “moral-
ism,” especially in its Christian or Kantian form. It is to unmask this gleeful

191
 Rowe, “Socrates on Reason,” 307.
192
 Rowe, “Socrates on Reason,” 307.
193
 See Brickhouse and Smith, Socratic Moral Psychology, 5–6.
194
 See Rowe, “Socrates on Reason,” 324.
420 Chapter 4

anti-moralism that I have coined “the un-Ethical Dative,” but joking aside,
the crucial point is that Plato counts on us to recognize the moral bankruptcy
of SI-B on our own, and thus that recognition functions as a springboard to
the Idea of the Good.
As a result, I am joining an antithetical alternative, both dialectical and
pedagogical, to the form of SP that Penner so ably defends when he expli-
cates οὐδεὶς βούλεσθαι τὰ κακά. Properly understood, Plato’s pedagogical
purpose is advanced by promoting the false view that nobody goes against
what’s good for them, nobody errs willingly in securing their own real good,
everyone pursues the real good for them, nobody does wrong to themselves
voluntarily, or willingly sacrifices their own happiness. In opposition to
all this, Socrates dies, Plato teaches, and the Guardians return to the Cave
because they prefer acting in accordance with the GoodT to their own happi-
ness, that is, the GoodE. It is precisely because the philosopher’s life is more
conducive to a philosopher’s own happiness than her dangerous decision to
πράττειν τὰ τῆς πολέως, that Plato discovered the secret of “a well-organized
city,” mastered ἡ πολιτικὴ τέχνη (R. 520e4–521a2), used the trial and death
of Socrates to exemplify it, and began the masterpiece for which he has been
preparing us since Protagoras with the word κατέβην.
The synergy between SP’s pedagogical usefulness and Plato’s lack of
commitment to it as a matter of truth arises from the way it emerges in Pro-
tagoras. In the midst of the Simonides exegesis,195 Plato allowed Socrates
“to make something bad willingly [ἑκὼν κακὸν ποῖειν]” (Prt. 345d8), in this
case, a discourse (cf. Prt. 313b4) about a bit of poetic “making” (cf. Prt.
339b9–10) that deliberately distorts the poet’s own intent (cf. Prt. 341b5–
d9), most egregiously by making the claim that he—along with all other
wise men—endorses SP (Prt. 345d6–e4). The context of its introduction
is therefore crucial: while proving that Simonides endorses SP, Plato uses
his Socrates to show that he himself does not: he is erring voluntarily (Prt.
345e1–2). While Protagoras claims that if Simonides contradicts himself in
the poem (Prt. 339b7–10),196 then his poem cannot be beautifully made, Plato
is demonstrating that a discourse that contradicts itself deliberately must be

195
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §4.
196
 Among the many other connections between Prt. and Men., there is the discussion of poetry
(95c9–96a4) to be considered; just as Protagoras brought out an involuntary self-contradiction in
Simonides, so too does Socrates here with the elegies of Theognis; cf. 96a3–4 and Prt. 339b9–10.
This connection is preceded by other verbal cues; the reference to the sophists (95b9), the use of
ἐπαγγέλεσθαι (cf. 95b10 and Prt. 319a6–7), and the phrase ποιεῖν δεινούς λέγειν (cf. 95c4 and
Prt. 312d6–e5). Nor should the ambiguity of τὸ κακῶς λέγειν at 95a5 be forgotten: for Anytus, to
κακῶς λέγειν means “to speak badly of” someone (94e3), not “to speak incorrectly” (Prt. 339d9;
cf. Thg. 127b2), and κακῶς ποιεῖν ἢ εὖ means “to do someone harm or good” (94e6), not “to make
something well or badly” (Prt. 339b9; 344b1; and 347a5).
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 421

very well made indeed.197 With SP having been introduced in this farcical
and therefore doubt-generating context, Socrates then gives it an apparently
more solid foundation in the GP Equation, and presents it in the form that
PTI would defend against Vlastos. Protagoras is therefore the crucial text
where SP is concerned, both as a matter of allegedly Socratic truth and of
Platonic pedagogy.
On the basis of my hypothesis that Protagoras was repeatedly performed,
or in any case that Plato expected his students to reread it after reading, for
example, Symposium and Meno, I need not argue that he expected any of
them to recognize his own attitude to SP the first time they saw and heard it.
Between that first time and Symposium, he will chip away at our certainty that
Socrates endorses it, especially in Hippias Minor, where he claims that the
one who speaks falsely deliberately is better than the one who does so invol-
untarily, and then proceeds to valorize Odysseus at the expense of Achilles,
which I take to be another example of doing wrong deliberately.198 But thanks
to the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy in Alcibiades Major, this “chipping away” begins
even earlier, as we see Socrates make a fallacious argument deliberately
while at the same time undermining our confidence in the GB Equation that
has already turned into the Triple Equation, culminating with the claim that
the Beautiful is the Pleasant at the end of Protagoras. Advancing beyond the
dialogues covered in Ascent to the Beautiful, we are in no doubt that Socrates
has withdrawn the GP Equation that is intertwined with SP in Protagoras
by the time we reach Gorgias, and thus may never have actually endorsed
it. In this context, Meno’s endorsement of something very like SP further
undermines our confidence in it.
Brickhouse and Smith make a crucial point about SP at the end of their
section on “What is Meno’s Moral Psychology” in Socratic Moral Psycho­
logy when they describe “Aristotle’s way of understanding Socrates’ denial
of akrasia” as follows: “any compelling case for Aristotle’s understanding of
Socrates’ position, accordingly, will have to rest on the evidence drawn from
the Protagoras.”199 My claim is that Aristotle’s misreading of Protagoras
is the fons et origo of Socratism, which leads to a way of reading Plato’s
dialogues that separates their author from his principal character. Most of
what Aristotle thinks he knows about Socrates than he learned from Plato’s
dialogues, and there is plenty of evidence that he didn’t read them very well
(see Introduction), if only because he was a great philosopher himself, and
with a very different temperament from Plato’s.

197
 Cf. Ep. 341c4–d2 and R. 435a1–4; on the self-contradictory connection, see Plato the Teacher,
267–68.
198
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §11.
199
 Brickhouse and Smith, Socratic Moral Psychology, 70.
422 Chapter 4

Although he was convinced that Socrates and indeed Plato’s Socrates

endorsed SP, Aristotle himself, of course, famously didn’t. I take that as
evidence that there was freedom in the Academy not to accept it, but that in
rejecting it, Aristotle did not do so on a literary basis: it was not because he
recognized that Plato erred deliberately in his dialogues—including Protago-
ras—that Aristotle rejected SP. And as a result, he did more than anyone to
make it possible to regard SP as fundamental to “the philosophy of Socrates.”
It is necessary to be very careful here, and I must remind the reader that next
to nothing written thus far about Socrates refers to the actual historical person
of that name.200 My justification for not taking Aristotle’s observations about
this Socrates as sacred writ have been given; whether despite or because of an
evident affection for Xenophon, there will be no reopening of “the Socratic
Problem” here.201 But in enumerating the forms of SP, I will come closer
to that enigma than ever before; as a result, some clarification is necessary
before doing so.
Having claimed that SP in its SI-B form is something we need to reject in
order to make the final ascent to the Good, I have suggested that we must also
reject a peculiarly literary form or application of SP, a form of it that Plato’s
use of deliberate fallacy repeatedly disproves. The two can and indeed must
be combined: Plato errs willingly by making SP in its SI-B form plausible
enough in a number of dialogues beginning with Protagoras. But between
two rejected forms of SP—one contradicted by Plato’s basanistic pedagogy,
the other by Justice along the Longer Way—there remains a considerable
residue of SP that still must be confronted,202 and it is here that (the historical)
Socrates would be found if, that is, we were inclined “to make sense” of him.
As already indicated, I am not so inclined: my subject is Plato.
But in preparation for enumerating three major forms of SP, I want to
register my belief that the two types of it already discussed are both Platonic,
and that it is unlikely that (the historical) Socrates himself endorsed, under-
stood, and deployed SP either in in its literary/basanistic or in in its Pennerite/
SI-B forms, the latter as a springboard or ἐπίβασις to the unhypothetical (R.

200
 Cf. Kahn, “Plato and Socrates,” 35: “even where the characterization [sc. of Socrates by Plato]
may be historical, the conversations are all imaginary. . . . The historicist reading of the Socratic
dialogues [i.e., that at least some of Plato’s dialogues are intended to be historically accurate
depictions of Socrates; cf. 34: ‘I would trace it back to Aristotle, whose account of Socrates is
largely if not entirely drawn from dialogues like the Protagoras’] seems to be due to a kind of
optical illusion produced by Plato’s uncanny [cf. ‘musical’] gift for creating lifelike pictures of
the past.”
201
 Following the lead of Dorion, “Rise and Fall,” 19: “it is the Socratic problem that caused an
impoverishment of exegesis because a direct consequence of limiting the scope of Socratic
studies to only the Socratic problem was the exclusion of entire sections of accounts relating to
Socrates—in particular Xenophon’s Socratic works—under the pretext that they did not conform
to what were believed to be the historical Socrates’ ideas.”
202
 See Müller, “Philosophische Dialogkunst Platons,” 145–148. Cf. Plato the Teacher, §22 and 259.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 423

511b5). It is to advance Plato’s purpose that these two are deployed, and
my claim is that they are deployed in tandem. Behind both may be what
looks like the original and Socratic form of SP: the vastly more interesting
and paradoxical claim that “nobody does wrong (to others) voluntarily,”
that is, the claim that Meno so vehemently resists. But by way of resist-
ing any attempt, including mine, to cut Socrates down to a usable size, the
most important “Socratic Paradox” from first to last must be recognized as
Socrates himself.203 Whether as “the historical Socrates,” dancing beyond
the literary-historical intersection of Aeschines Socraticus,204 Aristophanes,
Xenophon, and Plato, or as the wondrous fellow with whom Plato confronts
us from Protagoras to Phaedo, Socrates alone is worthy of being called “SP-
1,” and what I have heretofore been calling “SP,” no matter how multiplex
that phenomenon may turn out to be,205 should as a whole be denominated as
nothing more than “SP-2.”
Which brings me to my third and final point about SP: near the center of the
paradox of Socrates himself is the aspect of Socrates that Socratists prefer to
forget: his obedience to the Divine Sign.206 In opposition to this forgetfulness,
I want to suggest that SP-2 operates in tandem with and must be understood
in the context of what I will call “SP-3,” the brute fact of Socrates’ “demonic
thing,” that is, his Divine Sign.207 To efface SP-3 in favor of SP-2, or to
transcend SP-2 in a holy-roller embrace of SP-3—the “crime” of which “the
author of Theages” is accused—are equally detrimental and indeed destruc-
tive of SP-1, he of whom it should not be our purpose “to make sense.”
Socrates confronts us—whether in his historical or various literary forms—as

203
 Gregory Vlastos, “Introduction: The Paradox of Socrates” in Vlastos (ed.), The Philosophy of
Socrates: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1–21 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1971), on 4:
“We find a man who is all paradox. Other philosophers have talked about paradox. Socrates did
not. The paradox in Socrates is Socrates.”
204
 See Kahn, “Plato and Socrates,” 34n3; the relevant fragments are conveniently translated and
discussed in Trevor J. Saunders (ed. and trans.), Plato, Early Socratic Dialogues; Edited with a
general Introduction (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1987), 377–380.
205
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §4, for an enumeration, albeit an indirect one.
206
 There is a noteworthy passage in W. R. M. Lamb, “General Introduction” to Plato in Twelve
Volumes, volume 2; Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus, ix–xix (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1924), on xii. After stating that (the real) Socrates “professed no positive doc-
trine,” Lamb remarks: “there were one or two beliefs which he frequently declared.” He then
proceeds, curiously, to list three of them, the first summarizing Aristotle’s Socrates (“virtue, he
said, is knowledge; for each man’s good is his happiness, and once he knows it clearly, he needs
must choose to ensue it”), the second based on Meno and Theaetetus (“further, this knowledge
is innate in our minds, and we only need to have it awakened and exercised by ‘dialectic,’ or a
systematic course of question and answer”). Bearing in mind, then, Lamb’s “one or two,” consider
the third: “He also believed his mission to be divinely ordained, and asserted that his actions were
guided at times by the prohibitions of a ‘spiritual sign.’” If there can be only one of Lamb’s three,
the last is it.
207
 On “the paradoxical nature of this exclusively Socratic experience” (220), see Stefano Jedrkie-
wicz, “Sign, Logos, and Meaning: The Platonic Socrates and his Daemonic Experience.” Mētis 9
(2011), 209–243.
424 Chapter 4

both paradox and mirror, and his purpose throughout is to persuade us to

obey the Pythian Apollo’s “Know Thyself.” To that pedagogical end, SP-2
and SP-3 work in tandem: forcing us to wonder why we do things that we
know are bad, and what it is, when we are about to do them, that sometimes
holds us back.
Domesticating the Sign as “conscience” can be left to others, and they
can deal with the avalanche of counter-claims and hostile recriminations
that must inevitably follow such an attempt. But it is by no means clear that
Socrates is the only one who has ever heard an uncanny φώνη,208 a δαιμόνιον
τι (cf. τις ἄλλος and οἱ ἔμπροσθεν at R. 496c4–5) just at the moment of doing
something that would be better left undone. We can restrict SP-3 to Socrates,
and dumb SP-2 down to the size of “what makes sense” to us, but only at the
expense of revealing ourselves to be terminally unworthy of SP-1, the great
paradox that is Socrates himself. The Socratic Paradox—in all of its forms—
forces us to recognize how little we know ourselves, not least of all when we
are certain that there is no such thing as θεία μοῖρα. He asks us to remember
how ignorant we are of our future, past, and present—and as a result, of “what
is good for us”—and therefore never to forget how badly we are in need of
taking care of that which we really are (Alc. 128e10–129b3). In the meantime,
we will continue to wonder about the paradoxical things that Socrates said,
did, and was—as we have been doing for more than two thousand years—for
it will only be true that nobody does bad things willingly when everybody
hears and obeys their Sign.

§15. HYPOTHESES AND IMAGES IN MENO:

INTRODUCING THE DIVIDED LINE

Among the students of Vlastos, Hugh H. Benson has perhaps the best claim
to be considered “post-Vlastosian,”209 and his interest in Cleitophon indicates
why: like Cleitophon himself, Benson is registering his discontent with “the
philosophy of Socrates.” Benson’s discontent focuses on K—arguably the
bedrock of Socratism—and he turns to “Dialectic in Plato’s Meno, Phaedo,
and Republic” in order to show how Plato meets Clitophon’s Challenge:
“How am I to go about acquiring this knowledge which is in some way

208
 The fact that Socrates hears the φώνη of a δαιμόνιον τι should be sufficient evidence for rejecting
the suggestion that Socrates is a daimon in Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? Translated
by Michael Chace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 49.
209
 Cf. Alexander Nehamas, “Review of Socratic Wisdom by Hugh H. Benson.” Mind 110, no. 439
(July 2001), 717–721, on 718: “From one point of view, Benson’s book is a series of disagree-
ments with Vlastos. . . . From another point of view, however, Socratic Wisdom is a straightfor-
ward continuation of Vlastos’s approach to Plato’s Socratic dialogues.”
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 425

crucially connected with virtue (henceforth, virtue-knowledge) and which

I recognize that I lack and value more than other knowledge?”210 To the extent
that Benson’s post-Vlastosian Socrates regards “robust virtue-knowledge”
as obtainable, the ἔλεγχος is inadequate,211 and to the extent that the Vlasto-
sian Socrates is committed to K, “the saliency of Clitophon’s challenge will
remain.”212
The result is a thoughtful examination of “the method of hypothesis”213 in
Plato’s middle-period dialogues that avoids endorsing the developmentalist
sea-change fundamental to the Socratist reading of the early ones.214 As such,
Benson’s book is itself a sea-change,215 raising as it does the possibility that
the best explanation of the challenge posed in Cleitophon is “Plato’s peda-
gogical approach.”216 By declaring himself neutral between “Plato’s proleptic
intentions or his own philosophical development,”217 Benson leaves room for
an approach based on Reading Order,218 and the juxtaposition of “Clitophon’s
Challenge” and “Dialectic in Plato’s Meno” points, however cautiously, in
the same direction.
According to Benson, the investigation “from hypothesis [ἐξ ὑποθέσεως]”
introduced in Meno (86e3) is the same method Socrates describes in Phaedo
and in the Divided Line of Republic 6, and it is this continuity claim that
makes his approach to “the hypothetical method” both important and inno-
vative.219 It is therefore also controversial, and the controversy begins with
the question of whether or not the hypotheses described as such in Meno are

210
 Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 2. For an assessment of Benson’s latest book, see Ravi Sharma,
“Platonic Inquiry.” Polis 34 (2017), 147–155, on 155: “In terms of its imagination, boldness, and
painstaking scholarship, this is an excellent book.”
211
 Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 23.
212
 Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 2n3.
213
 Cf. the first words of chs. 4–8 in Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge.
214
 Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 8–9: “Perhaps the most extreme representative of this model is
Gregory Vlastos according to whom the philosophical views expressed in the elenctic dialogues
could not have inhabited the same brain as the brain inhabited by the philosophical views of the
middle or classical dialogues, unless it were the brain of a schizophrenic.”
215
 But Benson’s originality in this regard should not be overexaggerated, especially since he fails to
consider Vasiliou Karasmanis, “The Hypothetical Method in Plato’s Middle Dialogues” (D. Phil.
dissertation, Oxford University, 1987); likewise emphasizing the continuity of Plato’s “hypotheti-
cal method” but giving Karasmanis his due is Jane Orton, “Mathematical Reasoning in Plato’s
Epistemology” (PhD dissertation, Edinborough University, 2013), especially on 8, 22–23, and
142–43; on Benson, see 87–88. With respect to originality, consider also Stemmer, Platons Dia­
lektik, likewise not cited by Benson, especially §15 (250–270). For a balanced defense of the more
conventional view, see R. W. Sharples, Plato: Meno (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1985), 9–14.
216
 Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 1n1.
217
 Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 11; as this use of “proleptic” indicates, it is primarily Kahn that
Benson has in mind; see 9n26.
218
 See Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 9–11, especially “the (rough) pedagogical order in which
Plato intended the dialogues to be read” (10).
219
 Especially with respect to Richard Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic, second edition (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1953).
426 Chapter 4

“provisional” or “cognitively secure.”220 Benson sidesteps this question: hav-

ing declared his neutrality with respect to Plato’s development, he can take
advantage of further elucidation in Phaedo and Republic to explain what has
been left “underdetermined” in Meno.221 As a matter of authorial strategy,
Benson will use Phaedo to flesh out what may already be present in Meno,
and only turns to the Divided Line at the very end,222 after showing how Plato
has already implemented “the hypothetical method” as Benson describes it in
Republic 5. In order to meet “Clitophon’s challenge,” then, Benson will show
that an integrated approach to the hypothetical method in Meno, Phaedo, and
Republic reveals that it is “not a mere second best,”223 but rather culminates
in the knowledge-affirming triumph of dialectic in Republic 7.224
Although there is no ascent to the Good without Dialectic, Benson’s
mistake is to regard this triumph as the vindication of “the hypothetical
method” introduced in Meno. The context is important: Socrates intro-
duces that method under duress (86d3–e1), for it is only because Meno
illegitimately insists on discovering whether virtue is teachable before hav-
ing discovered what virtue itself is (86c7–d2) that Socrates resorts to the
method (86e1–4). Benson’s claim that it is “not a mere second best” must
therefore marginalize this dramatic context.225 In the last analysis, Benson’s
attempt to show how the hypothetical method achieves a recognizably
Socratic “virtue-knowledge” by means of the Platonic Ideas and Dialectic
as described in Republic 7 demonstrates something quite like his continu-
ing loyalty to Socratism;226 my goal, by contrast, is to show that Socratism
in its systematic form is better understood as a Hypothesis that needs to be
overcome through Dialectic.
But Benson’s recognition that Cleitophon constitutes a crisis for K-based
Socratism is a breakthrough in itself. Moreover, his ongoing claim that the
hypothetical method introduced in Meno must be understood in the context
of related passages in Phaedo and Republic is an equally important insight.
Finally, by refusing to endorse the traditional developmental approach, and

220
 Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 123.
221
 See Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 269n84; this important note broaches but does not explore the
way hypotheses are used in Prm., a critical subject: as Benson states: “A major innovation in the
Parmenides is the requirement at 135e8–136a3 to examine/confirm both the hypothesis and [my
emphasis] the negation of the hypothesis.” As far as I’m concerned, this merely makes explicit
what was always present in “the hypothetical method,” i.e., that a hypothesis is intrinsically
“moveable,” “corrigible,” or “provisional.”
222
 In chapters 8 and 9 (the last) in Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge; Men. is the subject of chapter 6.
223
 See Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, chapter 4; cf. 116: “Plato does not disparage or otherwise
treat the method of hypothesis as a second-best method for learning—at least for those of us who
remain embodied.” On his curious exemption, see also 111n63.
224
 Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 238.
225
 See Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 95–96.
226
 Cf. Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 265.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 427

by supporting his continuity claim with the possibility that discrepancies

between the three dialogues may be better understood as pedagogical, he
takes a third giant step forward. Hence the attention I will pay to his important
book in this section.
So salient are the strengths of Benson’s book, indeed, that even its culmi-
nating misstep is of tremendous dialectical value: in his study’s final chapter
(“Dialectic in the Republic”), Benson sets himself the task of minimizing the
distance between the Second and the First Part of the Divided Line.227 Noth-
ing could be more antithetical to my own approach.228 The sharp distinction
between the objects of διάνοια considered in the Line’s Second Part, both
mathematical and otherwise, and the Idea of the Good that is the unhypo-
thetical ἀρχή of the First, is the principal battleground of Platonism,229 and
this is why the so-called “Intermediates” will come to play a dominant role
in my account of the post-Republic dialogues.230 Following the well-worn
path,231 Benson does not distinguish the two noetic parts of the Line by the
ontological status of their objects but only by the methods used to consider
them,232 and he regards the strictly methodological shortcomings described
in the Second Part of the Line as overcome in Socrates’ account of arithme-
tic and geometry in Republic 7.233 But however illegitimate this move may

227
 Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 247n27.
228
 For Benson’s comments on διάνοια, see Clitophon’s Challenge, 258 and notes.
229
 In addition to Penner, “The Forms,” 225n6, see Stemmer, Platons Dialektik, 200–206, likewise in
the overall context of collapsing the GoodT/GoodE distinction. Despite R. 510c3–5, “die Hypoth-
esen sind nicht die Objekte der Mathematik” (201) but rather “propositions” (Sätze on 201–202);
for the origins of this debate, cf. R. M. Hare, “Plato and the Mathematicians” in Renford Bam-
brough (ed.), New Essays on Plato and Aristotle (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965),
21–38 and C. C. W. Taylor, “Plato and the Mathematicians: An Examination of Professor Hare’s
Views.” Philosophical Quarterly 17, no. 68 (July 1967), 193–203, on which see Guardians on
Trial, 437n349.
230
 See especially Plato the Teacher, 318n76, Guardians in Action, 208n31, and Guardians on Trial,
389n212. For the present, the alternatives are neatly summarized in Karasmanis, “Hypothetical
Method,” 219: “the main problem is whether or not the objects of dianoia [sc. in the Divided
Line] are Forms or the mathematical intermediates about which Aristotle speaks in Metaphysics.”
Although he errs in endorsing Taylor’s critique of Hare (214–219; see previous note), he makes
a crucial observation on 227: “nothing prevents us from assuming that Plato thought there could
be ethical dianoia that used similar methods to mathematics.” My claim is that even though the
method described in the Second Part of the Divided Line applies paradigmatically to “the math-
ematical intermediates about which Aristotle speaks in Metaphysics,” it extends to the Shorter
Way and to most of what (numerically speaking) is called “the Theory of Forms.” This extension
explains what Penner claims not to understand in “The Forms,” 225–26n6.
231
 See Henry Jackson, “On Plato’s Republic VI 509 D sqq.” Journal of Philology 10 (1882),
132–150.
232
 Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 254: “Dianoetic seeks knowledge of the Forms by in some way
using or thinking about the things that are images of Forms. Dialectic seeks this knowledge by
thinking about or viewing the Forms directly.” In the context of “the Intermediates,” the reference
to Smith 1996 in the attached note (254n54) is significant; see Guardians on Trial, 389n212.
233
 See Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 257–259.
428 Chapter 4

be,234 Benson’s attempt is ultimately salutary because it focuses the reader’s

attention on the crucial question of how a method that depends on Images
and Hypotheses—like numbers (cf. “the odd and the even” at R. 510c3–4)
and geometrical diagrams—differs from one that culminates with an ascent
to the unhypothetical Idea of the Good,235 and the fact that Benson will use
“the Battle Hymn of the Republic” (R. 534b8–d1) to minimize that difference
constitutes the culminating proof of his book’s dialectical value.236
Part of the problem is the order in which Benson considers the three dia-
logues relevant to his study: if he had placed Cleitophon between Meno and
Republic, he would have seen more clearly that it is the discontinuity between
the Second and the First Part of the Line that is valorized by “Clitophon’s
challenge.” Instead of using the Form-hypothesizing method described in
Phaedo to supplement the “underdetermined” Meno, he could have used
the Line to illuminate the deliberate shortcomings of the Final Argument in
Phaedo. Having already offered a post-Republic reading of that dialogue,237
my purpose, by contrast, is to show how the pre-Republic dialogues, Meno
in this section,238 prepare us for the Line, and the first step in that process
is to recur to the foundations on which this study is based. The relationship
between Meno, Republic, and Phaedo—to arrange them on the basis of their
places in the ROPD—is a good example of the interplay of proleptic, vision-
ary, and basanistic elements in Platonic pedagogy. The much fuller discus-
sion of Hypotheses in the Second Part of the Divided Line in Republic 6 is
the moment of vision for which the difficulties we first encounter in Meno
are intended to prepare us; our grasp of that vision is then tested in Phaedo,

234
 Cf. Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 258: “Plato’s use of dianoia at [R.] 7.533d6 might be thought
to require locating the propaideutic mathêmata in L3 [sc. in the Second Part of the Line]. In nam-
ing the propaideutic mathêmata dianoiai, rather than epistêmai, isn’t Plato explicitly locating
these mathêmata in L3? [‘Yes’ would be my answer] Plato’s general resistance to a technical
vocabulary, underscored by the concluding sentence of 7.533d4–9, tells against a positive answer
to this question.” Cf. 247n27.
235
 Cf. Lee Franklin, “Particular and Universal: Hypothesis in Plato’s Divided Line.” Apeiron 44
(2011), 333–358, on “the theoretical progression between the upper levels of the Divided Line,
moving from isolated or loosely connected proofs based in constructions designated by hypoth-
esis, towards systematic arrangement of such proofs in a coherent system, based for the first time
in definitions” (357). It is this progression that leaves room for or even demands “inventing inter-
mediates” in Lee Franklin, “Inventing Intermediates: Mathematical Discourse and its Objects in
Republic VII.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 50, no. 4 (2012), 483–506.
236
 See Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 259–260. See also Stemmer, Platons Dialektik, 192–194;
with 194n12, cf. Guardians in Action, 251n176.
237
 See Guardians on Trial, §16.
238
 Cf. Lee Franklin, “Investigation from Hypothesis in Plato’s Meno: An Unorthodox Reading.”
Apeiron 43, no. 4 (2010), 87–116, and consider the role of “properties and their bearers” in
Lee Franklin, “The Structure of Dialectic in the Meno.” Phronesis 46, no. 4 (November 2001),
413–439.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 429

where along with the Big, the Good is treated as hypothetical (Phd. 100b3–7),
that is, the very thing it is not.
It is only in the Line that Socrates clarifies what it is merely implicit in
Meno: the hypothetical method described in its Second Part cannot purge
itself of an inescapable dependence on Hypotheses or Images (R. 511a4–b1).
It does not attain “to a principle [ἐπ’ ἀρχήν]” (R. 511a6) and by contrasting
it with Dialectic (R. 511b2–c2) Socrates shows that it is an error to make
Hypotheses “principles [ἀρχαί]” as opposed to “actual hypotheses [τῷ ὄντι
ὑποθέσεις],” which are to be used merely as “approaches [ἐπιβάσεις]” (or
“springboards”) and “jumping-off points [ὁρμαί]” (R. 511b4–5). Dialectic is
the alternative to this method, not a purification of it, and on my account the
reader’s task is not to create, for example, a purified or dialectical version of
geometry, but rather to identify the use of Images and Hypotheses in contexts
that are not obviously either arithmetical or geometrical.239
As already emphasized, the reader’s ability to recognize Images and
Hypotheses for what they are—particularly when they are not identified as
such—is crucial for seeing how the Second Part of the Divided Line is con-
nected to the Shorter Way. In interpreting Plato’s Republic, then, we must
realize that the City functions as an Image, and that both it and its useful-
ness for persuading Glaucon (and the reader) to choose Justice is grounded-
ungrounded in a series of unquestioned but questionable Hypotheses. In this
context, Meno proves to be the jumping-off point for helping us to take
this critical interpretive step. Moreover, the most important of these in the
ROPD is the Geometrical Problem used to introduce the hypothetical method
(86e4–87b2) before that method is implemented in a discussion of whether
virtue is teachable (87b2–c10).240
What makes this all the more remarkable is that we are being prepared
to recognize that Hypotheses are “provisional” in the dialogue’s most
ostentatiously Socratist passage. And this remarkable juxtaposition justifies
my claim that “the most radical Socratism” is provisionally present in the
ROPD from Protagoras forwards, for in relation to Dialectic, Hypotheses are
not principles in need of confirmation,241 but rather springboards that we are
“making” (ποιούμενος at R. 511b4) and then “doing away with” (ἀναιροῦσα

239
 Particularly useful is Benson’s suggestion that the City functions as an Image; see Clitophon’s
Challenge, 252: “The analogue of geometric diagrams in an inquiry concerning the nature of jus-
tice goes as follows: construct, as a thought-experiment, an ideal city and then examine what jus-
tice is in it.” Unfortunately the attached note fails to distinguish διάνοια-based images that serve to
make sensible objects intelligible and those—like the Cave and the Line (“the philosophical ana-
logue of geometric diagrams” at 252n45)—that create sensible analogues for intelligible objects.
240
 Cf. Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 247n27.
241
 As Benson, claims they are: Clitophon’s Challenge, 248.
430 Chapter 4

at R. 533c9).242 The latter is particularly important, for if we leave them

unmoved (ἀκινήτοι at R. 533c3)—that is, unquestioned as opposed to negated
or rather sublated243—we cannot make the final ascent to the Good.244
To hammer the crucial point: the ability to identify Hypotheses even when
they are not explicitly named as such will prove to be absolutely necessary
when reading Plato’s Republic. In order to see the connection between the
Shorter Way and the Second Part of the Divided Line, the reader must either
reread Republic 4 with Republic 6 already in mind or must, thanks to the
ROPD, remember, on the basis of Meno, that “the hypothetical method” is
being used in Republic long before the verb “hypothesizing [ὑποθέμενοι]”
is applied to the Law of Non-Contradiction at Republic 437a5. Crucial as it
is for justifying the tripartite soul, the “provisional” aspect of even this most
self-evident Hypothesis is emphasized: “let us proceed on the hypothesis
[ὑποθέμενοι] that this is so, with the understanding that, if it ever appear
otherwise, everything that results from the assumption shall be invalidated.”
Although this is the critical moment for linking the Shorter Way to the
Divided Line, it is not unique.
In Plato the Teacher (§12), I used a passage a few pages earlier (R.
435a5–c2) to illustrate the use of four unnamed Hypotheses, showing how
the rejection of any one of them would undermine the conclusions reached in
the Shorter Way. Beginning with the governing assumption that that there are
four virtues (R. 427e6–428a8), and that each of them can be defined on the
basis of the three component parts of either City or Man (R. 435b4–8), we can
assume—since justice in the City must be the same justice we are searching
for in the Man (R. 435b1–3)—that what we find in either will align what we
find in the other (R. 435a6–9). I also pointed out that we have been prepared
to resist an unquestioning and uncritical assent to such methods beginning
with the discussion of UV in Protagoras.245 A deadpan reading of the Shorter
Way must ignore the problematic results of that earlier discussion, and forces
us to depend on a series of unchallenged assumptions: that the parts of virtue

242
 Cf. Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 256n61: “I here follow what Mueller (1992, 188) calls the
‘consensus that the only destruction Socrates has in mind is the destruction of the hypothetical
character of mathematical hypotheses through subsumption under an unhypothetical starting
point.’” See also 257n63.
243
 This standard English translation of the Hegelian Aufhebung (or rather aufgehoben) suggests that
the Shorter Way corresponds to Hegel’s Verstand, the Longer with Vernunft; in that context, it
might be useful to translate διάνοια as Verstand. See also Plato the Teacher, 144–145, and Guard-
ians in Action, 232–234.
244
 Benson does not deny this, but needs to use the GoodT to confirm Hypotheses rather than transcend
them; hence the reference to Ian Mueller, “Mathematical Method and Philosophical Truth” in
Richard Kraut (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato, 170–199 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), 188 above. Cf. Wolfgang Wieland, Platon und die Formen des Wissens
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), 216; despite the typical error on the method (“die
Art”) vs. objects (i.e., “seine intelligiblen Gegenstände”) dichotomy in the Divided Line, things
improve with “es mag sein.” Note also the use of “Aufheben” (see previous note).
245
 See Plato the Teacher, 127–128.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 431

can be definitively distinguished, that there are four of them not five, and that
a process of elimination can be used to identify justice after having found
wisdom, courage, and temperance.
Meno plays the critical role in preparing the reader to recognize the deliber-
ate inadequacy of “the hypothetical method” even before encountering the Line
in Republic 6, and that preparation is a good illustration of the proleptic ele-
ment in Platonic pedagogy. Not surprisingly, geometry plays an important role
in connecting the two, but the principal lesson arising from that geometrical
connection has been overlooked. Although the gymnastic exercise I will call
“Hunt for Hypotheses” will be emphasized below, that process only begins
when Socrates applies the method of hypothesis to the question of whether vir-
tue can be taught. In order to understand that exercise in context, my first task
is to show that the Geometrical Problem has already established the proleptic
connection between Meno and the Second Part of the Divided Line.
In order to show the pedagogical purpose of that connection, the follow-
ing facts must be emphasized: (1) the Divided Line makes it clear that the
method described in the Second Part of the Line depends on both Hypotheses
and Images (R. 510b4–8), (2) the relevant “Image” in the case of geometri-
cal problems would be a geometrical diagram, (3) there are two geometrical
examples discussed in Meno, the first used to illustrate Recollection, the
second (i.e., the Geometrical Problem) to illustrate the hypothetical method,
(4) thanks to an ancient scholiast, we possess the requisite diagrams for visu-
alizing the first and most famous of these,246 that is, the Slave-Boy’s Square,
but (5) we possess no such diagram in the case of the Problem that introduces
the hypothetical method. Finally (6) the Geometrical Problem and its solu-
tion, including the precise meaning of the various words and phrases that are
used to describe it, remain matters of controversy, and over the centuries has
spawned numerous attempts to explain it.247
If the last is the not the most important of these facts in an absolute sense,
it is the most important of them for my interpretation. As a general matter,
I have found in the course of studying Plato that when a passage in the dia-
logues has generated ongoing controversy over the course of centuries, we
should realize (or at least hypothesize) that Plato intended it to do just that.248
It is on the basis of this interpretive principle, already applied elsewhere in

246
 See Greene, Scholia Platonica, 171–73.
247
 See Thompson, Meno of Plato, 146–153, especially the Latin on 148, Bluck, Plato’s Meno,
441–461, and Sharples, Plato: Meno, 158–160; more recently, see Wolfsdorf, Trials of Reason:
Plato, 164–173.
248
 Consider “the peculiar nature of Plato’s philosophical work, which seems to promote rather than
assuage controversy” in Laszlo Versényi, “The Cretan Plato.” Review of Metaphysics 15, no. 1
(September 1961), 67–80, on 79. Contrast this with Scott, Plato’s Meno, 133–137, ending with:
“So although it is possible that the difficulty of this passage is due to Plato’s failure to explain (or
even understand) the geometry in question, there is a perfectly plausible explanation that permits
a more favorable verdict.”
432 Chapter 4

the corpus,249 that I make the following deductions from these six facts: (a) “(6)”
arises as a direct result of “(5),” (b) since the scholiast’s diagrams in the case of
the Slave-Boy’s Square are unique, Plato is probably responsible for “(4),” (c)
but even if he is not, he is certainly responsible for “(5),” (d) by “(1)” and “(3),”
Plato is therefore also responsible for, and thus both anticipated and provoked
“(6),” and finally (e), Plato intended “(5)” to illustrate the necessary role of
Images as per “(1).” In turning to the text, then, my purpose will therefore not
be to offer another solution to the Geometrical Problem but rather to show that
Plato expected us to understand why no definitive solution will be forthcoming.
This does not mean, of course, that Plato did not expect us to search for
such a solution, and it would be too much to say that the search for one
defeats Plato’s purpose, especially since “(e)” depends on “(1).” What I am
claiming is that Plato will only have fully attained that purpose once we
recognize that he wanted us to know—and know for a certainty—why no
solution is possible.

Socrates: I mean ‘from a hypothesis’ in this way, the way the geometers often
examine, when someone asks them, for example, an area [περὶ χωρίου], whether
it is possible to inscribe this area [τόδε τὸ χωρίον] in this circle [τόνδε τὸν
κύκλον] as a triangle.250

We have barely started and are already faced with insoluble problems cre-
ated by the absence of “Socrates’ Diagram in the Meno of Plato.”251 Does
the word χωρίον in περὶ χωρίου refer to an area or a shape?252 What kind of
angle will that triangle have (cf. R. 510c4–5)? Most importantly, what are we
to imagine that Socrates is doing when he refers to τόδε τὸ χωρίον and τόνδε
τὸν κύκλον?253 The answer is obvious: Socrates is pointing to a diagram that
Plato has deliberately made it impossible for us to see.254
The citations accompanying the foregoing questions could be multiplied,
along with further attempts to explain the Geometrical Problem that begins in
this highly inauspicious way. But no matter how simple any proffered solu-
tion may be,255 it has not yet proved simple enough. As Plato’s students, we
are only one obvious question away from grasping his point, but we are too

249
 See Guardians in Action, §3.
250
 86e4–87a1; translation by Stephen Menn, “Plato and the Method of Analysis.” Phronesis 47, no.
3 (2002), 193–223 on 209.
251
 Cf. A. S. L. Farquharson, “Socrates’ Diagram in the Meno of Plato, pp. 86e–87a.” Classical Quar-
terly 17, no. 1 (January 1923), 21–26.
252
 See Wolfsdorf, Trials of Reason, 165–167.
253
 J. T. Bedu-Addo, “Recollection and the Argument ‘From a Hypothesis’ in Plato’s Meno.” Journal
of Hellenic Studies 104 (1984), 1–14 on 6.
254
 Naoya Iwata, “Plato on Geometrical Hypothesis in the Meno.” Apeiron 48, no. 1 (2015), 1–19
on 13–14.
255
 Cf. Robert Sternfeld and H. Zyskind, “Plato’s Meno: 86E-87A: The Geometrical Illustration of the
Argument by Hypothesis.” Phronesis 22, no. 3 (1977), 206–211 on 208.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 433

sure of our own sufficiency to hear him asking it.256 The difficult challenge
his puzzle offers us still remains audible today, and most of us—leaving aside
those who have “a horse in this race”257—would be willing to confess our
inability to meet that challenge effectively with an honest: “I can’t solve the
puzzling problem you have posed for us.”
We therefore only need to imagine Plato asking us in response to this hon-
est and welcome confession: “Why not?” With this question he would be
asking us to reflect not on our own intellectual inadequacy but rather on why
we can’t know what we don’t know, and in the process would be preparing
us for what he will soon enough explain to us in the Divided Line.258 Having
created the puzzle, Plato knows why we can’t solve it: he has not given us
sufficient visual information, but by using like τόδε τὸ χωρίον and τόνδε τὸν
κύκλον—demonstratives that point to nothing—he proves that he has given
us sufficient information to be sure that the information he has given us is
insufficient.259 In short, he has withheld from us the requisite Image.
Having allowed us to imagine Socrates pointing to τόδε τὸ χωρίον and
τόνδε τὸν κύκλον, Plato next presents him doing something even more inter-
pretively opaque: he impersonates a geometer, perhaps for comic effect, by
making a speech for him. What makes parody possible is that Socrates is not
simply speaking as a geometer but rather impersonating the kind of thing that
a geometer would say:

Socrates: {A geometer} [τις refers back to ‘one of’ οἱ γεωμέτραι at 86e4–5]

might say, ‘I don’t yet know whether this {area} [τοῦτο] is such {as to make
the construction possible}, but I think I have as it were a hypothesis that would
help towards the question, as follows: if this area [τοῦτο τὸ χωρίον] is such that
when it is applied to the given line [παρὰ τὴν δοθεῖσαν αὐτοῦ γραμμήν] {sc. the
diameter of the circle}, it falls short by an area similar to the applied area, then
one thing seems to me to follow, but another if it is impossible for this to hap-
pen. So after hypothesizing I am willing to tell you what follows about inscrib-
ing {the area} in the circle, whether it is impossible or not.’260

256
 Cf. Guardians in Action, 62–63 and 68.
257
 See David Ebrey, “Review of Hugh H. Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge.” Notre Dame Philosophi-
cal Reviews (November 21, 2016), n2.
258
 For the diagram-based connection between Meno and the Divided Line, see Gregory Vlastos,
“Anamnesis in the Meno; Part I: The Data of the Theory.” Dialogue 4 (1965), 143–167, on
144–145; it is in part because he is trying to defend Plato from Ross and in part because he regards
a dependence on Images as applying only to “the common run of mathematicians, not . . . those
enlightened by his philosophy” (144) that he struggles to purge the passage—even to the extent
of rewriting it (145–148)—of dependence on the visual, despite his awareness that Plato “keeps
Socrates so busy tracing figures in the sand.”
259
 Cf. Karasmanis, “Hypothetical Method,” 106: “The problem must be comprehensible to Meno
and not insolvable.” The most elegant solution meeting these criteria relies on the dialogue’s only
diagram; see Judith I. Meyers, “Plato’s Geometric Hypothesis: Meno 86e–87b.” Apeiron 21, no.
3 (Fall 1988), 173–180.
260
 87a1–b2 (translation Menn).
434 Chapter 4

In the midst of the controversy that the Geometrical Problem itself has gener-
ated, the dramatic implications of this puzzling performance have escaped
notice: we are not only listening to the words of a geometer as impersonated
by Socrates but being forced to imagine what that geometer is doing while
speaking them (cf. Aristides in §13 ad fin.). As impersonated by Socrates, the
imaginary geometer is not only pointing to what Socrates has already drawn
beforehand—that is, τόδε τὸ χωρίον and τόνδε τὸν κύκλον—but also to what-
ever new figures or lines “he” is now adding to that earlier drawing while say-
ing these words, and in particular, drawing what he calls “the given line of it.”
The Divided Line offers a useful commentary on Socrates’ impersonation
of a geometer, explaining as it does the gap between what the geometer imag-
ines himself to be saying and what we, his auditors, are unable to understand
because we can only hear his words without being able to see what he is doing
while saying them:

‘And do you not also know that they [sc. the mathematicians] further make use
of the visible forms [τὰ ὁρωμενα εἴδη] and make discourses concerning them
[sc. τὰ ὁρωμενα εἴδη], though they are not thinking [διανοεῖν] of them but of
those things of which they are a likeness, making their discourses for the sake
of the square as such [τὸ τετράγονον αὐτό] and of diameter as such [διαμέτρη
αὐτή], but not for the sake of the image of it which they draw, and the others in
the same way: the very things which they mold and draw, which have shadows
and images [εἰκόνες] of themselves in water, these things they treat [χρώμενοι]
in their turn as only images [ὡς εἰκόσιν], but what they really seek is to get
sight of those things themselves [αὐτὰ ἐκεῖνα] which somebody [τις] cannot see
otherwise than by thought [διάνοια].’261

In allowing Socrates to explain in Republic 6 what the mathematicians think

they are doing, what they imagine they are seeing, and that for the sake of
which they are molding and drawing the things that they draw and mold,
Plato is challenging us to assess the level of success they manage to achieve
while doing so. The purpose of the Geometrical Problem in Meno is to illus-
trate in advance the necessarily limited nature of that success: no matter what
the impersonated geometer thinks he is discussing, he can only make his
meaning plain to us by pointing to this square or that diameter.
The word “diameter” proves to be particularly important. In translating
the geometer’s speech as delivered by Socrates, Stephen Menn thinks that
he knows that “the given line” (ἡ δοθεῖσα γραμμή at 87a4) is the diameter
of τόνδε τὸν κύκλον, and as we will see, this hypothesis is widely shared by
those whose efforts to solve the Geometrical Problem are currently taken most
seriously. In response, G. E. R. Lloyd has made some valuable observations:

261
 R. 510d5–511a2 (Paul Shorey translation modified).
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 435

This passage contains the following major ambiguities or obscurities. (1) What
is the χωρίον mentioned at 86e6, 87a3–4? Are we dealing with any area, a rect-
angle, a square, or even the square that had been used at 82cl in the discussion
with the slave-boy (though that was introduced as τετράγωνον χωρίον)? (2)
In the expression παρὰ τὴν δοθεῖσαν αὐτοῦ γραμμήν how should δοθεῖσαν be
taken? Which line is ‘given’? Is this the diameter of the circle? Or a chord? Or
some line associated not with the circle, but with the area/rectangle/square to
be inscribed?262

Although these unanswered questions arise for Lloyd solely on the basis of
Meno, once having arisen, they need to be understood on the basis of the
Line as unanswerable in principle. As a result, it becomes unclear whether
we learn more about the Meno from the Divided Line than we can about the
Second Part of the Line from Meno.
There is, however, one crucial question we can answer by examining these
two passages side by side. When Socrates tells us that the mathematicians are
“making their discourses for the sake of the square as such [τὸ τετράγονον
αὐτό] and of diameter as such” (R. 510d7–8),263 are we to imagine that Plato
believes they are successful in doing so? This question proves to be at the
heart of the problem of Intermediates: if the mathematicians are making
discourses about Platonic Ideas like “the Square as such,” then mathematical
objects cannot be merely “intermediate” between Forms and sensible things.
But what if they cannot make discourses of this kind even when they think
they are doing so? Banishing the Intermediates from Plato’s thought requires
turning mathematicians into Platonists,264 but what Plato expects us to learn
from Meno is that there is no “Platonic geometer” capable of overcoming
either a sub-dialectical dependence on unquestioned Hypotheses or an ines-
capable reliance on visual Images.265 It is therefore no accident that the most

262
 G. E. R. Lloyd, “The Meno and the Mysteries of Mathematics.” Phronesis 37, no. 2 (1992), 166–
183 on 167. For an attempt to parley the reference to the coming Mysteries (πρὸ τῶν μυστηρίων
at 76e8–9) into evidence for the Prinzipienlehre, see Gaiser, “Platons Menon, 255–257 and 292;
cf. Krämer, “Retraktationen,” 165n94.
263
 An important contribution to the debate about Intermediates in Plato is Moon-Heum Yang, “The
‘square itself’ and ‘diagonal itself’ in Republic 510d.” Ancient Philosophy 19 (1999), 31–35; for
the connection to Men., see 33n4.
264
 Or reducing Platonists to geometers, as in Penner, “The Forms,” 204 (“the Forms are precisely
the abstract objects that are the objects of the objective sciences”) and Jürgen Mittelstrass, “Die
geometrischen Wurzeln der Platonischen Ideenlehre.” Gymnasium 92 (1985), 399–418; by deriv-
ing the Ideas from διάνοια (413–414), Mittelstrass misconstrues the process: it was the noetic
vision of the Ideas that made the discovery of the Intermediates possible, and this explains why
the consummate dialectician merely uses the discoveries made by geometers (Euthd. 290b10–c6).
Cf. Kapp, “The Theory of Ideas,” 70.
265
 Cf. Kathleen V. Wilkes, “Conclusions in the Meno.” Archiv für die Geschichte der Philosophie
61 (1979), 143–153, on 143–144n4: “Possibly, too, Socrates is using these ‘hypotheses’ to play
a role analogous to the two sketches he drew for the slave: starting points to jog the recollector’s
memory.”
436 Chapter 4

influential attempt to solve the Meno conundrum—and thus to overlook the

Line-based explanation of why no such solution is possible—was made by
John Cook Wilson (1849–1915), the same scholar who has done more than
anyone else to persuade the Anglo-American reception of Plato that the Inter-
mediates are not to be found in the Divided Line,266 or anywhere else in Plato.
Only a year after the appearance of “On the Geometrical Problem in Pla-
to’s Meno,”267 Cook Wilson published his “On the Platonist Doctrine of the
ἀσύμβλητοι ἀριθμοί.”268 As indicated by its title, this second paper deals pri-
marily with Numbers, and its purpose is to validate Aristotle’s testimony, pri-
marily in Metaphysics M-N, that Plato regarded Numbers as ἀσύμβλητοι or
“inassociable.” As Ideal or Form-Numbers, such (“un-addable”) “numbers”
were unitary, but not in the sense that they were congeries of identical units:
they were “monadic” without being composed of (hypothetical) monads.269
For Cook Wilson, Plato’s ἀριθμοί are ἀσύμβλητοι because they are Platonic
Ideas (ἰδέαι), and the last section of this influential paper gave a negative
answer to the question it posed: “Is the doctrine of τὰ μεταξύ to be found in
Plato’s Republic?”270 Although geometry plays only a small part in this paper,
Cook Wilson usefully compares ἀσύμβλητοι ἀριθμοί to geometrical objects:

Geometry of course affords an exact parallel [sc. to ἀσύμβλητοι ἀριθμοί]. Just

as the Universals represented by the Numbers cannot enter into arithmetical
operation, in the sense explained [this is what makes them ἀσύμβλητοι, for only
as a collections of units can they be added, etc.], so also the Universals repre-
sented by the figures cannot have geometrical constructions performed upon
them, or be elements in such constructions. ‘The Circle’ as we have said is a
Universal, and e.g. just as ‘the number Two’ cannot be added to ‘the number
Two,’ the Circle cannot intersect the Circle. That is circularity cannot intersect
circularity, for there is only one circularity.271

Cook Wilson writes “the figures” because he is assuming that Plato—qua

(non-existent) “Platonic geometer”—is making discourses about “the Circle
itself,” “the one Circle,” or even “circularity itself.” Plato allows Socrates to
reveal the inherent unintelligibility of all such discourses in Meno, and then

266
 See especially Plato the Teacher, 319n76.
267
 J. Cook Wilson, “On the Geometrical Problem in Plato’s Meno.” Journal of Philology 28 (1903),
224–240.
268
 J. Cook Wilson, “On the Platonist Doctrine of the ἀσύμβλητοι ἀριθμοί.” Classical Review 18, no.
5 (June 1904), 247–260.
269
 Cf. Annas, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 15, Guardians in Action, 203–218, and Guardians on Trial,
375–377.
270
 See Wilson, “On the Platonist Doctrine,” 257–259, climaxing with: “the objects of διάνοια are
ἰδέαι, for nothing but an ἰδέα can be object of νοῦς.”
271
 Wilson, “On the Platonist Doctrine,” 250.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 437

explains the basis of that unintelligibility in the Divided Line.272 Like Cook
Wilson himself,273 Plato knows that in order to be saying anything meaning-
ful, the geometer must be pointing, as it were, to τόνδε τὸν κύκλον, even
while speaking of—or rather attempting to speak of—“circularity itself.”
Not only did Cook Wilson inadvertently confirm the thought-process
that led Plato to regard mathematical objects as τὰ μεταξύ in Statement
and Inference,274 he offered a perfect illustration of the shortcomings of
the method Socrates describes in the Second Part of the Divided Line in
“On the Geometrical Problem in Plato’s Meno.” First of all, he must supply
the requisite Images,275 and more than a hundred years later, his diagrams
have recently reappeared, now labeled “Cook Wilson I” and “Cook Wilson
II” in a 2008 book by David Wolfsdorf.276 And then there is the embrace of
the ambiguity made possible by the plasticity of the geometer’s Image-less
speech: in order to prove that τόδε τὸ χωρίον is not a rectangle but a paral-
lelogram—and thus that the relevant Hypothesis involves the “reduction” of
one problem to another—Cook Wilson must alternately take χωρίον to mean
first “area” and then “shape.” It is this move that interests Wolfsdorf, and in
a classic example of ignotum per ignotius,277 he is reviving Cook Wilson’s
solution to the Geometrical Problem in order to reconfigure Socrates’ “hypo-
thetical method” in the following discussion of virtue as “reasoning from a
postulate.”278 But Cook Wilson can only reach the destination Wolfsdorf finds
congenial by justifying his claim that the words “its given line” in παρὰ τὴν
δοθεῖσαν αὐτοῦ γραμμήν refer to the diameter of τόνδε τὸν κύκλον on the
basis of an argument that has depended on that merely provisional hypothesis
from the start.279

272
 On Ep. 342c2–3, see Plato the Teacher, 265n33.
273
 See Wilson, “On the Geometrical Problem,” 345–348, climaxing with: “The statement that ‘tri-
angularity is a universal’ is thus seen to be a linguistic impossibility, which is disguised by the
grammatical form of the abstract noun which is supposed to represent the universal.”
274
 Cf. R. Lloyd Beck, “John Cook Wilson’s Doctrine of the Universal.” Monist 41, no. 4 (October,
1931), 552–582 on 564: “On the strength of these difficulties Cook Wilson decides that triangular-
ity cannot be a true universal. The more precise reasons for this conclusion can be reduced to the
following considerations. The universal exists only in particulars. However, if we attempt to define
or explain the universal by itself, we must ipso facto consider it in abstraction from particulars.
But the mind is not able to apprehend the universal except in the apprehension of a particular.”
Note that this analysis applies to Intermediates, not to Beauty, Justice, or the Idea of the Good.
275
 Cf. Gaiser, “Platons Menon,” 273–281.
276
 Wolfsdorf, Trials of Reason, 166.
277
 See Lindsay Judson, “Hypotheses in Plato’s Meno.” Philosophical Inquiry 41, no. 2/3 (Spring/
Summer 2017), 29–39.
278
 Wolfsdorf, Trials of Reason, 161.
279
 Wilson, “On the Geometrical Problem,” 236: “Further it is much in favor of the interpretation of
ἡ δοθεῖσα γραμμή as the diameter that with it the problem works out so neatly; and that this might
be seen the better, the question of the meaning of ἡ δοθεῖσα γραμμή has been postponed till after
the solution has been worked out.”
438 Chapter 4

The circularity of Cook Wilson’s argument should not surprise us: pre-
cisely this feature of the hypothetical method is described in the Divided Line
(R. 510d2–3). More importantly, the Shorter Way proleptically illustrates
this methodological circularity when the anticlimactic discovery of justice
in Republic 4 (R. 432b3–433c3) merely repeats and confirms an originating
decision for the division of labor made the City’s basis from the start (R.
369e3–370a4; cf. 432d8–433b2).280 A different and indeed antithetical Idea of
Justice will emerge in the light of the Good in Republic 7,281 and the unbridge-
able gulf between the First and Second Parts of the Divided Line will be
embodied in the destruction of the merely provisional hypothesis laid down
at the beginning of the Shorter Way: the voluntary Return to the Cave will
require philosophers to undertake two jobs, for only one of which are they by
nature suited.282 The alternative to the Longer Way can only be a shortcut, and
it is the dependence of διάνοια on Images and merely provisional Hypoth-
eses that will block Benson’s attempt to rehabilitate the hypothetical method.
But Cook Wilson had already taken the crucial misstep:

It follows of course that an object of διάνοια when its full nature is apprehended,
when, that is, its connection with the true ἀρχή is seen, is νοητόν in the higher
sense, i.e. object of νοῦς; and this is exactly what Plato says: καίτοι νοητῶν
ὄντων μετ’ ἀρχῆς. This is a confirmation of the view that the objects of διάνοια
are ἰδέαι, for nothing but an ἰδέα can be object of νοῦς.283

By tracing Benson’s misstep back to Cook Wilson, it becomes easy to see that
it is not Benson’s alone.
For example, after quoting Republic 533b5–c6,284 Ian Mueller refers to a
current consensus that would not exist without Cook Wilson’s influence:

Some later Platonists used this passage to belittle mathematics, and modern
scholars have debated what Socrates could have in mind by destroying the
hypotheses of mathematics. I think it is fair to say that there is now consen-
sus that the only destruction Socrates has in mind is the destruction of the

280
 Cf. Plato the Teacher, 44–45.
281
 See Plato the Teacher, §17. Not, however, for all readers, as ably explained in Apelt, Platonische
Aufsätze, 211–212.
282
 See Plato the Teacher, §22.
283
 Wilson, “On the Platonist Doctrine,” 259; for Cook Wilson’s reliance on καίτοι νοητῶν ὄντων
μετ’ ἀρχῆς, see Guardians on Trial, 374–74n180.
284
 R. 533b5–c6 (Mueller’s translation): “Geometry and the studies associated with it . . . do appre-
hend something of being, but. . . they are dreaming about it. They cannot have a waking vision
of it as long as they use hypotheses and keep them fixed, unable to give an account of them.
For when the starting point is not known and the finishing point and what comes in between are
woven together out of what is not known, there is no way that such a consistency will ever become
knowledge.”
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 439

hypothetical character of mathematical hypotheses through subsumption under

an unhypothetical starting point. Equally when he denies that ordinary math-
ematics is knowledge he does not mean that it is false, but only that it lacks
the requisite foundation to count as known. Insofar as mathematics provides
dialectic with its hypotheses, dialectic starts with truths that it will test but not
refute.285

It should therefore not surprise us that when Mueller comes to examine

“Investigation from a Hypothesis in Meno,” he proceeds “as if the mean-
ing of the [geometrical] example is transparent”286 before contrasting “the
generally smooth working of mathematics with the rough-and-tumble of the
Socratic examination of doctrines.”287 Mueller traces the problems arising in
the latter from a failure to define “hypothesis” clearly,288 and this determines
his approach to what follows in Meno. Having quoted Meno 87b-c289—albeit
with a crucial ellipsis, as we shall see—Mueller makes full use of the techni-
cal terms Plato fails to use:

Socrates does not describe a diorismos, but performs what I have called an
analysis, that is, he reduces the question of establishing that virtue is teachable
to the claim that virtue is knowledge if and only if it is teachable, or at least:
‘Hypothesis-theorem. If virtue is knowledge, then it is teachable.’ But corre-
sponding to the need for a diorismos in the case of the geometric example, the
hypothesis-theorem is of use only if one can establish ‘Hypothesis-lemma. Vir-
tue is knowledge.’ There has been scholarly disagreement as to which of these
two hypotheses Socrates considers to be the hypothesis to which he has reduced
the question of teachability.290

The locus classicus of the “scholarly disagreement” to which Mueller

refers is visible in the second edition of Richard Robinson’s Plato’s Earlier
Dialectic (1953) where the criticisms Friedländer and Harold Cherniss lev-
eled at the chapter on Meno in the first edition (1941) prompted Robinson to
backtrack, now identifying K as the passage’s principal hypothesis.291 There
has subsequently been widespread discontent with what might be called

285
 Mueller, “Mathematical Method,” 188; cf. Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 256n61.
286
 Mueller, “Mathematical Method,” 197n25.
287
 Mueller, “Mathematical Method,” 180.
288
 Mueller, “Mathematical Method, 180.
289
 Mueller, “Mathematical Method, 178.
290
 Mueller, “Mathematical Method, 178–179.
291
 On Richard Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), see Paul
Friedländer, “Review of Plato’s Earlier Dialectic, by Richard Robinson.” Classical Philology
40, no. 4 (October 1945), 253–259, especially on 255, and Harold Cherniss, “Some War-Time
Publications Concerning Plato.” American Journal of Philology 68, no. 2 (1947), 113–146, on
133–146; see especially 140n38.
440 Chapter 4

“Robinson’s Retreat,”292 and this discontent links this passage in Mueller to

the most recent discussion of Cook Wilson’s solution to the geometrical prob-
lem.293 As indicated by Mueller’s discussion of whether Socrates’ principal
hypothesis is a lemma or a theorem, a Cook Wilson-inspired rehabilitation
of διάνοια can take many forms, but the dominant one at present relates to
“the method of hypothesis” in Meno, and leads to the affirmation of Mueller’s
“Hypothesis-theorem” hypothesis, that is, that the hypothesis in question is
not simply K but rather a conditional or bi-conditional, a step that Benson
appropriately resists taking.294 But what makes Benson’s approach even
more valuable is that he realizes it is not by the intrinsic truth-value of the
hypothesis (especially when it is reconfigured as a bi-conditional theorem or
postulate) that the method can be rehabilitated, but only by means of the Idea
of the Good, and on the basis of the Battle Hymn.
Plato’s purpose is neither to provide us with Mueller’s chastened typology
of “hypotheses” nor to contrast the alleged clarity of the Geometrical Prob-
lem—for it possesses nothing of the kind—with “the rough-and-tumble of
the Socratic examination of doctrines.” He is neither trying “to establish [K]
by using the further hypothesis that virtue is good” nor attempting to destroy
“the hypothetical character of mathematical hypotheses through subsump-
tion under an unhypothetical starting point.” At the center of Plato’s story
is the Idea of the Good, and it is in relation to the Good that we must assess
knowledge, virtue, and happiness in order to determine whatever degree of
goodness they may possess. Above all, we do not ascend from the shadows in
order to discover a more reliable handmaiden for a rehabilitated version of the
hypothetical method, and it is not to some chastened version of mathematics
that we will return after ascending to the Good but only to the Cave.
In Meno, Plato is already preparing us for the Longer Way’s downward
path to Justice,295 and he is doing so by provoking dialectic;296 in Republic
6–7, he will explicitly contrast dialectic with the methods that must neces-
sarily be applied to the merely dianoetic objects of the Second Part of the

292
 See Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (second edition), 117–119.
293
 See Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 158–159, especially 159n14. For Benson’s relation to Wolfs­
dorf more generally, see 120–123, especially 121n19.
294
 Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 159; Cf. Weiss, Virtue in the Cave, 131n10, Scott, Plato’s Meno,
221–224, arising from 138 and 175, and Christina Ionescu, Plato’s Meno: An Interpretation (Lan-
ham, MD: Lexington, 2007), 171–176 (“Appendix 2: The Initial Hypothesis in the Meno”). On the
first and last of these—Scott rejects the bi-conditional interpretation—see Debra Nails, “Review
of Christina Ionescu, Plato’s Meno.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (November 15, 2007).
295
 Note the word choices in Annas, Introduction, 277; for καταβαίνειν at R. 511b7–c1, see Plato
the Teacher, §17.
296
 Cf. Judson, “Hypotheses in Plato’s Meno,” 37, “enquiring by using hypotheses requires just as
much rigor and just as steadfast a refusal to take things for granted as a standard Socratic enquiry
into what X is.”
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 441

Divided Line.297 The intrinsic lack of transparency made visible by the

absence of an Image in the Geometrical Problem begins to provoke this
dialectic in Meno, and Plato then finds any number of ways to continue that
process in “the Socratic examination” that follows it. An overview of that
examination may be useful, and a good place to start is with the following
summary by Roslyn Weiss:

The complete argument is as follows. If virtue is knowledge, then it is teachable;

there is nothing good or beneficial besides knowledge; virtue is good and benefi-
cial; hence, virtue is knowledge. But if virtue is knowledge, then it is teachable;
in anything teachable, there are teachers and pupils; there are no teachers or
pupils of virtue; virtue is not teachable; hence, virtue is not knowledge.298

Although Weiss is one of those scholars who opposes “Robinson’s

Retreat,”299 the repetition of “if virtue is knowledge” in this summary supports
the notion that K functions as hypothetical in the argument: Meno has wanted
to know from the start whether virtue is teachable (70a1–2) and by assum-
ing K—whether as atomic or as part of a conditional (87b5–7)—Socrates can
show Meno, at least, that it is (88c2–4) before reversing himself by showing
that it isn’t (89e1–3). But what I find most valuable in Weiss’s humorous sum-
mary are the words “there is nothing good or beneficial besides knowledge”
(cf. 87d4–6), and an important step forward is to situate this claim in the con-
text of the ROPD: (1) it was introduced in the First Protreptic of Euthydemus
(Euthd. 281e3–5; cf. 292b1–2), (2) it will be contradicted by the Idea of the
Good in Republic 6 (R. 505b8–10), and (3) it functions in the interim as purely
provisional, that is, as a Hypothesis. What makes Weiss’s summary humorous
is that it reduces the argument to an antinomy—of the kind we will encoun-
ter again in Parmenides, and there again in the context of hypotheses (Prm.
136b6–c5)—with its two parts leading to antithetical results.
Those whose purpose is to defend the viability of the hypothetical method
find it convenient to minimize the significance of the second part; for Ben-
son, the absence of teachers and students is a merely empirical observation
with no bearing on a method that should make no use of any objects of sense
(R. 511c1). But in a dialogue that has not only revived the question that
sparked so much debate in Protagoras—that is, the question, mediated by
the First Protreptic,300 of whether virtue is teachable (Prt. 319a10–b3)—but
has also introduced Recollection as a way of explaining how the proper ques-
tions can provoke us to learn without being taught, the two-part argument’s

297
 See Plato the Teacher, §13.
298
 See Weiss, Virtue in the Cave, 130n8.
299
 Weiss, Virtue in the Cave, 131n10.
300
 Cf. Prt. 323c5–8 and Euthd. 281c1–4.
442 Chapter 4

negative result has much the same purpose as its apparently more positive
part. Whether in its positive or negative phase, the purpose of the hypo-
thetical method is to provoke dialectic, and if Plato’s students must wait until
Republic 6 to be confirmed in their suspicion that knowledge is not the only
good—that is, that the Hypothesis “there is nothing good or beneficial besides
knowledge” is false—they need only look around the room: the existence of
the Academy in which Plato’s students are presently reading Meno (whether
in Athens or elsewhere) contradicts the negative part of the argument.
Finally, one last aspect of Weiss’s summary deserves preliminary atten-
tion: it appropriately emphasizes the circularity of the argument’s positive
part: “If virtue is knowledge, then it is teachable; there is nothing good or
beneficial besides knowledge; virtue is good and beneficial; hence, virtue is
knowledge.” An argument to the effect that “virtue is knowledge” that begins
with the assumption that “if virtue can be taught it must be knowledge”
illustrates once again a second feature of the method described in the Second
Part of the Divided Line: since the initial Hypothesis remains unquestioned,
we must reach a conclusion that is in accord with it (R. 510d2–3). The indis-
pensability of Images and the inescapability of one’s initial Hypothesis are
therefore both illustrated in Meno before being explained in Republic.
Attention to the argument’s circularity clears up two long-standing inter-
pretive problems, one specific to the Meno passage,301 the other involving
the relationship between the hypothetical method and dialectic in general.302
Part of the resistance to recognizing K as the argument’s (principal) Hypoth-
esis (or at any rate as one of its Hypotheses) is that, as Robinson explained
in 1953: “our [K-affirming] interpretation involves that the reasoning, or
most of it, takes place to the hypothesis and not from it.” When this result is
interpreted in the context of the Line, we need not imagine that “destroying
hypotheses [τὰς ὑποθέσεις ἀναιροῦσα]” (R. 533c9) means destroying their
hypothetical character but only “taking back [ἀνατιθέσθαι]” (89d4) our argu-
mentative commitment to their “incorrigibility.”303

301
 As illustrated by Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (second edition), 118: “He [sc. Socrates]
presents the proposition that virtue is knowledge [sc. K] first as an hypothesis or premiss from
which to infer a conclusion, and then as itself a conclusion inferred from the prior hypothesis that
virtue is good.”
302
 As illustrated by Cherniss, “War-Time Publications,” 143: “each hypothesis as soon as it is
deduced from a ‘higher’ hypothesis ceases to have the character of an hypothesis.”
303
 Cf. Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (first edition), 164: “mathematics treats propositions as
incorrigible which it ought not to. A beginning, then [Robinson is referring to the word ἀρχή at
R. 511b6], is a proposition that we are fully justified in taking for incorrigible, as an hypothesis
is one that we must maintain only tentatively.” Although it is an error to regard either άρχή as
ὑπόθεσις as propositions—both the Idea of the Good and the One are rather objects, the one of
διάνοια, the other of νοήσις—Robinson’s use of “corrigible” is welcome, especially since it is
more colloquial than “falsifiable.”
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 443

But thanks to the fact that we are reading “the Meno Doublet” of an earlier
argument in Euthydemus (see §6), the ramifications of the positive argu-
ment’s circularity are even more significant. In this echo of the First Protrep-
tic in Meno, we discover that (Systematic) Socratism itself is at stake (see §2).
The critical claim in the First Protreptic was that wisdom is (the only) good
and ignorance (the only) bad (Euthd. 281e4–5); Socrates emphasized this
claim’s importance when he told Crito that Cleinias and he had agreed: “noth-
ing else beside a certain knowledge is good” (Euthd. 292b1–2). As already
noted, this principle reappears in Meno (87d4–8)—for the argument from that
point forward depends on the Hypothesis that nothing other than knowledge
can be good—and the multiple references to the First Protreptic that fol-
low (87e5–88e4) will allow Socrates to reach the conclusion that φρόνησις
(alone) “would be the beneficial [τὸ ὠφέλιμον]” (89a1–2).304 Thanks to the
fact that we have already agreed that “virtue is beneficial” (89a2 refers back
to 87e3), K—which first appeared in the telltale company of an initial “if” at
87b5–c1 and 87c5—emerges as a conclusion of an all-too-familiar argument
that we are now being taught to see as fully dependent on a “corrigible”305
Hypothesis or rather on a long series of them: “Virtue then, as a whole or in
part [ἤτοι σύμπασιν ἢ μέρος τι], is wisdom [φρόνησις].”306
The addition of “as a whole or in part” at the moment of the positive argu-
ment’s triumph is significant. At a critical moment in the First Protreptic
(Euthd. 281c6–e2), Socrates deleted justice (cf. Euthd. 279b5 and 281c6) but
implied that what was true of courage was also true of temperance: because
the coward would be less active than the courageous man, an alleged virtue
like courage—and by extension, temperance and justice—would be produc-
tive of more evils (μείζω κακά at Euthd. 281d6) than their opposites, that
is, cowardice, intemperance, and presumably injustice, when not guided by
wisdom and φρόνησις. In the Meno Doublet (88b1–6), Socrates now uses the
distinction between “with mind [σὺν νῷ and μετὰ νοῦ]” (88b5 and 88b7) and
“without mind [ἄνευ νοῦ]” (88b5 and 88b8)—he had used “without φρόνησις
and σοφία” in Euthydemus (281b5–6)—to make a fuller contrast between a
merely mindless kind of boldness (θάρρος τι) and a φρόνησις-based courage
(88b3–4) which alone proves to be beneficial. But this increased clarity is off-
set by the two goods of the soul that will prove to be harmful when not guided
by φρόνησις in the sequel: σωφροσύνη and εὐμαθία (88b6–7). As difficult as

304
 On the switch to φρόνησις, see Karasmanis, “Hypothetical Method,” 98n13, citing Jacob Klein, A
Commentary on Plato’s Meno (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965).
305
 Well described in Gordon, Plato’s Erotic World, 107: “To reason from hypothesis is both to posit
an idea and, simultaneously, to hold it at arm’s length while exploring it and testing its viability.”
306
 89a3–4 (G. M. A. Grube translation).
444 Chapter 4

it is to imagine that σωφροσύνη can be harmful, it is more difficult to imagine

how εὐμαθία can be ἄνευ νοῦ, “either as a whole or in part.”
But quite apart from its relation to the First Protreptic, something very
strange happens next in its Meno Doublet. Having proved that virtue is
φρόνησις at the circular confirmation of what began with the application of
the hypothetical method at 87b2–c4, Socrates then makes a further claim at
89a5–7—I will call it “the Bridge Too Far”—that not only presupposes that
virtue is teachable but requires that it be so. Why does he spoil his moment of
triumph by overreaching in this way? Having successfully built on the most
clearly marked Hypothesis in the passage (and thus the clearest evidence that
there are more than one of them),307 it must follow that if virtue is good (87d3)
and if what is good is beneficial (87e3 and 89a2) that we can prove, thanks
to the intervening reprise of the First Protreptic that begins at 88e5 if not at
87d4, that it can only be some kind of knowledge (φρόνησις) that is respon-
sible for our ability to use things—and “the things of the soul” in particular
(88a6, 88d7, and 88e6)—in a beneficial manner (88d6–89a2). Why then does
Socrates now add that the good cannot be so by nature (φύσει at 89a5–7), a
claim he will substantiate in a truly strange manner?
To begin with, this is only the fourth time in Meno that the word φύσις
has appeared, with the second and third appearances both connected to
Recollection (81c9–d5 and 86d1), as we shall see. But the first reference to
φύσις is no less significant, and proves that Plato has been preparing us for
the Bridge Too Far from the start. Meno’s opening question presupposed a
distinction between what is “teachable” (διδακτόν)—whether in the sense of
being “practicable” (ἀσκητόν) or more generally “learnable” (μαθητόν)—
and “what comes to be by nature [φύσει] for human beings” (70a1–4); in
case we missed it, Plato then causes Meno to hammer this distinction at
86c7–d2, where the alternative to virtue as διδακτόν is simply virtue as
acquired φύσει.308 Since Socrates will soon enough embark on a conversa-
tion with Anytus (90b4–94e2) leading, shortly after his ominous exit speech
(94e3–95a1), to the negative conclusion that since we can discover no teach-
ers or students, virtue cannot be teachable (96b6–c10), the curious passage
that follows the apparent triumph of the positive argument at 89a3–5—begin-
ning with the claim that the good cannot be good φύσει at 89a5–6 and ending
with the arrival of Anytus at 89e9–10—deserves special attention, not least
of all because it came to play a central role in Robinson’s Retreat. It begins
with a bang:

307
 See Lynn E. Rose, “Plato’s Meno, 86–89.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 8, no. 1 (January
1970), 1–8, on 5–6, especially “there may be many hypotheses in the same argument.”
308
 Cf. Wilkes, “Conclusions in the Meno,” 148: “We can only conclude that Meno has failed entirely
to see the bearing of the theory of ἀνάμνησις on his original question. Equally clearly, though, we
can see that Plato was fully aware of it, and intended his readers to be so too.”
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 445

Socrates: No, for then, I presume, we should have had this result: if good men
were so by nature [φύσει], there would surely be for us [ἡμῖν] those who would
know the good among the youth—their natures [οἳ ἐγίγνωσκον τῶν νέων τοὺς
ἀγαθοὺς τὰς φύσεις]—and with those (youths) having been pointed out, we
[ἡμεῖς] should have taken them over and would be guarding [φυλάττειν] them
in an acropolis [ἐν ἀκροπόλει], having set our mark on them much more than
on our gold [τὸ χρυσίον], so that nobody corrupted them, and that when they
came to be of age, they might be useful to their cities [χρήσιμοι ταῖς πόλεσι].
Meno: Yes, most likely, Socrates. Socrates: Since then the good do not become
good by nature [φύσει from φύσις], is it by learning [μαθήσει from μαθήσις]?309

The anticipated answer to Socrates’ last question is obviously “yes,” but

one would have expected it to be supported by a very different kind of argu-
ment: it is most obviously because K is true that virtue must be acquired by
μαθήσις, and it is because it must διδακτόν in order to be acquired that it
cannot be because of φύσις that the good are good. Instead of affirming this
claim on a logical basis justified by the triumph of the positive argument
that he has just concluded (89a3–5), Socrates offers us instead an empirical
argument (89b1–7) that anticipates the equally empirical basis for the nega-
tive argument that will immediately follow (89d6–e4): just as there would be
teachers and students of virtue if virtue were διδακτόν, so also would there
be—we are asked to believe—a bizarre incubator of the naturally good if the
good were good by nature. The first step in unpacking this amazing passage,
then, is to recognize the structural connection between two contrary-to-fact
claims: if virtue were teachable, there would be teachers and students, and if,
on the other hand, the good were so nature, there would be what I will call
“the Acropolis Treasury.”
The textual details are significant, and will soon enough be echoed in
Republic.310 With their natures (αἱ φύσεις) under guard (derived from ἐφυλ-
άττομεν at 89b4) and carefully preserved from corruption in an acropolis (ἐν
ἀκροπόλει), the youth, recognized as something much more valuable than
gold (πολὺ μᾶλλον ἢ τὸ χρυσίον), will descend from the common treasury
in order to be χρήσιμοι ταῖς πόλεσι, that is, “useful to their cities” (89b1–7).
Along with “Teiresias among the Shadows” (100a2–b1) and the anticipation
of the Second Part of the Divided Line in the passage on the hypothetical
method that precedes it, the Acropolis Treasury therefore links Meno to
a reading of Plato’s Republic that identifies the Guardian’s voluntary and
Socratic Return to the Cave as the instantiation of Justice.
And in this context, the words χρήσιμοι ταῖς πόλεσι prove to be particu-
larly important. The best proof that the natures of the youth are good—i.e.

309
 89b1–8 (Lamb modified).
310
 Cf. Narcy, “Enseignement et dialectique,” 491–494.
446 Chapter 4

what it is that οἳ ἐγίγνωσκον τῶν νέων τοὺς ἀγαθοὺς τὰς φύσεις actually
know about their natures—is that they will be useful to the rest of us, not
merely concerned with SB, or what merely benefits them. After all, the posi-
tive argument in the Meno Doublet is that since virtue is knowledge, it can
therefore be taught, and that it is knowledge alone that makes it possible for
us to use all other so-called “goods”—including temperance, justice, and
courage (88a7)—in a manner that benefits ourselves. The youth whose good
natures we are guarding ἐν ἀκροπόλει have not yet been corrupted by this
self-benefitting shortcut.
But that doesn’t mean that our golden youth haven’t been exposed to it,
and the Acropolis Treasury is imbedded as a Bridge Too Far in the Hypotheti-
cal Argument because we can only walk the Longer Way by rejecting the
Shorter, and only ascend to the Idea of the Good through Dialectic by reject-
ing the Hypothesis that virtue is good because it is τὸ ὠφέλιμον (89a2).311
Plato will echo this distinction at 98c9 with the words ὠφέλιμοι ταῖς πόλεσι,
where the crucial word ὠφέλιμον will finally receive the dative he has taught
us that it needed from the start (Prt. 333d8–334c6).
Plato reminds us that the hypothetical method is still in play at 96e7–97a1
and 98c5–8 with specific references to the earlier claim that the good are
ὠφέλιμοι (87e1–2). This claim is crucial to the success of the positive argu-
ment once combined with the Hypothesis that virtue is good (87d3), that is,
that it is by virtue that the good are good (87d8–e1) and that virtue is benefi-
cial (87e3 and 89a2). But Socrates now argues that both knowledge and cor-
rect opinion (δόξα) make men equally “beneficial to their cities” (98c8–10)312
before asking whether either one of the two is acquired φύσει (98c10–d2).
When Meno replies that neither of them is (98d3) Socrates reprises the
Academy-denying dilemma (98d4–e9) that leads to the return of θεία μοῖρα
(98e10–100a2) but only after hammering the importance of the Acropolis
Treasury by misplacing it (98d7–8). In Republic 6–7 we will learn that Dia-
lectic is necessary for ascending to the Idea of the Good. A less than obvious
corollary is that it is specifically to the meaning of “good,” “beneficial,” and
the Socratist equation of the two that Dialectic must be applied. What does
it mean to say, as is said three times in Meno (87e1–2, 96e7, and 98c5), that
good men are beneficial?
For anyone wishing to know whether the natures of the young are good
(89b2–3), such a question is invaluable: those who equate the Good with what
is beneficial to themselves will never be ὠφέλιμοι to their cities. In the Meno
Doublet as in the First Protreptic, Socrates can only show that knowledge is

311
 Bearing in mind that “the beneficial,” either without the dative or with the (un-)ethical dative “for
us,” connects a UV and K-based virtue to the GoodE by IOV and CA.
312
 Specifically with respect to the ROPD, consider Segvic, “No One Errs Willingly,” 8: “The con-
trast between doxa, opinion, and epistēmē, knowledge, is at the heart of the Gorgias as a whole.”
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 447

beneficial because without it we are unable to use the other alleged “goods”
to benefit ourselves; this is why the phrase “to benefit us [ὠφελεῖν ἡμᾶς]”
appears in it twice (87e6 and 88a4) while being implied by all eighteen uses
of ὠφελεῖν (4 times), ὠφελεῖσθαι (1), and ὠφέλιμα (13) between 87e2 and
89a2. The same restriction with respect to ὠφελεῖν (cf. 77d1–6) is likewise
responsible for Meno’s acceptance of SP (see §14). It is only on the verge
of pointing out the two equally effective ways of reaching Larisa (97a9–c2)
that we are provoked to remember that good men are ὠφέλιμοι because they
benefit others (96e7–97a5), a recollection made all the easier since it is only
the active sense of εὖ πράττειν that is in play at 96e3.313
Bedeviling every discussion of the hypothetical method in Meno is the
inescapable fact that the only claim that Plato allows Socrates to identify as
a ὑπόθεσις in the passage is the apparent truism that virtue is good (87d3).
The full importance of Plato’s thought-provoking decision to do so only
becomes obvious when Socrates repeats it at 98e10, after having echoed
the Acropolis Treasury’s χρήσιμοι ταῖς πόλεσι with ὠφέλιμοι ταῖς πόλεσι at
98c9. It is only after we have erroneously equated the good with the beneficial
and the beneficial with what “benefits us” that can we bring the proper dialec-
tical objection to this Hypothesis. The only way that we can demonstrate that
we have grasped the true significance of the hypothetical method is by recog-
nizing what makes a given hypothesis ambiguous and therefore corrigible,314
treating it in the process as both springboard and spur (hence ὁρμή at R.
511b5; cf. R. 506e1). Explained fully in Republic 6, the method has already
been implemented in Meno: without our natural awareness of the base and
slavish inadequacy of making “the good for us” the measure of our inner man
(cf. R. 504c1–8), we cannot make the ascent to the Good. Teaching, practice,
and nature will be combined in Platonic pedagogy, and only by repeatedly
exposing us to deliberate falsehood can Plato prepare us to remember what
all of us already know.
On the basis of K, Socrates can make virtue seem desirable because he can
use the CA to show that knowledge benefits us, and that only when φρόνησις
guides the way we use “the things of the soul” will we secure our happiness
(88c1–3). Between Euthydemus and Meno, the brittle foundation upon which
this exhortation depends is being repeatedly exposed by a course in deliberate

313
 A further advantage of acknowledging the deliberate ambiguity of εὖ πράττειν is that it prepares
us for the equally ambiguous εὐδοξία at 99b11; to pass from the self-evident claim that certain
famous Athenian statesmen are “well-reputed” to the suggestion that they are therefore “well-
opined,” i.e., blessed with right opinion, depends on the kind of deliberate equivocation for which
we have long since been prepared. For discussion and bibliography, see Robert W. Hall, “Ὀρθὴ
Δόξα and Εὐδοξία in the Meno.” Philologus 108, no. 1 (January 1964), 66–71. For the correct use,
see Mx. 247b7; cf. Mx. 238d3–8.
314
 For the necessarily preliminary, provisional, and corrigible character of Hypotheses in Plato, see
Hans-Peter Stahl, “Ansätze zur Satzlogik bei Platon: Methode und Ontologie.” Hermes 88, no. 4
(November 1960), 409–451, especially 438 and 446.
448 Chapter 4

fallacy, a vastly entertaining play of character, and a geometry-based discus-

sion of methodology. But the reason that the series of dialogues Plato devoted
to the various virtues will culminate in Republic is simple, and the Acropolis
Treasury explains it: he is determined to know and guard the kind of natures
who will be beneficial for their cities, and who will therefore choose Justice
without concern for whether doing so is good for them. And by giving us
the tools to recognize the false steps his Socrates will take along the various
precursors of the Shorter Way, Plato is provoking us to remember what he is
certain that we already know or opine φύσει thanks to Recollection: that what
makes Justice good is that it is beautiful, not that it is good or beneficial for
us. The Acropolis Treasury follows the Meno Doublet as a result.
The alleged non-existence of Acropolis Treasury therefore serves the same
purpose as Socrates’ subsequent claim that virtue cannot be taught because
no teachers or students of it can be found. Thanks to the Academy, the two
empirical claims are equally false but equally necessary in order to under-
stand what Plato intends us to discovere here. Only a Tale of Two Schools,
both playfully presented as non-existent, can illustrate the necessary interplay
of φύσις and μαθήσις in Platonic pedagogy. What I will call “the Platonic
Synthesis” is the resolution of the dilemma with which Socrates had skew-
ered Alcibiades at the start: if you know what justice is, you must either have
been taught it or have discoved it for yourself (Alc. 106d4–5).315 Although
Plato the Teacher has supplied the necessary pedagogical provocation, read-
ers must discover Justice for themselves.
In other words, while a traditional “School of Virtue” would purport to
bestow knowledge without acknowledging the role of Recollection, the imag-
inary Acropolis Treasury so emphasizes goodness φύσει that it negates the
necessary role of didactic and dialectical provocation.316 It is therefore provo-
cation’s pedagogical role that Plato illustrates with his Tale of Two Schools:
insofar as both are equally one-sided, they deserve to be regarded as equally
non-existent: neither can exist without the other. It is only their Platonic Syn-
thesis that exists, and only by saying “no” to the non-existence of both do we
overcome the one-sidedness of each.
It is here, then, as advanced preparation for Republic, that “the unity of
Meno” is to be found. Beginning with Meno’s opening question (70a1–4),
Plato has broached the possibility that there is a third alternative (ἄλλῳ τινὶ
τρόπῳ) between the (artificial) διδακτόν-ἀσκητόν-μαθητόν nexus and the
(natural or automatic) φύσει (cf. Prt. 323c3–324a1). Plato reminds us of that
third alternative with ἢ ὡς τίνι ποτὲ τρόπῳ at 86d1, but its return in earnest
begins after the hypothetical method reaches its positive peak (89a3–5).

315
 For other connections between Alc. and Men., see Harold Tarrant, “Meno 98a: More Worries.”
Liverpool Classical Monthly 14, no. 8 (October 1989), 121–122.
316
 See Weiss, Virtue in the Cave, 136–138, and Scott, Plato’s Meno, 157–160, especially 158n18.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 449

First the non-existence of the Acropolis Treasury eliminates the natural or

automatic route (89a6–c4) then the non-existence of the School of Virtue
apparently eliminates the artificial nexus (89c5–e9). For this reason, the Tale
of Two Schools really begins with the dialogue’s opening question: the acqui-
sition of virtue (in) ἄλλῳ τινὶ τρόπῳ is its synthetic resolution. By provoking
us to create for ourselves a properly dialectical account of his (eternal and
ROPD-based) Academy, Plato’s chosen medium illuminates and instantiates
his message: the alleged non-existence of the Two Schools guides us to the
truth, contradicting as it does the very process we are currently experiencing.
It is only by provoking his readers to overcome the false that can Plato lead
them to the truth, and the Bridge Too Far follows the apparent success of the
Meno Doublet because the deployment of deliberate falsehood constitutes
the pedagogical core of the hypothetical method. Beginning with Protago-
ras, Plato has focused our attention on the question of whether he can teach
his students virtue through his dialogues, and in the series of dialogues that
begins with Euthydemus, this question becomes central. Meno forcefully
revives it in anticipation of its long-awaited and carefully prepared answer.317
And Cleitophon will follow Meno in the ROPD because Plato will give his
students the chance to express their understandable frustration—on the verge
of the decisive Republic—with an education that may well appear not to have
taught them what they came to learn. But that sense of frustration will only be
acute for those who still yearn for a shortcut, and who have therefore failed
to learn the lesson of the Tale of Two Schools: Plato’s Academy, recreated
wherever his Meno is being read, combines a pedagogy based on μαθήσις
with the necessary role of φύσις. Despite this chapter’s duress-induced
emphasis on its two most overtly Socratist passages, the center of Plato’s
memorable Meno must therefore always remain the pedagogical revolution
wrought by the emergence of Recollection.318

317
 See Alexander Nehamas, “Meno’s Paradox and Socrates as a Teacher” in Nehamas, Virtues of
Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates, 3–26 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1999), 10–12 (on Prt. 313a1–314c2).
318
 Among the enemies of Recollection, a prominent place must be reserved for Theodor Ebert, “‘The
Theory of Recollection in Plato’s Meno’: Against a Myth of Platonic Scholarship” in Michael
Erler and Luc Brisson (eds.), Gorgias-Menon: Selected Papers from the Seventh Symposium
Platonicum (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2007), 184–198; so intent is he to root out this “myth”
that he manages to disfigure Ebert, “Studien zur griechischen Philosophie von Gregory Vlastos”
with a polemical excursus, replete with an extraneous textual emendation, devoted to his hobby
(281–287), a horse first mounted in Theodor Ebert, Meinung und Wissen in der Philosophie
Platons: Untersuchungen zum Charmides, Menon und Staat (Berlin and New York: Walter de
Gruyter, 1974), 86–104. Not surprisingly, his approach to Meno is anchored in a more general
attack on “die Zweiteilung der Welt” (211)—itself based on distinguishing the First and Second
Parts of the Divided Line only on the basis of an “Erkenntnisprozeß” (181), and thus with predict-
able implications for the Intermediates (183–193). In the end, he blames Aristotle’s misunder-
standing “für den Chorismos der Ideen” since Plato “ist nicht der Begründer der Metaphysik des
Platonismus” (212–213).
450 Chapter 4

Indeed Plato has made the consequences of this revolution difficult to miss
from the very beginning of Socrates’ application of the hypothetical method:

Socrates: In the same way with regard to our question concerning virtue, since
we do not know either what it is or what kind of thing it may be, hypothesizing
it let us examine whether it can be taught or not, speaking as follows: what kind
of thing among the (existent) things concerning the soul must virtue be for it
to be teachable or not teachable? In the first place, then, if it is something dis-
similar or similar to knowledge, is it taught [διδακτόν] or not—or, as we were
saying just now, remembered [ἀναμνηστόν]? Let it make no difference to us
[διαφερέτω δὲ μηδὲν ἡμῖν] which name we should use but (simply): is it taught?
Or is not this evident to everyone—that a human being is taught nothing else
than knowledge? Meno: I agree to that.319

Although Meno evidently fails to grasp that it is our ignorance that we have
repeatedly been taught,320 it is unclear whether Plato’s readers have done
much better, and that goes double for the partisans of K-based Socratism.
Plato is asking us from the start to challenge as corrigible each step of the
argument, and this is why “Hunt for Hypotheses” is the game we are now
playing.
While a tremendous amount of effort has been devoted to discovering the
Hypothesis in this passage, or at the very least the principal Hypothesis on
which the argument that follows depends, the fact that the whole of it depends
on the false claim that it makes no difference whether we regard virtue as
διδακτόν or ἀναμνηστόν has been overlooked or misinterpreted.321 In dia-
logue with Francis M. Cornford, who tried to make the passage that follows
compatible with Recollection by leaving to the reader the task of distinguish-
ing διδακτόν from ἀναμνηστόν,322 Bluck took a step backward by claiming
that διδακτόν must be identified with ἀναμνηστόν from this point forward.323
Scott follows him in this error:

319
 87b2–c4.
320
 See John Sallis, Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues, third edition (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana Universitry Press, 1996), 83: “The myth shows, in other words, that
Meno is ignorant of the involvement of ignorance in human knowledge; this is the deeper sense in
which, as was already indicated from the outset, Meno’s ignorance is pre-eminently an ignorance
of ignorance.”
321
 See Bluck, Plato’s Meno, 20–22 and 324–325, ending with: “Although in much of what follows
[an understatement] διδάσκειν and διδάσκολος are in fact used in the sophistic sense, there is no
reason to suppose [apart, that is, from the fact that the equation of διδακτόν from ἀναμνηστόν
functions as a (necessary) Hypothesis in the illustration of the hypothetical method] that the
‘maieutic’ sense [see 21n2 for a defense (‘I use this expression for convenience’) of the importa-
tion of this term from Tht.] is entirely forgotten [certainly it is not forgotten by Plato’s preferred
reader!] or left out of account [which it is in the text, and deliberately so].”
322
 Cf. “disguises,” “deliberately ignored,” and “masked” at F. M. Cornford, edited by W. K. C. Guth-
rie, Principium Sapientiæ: A Study of Greek Philosophical Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1952), 60n1.
323
 Bluck, Plato’s Meno, 20–21.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 451

Socrates first introduces the maieutic sense of teaching into the dialogue at
87b8–c1 where he bids Meno not to quibble about words and treats the words
‘recollectable’ (ἀναμνηστόν) and ‘teachable’ (διδακτόν) interchangeably; thus
‘knowledge is teachable’ is equivalent to ‘knowledge is recollectable.’324

For the sake of temporarily salvaging Plato’s consistency,325 prominent

interpreters are therefore asking us to forget the revolutionary distinction
Socrates has just introduced. But if we have learned anything about Recol-
lection, we will remember that ἀναμνηστόν and διδακτόν are by no means
interchangeable, as Harold Tarrant has explained:

In a sense it makes no difference to Plato which term we use. But it makes

a great deal of difference which term is more accurate, for in one case the
‘teacher’ is an instructor and in the other a memory-stimulator. In one case the
‘teacher’ would be a sophist; in the other it will be Socrates. Might Socrates
after all be something like a teacher of excellence—a facilitator of the appropri-
ate moral knowledge?326

He might indeed, although Tarrant would have done better to emphasize Pla-
to’s agency here. In fact, it makes a great deal of difference to Plato “which
term we use,” for through his Socrates, he really is “a teacher of excellence,”
and it is because he is using basanistic pedagogy that he is recognizable as
Tarrant’s “memory-stimulator.”
In addition to being one of the argument’s hypotheses, the alleged inter-
changeability of διδακτόν and ἀναμνηστόν is therefore better understood as a
deliberate falsehood, and it is misplaced charity to palliate the resulting inco-
herence.327 It is no wonder that those who have followed Aristotle in dividing
Plato from himself have regarded Meno as “transitional” between a Socratic
Socrates and a post-Socratic or Platonic “Socrates,” but Plato has been one
step ahead of this wrong-headed division from the start. Although he is only

324
 Scott, Recollection and Experience, 42n16; he cites Bluck at the end of the note. Cf. Daniel T.
Devereux, “Nature and Teaching in Plato’s Meno.” Phronesis 23, no. 2 (1978), 118–126, on 120:
“Shortly after the recollection passage, Socrates says that the terms ‘teachable’ and ‘recollectable’
may be used interchangeably (87b–c). Here he is evidently using ‘teaching’ to designate an activ-
ity compatible with the theory of recollection [for n9, see following note]; i.e., the sort of activity
which is exhibited in the questioning of the slave boy.”
325
 Devereux, “Nature and Teaching, 125n9 (for context, see previous note): “I trust that the other
possibility—that Socrates has simply forgotten within the space of a few pages his earlier claim
that there is no such thing as teaching—need not be taken seriously.”
326
 Harold Tarrant, Recollecting Plato’s Meno (London: Duckworth, 2005), 39. For discussion of
sophistic teaching, see Erler, Sinn der Aporien, 60–77.
327
 Cf. Narcy, “Enseignement et dialectique,” 489: “Considérés dans leur lettre, les propos de Socrate
sont incohérents. Il vient de montrer assez clairement que διδακτόν et ἀναμνηστόν ne sont pas
équivalents, et après l’épisode de la réminiscence, il ne devrait plus être possible de lire que l’on
enseigne (διδάσκεται) la science (ἐπιστήμην).” Hence the claim that Plato’s readers must “try to
claw their way back to the heart of Plato’s message” in Tarrant, Recollecting Plato’s Meno, 54.
452 Chapter 4

now showing his hand, the conclusion of Protagoras has long since set the
stage for the transition we are now being challenged to discover: while main-
taining that virtue is not διδακτόν, Socrates had repeatedly scored against the
famous sophist by showing that it is the kind of thing that Protagoras should
be able to teach (Prt. 361b7–c2) but cannot. It is also the same kind of σοφία
that Cleinias assumes is διδακτόν in Euthydemus.
So let’s not miss the forest for the trees: it is only because of this Recollection-
effacing interchangeability that we can recognize this passage as the Meno Dou-
blet of the First Protreptic. Plato counts on us to link the two passages as indeed
so many have done, but most have failed to learn from the parallel. In looking
back on Euthydemus, we should now be able to see that TEA—dependent as it
is on the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy—functions there as the Protreptic’s unquestioned
but in principle corrigible Hypothesis. And if we can avoid the kind of interpre-
tive “charity” that conceals Plato’s provocative use of deliberate falsehood,328
we can learn even more about the Doublet from this backward glance. Without
the alleged interchangeability, Socrates’ argument won’t work. The Bridge
Too Far follows K’s merely circular triumph because we are being reminded
at the end that we have been told to forget Recollection at the beginning, and
indeed the Meno Doublet can only be a doublet if we have done so.
Whatever may be the interpretive imperatives that make so many of us
wish to disjoin Recollection from Plato’s serious concerns, we therefore need
to recognize that the imperative διαφερέτω δὲ μηδὲν ἡμῖν (“let it make no dif-
ference to us” at 87b8) functions here as something even more hypothetical
than a Hypothesis: it is a falsehood disguised as a postulate. If we don’t rec-
ognize that, the Platonic synthesis will be invisible; if we do, we have entered
the Academy. Whether we will do so or not remains unclear, but with the
return of φύσει at 89a6—and it really returns all the way from Protagoras via
Euthydemus329—Plato reminds us that even in the case of inquiries “concern-
ing virtue [περὶ ἀρετῆς],” φύσις was made the basis for Recollection from the
start (81c7–d5) and that Socrates ridiculed Meno for regarding the claim that
learning (μάθησις) could be ἀνάμνησις as διδακτόν (81e3–82a3). But even if
Meno fails to realize that an awareness of our ignorance really is διδακτόν—it
is the very thing Socrates has been teaching us since Protagoras—we should
be prepared to remember it for him.

328
 Cf. Scott, Recollection and Experience, 42, and Scott, Plato’s Meno, 143: “To remove any incon-
sistency in his various remarks about teaching and knowledge, we need to distinguish different
conceptions of teaching. I take it that at 87b–c ‘teachable’ means something quite specific: knowl-
edge can be recollected with the aid of questioning. It is only in this sense, where the teacher acts
as a catalyst working with the innate resources of the learner, that knowledge is teachable.” Cf.
Devereux, “Nature and Teaching,” 121.
329
 At Euthd. 281c2, ἀπὸ ταὐμάτου (“on its own”) is used as the opposite of διδακτόν—Clinias spares
Socrates the trouble of proving that wisdom is teachable by rejecting this alternative (281c1–8).
Cf. Prt. 323c3–8 where Protagoras links ἀπὸ ταὐμάτου to φύσει and contrasts both with virtue as
διδακτόν and acquired by practice.
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 453

Socrates: Since then the good do not become good by nature [φύσις], is it by
learning [μάθησις]? Meno: I think that that is now proved [ἤδη ἀναγκαῖον]; and
it is clear, Socrates, according to the hypothesis, if virtue is knowledge, that
it is teachable [κατὰ τὴν ὑπόθεσιν, εἴπερ ἐπιστήμη ἐστὶν ἀρετή, ὅτι διδακτόν
ἐστιν].330

If the Acropolis Treasury has played no significant role in the discus-

sion of the hypothetical method in Meno—Weiss and Scott are honorable
exceptions—the same can scarcely be said of this passage,331 which imme-
diately follows it. Meno himself prepares us to understand why this should
be the case: it is not on the basis of the non-existence of the Treasury that
he regards as “already necessary [ἤδη ἀναγκαῖον]” the view that virtue—by
which the good are good (87d8–e1)—is acquired by μάθησις rather than
φύσις (89c2–4).332 Meno clearly recognizes what Socrates uses the Treasury
to conceal: it is on the basis of the foregoing argument culminating with the
vindication of K that being good φύσει must necessarily be rejected, and
not because of any outlandish contrary-to-fact. As a result, scholars whose
exclusive interest in this passage centers on the question of whether or not
K is the Hypothesis on which the positive argument depends have subjected
Meno’s observation to a level of scrutiny strangely incommensurate with the
young man’s acuity.333
Whatever Meno means by the words κατὰ τὴν ὑπόθεσιν, εἴπερ ἐπιστήμη
ἐστὶν ἀρετή, ὅτι διδακτόν ἐστιν,334 he thinks he has a good enough grasp on
Socrates’ argument to recognize it as proving, even without recourse to the
empirical non-existence of the Acropolis Treasury, that the good are not good
φύσει. While it must be regarded as likely that Meno does not understand as
much as he thinks he does, I tend to agree with what seems to be the clear
meaning of his words: on the basis of the ὑπόθεσις that ἀρετή is ἐπιστήμη—
designated as hypothetical in the traditional sense by the emphatic εἴπερ—
Socrates has managed to prove that (ὅτι) ἀρετή is διδακτόν, thus fulfilling
Meno’s desire to discover whether we should regard it as coming to be among
men as διδακτῷ or φύσει (86c9–d2). Aware, as we must be, that he has gained

330
 89b9–c4 (Richard Robinson, second edition). Cf. Lamb’s translation: “Socrates: So since it is not
by nature that the good become good, is it by education? Meno: We must now conclude, I think,
that it is; and plainly, Socrates, on our hypothesis that virtue is knowledge, it must be taught.”
331
 As in the footnote that prompted Robinson’s Retreat in Cherniss, “War-Time Publications,”
140n38: “the position of ὅτι shows that the sentence means ‘it is clear that it is teachable accord-
ing to the hypothesis if virtue is knowledge.’” See also Bedu-Addo, “Recollection,” 9, and Harold
Zyskind and R. Sternfeld, “Plato’s Meno 89C: ‘Virtue Is Knowledge’ a Hypothesis?” Phronesis
21, no. 2 (1976), 130–134, especially 132. Bedu-Addo is in dialogue throughout with Crombie,
Examination of Plato’s Doctrines, 2.529–48.
332
 See Scott, Plato’s Meno, 223–224.
333
 See especially Wolfsdorf, Trials of Reason, 162–164.
334
 See Wolfsdorf, Trials of Reason, 164: “Let us therefore dismiss the common reading.” Cf.
Ionescu, Plato’s Meno, 176n7.
454 Chapter 4

his objective because Socrates has argued κατὰ τὴν ὑπόθεσιν, Meno never-
theless has no inkling of the lesson that Plato is already expecting us to intuit
from that fact, and which he will spell out for us in the Divided Line: a vic-
tory achieved by circular reasoning is hollow. Meno is fully content because
he has gained his end; Plato’s purpose is to focus our attention on the strictly
hypothetical means by which he has gained it.
Because he understands nothing of this, Meno expresses dismay when
Socrates responds by giving voice to the doubts that will lead to his palinode
on the apparently settled question of whether virtue is διδακτόν:

Socrates: Perhaps, by Zeus: but have we not agreed to this [τοῦτο] inappropri-
ately [οὐ καλῶς]? Meno: Well, it certainly seemed just a moment ago [ἄρτι] to
be said appropriately [καλῶς λέγεσθαι]. Socrates: Yes, but not only a moment
ago [ἐν τῷ ἄρτι] must it [αὐτό] seem to be said appropriately [καλῶς λέγεσθαι],
but also in the present [ἐν τῷ νῦν] and in the hereafter [ἐν τῷ ἔπειτα], if there
will be any of it that is sound.335

It is easy to understand Meno’s frustration. Socrates’ willingness to cross the

Bridge Too Far immediately after the conclusion of the positive argument at
89a3—it is to this that Meno’s ἄρτι refers—had suggested that Socrates him-
self had no doubts as to the argument’s success. But Plato has been expecting
us to experience that argument, like the earlier argument that persuaded Meno
to embrace SP, in a very different manner from the way Meno has evidently
experienced it.
Indeed Meno’s ready and enthusiastic acceptance of τοῦτο—a reference
to κατὰ τὴν ὑπόθεσιν, εἴπερ ἐπιστήμη ἐστὶν ἀρετή, ὅτι διδακτόν ἐστιν, the
importance of which is then hammered by αὐτό—should be taken as a clear
sign that τοῦτο must not be regarded as καλῶς λέγεσθαι, even if it seemed to
be so to us in what Socrates now calls ἐν τῷ ἄρτι. Reminding those who have
recently read Laches and Charmides of the threefold inadequacy of KGB with
this reference to past, present, and future, Plato is more importantly position-
ing the present crisis of Meno (ἐν τῷ νῦν) between the past of Euthydemus (ἐν
τῷ ἄρτι) and the future (ἐν τῷ ἔπειτα) of Republic. Thanks to a combination
of what Xenophon teaches us about Meno’s character and what Socrates has
just taught us about methodological shortcuts, we revisit the First Protreptic
with new eyes in Meno, and can measure our progress by the fact that Meno
alone is certain that τοῦτο deserves its καλῶς λέγεσθαι (cf. 89a4–5).
In his own playful manner, Plato has just revealed why the Play of Char-
acter both dominates and enlivens the series of virtue-dialogues between
Euthydemus and Meno. Of the various alternatives present in Meno’s open-
ing question, the one that receives no further attention in the dialogue is that

335
 89c5–10 (Lamb modified).
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 455

virtue is acquired through practice, that it is ἀσκητόν (70a2). In discussing the

Acropolis Treasury, it is easy enough to identify Plato’s imaginary Guardians
as those “who would know the good natures among the youth” (89b2–3) but
to confine this knowledge to them or to Plato the Teacher is insufficient: it is
the knowledge that Plato’s dialogues are training us to acquire for ourselves,
repeatedly forcing us to practice our powers of discernment in assessing the
comparative merits of Lysis and Menexenus, Ctesippus and Cleinias, Laches
and Nicias, Charmides and Critias, and most importantly Callicles and Meno.
Since these characters are works of art, Plato can fashion them as he pleases,
and that means for our pedagogical benefit. We examine each of them in turn,
repeatedly confusing good natures with bad ones, with no awareness that it is
ourselves we see again and again in the mirror of their portraits, and nothing
illustrates Plato’s broadmindedness better than the fact that so many of us
would mistakenly regard Callicles as the incurable one.

Meno: Why is that? To what are you looking while disputing it [αὐτό] and
doubting [ἀπιστεῖν] lest virtue should not be knowledge [μὴ οὐκ ἐπιστήμη ᾖ
ἡ ἀρετή]? Socrates: I will tell you, Meno. That it is teachable if indeed it is
knowledge [τὸ μὲν γὰρ διδακτὸν αὐτὸ εἶναι, εἴπερ ἐπιστήμη ἐστίν], this I am not
taking back [άνατιθέσθαι] lest it is said inappropriately [μὴ οὐ καλῶς λέγεσθαι],
but that it is not knowledge [ὅτι δὲ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐπιστήμη], see if I seem to you to
be doubting [ἀπιστεῖν] plausibly [εἰκότως].336

The position from which Robinson conducted his famous Retreat was
that the principal Hypothesis in the positive argument was the one Socrates
refuses “to take back [άνατιθέσθαι]” here: virtue is teachable if it is knowl-
edge, and the echo of εἴπερ ἐπιστήμη ἐστὶν ἀρετή (89c3) with εἴπερ ἐπιστήμη
ἐστίν here (89d4) leaves little doubt that Plato wrote the two passages as he
did in order to force us to compare them. Since my position on the meaning
of ὑπόθεσις in Plato is the opposite of Wolfsdorf’s, I regard the fact that
Socrates refuses to take back the conditional as sufficient proof that Robin-
son’s Retreat was justified: it is the conditional’s protasis (i.e., εἴπερ ἐπιστήμη
ἐστὶν ἀρετή) that is the argument’s Hypothesis, or rather—to state my own
position accurately—that it would be its Hypothesis if it had only one, which
I deny. Instead, it is only one among many.
Socrates’ pointed refusal to apply άνατιθέσθαι to the conditional and only
to the conditional indicates that it alone—among a lush profusion of other
corrigible claims beginning at 87b2—is not hypothetical. Why should it be
when the conditional makes the case? In order to gratify Meno’s misplaced

336
 89d1–6.
456 Chapter 4

desire to learn how virtue can be acquired before knowing what virtue is
(86d3–6), Socrates proved that Meno had learned nothing about how knowl-
edge can be acquired by further hypothesizing—having hypothesized K at
87b3–4 as Friedländer and Cherniss claimed—that it is only knowledge that
can be taught (87c2–3).
It is not for nothing that the word “mathematics” is derived from the things
that are paradigmatically learnable, and only a dull student could fail to expe-
rience on encountering geometry something of the excitement that comes
from the lively interplay of easily graspable principles, clarifying diagrams,
and definitive proofs (82b9–85b7). The insight embodied in the Divided Line
is that the acquisition of geometrical knowledge is unlike the acquisition
of virtue in all of these respects, and Plato created the distinction between
διάνοια and νοήσις in order to explain the difference. It would not be entirely
unnatural to refer to both kinds of “knowledge” as ἐπιστήμαι (R. 533c8–d9),
but only νοήσις fully qualifies.
Meno precedes Republic in the ROPD because it will be by means of
νοήσις that we will catch sight of the Idea of the Good (if we do)337 and then,
from it, work our way down to Justice (R. 511b5–c1),338 if, that is, we do not
already believe we have found it on the Shorter Way (cf. Alc. 109e1–110a1).
The provocative dilemma of the Guardians—embodied in the tension
between the injustice of compelling them to return to the Cave (R. 519d8–9)
and the evident excellence of their voluntary decision to do so (R. 520e1)—
depends on our intrinsic and innate capacity to know that the Idea of the
Good is infinitely better than merely our own good, that is, the GoodE. While
readily admitting that no geometrical example in particular could come any-
where close to proving the reality of Recollection—indeed that’s the point of
using mathematics to distinguish διάνοια from νοήσις—the fact remains that
Plato without Recollection is like Socrates without Plato.339
Unfortunately, our current “Tale of Two Platos” has accomplished both
equally undesirable results at one and the same time: up until the moment
that Plato began placing preposterous notions like Recollection in his mouth,

337
 Thus there is a pre-established harmony between (1) the reduction of the GoodT to the GoodE
(155–158), (2), the rejection of merely hypothesized mathematical objects (as opposed to proposi-
tions) in the Divided Line (200–202), and (3) the deflationary approach to νοήσις (215–220) in
Stemmer, Platons Dialektik, climaxing with 220–221n116. On the other hand, if he had more
sharply divided the First from the Second Part of the Divided Line, the following observation on
209 would be most welcome: “Das hypothetische Verfahren ist eine Methode, innerhalb der Doxa
[cf. R. 534c2] zu möglichst fundierten, verantwortbaren Ergebnisse zu kommen.”
338
 See Plato the Teacher, 183–184.
339
 Despite “Plato’s sustained attempts to set him as an authentic philosopher in the sharpest possible
contrast to the ‘sophists’” (293), Socrates is numbered among the latter in André Laks and Glenn
W. Most (eds.), in collaboration with Gérard Journée and assisted by David Lévystone, Early
Greek Philosophy, volume 8, part 1 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press,
2016), 293–411; note the reliance on Prt. and Aristotle for “Views on Virtue” (376–397).
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 457

Socrates enjoyed a nonsense-free existence in “the early dialogues.” Against

the insipidity of this Aristotle-inspired Tale, Plato’s Meno shines out like a
beacon, and the reason I have concentrated my attention on the dialogue’s
Socratist elements—very much against my interpretive instincts, as must
by now be obvious—is that Plato is using precisely those elements to dem-
onstrate the radical insufficiency of any account of the virtues that does not
revolve around the GoodT. Our mothers have long since demonstrated a ready
willingness to prefer our good to their own, and there is nothing more natural
than the realization—shared by decent people at all times and all places—that
human excellence is not secured by the kind of knowledge that systemati-
cally benefits ourselves. Under the influence of an equally natural selfishness
and the artificial assistance of whatever form of sophistic that happens to be
current in our lives,340 we can doubtless forget what all of us have the innate
capacity—quite literarly “from birth”—to remember, but Plato will remain
forever on the other side. Unfortunately, however, he tends to disappear and
may well become yet more invisible.
Among the scholars who have rejected Robinson’s Retreat by arguing that
K is not the argument’s (principal or single) Hypothesis I have yet to find one
who defends that position on a purely Socratist basis, that is, that since we
know (Aristotle’s) Socrates regarded K as true, (Plato’s) Socrates could not
possibly have regarded it as (merely) hypothetical, and therefore we must find
in the Meno passage some other Hypothesis that he did regard as hypotheti-
cal. I find this lacuna interesting and regard it as merely transitional. The war-
time defense of K as Hypothesis by Friedländer and Cherniss that prompted
Robinson’s Retreat triumphed in a pre-Socratist world, and even the creator
of the Socratist revolution characteristically and rigidly isolated Meno from
“the philosophy of Socrates.”341 I do not believe that radical Socratism will
indefinitely rest content with this isolation: on the basis of SP, the lure of UV,
and the Meno Doublet, further attempts will inevitably be made to provide
the dialogue with a fully Socratist reading and they will build on the work
done by the critics of Robinson’s Retreat. Naturally these attempts will either
ignore Recollection altogether or find some other interpretive expedients for

340
 Cf. Panos Dimas, “Teachers of Virtue.” Ancient Philosophy 27 (2007), 1–23, on 20: “Every
human being has pre-natal knowledge of the truths in which virtue consists [it is not altogether
clear that the plural is appropriate here], all of which are forgotten at birth [although not perhaps
by the one who gives us birth]. As a gift from the gods, some human beings are more liable to
recollect, even without being exposed to the treatment the slave boy was. That is, they can see the
truth about what is beneficial to do [for whom? sophistic selfishness points in one direction, Plato
in the other] in given circumstances when exposed to them, with sufficient consistency for them
to be called good.” If this “beneficial” lacked a dative for the right reason, Dimas would have
remembered that only the Idea of the Good is sufficiently consistent to be called “good.”
341
 Gregory Vlastos, “Elenchus and Mathematics: A Turning-Point in Plato’s Philosophical Develop-
ment.” American Journal of Philology 109, no. 3 (Autumn 1988), 362–396.
458 Chapter 4

regarding it as superfluous or innocuous. They will also continue to ignore the

Doublet’s hypothetical context.
In any case, to the extent that K links virtue to the kind of hypothetical
“knowledge” that Plato will unmask as (merely) διάνοια, it is false, but when
the knowledge in question is not hypothesis-dependent—when it is rooted in
νοήσις and thus ascends to the Idea of the Good by dialectic before taking
the next step that begins with κατέβην—it is true. With K serving as the rul-
ing Hypothesis in the first stage of the argument,342 Socrates next sets about
to justify it in its second phase beginning with the (further) Hypothesis that
virtue is good,343 and it is doubtless the two different roles K plays in the two
different phases of the argument that has created much of the controversy
that clusters around Robinson’s Retreat. In fact, the positive argument that
establishes virtue as διδακτόν depends on many Hypotheses—this is what jus-
tifies the Hunt—and none of them is incorrigible. Among these K is merely
the funniest,344 not the most important, and since K’s truth cannot be proved
on the basis of διάνοια, part of what makes it the funniest Hypothesis is that
Plato uses it to demonstrate the circularity of the hypothetical method, thus
anticipating the inadequacy of the Shorter Way.
As already indicated, some prior awareness of διάνοια’s trans-mathemat-
ical circularity—like some prior practice in the Hunt for Hypotheses—will
prove useful when it comes to transcending the Shorter Way.345 But despite
the important role of K in both phases of the argument, the most important
Hypothesis is this passage is not the one that unmasks the Shorter but the one
that negates the Longer. The proof of K begins with the (further) Hypothesis
that virtue is good: in order to prove that virtue is knowledge (i.e., K), it is

342
 87c1–10 (Lamb modified): “Socrates: Or is not this evident to everyone [τοῦτό γε παντὶ δῆλον]
that a human being is taught nothing else than knowledge? Meno: I agree to that. Socrates: Then
if virtue is a kind of knowledge, clearly it must be taught [εἰ δέ γ᾽ ἐστὶν ἐπιστήμη τις ἡ ἀρετή]?
Meno: Certainly. Socrates: So you see we have made short work of this question—if virtue
belongs to one class of things it is teachable, and if to another, it is not. Meno: To be sure.” For
the division of the argument into two parts, see, for example, Wolfsdorf, Trials of Reason, 162.
343
 87c11–d4 (Lamb modified): Socrates: The next question, it would seem, that we have to consider
is whether virtue is knowledge, or other than knowledge [πότερόν ἐστιν ἐπιστήμη ἡ ἀρετὴ ἢ
ἀλλοῖον ἐπιστήμης]. Meno: I should say that is the next thing we have to consider. Socrates: What
then? Do we say that virtue [ἡ ἀρετή] is anything other than good [ἀγαθόν] and this hypothesis
remains for us [καὶ αὕτη ἡ ὑπόθεσις μένει ἡμῖν], that it is good [ἀγαθόν]?
344
 With the joke being at the expense of those who, following Aristotle, regard Socrates’ commit-
ment to K as outweighing the complexity of Plato’s testimony.
345
 Cf. the repeated use of “on the hypothesis” in Rachana Kamtekar, “Review Article: Socrates and
the Psychology of Virtue.” Classical Philology 107, no. 3 (July 2012), 256–270, on 270: “instead
of thinking, for example, that Plato at one point believes that actions can only be motivated by
beliefs about goodness and badness, but then realizes that this can’t account for akrasia and
animal behavior, we might consider instead that on the hypothesis that virtue is knowledge, all
action would have to be motivated by beliefs about good and bad, but that on the hypothesis that
the soul is partitioned like the city, each part of the soul would have to be capable of initiating
action on its own.”
 Theages and Meno: Socratic Paradoxes 459

necessary to claim that knowledge is good. Naturally Socrates knows per-

fectly well how to do this: if Happiness (configured as the passive version
of εὖ πράττειν) is the good for which we all aim, and if it is only through
knowledge that we can εὖ πράττειν in the active sense, it is only knowledge
(σοφία-φρόνησις-νοῦς) that secures (and perhaps constitutes)346 “the Good.”
For all the parallels between the First Protreptic and its Meno Doublet, the
most obvious difference between them is the absence of the Εὖ πράττειν
Fallacy in the latter. Although Happiness makes a brief appearance as “end”
in the Doublet (88c3), the absence of εὖ πράττειν makes another expedient
necessary, and given the context, that expedient must take the form of a
Hypothesis, the corrigibility of which must be commensurate with that of the
Fallacy. Here is the critical moment:

Meno: Certainly we do. Socrates: Then if there is something good apart and
separable from knowledge [εἰ μέν τί ἐστιν ἀγαθὸν καὶ ἄλλο χωριζόμενον
ἐπιστήμης], perhaps virtue [ἡ ἀρετή] is not a kind of knowledge [ἐπιστήμη τις];
but if there is nothing good that knowledge does not embrace [εἰ δὲ μηδέν ἐστιν
ἀγαθὸν ὃ οὐκ ἐπιστήμη περιέχει], suspecting [ὑποπτεύοντες] it to be some kind
of knowledge we would be suspecting [ὑποπτεύοιμεν] rightly.347

Like the pair εἰκάζοντες/εἰκάζοιμεν that appears at the end of the crucial
passage between the Bridge Too Far and the arrival of Anytus,348 Plato
deploys ὑποπτεύοντες/ ὑποπτεύοιμεν here to expedite our Hunt for Hypoth-
eses.349 Revealing the implicit corrigibility of all the Hypotheses we are
presently ὑποθέμενοι (87b3–4) with the even more suspicious ὑποπτεύοντες,
Plato allows Socrates to emphasize as hypothetical the most corrigible,
falsifiable, and indeed downright false Hypothesis of them all: that there
is no Good beyond knowledge. Embedded as a Hypothesis in a διάνοια-
based argument—for both ὑποθέμενοι and εἰκάζοντες anticipate the Divided
Line (R. 510e2–511b4)—the suspicion that there is no other ἀγαθόν that is

346
 The “perhaps” recalls the Santas Circle.
347
 87d4–8. For comment on ἄλλο χωριζόμενον ἐπιστήμης, see Maurizio Migliori, “Socrate e Gorgia
di fronte all’insenamento della virtù” in Michael Erler and Luc Brisson (eds.), Gorgias—Meno;
Selected Papers from the Seventh Symposium Platonicum, 162–168 (Sankt Augustin: Academia,
2007), 164.
348
 89d6–e9 (Lamb modified): “Socrates: For tell me now: if anything at all, not merely virtue, is
teachable, must there not be teachers and learners of it? Meno: I think so. Socrates: Then also con-
versely, if a thing had neither teachers nor learners, in surmising [εἰκάζοντες] that it could not be
taught we would be surmising [εἰκάζοιμεν] appropriately? Meno: That is so: but do you think there
are no teachers of virtue? Socrates: I must say I have often inquired whether there were any, but
for all my pains I cannot find one. And yet many have shared the search with me, and particularly
those persons whom I regard as best qualified for the task.” The arrival of Anytus (89e9–90a1)
follows Socrates’ reprise of Protagoras; cf. 90d2–92a6.
349
 Cf. Judson, “Hypotheses in Meno,” 32.
460 Chapter 4

χωριζόμενον ἐπιστήμης confronts the reader with the pre-Republic acme of

falsehood,350 and not—it should be noted—because opinion (δόξα) is equally
beneficial (97c4–5), that is, is every bit as ὠφέλιμον for us as knowledge is.
In bringing to an end our warm-up Hunt for Hypotheses, this one (87d6–8)
proves to be the most false of all, and it deserves that distinction because
Plato is on the verge of contradicting it by distinguishing the Idea of the Good
from φρόνησις in Republic 6 (R. 505b8–11). As for δόξα, whether or not it
succeeds in taking us to Larissa,351 it will have already have been left behind
by the end of Republic 5,352 and Socrates will not be travelling to Thessaly
(cf. Cri. 53e5–54a10). But in addition to the doubly false claim that if there
were any good apart from knowledge it would be right opinion, there is a
third level of falsehood to be considered, and this one is structural. The Lon-
ger Way that will eventually lead us away from δόξα, first to Beauty and then
to the Idea of the Good, requires us to recognize the intrinsic inadequacy of
the hypothetical method that is now being used in Meno. Nor, thanks to Rec-
ollection and θεία μοῖρα, is the reader entirely dependent on what is to come
in Republic for recognizing its inadequacy. With just the right amount of
Socratic provocation, the Platonic Synthesis will insure that any nature worth
guarding in the Acropolis Treasury will easily recall why the real ἀγαθόν is
something far more beautiful than the kind of knowledge that converts “Meno
the Thessalian” to Socratism.

350
 The argument of the Doublet is usefully reduced to two syllogisms—(1) “Tugend ist gut / Was
gut ist, ist Wissen // Tugend ist Wissen” (264) and (2) “Tugend ist Wissen / Wissen ist lehrbar //
Tugend is lehrbar (263; cf. 266)—in Ernst Heitsch, “Platos hypothetisches Verfahren im Menon.”
Hermes 105, no. 3 (1977), 257–268; cf. Heitsch’s discussion of the inductive argument that is used
to establish “was gut is, ist Wissen,” and then to overthrow it (265–268). See also Ernst Heitsch,
Erkenntnis und Lebensführung: eine Platonische Aporie (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1994), 11–13.
Building on Heitsch and even more useful is Norbert Blössner, “The Unity of Plato’s Meno.”
Philologus 155, no. 1 (2011), 39–68, on 53–57, climaxing with: “The wrongness of premise B2
(‘Whatever is good, is knowledge’) implies that Socrates was wrong when he tried to prove this
premiss in 87e5–89a5 [note that both Blössner and Heitsch think that Socrates is wrong because
δόξα is equally “good,” not because the Idea of the Good alone is]. This passage, then, belongs to
a type that is not so rare in Plato’s dialogues: passages where Socrates makes mistakes which are
later detected as mistakes by Plato’s characters (or can be detected as mistakes by the reader).”
351
 Cf. Gail Fine, “Knowledge and True Belief in the Meno.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy
27 (2004), 41–81, on 44: “Since the Meno allows knowledge and belief about at least some of
the same things, it is incompatible with this version of the Two Worlds Theory [sc. ‘there are no
beliefs about forms, and there is no knowledge of sensibles’]. Indeed, if Plato is speaking literarly
in saying that only the traveller can know the way to Larissa (rather than providing an analogy to
illustrate the, or a, difference between knowledge and mere true belief), he explicitly countenances
knowledge of sensible particulars.” Not surprisingly, her approach is informed (see 44n6) by her
earlier “Knowledge and Belief in Republic 5.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 60 (1978),
121–139, an important landmark in the Owenite attack on Platonism thanks to its last word: “The
price of ascribing to Plato a valid argument whose premises are noncontroversial is the loss of the
two worlds theory. It is a price I am quite willing to pay.”
352
 In dialogue with Fine throughout (see previous note) is Whitney Schwab, “Explanation in the
Epistemology of the Meno.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 48 (2015), 1–36; consider
especially 8n14: “Intense debate surrounds the question whether Socrates takes ἐπιστήμη to be a
privileged kind of δόξα.”
 Chapter 5

Before and After Cleitophon

§16. LOOKING FORWARD: ANSWERING

CLEITOPHON’S QUESTION (408E1–2)

By tracing back to Schleiermacher the theory that Republic 1 was origi-

nally an independent Thrasymachus,1 Friedländer points to a curious sym-
metry: by denying the authenticity of Cleitophon,2 the same scholar who
deprived Plato’s Republic of one independent “Introduction” would give
it another. Although Republic 1 introduces the rest of the dialogue, it is
better understood as a fully integrated part of the work,3 and if it must be
regarded as an “Introduction,” it is best understood as one of three with
which Plato equipped his masterpiece. As indicated in §8, Friedländer
identified the first by emphasizing the connections between Republic 1
and Gorgias.4
By placing Cleitophon in the Eighth Tetralogy followed by Republic,
Timaeus, and Critias, Thrasyllus recognized what has long seemed so obvious

1
 See Friedländer, Plato 2, 305–6n1. I cite Friedländer primarily for the reader’s convenience: for
an even more valuable note, covering the same material with more insight, see Luigi Stefanini,
Platone, second edition, two volumes (Padua: A. Milani, 1949), 1.203–206n3.
2
 See Schleiermacher, Über die Philosophie Platons, 335–336.
3
 On Kahn, “Proleptic Composition in the Republic,” see Plato the Teacher, 90–91.
4
 Friedländer is a proponent of an independent Thrasymachus; in addition to Plato 2, 50–66, see also
244: “In the Gorgias [thus begins the first sentence in the chapter devoted to that dialogue], Plato
returns to the Thrasymachus, raising both form and content of the earlier work to a new creative
level.”

461
462 Chapter 5

to me:5 that Socrates replies to Cleitophon in Republic. While Plato’s Thra-

symachus—as Ferdinand Dümmler (1859–1896) began calling Republic 1 in
18956—only acquired an independent existence in the heyday of the Order
of Composition paradigm, Cleitophon has been fully separate from Republic
from the beginning, whether as Plato’s work or someone else’s. Only if we
admit that Plato’s Republic needed some kind of separable Introduction can
we make sense of the curious fact that it lost one and gained another at the
same time, and my ongoing claim is that an embattled Cleitophon, not least
of all because it could never be anything other than separate, does that job far
better than an imaginary Thrasymachus.
If Cleitophon ever reenters the canon as a genuine Platonic dialogue,
the credit will go to the late Simon Slings (1945–2004) whose scholarship
and erudition it is easier to praise than replicate.7 In addition to his work on
Cleitophon,8 Slings produced a new edition of Republic before his untimely
death,9 and his interest in these two dialogues is one of several examples
where scholarly interest supports Reading Order.10 In the course of his more
than two hundred-page “Introduction” to Cleitophon, he succinctly described
another connection between it and the alleged Thrasymachus:

Before we can proceed to reconstruct it ourselves [sc. ‘the author’s intention in

the light of the Republic’], a question must be raised to which the contemporary
reader knew the answer whereas we do not: was Republic 1 ever published as
a separate dialogue? If it was, the Clitophon contains a clear message: when
Socratic literature tries to go beyond mere protreptic, it achieves nothing, wit-
ness the ‘Thrasymachus’ (or whatever name may be given to Republic 1 as an
isolated dialogue). This hypothesis, which automatically dates the Clitophon

5
 Cf. Christopher Rowe, “What Might We Learn from the Clitophon about the Nature of the Acad-
emy?” in Klaus Döring, Michael Erler, and Stefan Schorn (eds.), Pseudoplatonica: Akten des Kon-
gresses zu den Pseudoplatonica vom 6.-9. Juli 2003 in Bamberg, 213–224 (Stuttgart : Franz Steiner,
2005), 214: “Before Slings’s 1999 [on which more below], I had always thought the Clitophon to be
obviously non-Platonic (and still think it so); yet here was someone who, after living with the little
piece—not much more than four Stephanus pages in length—for twenty years, had decided that it
could declared not merely Platonic, but actually Plato’s.” Cf. S. R. Slings, Plato, Clitophon; Edited
with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1999); before announcing his verdict (“although not without hesitation, I accept the Clitophon as
a genuine work of Plato” on 233–234), Slings himself refers to “the opinion of someone who has
lived with this little work on and off for the past thirty years” (233).
6
 F. Dümmler, Zur Komposition des platonischen Staates (Basel: Reinhardt & Sohn, 1895).
7
 Cf. Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 234n409.
8
 His doctoral dissertation was published as S. R. Slings, A Commentary on the Platonic Clitophon
(Amsterdam: Academische Pers, 1981). Mention should also be made of H. Kesters, “De authen-
ticiteit van den Kleitophoon.” Philologische Studien 6, no. 6 (1934–1935), 161–189; for a tribute,
see Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 98.
9
 Rowe, “What Might We Learn,” 213n2: “His monument will surely be his fine new edition of the
Republic, published by Oxford University Press in 2003 to replace Burnet’s of a century before; it
is no mean task to have improved on Burnet, which he undoubtedly has.”
10
 Cf. Denyer on Prt. and Alc., Rowe on Smp. and Ly., Sprague on Euthd., La., and Chrm., Hackforth
on Phdr. and Phlb., and (less tenuously than the last example) Sedley on Cra. and Tht.
 Before and After Cleitophon 463

between the publication of Republic 1 and that of Republic 2–10, was first
put forward by H. Oldenberg [1875; subsequent citations will be deleted] and
adopted among others by [Rudolf] Kunert, [G. M. A.] Grube, Friedländer, Julia
Annas and, with some reservations, [Konrad] Gaiser.11

Although Slings himself short-circuits this suggestion with an unusually

vehement rejection of the possibility that Plato could have divided his
Republic into books,12 his attention to what I will call “(the) Thrasymachus-
Response (Theory)” is well placed, and will guide my way forward.
Slings quotes the sentence of Hermann Oldenberg’s Questions Concerning
the Sacred Things of the Arval Brethren that got this ball rolling in Latin,13 but
does not mention that it is the last of four “controversial opinions” with which
he ends this work, functioning there as the philological equivalent, unproven
but stimulating, of Fermat’s Last Theorem.14 Although Wilamowitz preferred
to read Cleitophon as a careless reply to Republic as a whole,15 his student
Rudolf Kunert endorsed Oldenberg’s “theorem” in his doctoral dissertation,16
albeit with due deference. But it is with Friedländer, another of Wilamowitz’s
students,17 that it is best to begin, particularly because he regards the existence
of Cleitophon—which like Wilamowitz and Kunert he regards as spuri-
ous—as evidence “that the first book of the Republic originally was a separate
dialogue.”18 Here is his statement of the Thrasymachus-Response Theory:

Thus, the little dialogue [sc. Clt.] presupposes the first book of the Republic—
and this applies to the very details of the discussion. Yet the Clitophon rules
out the other books of the Republic on this ground: the reason for Kleitophon’s
taking sides against Socrates is that the latter is conversant only with ‘protreptic’
and has nothing positive to teach.19

11
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 204–205.
12
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 207: “it is certain that Plato himself did not divide the Republic into
books.”
13
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 204n370.
14
 H. Oldenberg, De sacris fratrum Arvalium quaestiones (Berlin, 1875), 53: “I judge Plato to have
published the first book of Republic separately, which having been published—and before the other
books appeared—the pseudo-Platonic Cleitophon was written.”
15
 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Platon, two volumes, second edition (Berlin: Weidmann,
1920), 1.490–91n5: “The author has not made the effort to read Republic through, for what inter-
ests him is only practical morality [die praktische Moral].”
16
 Rudolfus Kunert, “Quae inter Clitophontem dialogum et Platonis Rempublicam intercedat neces-
situdo” (Greifswald, 1881), 20: “It has therefore been demonstrated that Cleitophon was written
once the first book of Republic had been published, then its remaining books appeared; whether all
or only part of them, we will consider below.”
17
 See William Musgrave Calder III, “The Credo of a New Generation: Paul Friedländer to Ulrich von
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.” Antike und Abendland 26 (1980), 90–102.
18
 Friedländer, Plato 2, 50: “Perhaps there is even external evidence for this view—namely the
strange little dialogue called Clitophon.”
19
 Friedländer, Plato 2, 50–51.
464 Chapter 5

From the first (409c1–3;20 cf. R. 336c6–d4) and third definitions of justice
(410a7–b1),21 to the ongoing theme of justice itself (beginning at 407b1–8), it
is difficult to see how Plato could have made the connection between Cleito-
phon and Republic 1 more obvious, quite apart from Thrasymachus (406a3
and 410c7), Lysias (406a2, 406a6, and 410e4), and Cleitophon himself (R.
328b7–8 and R. 340a3–b8). And as Wilamowitz’s “careless reader” theory
indicates,22 it is little less obvious that whatever valid self-criticism there may
be in Cleitophon with respect to an independent Thrasymachus—or indeed to
“the Socrates of early dialogues such as the Gorgias, the Laches, etc.”23—it
is not germane to the rest of Republic.24 It is therefore easy to see why Grube,
who unlike Friedländer defends Plato’s authorship,25 nevertheless wrote:
“We are thus led to a first conclusion, that the Cleitophon cannot have been
written later than the bulk of the Republic.”26 But perhaps the most delicious
moment in Grube’s groundbreaking paper—for he was the first to combine
the Thrasymachus-Response Theory with an authentic Cleitophon—is his
negative response to both of the historical objections made in the following
passage:

20
 All otherwise unidentified references in this chapter are to Cleitophon; for this choice of spell-
ing—Clitophon and Kleitophon have better claims—see Altman, “Reading Order and Authentic-
ity,” 1n2.
21
 For analysis based on the dialogue’s three definitions of justice, see Slings, Plato, Clitophon, II.
5. 1–3 (180–209). The second definition (“Friendship in cities,” 185–193) will receive attention
in §17.
22
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 207–208: “it is out of the question that the second half of the Clitophon is
meant as an attack on the Republic, unless one resorts with Wilamowitz to the slightly absurd view
that ‘der Verfasser hat sich die Mühe nicht gemacht, den Staat durchzulesen’ (Platon, 1.386n1 [he
is using a later edition; this passage is translated above]) we must apparently suppose that he wrote
for a public as lazy as himself. As I have stressed repeatedly, our author understands quite well
what Plato’s dialogues are all about; he also knows Plato’s conception of justice (section II. 4. 1)
and how could he have acquired that knowledge unless it was (and this is the minimum require-
ment) by reading the Republic, and the Gorgias besides?” Cf. Rowe, “What Might We Learn,” 223:
“the more reference there turns out to be in Clitophon to the argument of the Republic as a whole
(i.e. outside the aporetic Book I), the harder, I take it, it will be to sustain Slings’s thesis about the
author’s purpose, and so also his identity.”
23
 G. M. A. Grube, “The Cleitophon of Plato.” Classical Philology 26, no. 3 (July 1931), 302–308,
on 303. Cf. 307 (a claim which will receive further attention in §17): “To sum up: The Cleitophon
expresses a criticism of Socrates as he appears in the early dialogues of Plato which is not unde-
served, and expresses a dissatisfaction which, in the nature of things, Plato himself must at one
time have felt.”
24
 Grube, “Cleitophon of Plato,” 303: “In the later books of the Republic, on the other hand, Socrates
does give practical guidance; the development of the theory of ideas, the whole scheme of educa-
tion, would give Cleitophon exactly the kind of help he is asking for . . . So that, whoever the
author, Cleitophon’s objections are nothing short of ludicrous if formulated after the appearance
of the whole Republic.” In the ellipsis and after the quoted passage, Grube refers to Tht. “and later
works.”
25
 Cf. Friedländer, Plato 2, 306n2.
26
 Grube, “Cleitophon of Plato,” 304.
 Before and After Cleitophon 465

Ptolemaeus was far from the mark when he suggested that Cleitophon’s tirade
did not deserve an answer, but, on the other hand, I do not agree with Grote
that the case is so well put that Plato himself could not have finished the
Cleitophon.27

Grube is right on both counts: Cleitophon deserves an answer and Plato was
perfectly capable of giving it one: he “finished” it in Republic.
But before setting about to substantiate that claim in the rest of this section,
it is worth considering what makes the Thrasymachus-Response Theory valu-
able quite apart from both Grube’s use of Order of Composition to explain
how Plato could have written Cleitophon, and Friedländer’s (actually Olden-
berg’s) problematic hypothesis of an anti-Platonic writer to explain why he
didn’t: it establishes a connection between the hypothesis passage in Meno
(see §15) and the Shorter Way that begins in Republic 2. Socrates turns to the
hypothetical method because Meno insists on pursuing the inquiry regard-
ing the acquisition of virtue before knowing what virtue is (Men. 86d3–e1);
this recreates the situation at the end of Thrasymachus (R. 354b4–6). After
all, a ROPD-based defense of an authentic Cleitophon must not only show
how it introduces Republic, but how it mediates between Meno and Plato’s
masterpiece.
Consider Grube’s brilliant response to George Grote, who regarded the
speech of Cleitophon as unanswerable: “let us imagine that the Republic
broke off after the speeches of Glaucon and Adeimantus in the second
book . . . would they too not have seemed unanswerable?”28 Thanks to the
structural parallel between the unanswered Cleitophon and the speeches of
Glaucon and Adeimantus (the latter ending at R. 367e4), the obvious connec-
tion between Cleitophon and Republic 1—which ends at the same point that
Meno has reached before Socrates resorts to the hypothetical method—helps
us to understand what he does next (R. 368c8–370b7): to answer the broth-
ers, Socrates first introduces the City as a diagram (beginning with γράμματα
at R. 368d2–5) or Image,29 after justifying its relevance to his answer with
one Hypothesis (R. 368e2–3) before building the City itself on another (R.
369e3–370b7).30

27
 Grube, “Cleitophon of Plato,” 303.
28
 Grube, “Cleitophon of Plato,” 303.
29
 See Plato the Teacher, 137–139 and 123n23. Cf. Rachana Kamtekar, Plato’s Moral Psychology:
Intellectualism, the Divided Soul, and the Desire for the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017), 20: “My proposal is that the city in the Republic functions as would a diagram in a math-
ematical hypothesis.”
30
 See Plato the Teacher, 122–123 and 113.
466 Chapter 5

E. Seymour Thompson was the first (1901) to highlight the connection

between Meno and Cleitophon,31 and thus to prepare for the ROPD sequence
Meno-Cleitophon-Republic. This sequence indicates the second great prob-
lem with Benson’s approach: it configures Meno as one of Plato’s three
responses to “Clitophon’s Challenge” rather than reserving that role for
Republic alone, and more specifically for its Longer Way, which unlike the
Shorter, effectively meets that challenge.32 It is only by recognizing the theo-
retical inadequacy of the Shorter Way that we can understand why the Longer
alone, and not Meno—which merely illustrates that inadequacy on a practical
level—answers “Clitophon’s Challenge.”
And this brings us to the third problem with Benson’s approach, illustrated
by the way he translates ἀρετή in the last sentence of Cleitophon (410e5–8).
He quotes this sentence twice, the first time on his study’s first page.

“For I will say this, Socrates [naturally Cleitophon is the speaker], that while
you’re worth the world to someone who hasn’t yet been converted to the pur-
suit of virtue [literally ‘to the person who has not been converted’; ‘the pursuit
of virtue’ is (at best) implied], to someone who’s already been converted you
rather get in the way of his attaining happiness by reaching the goal of virtue
[ἀρετή].”33

Although full discussion of the meaning, significance, and translation of this

sentence will be reserved for §17, it is noteworthy, problematic, and revealing

31
 Thompson, Meno of Plato, 57–58 (commenting on Meno 70a1–2, ἆρα διδακτὸν ἡ ἀρετή): “Cp.
also Clitophon 407b [Thompson has just cited passages from Prt. and Euthyd.; see below]. (This
dialogue, if genuine, as it probably is, must be regarded as an introduction to the Republic [note
that this is very different from the Thrasymachus-Response Theory], left for some reason unfin-
ished [for this claim, however, Thompson cannot be praised]. As the Meno is also in a manner
introductory to the Republic [but he’s back on track here], correspondencies between the Clitophon
and the Meno are worth noting.) In Clit. l.c. [407b3–7] we read τῶν δ’ ὑέων ἀμελεῖτε, καὶ οὔτε
διδασκάλους αὐτοῖς εὑρίσκετε τῆς δικαιοσύνης [as noted earlier, this is the first mention of justice
in the dialogue], εἴπερ μαθητόν· εἰ δὲ μελετητόν τε καὶ ἀσκητόν [on 58, on the word ἀσκητόν,
Thompson notes: ‘The word appears to occur in this sense only here and in Clit. l.c.’], οἵτινες
[on my reading, this is self-referential, with the apparently unfinished Cleitophon itself being an
‘exercise’ in justice] ἐξασκήσουσι καὶ ἐκμελετήσουσιν ἱκανῶς.” The fact that Thompson cites
Prt. 361a–b, Euthd. 282b–c (where Cleinias spares Socrates the trouble of proving that σοφία is
διδακτόν), and Clt. in this note makes sense not only because the latter immediately follows Men.
in the ROPD, but because of the six-dialogue series that joins Men. to Euthd. (see §5), and the RPT
that places the third performance of Prt. between Meno and Clt. (see §11). There will be more on
this last point in the final section.
32
 The first problem (see §15) being Benson’s (related) attempt to seamlessly connect the hypothetical
method to dialectic by collapsing the difference between the first two parts of the Divided Line, and
thus to bridge the gulf that separates the Shorter Way—dependent as it is on Images and Hypoth-
eses—from the Longer, which ascends, by dialectic, to the un-hypothetical precisely by treating
Hypotheses as τῷ ὄντι ὑποθέσεις (R. 511b4).
33
 Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 1; the non-textual “the pursuit of virtue” is in Gonzalez’s transla-
tion (Cooper and Hutchinson, Plato, Complete Works, 970).
 Before and After Cleitophon 467

that the second time Benson quotes it, he does so with supplementary brack-
ets as follows:

We cannot help feel some sympathy to Clitophon’s complaint that while

Socrates is “worth the world to someone who hasn’t yet been converted to the
pursuit of {robust virtue-knowledge}, to someone who’s already been converted
{he} rather get{s} in the way of his attaining happiness by reaching the goal of
{virtue-knowledge}” (Clitophon 410e5–8). Perhaps, Plato has a better response
to offer elsewhere.34

By embellishing the first (and non-existent) “virtue” as “robust virtue-knowl-

edge,” Benson is revisiting the major claim of chapter 1 (“Learning from
Others in the Elenctic Dialogues”) that ends with this passage: in contrast
with the de novo inquiry embodied in the hypothetical method—an inquiry
that Benson claims will yield “robust virtue-knowledge” through Dialectic—
“the elenctic dialogues” cannot answer or rather have thus far failed to answer
“Clitophon’s Challenge.”35
The real problem here, then—and the third by my count—arises when
Benson construes Cleitophon’s actual use of ἀρετή at 410e7 as “virtue-
knowledge,” a choice that begs the question regarding the difference between
the Longer Way of Republic 6–7 and “the elenctic dialogues.”36 More spe-
cifically, “virtue-knowledge” begs the question of K’s status by assuming
that virtue simply is virtue-knowledge, and it is here that the priority of
Meno to Cleitophon can be justified: having just treated K as hypothetical in
Meno—and it is worth repeating that Benson remains agnostic on Robinson’s
Retreat37—his “translation” of “virtue” as “virtue-knowledge” presupposes
K’s ongoing authority, an authority that simultaneously diminishes the dif-
ference between Socratism and what is about to be revealed in Republic and
also ignores the treatment of K in Meno.
As will become clearer in the following section, the (Santas-)circularity
of “virtue-knowledge”—that is, the insoluble problem of what “good” virtue
qua (the only) good (cf. Euthd. and Men.) is the knowledge of38—will be
made obvious once again in Cleitophon (409e10–410a6). And while there is
some evidence that Cleitophon himself may be seeking “virtue-knowledge”

34
 Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 47.
35
 See Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 47, beginning with: “We would do well, then, to take Clito-
phon’s challenge seriously.”
36
 Note the lingering if negative influence here of the distinction between “knowledgeC” and “knowl-
edgeE” (i.e., “elenctic knowledge” as opposed to “what we know with certainty”) in Gregory
Vlastos, “Socrates’ Disavowal of Knowledge.” The Philosophical Quarterly 35, no. 138 (January
1985), 1–31, on 18. Cf. Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 14–17n55.
37
 See Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge, 158–159.
38
 For the Santas Circle, see §2.
468 Chapter 5

(408e2–3), the crucial distinction Plato causes him to make (for our benefit)
between that which is τεχνή-taught (409a7–b6, culminating with δίδαγμα)
and the product, result, or action of justice (its ἔργον at 409b6) is what pre-
pares us to make our own personal choice to return to the Cave once having
exited it.39 We do this only after we realize that the only knowledge that could
be the good is knowledge of the Good (R. 505b8–11), and that is why virtue
(or better yet Justice) is not “virtue-knowledge” or even knowledge simple-
ment: it is better understood as activity (qua ἔργον) in accordance with noetic
knowledge of the Idea of the Good.40

But when Cleitophon asks what exactly it is that is the ergon (‘product,’ ‘out-
come’) of justice, the first set of substantive answers turns out to consist of
the ones which Thrasymachus rules out at Republic 336c-d [i.e., τὸ δέον, τὸ
ὠφέλιμον, τὸ λυσιτελοῦν, τὸ κερδαλέον, and τὸ συμφέρον], and which Socrates
plays at accepting; the Cleitophon now gives the kind of argument that Thra-
symachus might have used, and thus becomes a kind of commentary on the
Republic.41

Although it cannot simply be a matter of chance, it is certainly a stroke of

good fortune (εὐτυχία) that Christopher Rowe should be the most dedicated
post-Slings critic of an authentic Cleitophon.42 Rowe reads the dialogue in
the German manner initiated by Schleiermacher,43 and carried forward by
Wilamowitz:44 it is an attack on Plato by (naturally) someone other than
Plato himself, or, as Rowe puts it: “as a parodic commentary on the Republic
written by some unidentifiable member of the Academy.”45 And likewise for-
tunate is the fact that the passage just quoted hoists Rowe on his own petard.

39
 Cf. Vasiliou, Aiming at Virtue, 38: “Cleitophon’s complaint is not that Socrates says anything
contradictory; it is simply frustrating for the purpose of serving as a guide to action.” So also 213:
“But Cleitophon’s puzzle still remains: which actions are virtuous/just? An answer to that is sup-
plied by the middle books of the Republic.”
40
 See Plato the Teacher, 100, 204, and 236 for Justice as “the maxim of the action” generalized in
the Allegory of the Cave.
41
 Christopher Rowe, “Cleitophon and Minos” in Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield (eds.),
in association with Harrison and Lane, The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political
Thought, 303–309, on 305. This piece was written before Rowe had a chance to read Slings,
Plato, Clitophon (see Rowe, “What We May Learn,” 213n7) but in between the two is a third:
Christopher Rowe, “Plato and Socrates.” Phronesis 45, no. 2 (May 2000), 159–173; 159–163 is
a brief but valuable review of Slings, part of which is recycled as an appendix to “What We May
Learn” (222–224).
42
 For an indication of the international rehabilitation of Clt., see the first Portuguese translation in
José Colen, “O Clitofonte de Platão. São os Filósofos inúteis no Ensino da Justiça? Estudo e Tra-
ducão.” Revista da Faculdade de Letras—Série de Filosofia 29 (2012), 17–29.
43
 Rowe, “Plato and Socrates,” 162.
44
 Rowe, “Plato and Socrates,” 162–163; although softened, one can still find a trace of der Verfasser
hat sich die Mühe nicht gemacht, den Staat durchzulesen, or at least to have read it well.
45
 Rowe, “What Might We Learn,” 219.
 Before and After Cleitophon 469

Here Rowe is claiming that since “the kind of argument that Thrasymachus
might have used”46 is placed in the mouth of an unnamed contemporary of
Socrates by Cleitophon (409c1–3),47 it therefore reflects the notion that “the
Cleitophon now gives” it. To put it another way, by attributing everything
that is said in the dialogue not to its first- or second-order characters, but to
what he calls “the Cleitophon,” Rowe is guilty of misreading Cleitophon in
the same way that his “unidentifiable member of the Academy” has misread
Republic. For Rowe, the fact that Cleitophon—the character, not the dia-
logue—attributes “to Socrates the idea of justice as doing good to friends
and harm to enemies”48 (this is the third definition of justice as analyzed by
Slings) proves the following:

Everything in the Republic (and potentially everything in the dialogues as a

whole) becomes treated—for literary purposes—as if it were Socrates talking.
Within the [‘non-Platonic’] author’s literary framework, as within the Platonic
framework it mimics, there can be no reference to Plato, only to Socrates—or
other characters; but evidently the author—whoever he is—does not care as
much as we modern readers have learned (at least more recently) to do about
who, actually, is speaking at any point in the dialogue, and simply treats
the Republic as if it were a series of proposals made by Socrates (i.e. Plato)
himself.49

Although Rowe’s reading here borders on the self-referential if not the

bizarre, he is pointing to a crucial passage: Cleitophon’s (initial) attribution
of Polemarchus’ definition of justice from Republic 1 to Socrates, that is, that
τὸ ἔργον (410a6) of δικαιοσύνη is “to harm [βλάπτειν] enemies and to treat
well [εὖ ποιεῖν] friends” (410a8–b1).

46
 See Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 182, on the order of R. 336d1–2 in comparison with 409c2–3: “The
first three terms occur, in identical order [sc. τὸ δέον, τὸ ὠφέλιμον, and τὸ λυσιτελοῦν], in the
Clitophon; τὸ κερδαλέον is absent, and τὸ συμφέρον opens the series instead of closing it.”
47
 Rowe, “What We May Learn,” offers two “features” that indicate the dialogue’s inauthenticity, and
the second will be considered in the text below. The first, which for Rowe proves that the author’s
is “the kind of external reading of the dialogues I have described” (220), depends on Cleitophon’s
reference to “your contemporaries (/people your age)” at 408c6–7, on which he comments (219):
“By and large, looked at from within the dialogues [sc. an ‘internal’ as opposed to what Rowe calls
‘external reading’], Socrates’ interlocutors are not for the most part his ἡλικιῶται [i.e., those of his
own age].” Rowe’s take on what “the author” must mean by this must be seen to be believed, but
his “internal” point is refuted not only by Crito (in Euthd.) and Chaerephon (in Chrm.-Grg.) but
more importantly by those twin darlings of the KGB-Socratist reading of Chrm. and La.: Nicias
and Critias. It is particularly easy to imagine the latter offering Cleitophon some of the cleverest
answers (cf. 408d2–6).
48
 Rowe, “What We May Learn,” 219 (emphasis in original).
49
 Rowe, “What We May Learn,” 220. Note the valuable admission that it is only recently that “we
modern readers” have begun attending to the Play of Character and the dialogue-form; thanks to
the influence of the students of Strauss, Victor Gourevitch in particular, I was doing so from the
start, hence my initial reservations about Vlastos.
470 Chapter 5

In response, consider first the question of Reading Order. If Cleitophon

precedes Republic,50 we have not yet encountered the dialogue between
Socrates and Polemarchus, and since the dialogues dealing with Socrates’
trial, refusal to escape, and death are even farther removed from our academic
present, we have not read Crito.51 What we have read, and read recently, is
the Fourth Platonic Paradox in Gorgias (PP-4). There Socrates claims that if
we really want to harm anyone (κακῶς ποιεῖν at Grg. 480e6 being the oppo-
site of εὖ ποιεῖν at Clt. 410b1), “whether an enemy or whosoever else” (Grg.
480b1), the best thing we can do is to prevent him from being punished for
his injustice (Grg. 480e5–481a2). More distantly and pervasively, there is
the culture-wide acceptance of “to harm enemies and to benefit friends” to be
considered,52 upheld consistently, at least for the most part, in Xenophon.53
But there is no need to look so far forward or back, for Socrates has never
said before and will never say again what Cleitophon tells us he must have
said next:

Cleitophon: That’s why at long last, Socrates, I asked you the questions your-
self, and you told me that it was a typical property of justice to harm enemies
and benefit friends. Later, however [ὕστερον δέ], it turned out that the just man
[ὁ δίκαιος] never harms anyone [this, of course, we will hear him say, but not
what follows:], as all he does to everybody is to their benefit [πάντα γὰρ ἐπ᾽
ὠφελίᾳ πάντας δρᾶν].54

It is characteristic of the teacher I love that the same text that led Schlei-
ermacher to expunge his Cleitophon proves a moment later (ὕστερον δέ) that

50
 For discussion of the alternative, see Plato the Teacher, 32n98.
51
 Cf. Rowe, “What We May Learn,” 220 (emphases in original): “I am unable to think of any reason
why Plato should have made Socrates the author, in the Clitophon, of a view which he is evidently
at pains to say is not Socrates,’ not only in Republic, but in Crito and elsewhere [the attached note
cites no others]. Thus what Slings himself says has been the main reason for athetizing the Cli-
tophon since Schleiermacher [‘beginning with Schleiermacher’ would be more accurate]—that it
would have Plato attacking Socrates (and himself)—will in a way [Rowe takes some pains here to
distance himself from what I called ‘the German manner’ even while confirming his proximity to
it] continue to be the chief reason for ‘athetizing’ the piece; only not for the general reason (easily
countered by Slings) that Plato is incapable of attacking himself, or Socrates (as Parmenides shows
[see Grube, “Cleitophon of Plato,” 303 and 308]), but because he could not, surely, have attacked
himself in this way.”
52
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 193: “There can be no reasonable doubt that Plato was the first Greek
writer to attack the traditional Greek idea that it is right and just to benefit one’s friends and harm
one’s enemies. Even in the fourth century this maxim is a solidly embedded rule of conduct.”
53
 See Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 194: “At least two Socratics felt no compunction in adopting this rule
of life: the anonymous author of the dialogue of which is an extract, and Xenophon, who states
this rule of life quite often [citations in n351] although he also says of Socrates δίκαιος δὲ ὥστε
βλάπτειν μὲν μηδὲ μικρὸν μηδένα, ὠφελεῖν δὲ τὰ μέγιστα τοὺς χρωμένους αὐτῷ [‘so just that he
did no injury, however small, to any man, but conferred the greatest benefits on all who dealt with
him’ (E. C. Marchant translation)] (Mem. 4.8.11).”
54
 410a7–b3 (S. R. Slings translation).
 Before and After Cleitophon 471

only Plato could have written it, for who else could have made the ἔργον of
ὁ δίκαιος: “to do all things for the benefit [ὠφελία] of all?”55 Not only is the
presence of this other-benefitting ὠφελία crucial in the dialogue’s third defi-
nition, so too is the presence of τὸ ὠφέλιμον in the first: having just encoun-
tered it in the company of τὸ συμφέρον and τὸ λυσιτελοῦν (409c2–3), we
naturally assume—in accordance with the paradigmatic Socratist protreptic
(Euthd. 280b5–c1 and Men. 87e5–88a4), corresponding here to what came
before ὕστερον δέ—that it means “beneficial for us,” not beneficial for every-
one else in all that we do. Indeed the most radical Socratists must claim that
what I will call “the un-Ethical Dative” also applies to the Idea of the Good
(ὠφέλιμα at R. 505a5).56 Hence the beauty of Rowe’s opposition to Slings:
when Cleitophon describes Socrates’ speeches as both “most protreptic and
most beneficial [ὠφελιμώτατοι]” (408c2–3), he clearly did not mean that they
were most beneficial to Socrates but to his auditors (cf. Xenophon, Memora-
bilia, 4.8.11)57 and thus to all the rest of us.
Since I am embarked on this book’s final chapter, it may be beneficial to
review the reasons why this passage is crucial to the interpretive architecture
that places Ascent to the Good after Ascent to the Beautiful. In Alcibiades
Major, Socrates extracts from Alcibiades the admission that the just is τὸ
συμφέρον (Alc. 113d1–116e1); since incurring wounds and death for the ben-
efit of others is unquestionably καλόν but by no means obviously “good”58 —
especially in the sense of good or advantageous for me—he can only do this
by means of the GB Equation and the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy (Alc. 116b2–5).
Although the transcendent Idea of Beauty comes into sight in Symposium,

55
 I take this sublime phrase to contain the truth of the crucial phrase εὖ πράττειν: Plato has defined
what it means “to do well,” and he exhorts us to do it (εὖ πράττωμεν at R. 621d2–3) in perfect
disregard for whether by doing so we will “fare well.”
56
 See Penner, “The Good, Advantage, Happiness,” 118, and Rowe, “The Form of the Good and the
Good,” 143–144: “But beyond all of this intertextuality [he has just cited (predictable) passages
from Prt., Chrm., Euthyd., and Grg.], what stands out from the exchange is the way that the good—
and so, by implication, the form of the good—is treated as something practicable and achievable;
that is, as something practicable and achievable within a human life. Or, to put it more precisely,
the good (the form of the good) is here being treated as if it were virtually identical with the human
good. (If we ask how this can be, the simple answer is that the pre-Republic dialogues show us at
least one way: each of us needs to know what is good for himself or herself [my emphasis], which
will bear some sort of generic relationship to what is good for each of the rest of us.” Cf. Stemmer,
“Grundriss,” 567–569.
57
 Cf. χρήσιμα (linked with ὠφέλιμα at R. 505a4) with Xenophon’s ὠφελεῖν δὲ τὰ μέγιστα τοὺς
χρωμένους αὐτῷ (translated above).
58
 Cf. Rowe, Plato and the Art, 73: “don’t Greek terms like kalon and aischron (‘fine’, ‘noble’, ‘beau-
tiful’; ‘shameful’, ‘ignoble’, ‘ugly’), which are scattered all over Plato’s text, bring in a specifically
moral value and the lack of it? So they may do, I respond, in ordinary language contexts; but Plato
himself wants to reduce the ‘fine and noble,’ or the ‘fine-and-good’ (kalon te kai agathon), to the
good.” Naturally by the latter he means what he writes, as a Pennerite, at 70n16: “The good and
bad things in question are clearly meant to be understood as things good or bad for us, i.e. for the
agent.”
472 Chapter 5

the GB Equation, the Eudaemonist Shortcut (Smp. 204e1–7), and the first
“assertion” of TEA in the dialogues (note δοκεῖ at Smp. 205a2–4) beckon,
and always ready to hand in the dialogues that follow is the further equation
of the Good and τὸ ὠφέλιμον, with the latter implicitly completed by the un-
Ethical Dative. As Rachel Barney has shown,59 Beauty takes no dative; that’s
why we ascend to it first, alone by itself and eternal (Smp. 211b1–2). But once
equated with “the beneficial,” the Good—which could be nothing more than
the GoodE—invites us to follow the path of Penner and Rowe. In this study
I have tried to show that Plato is always one step ahead of them because the
GoodT is his actual goal for us. Albeit carefully prepared in Cleitophon, he
will take the most important step toward that τέλος (cf. Smp. 205a3) with
κατέβην, the first word of his Republic, understood as the ἔργον of justice.
“The Guardians’ return to the Cave has always been recognized as a major
problem in the Republic,”60 and for Julia Annas, the solution is to get rid of
the dative entirely:

They do not go down because it is better for them; they would be happier and
better off doing philosophy. Nor do they sacrifice themselves altruistically for
the others; the others do benefit by their rule, but so do they, for under any other
rule they would suffer, deprived of their appropriate role of organizing society
for the best. They go down because they realize that that is best—simply best,
not best for any particular group of people. They know what is really good, not
good relative to the interests or situation of anyone. And it demands their return;
so they go.61

There are good things here: in addition to her “simply best,” and thus the
elimination of the dative, there is also the abrogation of TEA, since “they
would be happier and better off doing philosophy.” But there are weaknesses
as well: she does not identify the “it” that “demands their return” as Justice.
And weaker still is the claim—which she will repeat ad nauseam as if to
make it true—that there is no sacrifice,62 or altruism involved.63 And it will
ultimately get even worse: in a chapter called “Plato’s Moral Theories,” she

59
 Cf. Barney, “Notes,” 367: “In traditional Greek usage, kalon and agathon are the two most central
and powerful terms of approbation, and the overlap between them is considerable. But there is one
striking contrast between the two. This is that while it is common to speak of what is agathon for
someone, using the dative of interest, the same construction is awkward and rare, if not impossible,
with kalon. This is because what is good is standardly so by being good for some-body or other;
but what is fine, generally speaking, is just plain fine.”
60
 Annas, Introduction, 269.
61
 Annas, Introduction, 266–267.
62
 With the quoted “sacrifice” as the first, there are six more uses of the word—all to the same
effect—at Annas, Introduction, 268–269, with two uses in one sentence on 268. This is why
Annas’s position is classified as “neutralist” in Plato the Teacher, 227–228.
63
 In addition to the passage quoted above, see Annas, Introduction, 331.
 Before and After Cleitophon 473

will contrast the Longer with the Shorter Way (what she calls “the main argu-
ment”) to the detriment of the former:

It will also be clear to the reader by now that I think that the main argument,
often summed up as the argument that ‘justice pays,’ is a forceful moral argu-
ment, and that the central books’ insistence on the impersonality of justice’s
requirements [i.e., the Longer Way] is a mistake. But is this not a paradoxical
position? Surely the demand that justice be shown to be in my interests is a
demand that I be given a non-moral reason for being just—or even an immoral
one? For is it not giving me a self-interested, egoistic reason to be just?64

By raising these three questions, Annas confronts us with the challenge of

Socratism in its most radical (or Pennerite) form. She recognizes that it is “the
main argument”—with the tripartite soul and ἀκρασία very much included
despite Aristotle—that is radically Socratist because it gives us “a self-
interested, egoistic reason to be just.” But by following Aristotle, and thus
systematizing Socratism around SP, the most radical Socratists have failed
to recognize that the Shorter Way is what they call “Socratic” in the crucial
sense: it is eudaemonist, and therefore can ultimately offer us “a non-moral
reason for being just,” or better, as Annas adds, “even an immoral one.”
The Longer Way, predicated on the emancipation of the un-hypothetical
GoodT from its (Un-Ethical) Dative of (self-) Interest, calls attention to this
“paradoxical position,” for despite her repeated claim, the Guardians outside
of Plato’s wondrous text are challenged to sacrifice their personal happiness
in the light of the Good, and thus most certainly do “sacrifice themselves
altruistically for the others.”
In short, all of “Annas’s Three Questions” (as I will call them) should
be answered in the affirmative, and they are the important questions to ask,
especially if her answers to them are, as I claim, the opposite of those Plato
expects from his true Guardians, those who do not need to be compelled to
return to the Cave by anything more than the intrinsic beauty of doing so.
Above all, Annas demonstrates in “Plato’s Moral Theories” that there are
two such theories at work in Republic—as indeed there are—and has thus
seen with great clarity the unbridgeable gap between the Longer and the
Shorter Ways:

I have stressed the way in which the absolute nature of justice’s requirements in
the central books [this is her formula for what I am calling ‘the Longer Way’]
undermines the kind of justification offered in the main argument. It will be
clear by now to the reader that I take the developments of the central books

64
 Annas, Introduction, 322–323.
474 Chapter 5

actually to conflict with the course of the main argument. For if justice must
be grasped as absolutely and unqualifiedly good [of course only the Idea of
the Good could be that], the requirements of justice [its ‘challenge’ would be
preferable] will hold regardless of any personal points of view or interests; but
Socrates undertook [in the Shorter Way] to show that justice was in the agent’s
interests, and Books 2–4 and 8–9 in fact try to show that it is something which
is worth having [my emphasis:] for the agent.65

The justification for quoting Annas at length is and will continue to be that
Cleitophon not only serves as an introduction to Republic, but also prepares
the reader to draw from it affirmative answers to Annas’s Three Questions.
It does so by anticipating or rather demanding an answer to the ques-
tion—I called it “Cleitophon’s Question” in Plato the Teacher66—that will
only be forthcoming when Plato challenges the philosopher to act in accor-
dance with Justice by returning to the Cave at “the crisis of the Republic.”67
Keep in mind that Annas entered this section in the context of the Thrasy-
machus-Response Theory,68 and that unlike Rowe she sees no good reason to
reject it as spurious.69 Here is Annas’s apt summary of what Cleitophon does
in Cleitophon (emphases mine):
he complains to Socrates that, although he would prefer to go to him for instruc-
tion, he is thrown back upon Thrasymachus, because at least the latter has defi-
nite and helpful views about what justice actually is, whereas Socrates is merely
negative: he knocks down other people’s accounts of justice, and implores them
with great passion to live the life of real justice, but offers them no help at all
about what this real justice actually comes down to; they are left baffled as to
what the first steps in living the good life could be. Now this makes no sense at
all as a reaction to the complete Republic; but it does make sense as a reaction
to Book 1 on its own.70

It “comes down to” the Cave, and its “first steps” lead to the Piraeus with Glau-
con. Although Annas clearly believes that Cleitophon could not be a response
to “the kind of justification offered in the main argument,” the real reason she
is right to claim that it “makes no sense at all as a reaction to the complete
Republic” is only because of “the absolute nature of justice’s requirements in
the central books,” that is, the Longer Way. It is only there that Socrates expects
Cleitophon and the rest of us to learn “what this real justice actually comes
down to.”

65
 Annas, Introduction, 322.
66
 See Plato the Teacher, 29–35.
67
 See Plato the Teacher, 38, 45, and §16.
68
 See Annas, Introduction, 17.
69
 Annas, Introduction, 17: “(usually labeled spurious, but for no very good reasons).”
70
 Annas, Introduction, 17.
 Before and After Cleitophon 475

A corollary to the Tale of Two Schools as described in §15 is that

although there are certainly teachers and students of virtue—the latter
being the ones reading Meno, and after it Cleitophon-Republic in Plato’s
eternal Academy—“what this real justice actually comes down to” is not
something that can be taught but rather must be recollected as a result of a
long train of pedagogical provocations.71 But as the last chapter made even
clearer, Socrates is still capable of making it seem as if virtue—thanks to
K and despite the intrusion of Recollection—can be taught, and by doub­
ling the First Protreptic from Euthydemus in the positive argument based
on the hypothetical method in Meno, Plato demonstrates Socrates’ ongo-
ing and continuing ability to offer a protreptic oration predicated on the
unexamined view that σοφία can be taught (cf. Euthd. 283c3–8) and the
notion that philosophy—despite the μεταξύ-based view enshrined in Sym-
posium and hammered in Lysis—is “the acquisition of knowledge [κτῆσις
ἐπιστήμης]” (Euthd. 288d7).
Because we are being prepared more directly for Republic in Meno than
in Euthydemus, the Meno Doublet is different of course: instead of draw-
ing attention to the scarcely praiseworthy compliance of Cleinias, Socrates
teaches us that virtue can only be taught if we are willing to make certain
debatable (i.e., hypothetical) assumptions. As a result, by the time we reach
this passage in Cleitophon, we know that Socrates’ ability to offer us the kind
of protreptic orations Cleitophon is now describing and praising likewise
depends on those same assumptions:

Cleitophon: These speeches and others of the kind, so numerous and so beauti-
fully formulated, that virtue can be taught [ὡς διδακτὸν ἀρετή] and that of all
things one should care most for oneself, I don’t think I’ve ever said a word
against them, nor will I in the future, I suppose. I regard them as both most pro-
treptic and most beneficial [προτρεπτικώτατοι τε καὶ ὠφελιμώτατοι]—they sim-
ply wake us up from our sleep. So I paid close attention in the hope that I would
hear what was coming next [τὸ μετὰ ταῦτα]; I did not put my questions [ἐπαν
ερωτᾶν] to you first, Socrates, but to some of your contemporaries [ἡλικιῶται]
and your fellow-aspirers or comrades or whatever that sort of relationship to
you is to be called.72

With ὠφελιμώτατοι having already been discussed, and with Meno hav-
ing just offered us a full explanation of the brittle foundations upon which
a Socratic protreptic to the effect (that) ὡς διδακτὸν ἀρετή depends, the

71
 Among which Annas’s Three Questions should be included.
72
 408b5–c7 (Slings modified).
476 Chapter 5

important thing here is τὸ μετὰ ταῦτα: “the thing after these things.”73 I take
the τὸ in τὸ μετὰ ταῦτα to refer to Plato’s Republic, and more specifically to
what Annas calls its “central books.” Plato will hammer the phrase in what
Cleitophon says next:

Cleitophon: Those among them who you think are really something I questioned
first, and I asked them what might be the discourse after these [τίς ὁ μετὰ ταῦτ᾽
εἴη λόγος]; I imitated you, after a fashion, in hinting at the answer. ‘My excel-
lent friends,’ I said, ‘now, in what way do we understand the exhortation to vir-
tue that Socrates is addressing to us [ἡ Σωκράτους προτροπὴ ἡμῶν ἐπ᾽ ἀρετήν]?
Is it all there is, and is it impossible to pursue the matter any further and grasp
it completely? Is it to be our lifelong task [ἔργον] to exhort those who have not
yet been persuaded by exhortation and theirs in turn to exhort others?74

Although τίς ὁ μετὰ ταῦτ᾽ εἴη λόγος could easily be construed as “what
might be the discourse that comes after these?,” we have not yet reached
Cleitophon’s Question which directly follows the three he has posed here.
After all, it was obvious to Thrasyllus, and should be so to us, that where
Cleitophon is concerned, Republic is ὁ μετὰ ταῦτα λόγος, and although it is
less obvious, the phrase ἡ Σωκράτους προτροπὴ ἡμῶν ἐπ᾽ ἀρετήν looks back-
wards to the First Protreptic and its Meno Doublet (see §18). Cleitophon’s
Question therefore follows these:

Cleitophon: Or is it necessary to ask [ἐπανερωτᾶν] Socrates and each other what

is after this [τὸ μετὰ τοῦτ᾽]—having agreed that this itself [τοῦτ᾽ αὐτό] is what
must be done by a person [ἀνθρώπῳ πρακτέον]— (i.e.,) from here to where [τί
τοὐντεῦθεν]?75

Plato hammers the verb ἐπανερωτᾶν—Cleitophon will apply it to himself

five times in the dialogue (408c5, 408c9, 408d7–e1, 408e10, and 409d9; cf.
αὖ ἐρωτώμενος at 409d6)—because it is now Cleitophon who becomes the
ἔλεγχος-wielding questioner in Cleitophon.76
More importantly, Plato repeats the phrase τὸ μετὰ τοῦτ᾽ for the third
time because he is using Cleitophon to announce the imminent arrival of his
Republic. Thanks to the hammered singular τοῦτ᾽ αὐτό—drawing attention

73
 The meaning of Cleitophon’s ταῦτα will be the subject of the following section, but it can do no
harm to make it perfectly plain now that I take it to mean the dialogues that precede Cleitophon-
Republic in the ROPD.
74
 408c7–d6 (Slings modified).
75
 408d7–e2.
76
 Cf. Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 18 (emphases in original): “What is more, there is elenchos in the
Clitophon, but it is directed against Socrates and his companions, and Clitophon is the one who
uses it (section II.4).” See also 51–53.
 Before and After Cleitophon 477

as it does to the replacement of the plural ταῦτα in the phrase’s previous

iterations (408c4 and 408c9)—the τοῦτ᾽ in μετὰ τοῦτ᾽ must refer back
to the ongoing necessity for each philosopher to pass along the exhorta-
tion to Justice to the next generation as described in the previous question
(408d5–6), soon to be symbolized by the torchlight relay race in Republic
1 (R. 328a3–4).77 By calling the eternal passing of Justice’s torch ἀνθρώπῳ
πρακτέον, Plato the Teacher is here defending his life’s work—his own ἔργον
δικαιοσύνης (cf. 409e8 and 410a8)—for he is now and always ready with a
reply to Cleitophon’s Question whenever we find ourselves ready to ask, as
if our own futures depended on the answer, τί τοὐντεῦθεν?
Whether Plato regarded the founding of the Academy, his pedagogical
activity in it while alive, and the construction and literary preservation of its
eternal curriculum as a sufficient response to the stern demands of Justice
must remain an open question. In any case, as a citizen of the United States,
writing a book about Plato in Brazil on a beautiful summer day in January
2018, I am in no position to tax him with either inconsistency or cowardice.
For what little it’s worth, I have come to suspect that the self-critical author
of Gorgias (see §9) believed his own contribution, however unfairly, to be
little less inadequate to the exigencies of his time—despite the towering supe-
riority, grandeur, and usefulness of his achievement—than I regard my own.
It would be a poor idealist who does not fall far short of her own ideals, and
I have had so much fun interpreting Plato’s dialogues that it is impossible for
me to imagine that writing them was anything but a vastly enjoyable labor of
love. But as I argued in Plato the Teacher, it is both lazy and textually irre-
sponsible to reconfigure “going back down into the Cave” as anything other
than taking active part in the politics of one’s native city,78 assuming, that
is, that one desires to do no such thing (R. 520e4–521a2; cf. Smp. 216a5–6).
Absent “the bridle of Theages,” Xenophon’s exile, citizenship in a backwa-
ter, or Socrates’ Sign (R. 496a11–b7), to πράττειν τὰ πολιτικά is the ἔργον
enjoined on all those who demand to learn from Plato τί τοὐντεῦθεν?
The fact that it should be Cleitophon who poses the question is further
evidence for this view. And here a historical excursion is in order, for the
study of no Platonic dialogue has been more greatly affected by archeol-
ogy than the little Cleitophon, and pending the discovery of Atlantis, this is
likely to remain the case. On February 26, 1890, F. G. Kenyon identified “the
London Papyrus” as Aristotle’s Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία,79 and it was published

77
 See Plato the Teacher, 42.
78
 Cf. Plato the Teacher, 240–242.
79
 See P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1981), here on 3.
478 Chapter 5

the following year.80 Cleitophon is mentioned twice in this rediscovered

treasure.81 In its twenty-eighth chapter (by Kenyon’s reckoning) the author—
whether Aristotle or someone else—gave an amazing account of Athenian
history organized around its leaders. Although this account begins with the
death of Pericles, its author found it necessary to justify the claim that things
got much worse after him, having been better before. The pre-Pericles rulers
mentioned include Solon, Peisistratus, and Cleisthenes (“who destroyed the
tyranny”), then Xanthippus, Miltiades, Themistocles, Aristides, Ephialtes,
Cimon, and Thucydides; long before Cleitophon makes an appearance, then,
the relevance of the text to the study of Plato is obvious. With the death of
Pericles, Nicias (“who died in Sicily”) and Cleon enter; the latter is blasted as
primarily responsible for the evils that ensued.82 Only then does Theramenes
make his appearance; having first been aligned with Miltiades, Cimon,
Thucydides, and Nicias, his connection to Nicias and Thucydides will there-
after be re-emphasized.83 Although Plutarch had preserved this triad and thus
its value, Kenyon was harsh about the presence of Theramenes among such
exalted company.84
It is often remarked that Plato never mentions Democritus, and there were
already explanations for this lacuna in antiquity.85 But given Plato’s evident
interest in Athenian politicians—after all, every member of the Athens
Quartet from Gorgias,86 including its variants in Theages and Meno, has just
been mentioned, along with Nicias—his failure to mention Theramenes is
even more remarkable. Like Alcibiades, Theramenes figures prominently in
both Thucydides and Xenophon,87 and his death by hemlock at the hands of

80
 See F. G. Kenyon (ed.), Aristotle on the Constitution of Athens, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1891).
81
 [Aristotle], Constitution of the Athenians, 29.2–3 and 34.3. For recent comment, see P. J. Rhodes
(ed.), Aristotele, Costituzione degli Ateniesi (Athenaion Politeia). Traduzione di A. Zambrini, T.
Gargiulo e P. J. Rhodes (Milano: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, Mondadori, 2016), 261 and 285.
82
 [Aristotle], Constitution of the Athenians, 28.3 (translation by P. J. Rhodes): “Cleon, it seems, more
than anyone else corrupted the people by his wild impulses, and was the first man who, when on
the platform, shouted, uttered abuse and made speeches with his clothes hitched up, while everyone
else spoke in an orderly manner. Next, after them, Theramenes son of Hagnon was champion of
the others and Cleophon the lyre-maker champion of the people.”
83
 [Aristotle], Constitution of the Athenians, 28.5 (Rhodes translation): “It appears that the best of the
Athenian politicians after the older ones were Nicias, Thucydides and Theramenes.” Cf. Plutarch,
Life of Nicias, 2.
84
 See Kenyon, Aristotle on the Constitution, 79–80: “This judgment shows with some clearness the
political prepossessions of Aristotle; but his statement that nearly everyone was of one mind as to
the merits of Nicias and Thucydides is somewhat noticeable. As to Theramenes, it is clear from
Aristotle’s own defense of him that he was simply an Opportunist with aristocratical sympathies.”
85
 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, 9.40; see Riginos, Platonica, 166–167.
86
 Cf. “the ‘Four Men’” in Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 123n228.
87
 Thucydides, book 8: 64.4, 89.2, 90.3, 911–2, 92.2–3, 6, 9–10 and 94.1. Xenophon, Hellenica,
1.1.12 and 22, 1.6.35. 1.7.4, 8, 17, and 31; 2.2.16–23, and 2.3, which includes a speech (2.3.35–49).
 Before and After Cleitophon 479

Critias in Hellenica 2 makes his absence in Plato all the more remarkable.88
Popularly described as “a moderate oligarch,”89 he was associated with a
polity famously praised as “a moderate blending of the Few and the Many”
in Thucydides,90 and depicted as the last bulwark against—and therefore
the paradigmatic victim of—the tyranny of Critias in Xenophon.91 Given
the position of “the Age of Heroes” in Republic 8,92 there is some reason to
think that if Plato had found any politician he could admire after Aristides, it
would have been Theramenes, and in the Era of Trump, it is only too obvious
that if our republic survives this crisis, we will probably have “a moderate
oligarch” to thank. But the closest Plato comes to expressing admiration for
Theramenes is that he named one of his dialogues Cleitophon.93
Before the rediscovery of the Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία, the only thing we knew
about Cleitophon apart from Cleitophon-Republic was that Aristophanes had
coupled him with Theramenes in Frogs.94 We would now learn much more
about Cleitophon, all of it consistent with that coupling. In the oligarchical
revolution of 411, Cleitophon offered an amendment,95 the purpose of which
has kept scholars guessing.96 Later, in the context of the Thirty, he is men-
tioned in connection not only with Theramenes, but Anytus.97 And archeology

88
 For Theramenes’ death, see Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.3.56.
89
 “Theramenes,” Wikipedia (accessed August 8, 2017): “A moderate oligarch, he often found
himself caught between the democrats on the one hand and the extremist oligarchs on the other.”
90
 Thucydides, 8.97.2.
91
 Cf. Victoria Wohl, Law’s Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 239: “Theramenes emerges as a hero in Xenophon’s
account (sympathetic as it is to oligarchic principles), an advocate of a just and lawful oligarchic
government whose conflict with Critias is the central drama of the narrative (2.3.23–56) and whose
unlawful death-sentence represents a tragic turning point in the oligarchic regime.”
92
 See Plato the Teacher, §30.
93
 See Nails, People of Plato, 102–103.
94
 Aristophanes, Frogs, 965–967; see Kenneth Dover (ed.), Aristophanes, Frogs; Edited with Intro-
duction and Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 313–314.
95
 [Aristotle], Constitution of the Athenians, 29.3 (Rhodes): “Clitophon moved that in other respects
Pythodorus’s proposal should be followed, but that the men elected should also search out the
traditional laws [οἱ πάτριοι νόμοι] which Cleisthenes had enacted when he set up the democracy,
so that they might consider these too and deliberate for the best—his point being that Cleisthenes’
constitution was not populist but very much like Solon’s.”
96
 See Martin Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law: Law, Society, and
Politics in Fifth-Century Athens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 371; his analysis
shows very little sympathy for Cleitophon: by invoking Cleisthenes—whose constitution was
δημοτική regardless of how Cleitophon chose to present it to the more extreme oligarchs, like
Pythodorus, whom he was opposing—he was in fact moderating their pseudo-Solonic “return” to
the Council of 400 as ἡ πάτριος πολιτεία (see following note).
97
 [Aristotle], Constitution of the Athenians, 34.3 (Rhodes): “The democrats tried to preserve the
democracy; of the notables those who belonged to the clubs and the exiles who had returned after
the peace treaty were eager for oligarchy; those who did not belong to any club and who in other
respects seemed inferior to none of the citizens had as their objective the traditional constitution [ἡ
πάτριος πολιτεία]: these last included Archinus, Anytus, Clitophon, Phormisius and many others,
but their particular champion was Theramenes.”
480 Chapter 5

wasn’t finished with Plato’s Cleitophon: “the Michigan Papyrus,” published

in 1968,98 established a conclusive link between Theramenes and Lysias,99
the source from whom Socrates learns that Cleitophon has been “blaming
his conversations with Socrates and praising highly the company [συνουσία]
of Thrasymachus” (406a2–4). Although a previously known fragment of a
speech by Lysias had mentioned a person named Cleitophon,100 it became cer-
tain, as it had not been before, that Plato had good reason to connect Cleito-
phon to Lysias, and now both were linked to Theramenes. Finally, if there
were any indication that Plato expected us to know about it, Cleitophon’s
amendment in 411—as a bid for political moderation at a dark time101—might
shed some light on why Plato prefaced his Republic with Cleitophon.
My own sense, however, is that no archeology was needed and hence
should not be used: between Aristophanes and Xenophon, Plato could count
on us to know enough for his purposes. Beginning with the great come-
dian’s presence in Symposium, what I am fancifully calling “the second” or
“sophomore year” in the Academy would have been a good time to read,
watch, or review the plays of Aristophanes, particularly if this study were
connected with mounting a (comic) performance of Plato’s own Protagoras.
Fancy aside, Republic presupposes the reader’s familiarity with the plays of
Aristophanes to a far greater extent than any previous dialogue, including
Symposium—that is, Ecclesiazusae in book 5,102 and Knights in book 6 (R.
488a8–b3)103—and given the connection between Frogs and Cleitophon, that
makes at least three plays.104 Another reference to Frogs in Republic makes
it look even more deliberate.105 And with Cleitophon (and thus Cleitophon-
Republic) connected to Theramenes, Xenophon’s Hellenica alone—already
necessary for understanding Critias in Charmides,106 as well as the anachro-
nism in Menexenus107—is sufficient for drawing our attention to Theramenes

98
 H. C. Youtie and R. Merkelbach, “Ein Michigan-Papyrus über Theramenes.” Zeitschrift für Papy-
rologie und Epigraphik 2 (1968), 161–169.
99
 See especially A. Andrewes, “Lysias and the Theramenes Papyrus.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie
und Epigraphik, 6 (1970), 35–38.
100
 Fr. 32.26 (C. Scheibe); on this and more, see Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 56–58.
101
 See Jacqueline Bibauw, “L’amendement de Clitophon (Aristote, Athenaian Politeia, 29,3).”
L’Antiquité Classique 34, no. 2 (1965), 464–483, following Paul Foucart [1836–1926], “Le Poète
Sophocle et l’oligarchie des Quatre Cents.” Revue Philologique 17 (1893), 1–10.
102
 James Adam, The Republic of Plato, edited with Critical Notes, Commentary and Appendices, two
volumes (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1905), 1.345–355.
103
 See Adam, Republic, 2.9 (on ναύκληρον κτλ.).
104
 See Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue, especially chapter 5.
105
 Note the reference to Frogs at R. 488a6, right before the allusion to the deafness of Demos in
Knights (R. 488b1). On τραγέλαφοι, see Adam, Republic, 2.9; note the proximity of Frogs 937
and 967, where Cleitophon and Theramenes are mentioned.
106
 And of course Sannio and Thrasyllus in Theages (see §13); nor should “Meno the Thessalian”
from Xenophon’s Anabasis be forgotten (see §14).
107
 See Ascent to the Beautiful, §13.
 Before and After Cleitophon 481

as Critias’ mortal enemy, and thus as a model of political moderation in

response to tyranny.108 So much for the historical excursion.
Since both Annas and Friedländer have been quoted to the effect that
Cleitophon provided “external evidence” for the Thrasymachus-Response
Theory, it deserves mention that a story told about Xenophon and Plato’s
Republic provides even stronger evidence for it. Of the three ancient reports
about the relationship between Plato and Xenophon,109 Aulus Gellius offers
the most detail, and his sane and balanced account creates a template for my
own approach to the question.110 As already noted, the only literary evidence
common to all three reports is the Athenian Stranger’s dismissive comment
about the education of Cyrus in Plato’s Laws,111 a connection that places Plato
second but presents neither man as an imitator. It is only Aulus Gellius, while
describing the views of the partisans he rejects,112 who provides an example
that assigns the kind of chronological priority to Plato that currently perme-
ates the dominant conception of their relationship:

This also they believed to be an indication of no sincere or friendly volition:

that Xenophon, with almost two of its books having been read [lectis ex eo
duobus fere libris] which first had gone forth among the public, reacted against
that famous work of Plato’s which he wrote about the best state of the polity
and about the administration of the state, and described a different kind of royal
administration, which has been entitled The Education of Cyrus.113

If Xenophon wrote the Cyropaedia in response to “almost [fere] the first

two books” of our Republic,114 this would support the notion that someone

108
 See Plato the Teacher, 355–358.
109
 Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, 14.3; Athenaeus, Sophists at Dinner, 11.112–114; and Diogenes
Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2.57 and 3.34.
110
 See Altman, “Division and Collection,” 110–112.
111
 Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 14.3, Athenaeus 11.112, and Diogenes Laertius, 3.34.
112
 Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 14.3: “For when a certain kind of great inborn ability [ingenia]
for the study of the same thing arises in two or more famous men of either equal or nearly equal
reputation [aut pari sunt fama, aut proxima], strife [contentio] likewise arises among their various
devotees about the extent of their industry and fame. Afterwards, then, the contagion of competi-
tion spreads from this external competition to these men themselves, and the race of those pursu-
ing the same finish-line of virtue [ad eamdem virtutis calcem], when the result is close or doubtful,
descends into suspicions of rivalry no by their own, but rather by the zeal of their supporters.”
113
 Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, 14.3.
114
 Following Henri Alline, Histoire du texte de Platon (Paris: E. Champion, 1915), who states as a
certainty on 15 that “la Cyropédie est la contre-partie des quatres premiers livres actuel,” and thus
“il faut donc supposer qu’ Aulu-Gelle se réfère à une autre division que celle de nos manuscrits,”
the theory of an earlier six-book version of Republic has recently been revived by Harold Tarrant,
“The Origins and Shape of Plato’s Six-Book Republic.” Antichthon 46 (2012), 52–78 and David
Sedley, “Socratic Intellectualism in the Republic’s Central Digression” in George Boys-Stones,
Dimitri El Murr, and Christopher Gill (eds.), The Platonic Art of Philosophy, 70–89 (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Cf. Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 205n378 and
Guardians on Trial, 275–76n240.
482 Chapter 5

else—whether Wilamowitz’s lazy reader or Rowe’s more skillful but never-

theless literarily obtuse Academic—wrote Cleitophon in the same circum-
stances. On Xenophon’s behalf, only the most prejudiced could claim that
Cleitophon is a better critical response to [Thrasymachus] than Cyropaedia,
but unfortunately it is possible to imagine a scholar making the claim that it
was Xenophon who wrote Cleitophon—thereby following in the footsteps of
Athenaeus, who recorded the remarkable suggestion that he was the author of
Alcibiades Minor115—a theory that could then be used to explain why Socrates
initially claims there that justice is benefitting your friends and harming your
enemies. In any case, no adequate account of Plato’s Cleitophon can fail to
quote this passage from Xenophon’s Memorabilia:

If any hold the opinion expressed in some written and spoken criticisms of
Socrates that are based on inference, and think, that though he was consum-
mate in exhorting men to virtue [προτρέψασθαι μὲν ἀνθρώπους ἐπ᾽ ἀρετήν],
he was an incompetent guide to it, let them consider not only the searching
cross-examination with which he chastised those who thought themselves omni-
scient, but his daily talks with his familiar friends, and then judge whether he
was capable of improving his companions [βελτίους ποιεῖν τοὺς συνόντας].116

Although Xenophon’s response to this opinion in the rest of Memorabilia is

good, Plato’s response to it in Republic must be judged better, and that is a
judgment that by no means reflects badly on the son of Gryllus. Nor does it
reflect badly on Plato that he could not have offered his better response with-
out being well acquainted with Xenophon’s.
As many of the notes to this section must suggest, the relationship between
Cleitophon and Republic is explored in greater depth in Plato the Teacher,
and its Introduction attempts to answer Strauss-inspired claims arising from
“Socrates’ Silence.”117 Not surprisingly, I argue there that Socrates breaks
that silence in Republic, and my reading of Plato’s masterpiece is based
on what might be called, by analogy, “the Cleitophon-Response Theory.”
There is no need to rehearse those arguments in any detail here, but it may
be helpful to mention my claim that the first-order audience of the long
speech that begins with κατέβην is Cleitophon himself, and that the way
Socrates describes Cleitophon in [Thrasymachus] is better understood as a
cautionary tale addressed to the real Cleitophon than as a record of an actual

115
 Athenaeus 11.114: ὁ γὰρ δεύτερος [sc. περὶ Ἀλκιβιάδου] ὑπό τινων Ξενοφῶντος εἶναι λέγεται.
116
 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.4.1 (Marchant): Cf. Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 77–82 and 216: “I think
it very likely that Xenophon refers to the Clitophon, but I see no way of proving it beyond doubt.”
Se also G. M. Bertini, “Saggio sul Clitofonte: Dialogo attribuito a Platone.” Rivista de filologia e
de instruzione classica 1 (1873), 457–480.
117
 As in Mark Kremer, Plato’s Cleitophon: On Socrates and the Modern Mind (Lanham, MD: Lex-
ington, 2004); see also Plato the Teacher, 29n83.
 Before and After Cleitophon 483

conversation.118 Of course both the first- and even the second-order audi-
ences—that is, Glaucon, Adeimantus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, and all
the rest of the dialogue’s characters—are merely secondary in comparison
with its primary or third-order audience: the reader. But Plato’s tacit or at
least veiled address to you, while not entirely inaudible on its own, becomes
much easier to hear when his Republic is read as an answer to Cleitophon’s
Question, not least of all because Socrates takes the first step toward Justice
with his opening word.
This is an important point and deserves further comment. Looking back
over my own reception of Plato, Cleitophon played no role in the way I read
Plato’s Republic except to confirm that reading in retrospect. It is, of course,
difficult to shake free from one’s own experience, but it seems clear that
if more readers understood Republic in the light of the distinction between
the Longer and Shorter Ways from the start, and thus bypassed or rather
climbed past a reading based on the City-Man symmetry of book 4—that
is, Republic as “Plato’s Political Theory”119—in favor of a reading based
on the return to the Cave in book 7, they would be much more inclined to
accept Cleitophon as genuine for same the reason I did: it prepares us for
such a reading.
Sensitivity to the centrality of justice from the start of book 1 and sympathy
with Glaucon’s plight from the start of book 2 is therefore sufficient for making
something like Cleitophon’s Question our own even without Cleitophon, and
when we turn to Republic in order to discover what Justice and its ἔργον really
is,120 we will find it in κατεβατέον (R. 520c1). But given the fact that such a read-
ing is by no means common, let alone the rule, and moreover that the rule is rather
“Plato’s Political Theory,” it begins to look as if Plato was not only generous to
write Cleitophon but that he needed to be so. For despite my own experience,
it is even clearer that if more readers accepted Cleitophon as an introduction to
Republic, they would be much more inclined to find the answer to Cleitophon’s
Question in the Allegory of the Cave: it tells him what to do next. And there is
some reason to think that (the historical) Cleitophon did it.
It would perhaps have been more natural to end this book with a look
forward to its sequel as I have just done; instead it has seemed preferable to
take a less obvious course, and §17 will therefore be retrospective. In part this
is because the Republic-based part of the Cleitophon-authenticity argument
has already been made, but there is more to the decision that needs explana-
tion. In describing the defense of Cleitophon presented in Plato the Teacher,

118
 See Plato the Teacher, 31–33, especially “parental storytellers” and 32n98.
119
 See Guardians on Trial, §9.
120
 See Plato the Teacher, §14, especially 145–148, on the (external) inactivity of the Shorter Way’s
“Harmonious Man.”
484 Chapter 5

I emphasized that defense’s dialectical and polemical aspect: it was directed

against a Strauss-inspired conception of Cleitophon, of the relationship
between it and Republic, and ultimately Strauss’s understanding of Republic
itself.121
In reflecting on my own work, I realize that although my dialectical oppo-
nent has changed—dialogue with Strauss has played very little part in this
study, for example—there has always been one, and in the present case, that
opponent is Socratism in its most radical form. It is that dialogue that will
be continued and consummated in this book’s final section. But while there
is still the chance to look forward in accordance with the present section’s
theme, it strikes me as remarkable that it should be the Tübingen School that
becomes the dialectical opponent in The Guardians in Action and (to a lesser
extent) in The Guardians on Trial.122 As a result, the words “as if in battle
[ὥσπερ ἐν μάχῃ]” (R. 534c1) reverberate throughout every volume of this
study, and it may be worthwhile to wonder why.
First of all, this tripartite division of Enemies is a bit too simplistic, and
ignores the ongoing polemic against Cook Wilson, his student Ryle, and
in particular against his student, G. E. L. Owen.123 Apart from the fact that
Penner identifies him as his teacher,124 Owen has barely been mentioned in
this book only because his polished and erudite project focused on configur-
ing “the late dialogues” as Plato’s own (revisionist) rejection of Platonism.125
But his spirit can be found here as well, not only because of the role of his
predecessors Cook Wilson and Prichard, but because Penner and Annas—
whose reading of Republic is so valuable precisely because it is hostile to
“the absolute nature of justice’s requirements in the central books”—were
his students.126 On the other hand, all the damage done to Platonism by the
Owenites on both sides of Plato’s Republic, even when combined with the
collective contributions of the Straussians, Tübingen, and the other Socrat-
ists—indeed even when the sum of them is multiplied—pales in comparison
with Aristotle’s.
As indicated in the Introduction, it is upon Aristotle’s testimony that both
Socratists and the Tübingen School equally and symmetrically rely, and

121
 See Plato the Teacher, 215–217 and 11n34.
122
 See especially Guardians in Action, 421–422 and Guardians on Trial, 322, 377, and 382–383.
123
 See Cooper, “Owen,” 177.
124
 It is worth quoting Penner, “The Forms,” 226n10: “Of course, some philosophers were content
to have Plato hold a view that was entirely absurd in this way [sc. ‘a metaphysically extravagant,
and probably absurd, theory of how it is that all Forms are perfect and all perceptibles deficient’].
My teachers Ryle and Owen certainly were. For Owen, Plato made the mistakes Wittgensteinians
generally expected in metaphysicians, generated from such things as not understanding the gram-
mar of incomplete predicates.”
125
 See Guardians on Trial, 64–67.
126
 See Annas, Introduction, v.
 Before and After Cleitophon 485

although mediated by Martin Heidegger,127 his influence on Strauss is not

much less than the more direct impact he had on Owen.128 In short, no other
enemy of Plato compares to Aristotle in authority or damage done, and his
influence pervades the whole. The standard defense of Aristotle’s authority as
a witness to Plato is that he was his student for many years in the Academy.
Against this defense it is possible to cite the internal inconsistencies in his
testimony, the evidence of his own philosophical proclivities, and his tem-
perament (as in the Introduction). To briefly summarize: his sense of humor
is dwarfed by Xenophon’s (to say nothing of Plato’s), and unlike the son of
Gryllus, the Stagirite never met Phaenarete’s son. Demonstrably dependent
on Protagoras for his portrait of Socrates, he mentions the latter’s Sign only
in Rhetoric.129 His own ontological dualisms bear more resemblance to the
Pythagoras-inspired Prinzipienlehre he attributes to the elderly Plato than
anything we can find written in the latter’s dialogues.130 Decisive for the
development of “Plato’s Development,”131 Aristotle’s fatal words “as Plato
said in Timaeus,”132 along with his embarrassingly ignorant comments about
Laws and Republic in his Politics,133 indicate an unconquerable insensitivity to
Plato’s literary genius. His eudaemonist attack on the Idea of the Good testifies
to a yawning philosophical gulf that not even a lifetime in the Academy could
have closed, and it is that gulf—not any special knowledge, direct or indi-
rect—that adequately explains the one-sidedness of his Socrates, who thereby
becomes his ally against Plato, who actually knew him. Just as it would be an
error to believe Odysseus when he gives testimony about his rival Achilles,134
so too is it an error to believe everything that Aristotle has to say about Plato.
All this and much more could be used to discredit Aristotle’s testimony,135
especially since he has been regarded as “the Philosopher” throughout much
of philosophy’s institutional history. But more germane to this study is the
prior question of what it really meant to be Plato’s “student for many years in
the Academy.” We’ve all taught students, and therefore know that it is often

127
 See my “The Heideggerian Origins of a post-Platonist Plato” in Adam J. Goldwyn and James
Nikopoulos (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Classical Receptions: International Modernism and the
Avant-Garde (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), 220–241.
128
 See Malcolm Schofield and Martha Nussbaum, “Introduction” to Schofield and Nussbaum (eds.),
Language and Logos: Studies in ancient Greek Philosophy Presented to G. E. L. Owen, ix–xiii
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), ix; note that all three of Owen’s (edited)
books are about Aristotle (Logos and Language, 339).
129
 On Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1398a5 and 1419a8, see Taylor, Varia Socratica, 65–66.
130
 See Plato the Teacher, 324n86 and Guardians in Action, 260–261.
131
 See Guardians in Action, 424 and Guardians on Trial, 29n47.
132
 See Guardians in Action, 20 and 36.
133
 See Guardians on Trial, 207–209.
134
 See Plato the Teacher, 385–386.
135
 Naturally one must cite here Harold Cherniss, Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato and the Academy,
volume 1 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1944).
486 Chapter 5

the most gifted among them who challenge our views every step of the way.
Those who are so inclined can apply that observation to Aristotle’s relation-
ship with Plato. In any case, Plato’s pedagogy presupposes such students,
and it cannot be effective without them. Cleitophon is a case in point: he is
dissatisfied with what he has heard, and challenges Socrates to come clean; as
I have been suggesting, he does so in Republic, at least up to a point. So how
much cleaner should we imagine that Plato came when and if a youngster
from Stagira challenged him? Rather than simply adding Aristotle or Owen
to Plato’s list of Enemies, then, it is more productive to synthesize all of
them in relation to the single Friend that pervades all of these studies: Plato
the Teacher.
The corollary to my ongoing claim that Plato used his dialogues as the
Academy’s curriculum is that the Academy’s curriculum was based on read-
ing his dialogues. By this I mean to suggest that it may well be a mistake to
imagine Plato baring his soul to his students, communicating to them orally
the inner meaning of his meticulously written literary jewels, or, for that mat-
ter, anything else. Due to the exquisite care with which he wrote, Plato had
every reason—and, as a proud and noble son of famous Athens, he had every
conceivable motivation—to regard his writings as “a possession into eter-
nity,” and if he regarded the dialogues he was planning, writing, and revising
as the Academy’s eternal curriculum, he could best ensure their ongoing
effectiveness by letting them speak for themselves even while he was alive,
just as they would need to do after he was dead. A remarkable fact deserves
emphasis: there are no anecdotes to the effect that Plato explained any of the
mysteries with which his dialogues abound.136 As a result, against Aristotle’s
“many years in the Academy,” I submit that knowing Plato didn’t count for
very much, and that he was no less elusive in person than he shows himself to
be in his writings. The best evidence that he gave hints as to how we should
respond to his questions is in Cleitophon,137 and thanks to Recollection, Meno
gives far better evidence as to why it would have been counterproductive for
him to do so.
Naturally there will be a series of battles that must be fought on the
question of “Plato’s views,” or about (to modify Paul Shorey) “what Plato
thought.”138 But at the center of all these quarrels is the eccentric but never-
theless plausible conception of Plato as a schoolteacher and, more specifi-
cally, of his dialogues as his school’s curriculum. Against the Owenites (and
Aristotle), I read the post-Republic dialogues as pedagogical tests, and against
the Pennerites (and Aristotle), I read the pre-Republic dialogues as preparing

136
 Cf. Guardians in Action, 97.
137
 See Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 51, 251, and 299–300 on 408d1.
138
 Paul Shorey, What Plato Said (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1933).
 Before and After Cleitophon 487

the reader for embracing the teaching upon which they will thereafter be
tested. Against the Stagirite, I do not read Republic as “Plato’s Political
Theory” or regard the education of the Guardians as extraneous to its pur-
pose.139 As for the schools of Tübingen and the Straussians, the first negates
the ontological basis of that teaching, while the latter usefully negates the
teaching itself. And that teaching—no matter how few have understood it—is
remarkably easy to understand. Indeed it is probably the fact that it is both
easy to understand and difficult to execute that accounts for its unpopularity
among philosophers, who evidently prefer making what is easy to execute
difficult to understand.140
Having ascended to a vision of the Idea of the Good, Justice requires
the philosopher to return to the Cave.141 Although unpacking that sentence
is both possible and necessary, there is really nothing more to it than this,
for Plato joins ontology and ethics indissolubly in a single paradigmatic
ἔργον.142 With respect to ethics, Justice in the light of the Good entails
what one might call “a post-eudaemonist altruism,”143 and as for ontology,
the Allegory of the Cave is based on and illustrates the distinction between
Being and Becoming, the culmination of a series of dualisms that begins
with soul and body and continues through intelligible and visible; the lat-
ter is responsible for the first cut in the Line, the former is introduced in
Alcibiades Major. Since the ascent to the GoodT requires the soul’s eman-
cipation from the sensible world,144 mathematics—and principally the
indivisible and thus non-existent One—plays a necessary, liberating, but
strictly propaedeutic role.145 Indeed Plato’s teaching is so simple and well
taught in the dialogues that a five-year course supervised by an instructor
sympathetic to Plato’s aims could take any given ninth-grader capable of

139
 As in Aristotle, Politics, 2.6; 1264b39–1265a1.
140
 For Plato’s awareness of the deliberate obscurity of deep thinkers, see Cra. 427d4–8.
141
 And does so, pace Strauss, in perfect contempt for the possibility that doing so may well prove
deadly dangerous.
142
 Hence the error embodied in Annas, “Plato and Common Morality,” 444: “I think that the Repub-
lic is best read as an attempt to shift the center of gravity of Greek ethics from an act-centered to
an agent-centered type of theory.” This dichotomy, entirely dependent on the Shorter Way, is a
false one: Justice as act finds its center of gravity in the Idea of the Good.
143
 Nor, pace the Socratists, is the teaching of even Plato’s early dialogues anything else: the (agent-
centered) GoodE is what Plato is challenging us to overcome, with TEA—following the GP Equa-
tion in Prt.—functioning as the corrigible Hypothesis that it is.
144
 Cf. Gaiser, “Platons Menon,” 290: “Durch die im Menon vorgeführte Denkform der Hypothesis
wird offenbar eine systematische Vermittlung zwischen dem Bereich der einzelnen Erschein­ungen
und den allgemeinen [but not separate!] Ideen möglich. Der ‘Chorismos’ zwischen der Welt
des Werdens und Vergehens und der Welt des gleichbleibend Seienden kann auf diese Weise
sprachlich, mathematisch, und dialektisch überbrückt werden.” The elimination of the χωρισμός
or Kluft between Being and Becoming—which I regard as unüberbrückbar—constitutes the
destruction of Platonism, and represents “the German side” imaged in the Introduction, corre-
sponding to the “English” hijacking of Vlastosian Socratism by Penner and Rowe.
145
 It is therefore, pace Tübingen, not the Good.
488 Chapter 5

graduating from a public high school from Protagoras to Phaedo through

Philebus, Sophist, and Laws.146 Naturally they’d learn a great many other
things in the process, enough indeed to be considered a liberally educated
human being.
But it is striking how little of the “teaching” I have just summarized can
be found outside of Republic, and even more specifically outside of its “cen-
tral books.” It is therefore a Republic-based teaching: everything prior to
Republic 7 prepares for it, and everything after Republic 7 either implements
this teaching—as in Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo—or tests the
student’s grasp of it. In the light of what’s about to come, the First Platonic
Paradox and the Trial of the Doctor in Gorgias, along with the hypothetical
method and Recollection in Meno certainly stand out, but everything finds
its place in retrospect, beginning with Alcibiades Major, our evolving under-
standing of Protagoras, and the mountain-top vision of Symposium. But it
would be a mistake to distill from these early dialogues any system, doctrines,
or teaching, and indeed it is pointless to do so before reaching Republic: since
it is the curriculum’s τέλος, only then will we see the relative importance of
the steps that have finally brought us up to the Good, and until we reach it,
nothing else can be grasped τελέως:

Cleitophon: ‘My excellent friends,’ I said, ‘now, in what way do we understand

the exhortation to goodness that Socrates is addressing to us? Is it all there is,
and is it impossible to pursue the matter any further and grasp it completely
[τελέως]?’147

Until we reach Republic 7,148 the answer to the last question is “yes” and
that’s why Cleitophon is asking it. In looking forward, then, it is proper to
ask what Plato’s students will have learned by the time they begin their study
of Republic, and the simple answer is: remarkably little, at least with respect
to the positive sense of “what Plato thought.”
Instead, they will have been exercised in a graduated series of texts whose
complexities have forced them to acquire a veritable arsenal of hermeneutic
skills that might best be called “gymnastic,” especially when it comes to
detecting deliberate deception. They will also bring to their encounter with

146
 None of which, pace the Owenites, prove that Plato abandoned Platonism.
147
 408d1–4 (Slings). Cleitophon’s Question follows at 408e1–2.
148
 Cf. “having been more completely educated [τελεώτερον πεπαιδεύμεμοι]” (R. 520b8); six words
later comes κατεβατέον.
 Before and After Cleitophon 489

Plato’s masterpiece an amazingly refined literary or “musical” sensibility.149

With a demonstrated ability to find the Argument of the Action through the
Play of Character, they are going to attend to the words of Glaucon with spe-
cial care, since it is with him that Socrates went down to the Piraeus. From
the importance of a dialogue’s opening words to the centrality of justice, the
lengthy Gorgias will be foremost in their minds, second only to Cleitophon
in that respect. They will carefully attend to hammered words and phrases,
and be sensitive to shortcuts and fallacies. Those whose souls took flight in
Symposium are yearning to fly again,150 and they will be prompted to do so,
but at the same time, having been repeatedly tested on KAH, they will also
see the War everywhere in Republic, as they must.
Nor should Meno be forgotten: it has awakened in them an acute awareness
of the (concealed) use of Hypothesis—they will need it—and as for Recollec-
tion, consider the words of Annas (emphasis mine):

Many philosophers have a notion of ‘morality’ according to which morality

excludes any appeal to self-interest; the two are thought of as mutually exclu-
sive. But this is not a notion of morality that we all unproblematically share. We
need to have good independent reasons for accepting it. Of course, most people
find it intuitively true, and true on reflection, that morality excludes selfishness
and making exceptions in one’s own favor just because it suits one to do so.
But self-interest need involve neither of these, and Plato’s notion of it certainly
does not.151

In making her pitch for self-interest, Annas naturally has in mind the dia-
logue’s “main argument,” that is, the Shorter Way, for it is only along the Lon-
ger that some of us will discover Plato’s answer to Cleitophon’s Question.152
But the important thing here is the italicized passage: it is a better example of

149
 Cf. Robert G. Hoerber, “Note on the Structure of the Republic.” Phronesis 6, no. 1 (1961), 37–40,
on 39: “Our approach to the Republic, moreover, appears to be corroborated by our recent stud-
ies of several ‘Socratic’ dialogues. The gist of these articles in brief is that Plato’s ‘Socratic’
dialogues, as a Janus-head, contain two facets—philosophic content and literary finesse—neither
of which must be stressed at the expense of the other.” Hoerber was a dedicated student of the
New Testament.
150
 Cf. Adam, “Vitality of Platonism,” 28: “Who then, according to Plato, is the true and heaven-born
teacher? He is one who makes it his aim, not to multiply, but to remove those leaden weights, that
the soul may thus obey her native impulse and soar upwards.” Adam died in 1907.
151
 Annas, Introduction, 324. Cf. Rowe, Plato and the Art, 72: “I suspect that the majority of modern
readers would prefer a Socrates who put the moral good, and moral knowledge, at the center of
his concerns than one who did not.” And despite the insinuation, this is true not only of modern
readers, and that despite attempts to configure antiquity as Judenfrei.
152
 See Penner, “The Forms,” 214–217 on “a longer and broader road or circuit.”
490 Chapter 5

Recollection in practice than the Slave-Boy’s geometrical diagram,153 and far

closer to the kind of thing the philosopher will remember when considering
whether or not to return to the Cave (R. 515c4–e2).
Despite the influence of current prejudice, I therefore regard Recollection
as a constitutive part of Platonism, and even if a geometrical example may be
said to have obscured the fact, what Plato primarily expects us to remember—
and thus to have known from the start—is that Justice in the light of the Good
is noble, admirable, and honorable (i.e., καλόν), not least of all because it is
also χαλεπόν. Everyone has the inborn capacity to recognize the moral beauty
of post-eudaemonist altruism—for it is built into the (mother) nature of things
(cf. Men. 81c9–d5 and Smp. 207b2–6)—and every decent person retains it.
Inspired by the example of Socrates’ footsteps and the jail cell to which they
led, Plato counts on our capacity to remember that a self-sacrificing Return to
the Cave, made possible by a prior ascent to the fully existent, transcendent,
and thus impersonal Idea of the Good, is “giving birth and bringing forth in
Beauty,” that is, the noblest thing a human being can do, and the essence of
Justice.

§17. LOOKING BACKWARD: SOCRATES AS

AN OBSTACLE TO SOCRATISM (410E7–8)

Unlike his more radical successors, the founding father of Socratism wisely
refused to take the bait. Regarding even Euthydemus as transitional, Vlastos
placed Meno beyond the pale as plainly Platonic.154 Coming of age in an
interpretive landscape dominated by Cherniss,155 Vlastos retains a lively
sense of Platonism;156 to an awareness of Recollection’s central role in it, he
adds his own theory that it was Plato’s growing interest in mathematics that
constituted the underlying cause of the “turning point,”157 reflected in the

153
 Cf. Penner, “The Forms,” 191: “It can be very tempting indeed to suppose that Plato, in the Repub-
lic, wanted us to see the Form of the Good [there are the article’s opening words] . . . imperson-
ally good (not just good for me, good for you, good for another).” Naturally Penner resists this
temptation; note the repetition of “I do not” on 222. But lest the slave-boy be forgotten, consider
also Gail Fine, “Enquiry and Discovery: A Discussion of Dominic Scott, Plato’s Meno.” Oxford
Studies in Ancient Philosophy 32 (2007), 352–367, on 360: “For though I do not think Socrates
says the slave has any sort of innate knowledge, I understand the temptation to think he says this.”
154
 See Vlastos, “Elenchus and Mathematics”; he renews his claims about a transitional Euthydemus
on 372–373, reinforcing them on 385, citing the speech (Euthd. 290b–c) that causes Crito’s Inter-
ruption (see §3).
155
 See Ebert, “Studien zur griechischen Philosophie von Gregory Vlastos,” 271. Cf. Penner, “The
Forms,” 226n10: “This absurdity [sc. the ‘metaphysically extravagant, and probably absurd,
theory of how it is that all Forms are perfect and all perceptibles deficient’] also suited a certain
(as one might say) mystical positivism that one could notice in Vlastos’s approach to Plato.”
156
 See Guardians on Trial, 108–109.
157
 See Vlastos, “Elenchos and Mathematics,” 376.
 Before and After Cleitophon 491

geometrical examples used in Meno.158 But it is not difficult to see why the
most radical Socratists abandoned Vlastos’s restraint. Since they were casting
aside his discomfort with SP, it was only natural that its presence in Meno
would suggest Plato’s ongoing allegiance to Socratism, and it is therefore no
accident that the first collaboration of Penner and Rowe would be an attempt
to reclaim Meno 77b-78b for “the philosophy of Socrates” (see §14).159
Despite any traditional reservations, then, the more that a systematic Socra-
tism recognized “the importance of Euthydemus” (see §2), the greater became
the conviction that its Meno doublet—its hypothetical context to the contrary
notwithstanding—indicated the possibility that the dialogue as a whole was
still decisively “Socratic.” Less explicit but more alluring was the fact that
the subject of Meno was simply virtue; there was now no need to reconfigure
individual virtue-dialogues like Laches and Charmides into tacit endorse-
ments of UV (see §6). Thus Meno offered the most radical Socratists irresist-
ible bait: the trifecta of SP, K, and UV, that is, all three “Socratic Paradoxes.”
Consider in this context the way Rowe uses the word “safe” in the following
passage from Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing:

In other words, the Meno may be treated as ultimately a quite safe piece of
evidence in support of taking Plato’s Socrates to be quite serious in identifying
excellence [i.e., virtue], not with the ‘moral virtues,’160 but with a particular
kind of knowledge (which will nevertheless itself involve a commitment to the
‘virtues’, insofar as these are good things when wisdom is ‘added’).161

The knowledge in question is a notion of KGB that depends on the First

Protreptic,162 and Rowe’s remark about the other “virtues,” which are only
“good things when [IFF would have been more honest] wisdom is ‘added,’”
likewise refers to the argument there that “money, physical strength, even
courage and (so-called?) good sense, sōphrosunē, will in fact be less desirable
for anyone than their opposites, insofar as they offer us more opportunities to

158
 Including the Image-less example Socrates uses to introduce the hypothetical method, on which
Vlastos, “Elenchos and Mathematics” is well worth quoting (380): “The geometrical example is
ostentatiously technical. To understand its mathematics the reader would have needed consider-
able proficiency in a branch of Greek geometry, the ‘application of areas,’ to which modern his-
tories of mathematics refer as ‘geometrical algebra.’ Plato could certainly have chosen a simpler
example. He is preening himself on his own expertise in geometry, warning his readers that if
they have not already done a lot of work in that science they will be unable to follow him, and
this will be their loss, not his: to keep up with the best he has to offer they must learn geometry.”
159
 But see Penner, “Unity of Virtue,” 43, especially “clearly transitional from Socrates to Plato.” Cf.
67n43 on “the recollection theory.”
160
 Descended from Penner’s reference to “the popular or ‘demotic’ virtues” in “Unity of Virtue,” 43;
for Rowe’s nod to Pennerism in the passage under consideration, see Plato and the Art, 70n16.
161
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 71.
162
 See Rowe, Plato and the Art, 70–71, beginning with “this view of things is most clearly illustrated
by the ‘first protreptic’ in the Euthydemus.”
492 Chapter 5

go wrong.”163 Intent on giving what he calls “a Euthydemus-style reading” to

a passage in Apology of Socrates (Ap. 30b), he first cites Meno to support a
“moral” reading of it,164 but then pivots—having declared the First Protreptic
as “safe” for virtue-KGB165—to using the Meno Doublet to undermine “the
‘moral’ reading.”166 In the following chapter, he will devote a three-paragraph
section (“Diversion: Learning as Recollection”) to deflating Recollection.167
For Rowe, then, Meno has become, at least “ultimately,” “a quite safe piece
of evidence” for Plato’s ongoing Socratism.168 But not even when qualified
by “ultimately” and “quite” is Meno a “safe piece of evidence” for the most
radical Socratists, and that is why they have preferred to assimilate isolated
passages from it piecemeal without proper discussion of context.
In fact, Meno makes a shambles of Socratism—hence the wisdom of
Vlastos in refusing “to take the bait”—and its Socratist elements are best
understood as the mirage of a K-based oasis that Plato has used to lure
the proponents of the Eudaemonist Shortcut onto the quicksand, and that
for the second time. Having failed to make the ascent to the Beautiful in
Symposium,169 those proponents would emerge from the puzzles of Lysis
only too ready to find comfort in the First Protreptic in Euthydemus; thanks
to the prominent role of the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy in the First, and the Santas
Circle in the Second Protreptic,170 they might have known themselves to be
on unsteady ground. But they forge on, as Plato knew they would. Finding
just enough to keep them going in Laches and Charmides, they must then
confront the limitations of K-F in Gorgias—where the world begins to be
turned upside down—and even if they ignore Theages, the ending of Meno
puts a nail in exclusively K-based virtue,171 with θεία μοῖρα forcing them
to detect Platonic irony where they had failed to detect it before. But Meno
deceptively and deliberately renews their hopes, and if they can ignore the

163
 For this argument, see §6; Rowe refers to it again on 73n24, where he notes that the First Protreptic
“denies that even the parts of ‘virtue’ are goods without knowledge, sc. of good and bad.”
164
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 69.
165
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 70: “Appealing to the Euthydemus in this way is safe enough, because
there is a whole range of dialogues that everyone would accept as predating Republic in which
Socrates suggests, or apparently moves in the direction of suggesting, or hints, that excellence,
or one or more of its parts, is knowledge of good things and bad things [sc. KGB]: Charmides,
Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Laches, Lysis, Protagoras—and Meno.” The m-dash indicates the deli-
cacy of this last step.
166
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 71.
167
 Rowe, Plato and the Art, 131–134.
168
 And not, it should be added, for Rowe alone; see Penner, “Socrates and the Early Dialogues,”
155n21: “the credit for using Meno 87bff against the earlier part of the Meno belongs to Irwin,
Plato’s Moral Theory, 301n57 and 305–306n3.”
169
 See Rowe, Plato and the Art, 73n24, quoted above in §16.
170
 On which see Rowe, Plato and the Art, 72n19.
171
 Cf. Penner, “Unity of Virtue,” 42; that Penner still had much to learn about Pennerism in 1973 is
made crystal clear in 42n11.
 Before and After Cleitophon 493

fact that it is Xenophon’s “Meno the Thessalian” who Socrates converts to

SP, and that the Meno Doublet illustrates the dependence of the First Protrep-
tic on the (merely provisional) Hypothesis of TEA, they will be given one
more chance to repent in Cleitophon before the Shorter Way—a third trip to
the quicksand—salvages the Eudaemonist Shortcut at the terrible expense
of undermining SP, K, and UV.172 Aristotle’s decision to divide Plato from
his Socrates at just this point illustrates the sense of shock this sojourn into
quicksand created from the start, and was intended to create.
To return to the present: by ignoring the way K is treated in Meno “87c-
89a,” Rowe can use that passage to support “a Euthydemus-style reading”
against “the ‘moral’ reading” based on Socrates’ earlier question about
acquiring good things at “78b-e”:

Socrates: But are you adding to this provisioning, dear Meno, a ‘justly
[δικαίως]’ or ‘piously,’ or does it make no difference to you, so that even if
someone provisions himself with them unjustly [ἀδίκως], all the same you are
calling them ‘virtue’?173

But when the unique character of justice reappears so prominently in Cleito-

phon (409a6), and then becomes the basis of Republic in what follows
(τὸ μετὰ ταῦτα at 408c4), Socrates’ determination to know which of the
adverbs—δικαίως or ἀδίκως—applies to the acquisition of good things in
Meno ceases to look quite as dispensable as Rowe’s K-based (and Pennerite)
determination to unify virtue as KGB requires him to regard it. And even
before the follower of Socrates who deemed himself “the most powerful
[ἐρρωμενέστατος]” (409a4) denominates as δικαιοσύνη “the art for the virtue
of the soul [ἡ ἐπὶ τῇ τῆς ψυχῆς ἀρετῇ τέχνη]” (409a3), Cleitophon has already
managed to make reference to Gorgias,174 the dialogue that would be the
first indication of the exceptional status of justice among the virtues—if that

172
 This point probably deserves more emphasis than I have already given it, but if there is a point to
be hammered it is that the Shorter Way combines the Socratist end (i.e., TEA)—and on this point
note the eleven uses of “happiness” in Annas, Introduction, 267–269—with ostentatiously anti-
Socratic means (i.e., in opposition to a Prt.-based image of Socrates): the four separate virtues,
the opinion-preserving and habit-dependent (i.e., non-K) account of some of them, and the SP-
destroying rehabilitation of ἀκρασία implicit in tripartition. Hence Aristotle’s misunderstanding of
the tripartite soul as characteristic of Plato in distinction to Socrates; it is by preserving the end—in
relationship to which alone the (traditional) Socratic Paradoxes are means—while systematically
undermining those means, that makes it easier to recognize that the Shorter Way is a springboard
by which we ascend to the Idea of the Good; those who try to traverse it on foot will sink.
173
 Men. 78d2–6.
174
 At 408b3–5; see Slings, Plato, Clitophon, in addition to 169, 171, and 199–203, especially 200
(emphasis mine): “It would seem, therefore, that the author of the Clitophon took his identification
of politics and judication [i.e., δικαστική at 408b4–5; cf. Grg. 520b3, 464b8/464c3 (ap. crit.), and
Dodds, Plato, Gorgias, 227–228] over from the Gorgias, and brought it in as a reference to the
educative role of the politician in that dialogue.”
494 Chapter 5

office had not already been filled by Alcibiades Major—and thus a plausible
challenge to UV.
Of the trifecta of “Socratic Paradoxes” that I have claimed fall under suspi-
cion in Meno (UV, K, and SP), there is no question that K, thanks to its role
in the hypothetical argument, is the most obvious and it will shortly prove to
be by far the most important. But I have reviewed the extraordinary role of
justice in dialogues on either side of Meno to strengthen the suggestion that it
weakens the case for UV as well, and not only because of the anticipation of
the Problem of the One and the Many (see §15). And even though the point
may be obvious, another word on the relationship between justice and UV is
requisite. While the kind of σοφία that causes us to εὖ πράττειν (or φρόνησις
as self-preserving prudence) or even σωφροσύνη as self-control, can easily
defended as simply and even exclusively good for the agent, courage—
especially in wartime—is sufficiently difficult to defend on a self-interested
basis that Plato begins our education with it in Protagoras and Alcibiades
Major. But it is justice that creates the real crisis for an agent-benefitting
conception of virtue: everyone knows that justice is incompatible with ben-
efitting yourself, at least at the expense of others, and decent people know far
more than that. The impossibility of reducing justice to self-interest explains
the revealing necessity of deleting justice in the First Protreptic, and any
self-benefitting basis for UV must stumble on it, leading directly to Annas’s
observation that “the Guardians’ return to the Cave has always been recog-
nized as a major problem in the Republic.”
In that context, one might easily prove that UV remains an unsolved prob-
lem in the dialogues by citing Laws 962d1–964a4,175 but I have something
more immediate in mind. The hypothetical argument begins as follows:

Socrates: In the same way also concerning virtue [περὶ ἀρετῆς], since we know
neither what it is nor what kind of thing [οὔθ’ ὅτι ἐστιν οὔθ’ ὁποῖον τι], hypoth-
esizing it [αὐτό] let us examine whether it is teachable or not teachable.176

Translating ὅτι ἐστιν as “what it is” is both natural and contextual (cf. Meno
86d5–6), but it is not inevitable: as hammered in Charmides, ὅτι can also
mean: “that” (Chrm. 170c9–d3). It is therefore possible that the first (hidden)
Hypothesis in the argument is existential: we are literally hypothesizing it

175
 Cf. Daniel Devereaux, “The Unity of the Virtues” in Hugh H. Benson (ed.), A Companion to
Plato, 325–340 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), especially 337–338 on Laws, ending with: “It
seems that Plato, even at the end of his life, was still puzzled about the nature of virtue because of
what he saw as the lack of unity and heterogeneity of the individual virtues.” See also Guardians
on Trial, 214, 256, and 261–262.
176
 Men. 87b2–4; cf. Prt. 361b7–8.
 Before and After Cleitophon 495

(αὐτό), that is, that there is a (single) thing virtue that exists.177 Be that as it
may, Vlastos comments on this passage as follows:

The use to which Plato’s new Socrates wants to put this [hypothetical] method
is made clear at once. To continue the citation in T20: T20 Meno 87b2–4: ‘Just
so, let us say about virtue: Since we know neither what it is (ὅτι ἐστιν) nor of
what sort it is (ὁποῖον τι), let us investigate from a hypothesis (ὑποθέμενοι αὐτὸ
σκοπῶμεν) whether or not it is teachable.’ The problematic proposition is p:
Virtue is teachable. The hypothesis to investigate p is h: Virtue is knowledge.
And h we know to be a cardinal Socratic doctrine [n59]. Here Socrates argues
first for h (87d-89c), then against it (96d-98c).178

I have not quoted this passage from Vlastos in order to press the point that
UV—like K (and many others)—functions as a Hypothesis in the ensuing
argument. Nor is it particularly relevant that Vlastos is seconding Robinson’s
Retreat on the hypothetical status of K in the argument, although it is cer-
tainly nice to have this great scholar’s support and even to rest, at the end,
on his authority. It would therefore be more accurate to say that this quota-
tion justifies this book’s dedication to Vlastos: here he hits the nail on the
head. But despite the pellucid analysis of the relationship between the Meno
Doublet and Aristotle’s Socrates, Vlastos misses the fact that Plato hasn’t
changed his mind about K, and he is using his Socrates for the same purpose
in Republic that he used him in Protagoras and everywhere else.
Important and perspicuous as this passage is, then, the broader sweep
of things indicates that note 59 (hereafter, “Vlastos’s Golden Footnote”),
attached to the claim that “we know” something about K and Socrates that
I, for one, have come to doubt was ever the case for Socrates, that is, Plato’s
Socrates, is even more important. My quarrel with Vlastos is that Plato’s
Socrates is the only Socrates relevant to this study, and the salient point of

177
 This reading solves three problems: (1) it differentiates ὅτι ἐστιν from ὁποῖον τι (ἐστιν), for if we
merely don’t know what it is, it is redundant to ask what kind of thing it is, (2) it explains the
participle ὄντων in the phrase that immediately follows the one quoted in the text, revealing the
statement to be hypothesizing both ὅτι ἐστιν and ὁποῖον τι: “Socrates: speaking as follows: what
kind of thing [ποῖόν τι] among the existent things concerning the soul [τῶν περὶ τὴν ψυχὴν ὄντων]
is virtue for it to be teachable or not teachable?” (87b5–6), and (3) it explains both the use of ἐστιν
at Men. 88c4 and the parallel to τῶν περὶ τὴν ψυχὴν ὄντων (87b5) just quoted: “Socrates: If then
virtue among the things in the soul [τῶν ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ] is something [τί ἐστιν].” For other relevant
existential assumptions, see Phlb. 15b1–2 (on which see Guardians in Action, 292–294), and more
importantly R. 510c3–5, on which see Plato the Teacher, 131–137, and Lloyd P. Gerson, Aristotle
and Other Platonists (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 237: “These hypotheses [sc.
as described in the Divided Line] would seem to be primarily, if not exclusively, existential.” On
this claim turns the question of the Intermediates, that is, whether the Second Part of the Divided
Line is distinguished only by its method or by its objects.
178
 Vlastos, Elenchus and Mathematics, 381.
496 Chapter 5

that quarrel is Vlastos’s characteristic claim—the claim that causes him to

divide Plato from his own Socrates in Meno—that K is “a cardinal Socratic
doctrine.” For ease of analysis, I have divided and enumerated the evidence
Vlastos cites in the footnote to support this crucial claim:

[1] Protagoras 361b: Socrates holds that all the virtues are knowledge, ‘insist-
ing’ on it (or ‘urging it, ὡς σὺ σπεύδεις). [2] Laches 194d: (Nicias speaking) ‘I
have often heard you say that each of us is good in those things in which he is
wise, bad in those in which he is ignorant.’ [3] For Aristotle this is the crux of
Socrates’ moral psychology: Nicomachean Ethics 1145b23–27; Eudemian Eth-
ics 1215b2–9; Magna Moralia 1182a15–26.179

Working backwards (and thus beginning with [3]), it has been this study’s
ongoing claim that while Aristotle is the founding father of Socratism, that
doesn’t mean that either Plato or Plato’s Socrates was ever a Socratist. As a
result, I have been at some pains to explain why Aristotle claimed that K was
“a cardinal Socratic doctrine” and have repeatedly and consistently traced this
claim back to the way he read Protagoras. Thanks to the far greater authority
of his Nicomachean Ethics in comparison with the other two sources, it is
therefore convenient that [3] leads us back to [1], for it is at 1145b23–24 that
Aristotle refers to the final argument in Protagoras, unmistakably paraphras-
ing Prt. 352c1–2. As for [2], Vlastos’s use of Nicias’ authority is particularly
germane in the context of Cleitophon, where it is obvious that Socrates’
companions—especially older and more authoritative contemporaries like
Nicias (cf. 408c5–6 and 409a4)—had but a faint conception of his views,
and could not be relied upon to furnish him or anyone else with authoritative
information regarding “a cardinal Socratic doctrine.” As for [1], the words
Vlastos quotes (ὡς σὺ σπεύδεις at Prt. 361b6) are addressed by Socrates
to himself in order to show K’s inconsistency with his ongoing claim that
virtue is μὴ διδακτόν, while thanks to the use of ὑποθέμενος at Prt. 361b8,
Protagoras has both hypothesized and represented the view that virtue is
διδακτόν.
In addition to emphasizing Aristotle’s role in making K “a cardinal
Socratic doctrine” and indicating the primary literary source upon which he
relied in sustaining that view (and on which others must continue to rely),
Vlastos’s Golden Footnote in context reveals the countervailing literary
evidence against doing so: the antithetical relationship—as deep as the dif-
ference between K as hypothesis and K as cardinal doctrine—between Meno
and Protagoras. It is not, of course, the only difference between them, quite

179
 Vlastos, “Elenchos and Mathematics,” 381n59; in addition to adding the bracketed numbers, I
have expanded the abbreviations used for the five works mentioned here.
 Before and After Cleitophon 497

apart from the other two Socratic Paradoxes included in what I have sug-
gested is a “Socratist Trifecta.”
More obviously, the emergence of Recollection in Meno points to the reso-
lution of the self-contradictions within the antithetical positions of Socrates
and Protagoras (Prt. 361a6–c2): virtue need not be knowledge in order to be
διδακτόν if Socratic teaching (aided by θεία μοίρα) merely elicits what is
ἀναμνηστόν. It is only when we see Protagoras disprove SP with his reluc-
tant embrace of the GP Equation (cf. Prt. 352c1–d4 and 351c7–d7) in order
to sustain the K-based claim that virtue is teachable (cf. Prt. 328c3–4 and
361b7–8) while revealing in the process that it is rather his conception of vir-
tue—which must leave room for pleasant courage (Prt. 360a2–3) and unwise
justice (Prt. 329e5–6)—that leads to UV, and where the pleasure-pain version
of KGB the sophists unanimously embrace (Prt. 358d4) can only achieve
what is beneficial for the agent; it is only when we see all this, that the delib-
erate and dialectical antithesis between Protagoras and Meno—an antithesis
predicated on their pedagogical unity—has been fully consummated. And this
explains why Meno announces the death of Protagoras (91e6).
Vlastos explains the antithesis between them by means of the Order of
Composition paradigm and “Plato’s Development.” My explanation begins
with the RPT-based observation that we did not see the Socratist Trifecta
implode in Protagoras the first time we saw it. For Vlastos, then, it is Plato
who changes between writing Protagoras and Meno; I am claiming that it
is the reader whose understanding of Protagoras has changed after reading
Laches, Gorgias and Meno. Having reached this point in the ROPD, we are
in a position to see the reversals performed on SP, K,180 and UV in the previ-
ous paragraph only when we see Protagoras again,181 after reading Meno.
As Vlastos proves, we do not need to see them all: the hypothetical role of
K is sufficient to prove the antithesis.
But when we see Protagoras, let alone perform it, immediately after hav-
ing studied Meno, something even more obvious must come into sight: the
GP Equation—on which all the aforementioned reversals depend—functions

180
 For an early critique of Vlastos’s approach to K in Prt., see O’Brien, The Socratic Paradoxes,
136–38n21. More recently, see Pangle, Virtue is Knowledge, chapter 4.
181
 For a thoughtful discussion of UV in Prt.—in critical dialogue with both Vlastos and Penner—see
Samuel C. Rickless, “Socrates’ Moral Intellectualism.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (1998),
355–367. For a Pennerite defense of “RMI” (“Reductive Moral Intellectualism”), see George
Rudebusch, “Socrates, Wisdom and Pedagogy” in Georgios Anagnostopulos (ed.), Socratic,
Platonic and Aristotelian Studies: Essays in Honor of Gerasimos Santas (Dordrecht: Springer,
2011), 165–184; this book’s readers will find his discussion of “False-Lead Pedagogy” (172–173)
amusing: to disarm “Socrates’ part/whole claims” (166), Rudebusch’s Socrates “prompts the
interlocutor with a suggestion that is false” (173; cf. discussion of basanizousin on 172). Justify-
ing my use of “Pennerite,” see George Rudebusch, Socrates, Pleasure, and Value (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press), xii, 130n11, 132nn8–9, and 143n17, the latter an attempt to
disarm εὐτυχία in the First Protreptic.
498 Chapter 5

as a (corrigible) Hypothesis in the Final Argument of Protagoras.182 Poised

on the edge of Republic, this would be the major thing that Plato might
have expected us to see, because on our ability to recognize the hypotheti-
cal method for what it is when not expressly identified as such, depends our
ability to recognize in the Second Part of the Divided Line a commentary on
the Shorter Way. And since we have seen Socrates reject that merely hypoth-
esized Equation in Gorgias before reaching Meno, we see Protagoras in a
new light the second time—although I am claiming it is really the third (see
§11)—that we encounter it.
Before moving on to the third, a retrospective word about that second will
not be out of place, that is, how a repeated performance of Protagoras would
have changed our point of view after having reached Symposium. The emer-
gence there of Phaedrus, Eryximachus, Pausanias, and Agathon as clearly
defined individuals—merely names the first time we saw Protagoras—points
to the increased and increasing importance of the Play of Character in the
post-Symposium dialogues. Thanks to an ongoing dialogue with the most
radical Socratists, the dramatic elements of those dialogues may have taken a
backseat in this book, but the reappearance of both Critias and Charmides in
Charmides, already present in the garden of Callias (Prt. 315a1 and 316a5),
underlines just how important each dialogue’s dramatis personae will have
become to the Argument of the Action. In the dialogues that precede Sympo-
sium, by contrast, the reader’s attention is focused on Socrates, and the rela-
tively colorless or one-dimensional portraits of both Alcibiades and Hippias
in their respective dyads is in marked contrast with the interpretive dilemmas
provoked by Lysis and Menexenus, Ctesippus and Crito, Laches and Nicias,
as well as Callicles and Meno. It would therefore be only the third time we
see Protagoras that the problematic character of its Socratist elements takes
center stage.
It is high time to begin honoring the fact that this section is part of a chap-
ter ostensibly devoted to Cleitophon, and here’s the link between it and the
foregoing: if the Academy’s second year (or semester, period, etc.) ends with
Meno as its first did with Symposium, a third performance of Protagoras
takes place between Meno and Cleitophon, and considered in that light, it is
the reappearance of SP in the latter that is the most prominent textual link.183
Building on the earlier dialogue’s phrase “beaten by pleasures [ἥττων τῶν
ἡδονῶν]” (407d6)—against which, of course, the GP Equation is deployed

182
 Kahn, “Review of Plato’s Progress,” 369.
183
 A more “musical” link (see Introduction) is Cleitophon’s resort to Thrasymachus; if Protagoras
were still alive—and Meno has just emphasized that he is not (Meno 91e6–7)—it might just as
easily have been his συνουσία that Socrates had heard from Lysias that Cleitophon was praising
to the skies (406a1–4).
 Before and After Cleitophon 499

in Protagoras (Prt. 352d4–353a6)—Cleitophon places in Socrates’ mouth

the dubious argument that since nobody wants to be beaten (407d6–7),184
being unjust cannot be voluntary (407d3–4) and must arise from ignorance
or lack of education (407d2–3). The comment of Slings on this passage is
remarkable:

Plato frequently sets out to prove the Socratic paradox οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἁμαρτάνει
(or its implication that no one wishes evil), e.g. Men. 77b6–78b2; Grg.
467c5–468c8; Prt. 352e5–357e8, and his arguments are never very cogent. I am
sorry to make such a claim, which will seem preposterous to many scholars.185

But the most important link between the two is even more basic. It is
because of the antithesis between Meno and Protagoras—when not palli-
ated by the Order of Composition expedient—that Cleitophon has reached
the point of despair that forms the emotional basis or Grundbestimmung of
the dialogue that bears his name. If what seemed to be “a cardinal Socratic
doctrine” proves on inspection not to be, if all we thought we knew about
Socrates beginning from Protagoras,186 and thus if all “we know” about
Socrates as Aristotle has managed to embalm him (and manifestly took him
to be as a student), if all this ultimately emerges as problematic in Meno—as
Vlastos perceptively recognized that it does—then Cleitophon’s confusion,
frustration, and challenge are fully warranted.187 The unanswered Cleitophon

184
 Cf. Mx. 247a4–6, where the dead are made to say that if they defeat (νικᾶσθαι) their children “in
virtue [ἀρετῇ],” that victory will be a disgrace, whereas if they are beaten (ἡττᾶσθαι) by them, they
will achieve εὐδαιμονία. In addition to making happiness independent of ante-mortem events (cf.
Herodotus, 1.32.7), note the preceding claim that ἐπιστήμη as a whole (πᾶσα), when “separated
from justice and the rest of virtue [χωριζομένη δικαιοσύνης καὶ τῆς ἄλλης ἀρετῆς]”—which would
be a difficult if not impossible separation to make if ἀρετή were simply ἐπιστήμη, that is, if K
were true—seems to be “wickedness not wisdom [πανουργία οὐ σοφία] (Mx. 246e7–247a2).” The
highly alliterative sentence between these two passages (Mx. 246a2–4) is the rhetorical highpoint
of the speech as a whole, increasing the importance of the context in which it is embedded.
185
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 285 (on 407d2–e2). The comment continues: “Of course, this commen-
tary is not the place to deal with the gigantic literature on these passages—I have to confine myself
to what seem to me the most important objections. Meno could have answered ‘Yes’ at 78a5 and
besides, Socrates’ question 77d4–6 implies an equivocation: κακός—morally evil: κακός—harm-
ful; Socrates’ question at Grg. 468a5–6 is framed as a dilemma, suggesting that neither end nor
means is evil; again the meaning of ἀγαθόν is not quite clear, cf. Dodds’s note, p. 235 (a); the
argument in Prt. is valid only if ἀγαθόν = ἡδύ and κακόν = ἀνιαρόν, cf. 351b3–d7; 353c9–355a5.”
I have corrected two minor orthographical errors in quoting this passage.
186
 Cf. Lloyd, “Meno and the Mysteries,” 179: “by initiation I mean rather the process whereby the
initiates themselves come to see some subject in a quite different light. They may even discover
that what they had been taught, or what they thought they had learnt, at an early stage in the
process, later turns out to be quite false.” Thus “by watching Protagoras” becomes the proper
answer—looking backward, as opposed to forward to Republic in Cleitophon’s Question (408e1–
2), which immediately precedes it—to the question he poses at 408e2–3 (Slings): “Cleitophon:
What do we say is the way to start learning justice?”
187
 As Benson perceptively emphasizes; see Clitophon’s Challenge, chapter 1 (1–47).
500 Chapter 5

proves that Socrates’ auditors thought (as many of them continue to think)
that they have been learning his cardinal doctrines in the dialogues under
consideration in Ascent to the Good; instead Plato is teaching them how to
read his mighty Republic.
Of course we can only see this to be true if we read Cleitophon as
genuine, and with that observation, we return to Slings. As indicated by
his attitude toward SP in the comment quoted above, he is neither writing
nor thinking within the Socratist tradition, and it is therefore an eloquent
tribute to his erudition and philological skill that the twin monuments of a
life cut short will have been preserved in publications by the Cambridge
University and Clarendon Press. Before examining his interpretive strategy
for vindicating the authenticity of Cleitophon—a strategy that reaches the
correct conclusion by means that are considerably less persuasive than they
are revealing—some remarks on the tradition to which Slings belongs are
in order. It would be easiest to link his approach to continental scholars like
Gaiser,188 and even more so to Victor Goldschmidt,189 but it is more useful
to think in broader terms.
Working backwards, his greatest modern debt, paradoxically, is to
Schleiermacher: accepting the original athetizer’s premise that Cleitophon
cannot be authentic if it constitutes an attack on Plato himself, Slings’s
interpretive task is to show that it isn’t,190 a project that will require him
to uphold his predecessor’s excision of Alcibiades Major.191 But it is even

188
 The influence of Konrad Gaiser, Protreptik und Paränese bei Platon: Untersuchungen zur Form
des platonischen Dialogs (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1959), 140–147 is immense; see especially
146n161.
189
 Note the many references to and quotations from Victor Goldschmidt, Les Dialogues de Platon;
structure et méthode dialectique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1947), especially on
52n98, 129n236, and 151–153. For further indication of his “continental” (and thus non-Socratist)
orientation, see the sources cited in 151n286, itself attached to a translated quotation from Emile
de Strycker: “Plato wants to make us understand that we wrongly identified ethical knowledge
with the technician’s skill.” This (warranted) rejection of CA is then linked, appropriately, to (a
τεχνή-based) K (151–152). As noted above in in connection with Thg., Clt. will not make a come-
back as long as Socratism continues to exercise hegemony over the Anglo-American reception of
Plato for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with philology.
190
 Cf. Rowe, “Plato and Socrates,” 160, on Slings: “Clitophon’s attack is not directed at Plato, or
at Plato’s Socrates (he makes it clear that he [sc. Cleitophon] has absolutely no quarrel with the
basics of Socratic teaching); only at a certain literary Socrates.” In light of this astute comment,
it becomes obvious that another of Slings’s literary debts is to Heinrich Brünnecke, “Kleitophon
wider Sokrates. Ein Beitrag zur Erklärung des nach ersteren benannten Dialoges der platonischen
Sammlung.” Archiv für die Geschichte der Philosophie 26 (1913) 449–478, beginning on 457 with
the ever handy Antisthenes.
191
 And do so in unusually apodictic terms; see Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 164: “Plato could never have
written anything like the Alcibiades 1, because he never loses sight of the reader, whom he wishes
to exhort by implication.”
 Before and After Cleitophon 501

more productive to trace the roots of his argument back to Xenophon, who
set himself to counter the impression “expressed in some written and spo-
ken criticisms of Socrates that are based on inference, and think, that though
he was consummate in exhorting men to virtue, he was an incompetent
guide to it.”192 Alcibiades Major falls under the ban because it confirms
these criticisms, and Slings needs a non-Platonic example of “philosophical
protreptic” that he can plausibly configure Plato’s Cleitophon as attacking.
Slings depends throughout on the distinction between “explicit” and
“implicit protreptic;”193 he will claim that Cleitophon constitutes an attack
on the former while preserving its author’s ongoing use of the latter, a cat-
egory that includes “the aporetic dialogue”194 but excludes “philosophical
protreptic.”195 What makes this approach less persuasive than revealing is
that it forces Slings to tie himself in knots while discussing Euthydemus.196
Having admitted at the start the obvious point that the First Protreptic is
an example of “explicit protreptic,”197 he must somehow persuade us—
in the light of the aporetic and circular Second Protreptic that builds on
it198—that Euthydemus as a whole,199 including its First Protreptic, must
really be understood as a defense of “implicit protreptic” as advanced in
“the aporetic dialogue.” While undermining a key element in the Socratist
reading of the First Protreptic,200 he confirms my claims about the presence
of fallacy in it,201 and generally leaves no doubt that Plato’s intention in
writing Cleitophon cannot be understood without considering its relation-
ship to Euthydemus. Particularly on this last point, Slings is very persuasive
indeed: it can’t be.

192
 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.4.1 (quoted in full above); on this passage, see Slings, Plato, Clito-
phon, 1, 45n86, and 77–82.
193
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 61–62.
194
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 163: “the aporetic dialogues, and the aporetic parts of other dialogues,
are Plato’s alternative for explicit exhortation, in other words, they are Plato’s [‘implicit’ is under-
stood] protreptic.”
195
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 60. For a useful summary of Slings’s thesis, see Rowe, “Plato and
Socrates,” 160.
196
 See especially Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 148–154 (“Protreptic in the Euthydemus”).
197
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 62 and 149.
198
 See Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 150–153.
199
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 148: “Euthydemus is not a protreptic dialogue, but a dialogue about
protreptic.”
200
 See Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 150–153.
201
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 61–62: “Socrates starts from the ἔνδοξον that all men desire to be happy
and via various (not always very convincing) steps arrives at the conclusion that in order to be
happy one must try and acquire wisdom, i.e. philosophize. This is explicit protreptic.” Cf. 148–149
and “literary trick” at 109. The excursus on Plato’s use of fallacy—including εὖ πράττειν—in the
context of “play” (159–160) deserves special attention.
502 Chapter 5

Since Slings is a great scholar, no intertextual connections between Cleito-

phon and Euthydemus are either ignored or invented, and he demonstrates
that there are many. Four of these will be reviewed now, saving a fifth for the
end. The first is textual (408c4–7; cf. Euthd. 283a1–7) and is merely confir-
matory.202 The second—which really involves multiple connections—links
Cleitophon’s account of Socratic protreptic in the first part of the dialogue
(407a9–e2) to passages in the First Protreptic.203 The third connects “the
circular regress” of the second account of justice Cleitophon received from
Socrates’ followers (409d2–410a6) in the second part of the dialogue (begin-
ning at 408c4) to the Santas-circularity of the Second.204 The fourth has
already been mentioned but deserves special consideration.
Although Slings will need to walk it back in order to ensure that Cleito-
phon, as a defense of “implicit protreptic,” is not an attack on any (genuine)
Platonic dialogue, he admits several times that the First Protreptic is an
example of “explicit protreptic,”205 that is, exactly the kind of thing he (accu-
rately and perceptively) claims that Cleitophon is attacking. Consider the
following passage about Euthydemus, where he suggests that it is because the
First Protreptic leads to the Second, and because the Second is deliberately
circular, that the First merely appears to be “explicit protreptic” since in fact
it ends in ἀπορία:

First, directly at the beginning of the conversation the σοφία looked for is
assumed implicitly to be a τεχνή (with ἐπιστήμη serving as trait d’union;
288d8–289c8). Introducing the concept of virtue as a τεχνή is a well-known
feature of the early Platonic dialogue; the concept invariably causes the main
aporia, as it does here. Because σοφία is a τεχνή, it must have an ἔργον (291e1);
this ἔργον must be ὠφέλιμον (292a8) and therefore ἀγαθόν (292a11; cf. Comm.
on 407a1 ὠφέλιμον). Now, in the first conversation [sc. the First Protreptic],
it had been proved that σοφία itself is the only ἀγαθόν (281e3–5); conse-
quently, the only ἔργον of σοφία is σοφία (292d8–e1; cf. section i.5.3). The
discussion has resulted in a circular regress (291b8–c1), and therefore in aporia
(292e6–293a1).206

Despite the complexities involved, the important point is that Slings is inad-
vertently showing how Cleitophon can be recognized as an attack on the

202
 In addition to Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 297–298 (on 408c4–7), see 31, 110, and 229, where
410b4–6 (considered ad loc. on 325).
203
 See Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 105–110.
204
 In addition to Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 150–153, see 52–53.
205
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 61–62, 135n250, and 142; for “walk it back,” see 154.
206
 See Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 150–151.
 Before and After Cleitophon 503

Socratist elements in Euthydemus,207 a position, it should be added, that is

much easier for continental scholars to recognize and embrace.208
Of course Slings is trying to prove something else, and the complexity of
the argument he is making in the passage just quoted arises from his attempt
to show that the First Protreptic is not the kind of “explicit protreptic” that is
under attack in Cleitophon. A less complicated way of proving him wrong is
to consider his dependence on what he calls “Clinias’ astonishing progress.”209
To begin with, it is crucial to his case that Alcibiades Major is both non-
Platonic and explicitly protreptic (“it is not an aporetic dialogue”210): as such,
it can become Plato’s target in Slings’s restored Cleitophon. For Slings,
Alcibiades is (merely) purged of “one false opinion,”211 he is “exhorted and
converted” with no benefit to the reader,212 and the dialogue is “not really
concerned with ethical problems.”213 Slings will then juxtapose these (ques-
tionable) observations with the more substantial benefit that allegedly accrues
to both Cleinias and the reader as a result of the two Socratic protreptics in
Euthydemus, compelling Slings to present them as “conversations,”214 exactly
what Vlastos recognized that they were not:

In each of two long segments of the dialogue he [sc. Socrates in the First and
Second Protreptics] turns his back on them [sc. the Euthydemus and Diony-
sodorus], giving all his attention to Cleinias, a beautiful boy, who hangs on

207
 Cf. Stefanini, Platone, 1.203–211, especially 203–206 (on Euthydemus specifically) and 204n3:
“Dopo di aver dimonstrato nel Clitofonte da quale punto di vista il socratismo è sterile agli effi
educativi, Platone compirà l’opera nella Repubblica, porgendo una ben diversa elaborazione dei
postulate fondamentali del maestro e risolvendo da un altro punto di vista il problema educativo.”
208
 Cf. Hermann Gundert, “Dialog und Dialektik: Zur Struktur des platonischen Dialogs.” Studium
Generale 21 (1968), 295–379 and 387–449; representative is 313: “Das beliebteste methodische
Mittel, dessen sich die elenktische Destruktion bedient, ist die Analogie der Techne [sc. CA], wie
sie durch die Hypothesis (4) [sc. K], das ‘Tugendwissen,’ nahegelegt ist; denn die Ausdrücke für
Wissen, ἐπιστήμη und weithin auch σοφία, werden primär als Sachverstand und Meisterschaft
in einer Kunst verstanden.” Incidentally, if Leo Strauss, who died in October 1973, was the
author behind L. S., “Review of Dialog und Dialektik. Zur Struktur des platonischen Dialogs
by H. Gundert.” Review of Metaphysics 27, no. 2 (December 1973), 387–388, that would prove
his extensive knowledge of post-War developments in the German Plato-reception; the fact that
Gundert was a Nazi may explain Strauss’s decision for anonymity. For the theoretical connections
between Strauss and Tübingen, see Altman, “Heideggerian Origins,” 225–230.
209
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 153; cf. 135n250. Cf. Scolnicov, “Plato’s Euthydemus,” 27.
210
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 163.
211
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 164.
212
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 164.
213
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 164.
214
 Beginning with Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 60. So also “two protreptic conversations” at 70n126,
then 75, 93, 149, 149n283, before finally giving way to this at 214–215: “Socrates’ conversations
with Clinias are specimens of explicit protreptic and of elenchos at the same time: the subject-
matter is protreptic, the method elenchos; as explicit protreptic, the conversations fail to reach
their aim, as elenchos they do not (Clinias does not acquire knowledge, but he does make a great
deal of progress).”
504 Chapter 5

his lips. Here for the first time in Plato’s corpus we see Socrates unloading his
philosophizing on the interlocutor in the form of protreptic discourse expounded
in flagrantly non-elenctic fashion as a virtual monologue.215

Finally, it is in this context that Slings mentions “the remarkable effect

which Socratic elenchos has on the young Clinias.”216 First of all, Slings
has managed to explain, albeit inadvertently, why Plato depicts Socrates
delivering his First Protreptic to a kinsman of Alcibiades (Euthd. 275b1), a
juxtaposition that suggests “Socratic elenchos” in fact had a far greater, albeit
temporary, effect on Alcibiades (Smp. 215d6–e1). But in order to show that
Cleinias progresses while Alcibiades is (merely) “converted,” Slings must
not only assume that Socrates was accurately presenting the boy’s comments
before Crito’s Interruption (Euthd. 290b3–d8) but that we must regard “Clei-
nias’ Progress”—as reflected in those comments217—as the result of “divine
intervention.”218
Once again, Plato’s comic Euthydemus proves itself to be a remarkably
unstable foundation on which to build. But it is necessary to emphasize that
Plato uses Cleitophon to do more than emphasize the limitations of Socratic
protreptic as practiced in both Euthydemus and Meno. As I pointed out in the
previous section, it is Cleitophon who takes over the familiar role of Socrates,
now becoming the ἔλεγχος-wielding questioner.219 Why? The reason that
Plato uses Cleitophon to interrogate and refute Socrates’ unquestioning and
unnamed followers—older men like Nicias and even more so Critias come to
mind—is that they collectively represent and attempt to defend what I have
been calling “Socratism,” understood here not as a modern misconception
but as a necessary springboard to Platonism, built into the pre-Republic dia-
logues and unmasked as inadequate by Plato himself. It is because Cleitophon
completes this process—for Cleitophon is insistently asking the questions
that Cleinias failed to ask in the First Protreptic and that Meno failed to ask
in its Doublet—that it will not be returning to the canon as long as Socratists
dominate the Anglo-American reception of Plato,220 for Socratism not only
depends on reading those passages uncritically, but as doctrinally constitutive
of “the philosophy of Socrates.”
For the same reason that Meno helps us to see that the GP Equation in Pro-
tagoras is the Hypothesis of the second argument for SP—the first, emerging

215
 Vlastos, “Elenchos and Mathematics,” 372; cf. Vlastos, Socratic Studies, 30.
216
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 153.
217
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 153, cites Euthd. 289c8–290d8.
218
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 154.
219
 Cf. Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 18 and 51–53, ending with the remarkable claim: “The author takes
the trouble to make it clear that this Clitophon is the real Socrates.”
220
 On the other hand, greater open-mindedness may well emerge elsewhere; cf. Franco Trabattoni,
“Sull’ autenticità del Teage e del Clitofonte (pseudo)platonici.” Acme 51 (1998), 193–210.
 Before and After Cleitophon 505

in the Simonides episode (Prt. 345d6–e6), properly farcical, can scarcely

be called an argument—so too it helps us to recognize that TEA, even
apart from the fallacious manner in which it is introduced (Euthd. 278e3),
is merely the Hypothesis of the First Protreptic. As for Cleitophon, Slings
has amassed sufficient evidence to support the view that it is a critique of
Socrates’ two Protreptics in Euthydemus, and that it is their inadequacy—and
the Santas-circularity rehearsed at 409e10–410a6 in particular—that leads to
Cleitophon’s (fully justified) dissatisfaction. In addition, then, to providing
additional evidence for connecting Cleitophon directly to both Euthydemus
and Meno,221 Slings also helps to confirm the proposal I made in §5: Euthyde-
mus and Meno are the matched endpoints of a six-dialogue series. Cleitophon
illustrates the necessity of Socratism.
By introducing the term “proleptic,” Kahn has made it possible to rethink
the relationship between Republic and the dialogues that precede it, and in
Plato and the Socratic Dialogue (1996) he has interpreted all of the dialogues
considered in Ascent to the Good—with the exception of Theages and Cleito-
phon—in relation to the master-hypothesis that Plato’s Socratic dialogues
“prepare his readers for the reception of a new and radically unfamiliar view
of reality.”222 Without denying the value of reading the six-dialogue series
in relation to Republic, the series as a whole is also proleptic with respect to
Cleitophon,223 the dialogue that immediately follows it.224
If the First Protreptic has not been seconded but rather deconstructed by
the role of Hypothesis in its Meno Doublet, if the virtue that Cleinias was so
sure could be taught in Euthydemus must now be reconsidered or even dis-
carded in the light of Recollection, if the Sign in Theages has undermined our
confidence that Nicias’ apparently Socrates-inspired KGB is “the teaching”
of Laches, if Plato’s Confession in Gorgias has helped us to see his kinsman
Critias in a new light, if the Self-Benefitting Doctor in Charmides has been
trumped by the death-defying Doctor on Trial in Gorgias, if that dialogue’s
Final Myth has called into question the very possibility that we could ever
(K-F) know “what is to be hoped and feared,” and finally if the notion that
without the guidance of self-benefiting wisdom, justice could do us more
harm than good—as both the First Protreptic and the First Platonic Paradox
suggest that it easily could—then Plato’s Cleitophon is a reflection of the
resulting confusion, Cleitophon’s resort to Thrasymachus included.

221
 For connections to Men., see Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 29–30 and 110–111.
222
 Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, i.
223
 Cf. Stefanini, Platone, 1.209: “Dopo il Protagora, l’Eutidemo, il Liside e il Carmide, il Clitophone
ne costituisce la conclusione.”
224
 Placed after the six-dialogue series, Clt. becomes thereby analogous (by ring-structure) to Ly., the
dialogue that precedes it; this might explain the lyre’s curious intrusion, discussed in Slings, Plato,
Clitophon, 115–117, following Gaiser, Protreptik und Paränese, 143n156.
506 Chapter 5

Against Thrasymachus, Plato the Teacher lived and died in the state-
ment of Socratic faith he immortalized (or at least tried to immortalize) in
his description of the just man in Cleitophon: πάντα γὰρ ἐπ᾽ ὠφελίᾳ πάντας
δρᾶν. In order to regain for that description the immortality it deserves, this
chapter’s purpose has been to prove that Cleitophon is a genuine Platonic
dialogue, not only because it looks forward to, and thus prepares the reader
for, Republic—primarily through Cleitophon’s Question (see §16)—but
also because of the backward-pointing concluding judgment it renders on
the (“Socratic”) dialogues that have preceded it. It reaches that conclusion,
appropriately, only at the end, and an analysis of its last words not only
proves that Cleitophon is complete, but that it completes the pre-Republic
dialogues as a whole, rendering a just verdict on the series of dialogues that
precedes it. Slings translates as follows:

Cleitophon: For I will maintain, Socrates, that for a man who isn’t yet persuaded
by your exhortations [μὴ μὲν γὰρ προτετραμμένῳ σε ἀνθρώπῳ] you are worth
the world [ἄξιον τοῦ πάντος], but for someone who is [προτετραμμένῳ δέ]
you’re actually almost a stumbling-block for reaching complete goodness and
so becoming truly happy [προτετραμμένῳ δὲ σχεδὸν καὶ ἐμπόδιον τοῦ πρὸς
τέλος ἀρετῆς ἐλθόντα εὐδαίμονα γενέσθαι].225

This book will conclude with a discussion of this μέν-δέ sentence, building
on a revised translation of its δέ-clause and a rejection of Slings’s ongoing
(and Schleiermacher-inspired) claim that Cleitophon is not (and could not be)
criticizing any of Plato’s own dialogues. The μέν-clause’s claim—that is, that
for the μὴ προτετραμμένῳ, Socratic protreptic is ἄξιον τοῦ πάντος—certainly
needs to be considered in relation both to Cleitophon’s own version of Socratic
protreptic and to the ongoing protreptic that begins in Alcibiades Major.
But the fact that Plato hammers the word προτετραμμένῳ singles out for
Cleitophon’s criticism what Socrates himself calls “my paradigm [παράδειγμα]
of protreptic discourses” [τὸ ἐμόν παράδειγμα τῶν προτρεπτικῶν λόγων]
(Euthd. 282d4–5),226 that is, the First Protreptic in Plato’s Euthydemus. Iden-
tifying the First Protreptic as the specific target in Cleitophon explains why
the dialogue ends as it does, with the words “to become happy [εὐδαίμονα
γενέσθαι],” and since Slings’s illuminating comment on that phrase constitutes
his own book’s last word, it will be quoted in full, beginning as follows:

e8 εὐδαίμονα γενέσθαι: the word εὐδαίμων is here used for the first and last
time, cf. Intr., section I. 3. 2.”227

225
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 335.
226
 As noted twice (60 and 149) in Slings, Plato, Clitophon with the word “model.”
227
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 335.
 Before and After Cleitophon 507

In that section of his Introduction, Slings meets the objection that Cleitophon
is unfinished, and the relevant passage will be noted.228 But what he writes
next gets quickly to the heart of the matter:

The premise of the protreptic argument in Euthd. (278e3 ἆρά γε πάντες

ἄνθρωποι βουλόμεθα εὖ πράττειν; cf. 280b6 εὐδαιμονεῖν ἂν καὶ εὖ πράττειν) is
the final note of Clit. as well as R. (εὖ πραττώμεν).229

Usefully citing the preliminary and therefore ambiguous use of εὖ πράττειν

(Euthd. 278e3) as well as the second version that glosses it with εὐδαιμον-
εῖν (Euthd. 280b6)—upon which Systematic Socratists therefore prefer to
rely—Slings has made the crucial link between the culminating critique
in Cleitophon and the First Protreptic; so far so good. But as construed by
Slings, that link suggests that if Socrates is what Cleitophon says that he is—
that is, an obstacle (ἐμπόδιον at 410e7) to “becoming happy” (τὸ εὐδαίμονα
γενέσθαι)—he is likewise an obstacle to τὸ εὖ πράττειν, and that is not the
case. As the citation of Republic’s closing εὖ πραττώμεν shows, Socrates
is exhorting us to εὖ πράττειν, and as already indicated, this cannot be the
passive (or εὐδαιμονεῖν-glossed) form of εὖ πράττειν precisely because of
the first passage Slings has just quoted: there is no need to exhort us with εὖ
πραττώμεν “to do well” what all men, even the worst of them, already want:
that is, to fare well (as in εὐδαιμονεῖν ἂν καὶ εὖ πράττειν). Republic’s final
εὖ πραττώμεν is therefore the opposite of the First Protreptic’s glossed εὖ
πράττειν, for the hypothesis of one is that all men wish to be happy, whereas
the un-hypothetical principle (ἀρχή) of the other is the Idea οf the Good, in
the light of which we are being exhorted to do the right thing, no matter the
cost to our own happiness. It is therefore εὖ πραττώμεν that both cancels and
legitimizes the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy.
The note continues: “If Clit. were the work of a forger, he would in view
of these parallels have written εὖ πράττειν.”230 Slings is certainly right that
Plato would not have written εὖ πράττειν, but only because Cleitophon looks
back to the Fallacy’s prior exposure in Euthydemus (see §3) Charmides (see
§6), and Gorgias (see §10). It is no longer Socrates who is an ἐμπόδιον to

228
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 13: “the key-word εὐδαίμονα comes as a sort of shock: although in fact
the whole dialogue had been concerned with the way one achieves happiness, the word-group
εὐδαίμων, -μονία etc. was not used before (cf. also Comm. ad loc.); there is besides a clear, though
seemingly artless, antithetical structure [sc. in the last sentence]. Apart from that, the last sentence
is tied up inextricably with the last but one (cf. Comm. on 410e5 γάρ), in which the prologue is
repeated almost word for word.” It is this symmetry that Slings uses to prove that the dialogue’s
completeness.
229
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 335.
230
 Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 335; a parenthetical citation to two passages in Letters follows: “(cf. Ep.
3 315b1–3 and—rather less obvious—Ep. 8 352b3).”
508 Chapter 5

the ambiguous εὖ πράττειν: thanks to a rigorous gymnastic training in the

detection of deliberate fallacy that begins in Lysis, Plato’s Guardians have
become a sufficient obstacle to this kind of thing on their own. And Plato has
provoked their suspicion about εὖ πράττειν in particular even sooner, begin-
ning in Alcibiades Major if not already in Protagoras.
There is a reason, then, that Cleitophon says that Socrates is an obstacle
to τὸ εὐδαίμονα γενέσθαι—which thanks to the definite article really means
something more like “the becoming (of) happy” or more colloquially “our
becoming happy”—instead of τὸ εὖ πράττειν. Plato is now leading us higher,
preparing us as he is for the final ascent to the Good. It is therefore no longer
mere fallacy that he is challenging us to recognize and reject but rather the
eudaemonist “good” that depends on that fallacy (hence Euthd. 278e3), and to
which his Socrates—despite what we may have thought the first time we were
exposed to the First Protreptic, that is, when Socrates was speaking to the μὴ
προτετραμμένῳ—really is an obstacle. From the start, Aristotle swallowed
the First Protreptic,231 and given his ongoing concern with friendship, it is
likely that he had already broken sympathetic company with Plato’s project in
Lysis.232 But Aristotle is not a Platonist’s concern, and it is a great misfortune
for Plato that so many Aristotelians have made his musical dialogues the ill-
suited objects of theirs.
Finally, there is the matter of translation: how should we integrate the
clause πρὸς τέλος ἀρετῆς ἐλθόντα into the Cleitophon’s claim that Socrates
is an obstacle to—for preserving the genitive form of τοῦ εὐδαίμονα γενέσθαι
would require us to translate ἐμπόδιον as something like “an enemy (of),” “a
short-circuiting (of), etc.—“our becoming happy.” By translating the clause
“a stumbling-block for reaching complete goodness and so becoming truly
happy,” Slings fails to honor the proximity of τοῦ to ἐμπόδιον (ἐμπόδιον τοῦ
. . . εὐδαίμονα γενέσθαι), which would require him to connect “a stumbling
block” directly to (without recourse to “and so”) “becoming truly happy.”
In the light of these considerations, the best way to preserve the genitive is
to translate τοῦ εὐδαίμονα γενέσθαι as “from becoming happy,” and translat-
ing ἐμπόδιον accordingly. If “becoming (truly) happy” is the desired object
or summum bonum—as it was and is for Aristotle, and must (therefore) be
for eudaemonist Socratism—the participle ἐλθόντα indicates what (or whom)
Socrates will block or obstruct on the pathway to that summum bonum: (our)
“coming” or rather “having come” πρὸς τέλος ἀρετῆς, that is, to virtue’s goal,

231
 As suggested by the next clause in Slings’s comment (Plato, Clitophon, 335): “εὐδαιμονία is also
the central concept of Aristotle’s Protrepticus (but B 52 Düring, not from Iamblichus, Protrep-
ticus, is an adaptation of Plato’s Euthydemus 280b7–d7 as likely as not).” I have expanded the
abbreviations.
232
 Cf. Price, Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle, 1.
 Before and After Cleitophon 509

end, or summit. Since the participle is aorist, I might be inclined to make it

temporally anterior to τὸ εὐδαίμονα γενέσθαι, but this isn’t necessary for
yielding the proper sense toward which Plato has been aiming us since the
introduction of the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy in Alcibiades Major (Alc. 116b2–5):

Cleitophon: but for someone who has been exhorted [προτετραμμένῳ δέ]
you’re actually almost [σχεδόν] an obstacle, blocking one reaching [or ‘who has
reached’] the summit of virtue from becoming happy.233

Not entirely, of course, hence Cleitophon’s σχεδόν. But as I have claimed

throughout, in opposition to the Order of Composition paradigm champi-
oned by Vlastos and so many others, Socrates is and always was—even in
Protagoras and the First Protreptic—a stumbling block to the Eudaemonist
Shortcut,234 and this is why it does damage to Plato’s dialogues to try to
extract from (some set of) them an Aristotle-influenced version of “the phi-
losophy of Socrates.”235 Slings will cite a beautiful passage from Phaedrus
at the end of his note to valorize the pedagogical version of torch passing
that Cleitophon so eloquently spurns (408d5–6),236 and if this citation justi-
fies Plato the Teacher, the one from Apology before it does the same for
Socrates.237 Yes, there may be a way to become happy by making others so—
at least as happy as humans can be (Phdr. 277a3–4)—thus finding a way “to
benefit others [εὐεργετεῖν] with the greatest benefit” (Ap. 36c4). If so, it is by
planting immortal seeds, as Plato has done, especially in a beautiful dialogue
set outside the walls of Athens, where, serenaded by the cicadas, and cooled
by the plane tree’s shade, we will dip our toes into the ever-flowing Ilisus of

233
 408e7–8.
234
 The conclusion of the note at Slings, Plato, Clitophon, 335 is: “above all, it is said to be the effect
of Socrates’ exhortation combined with elenchos in Ap. 36d9–10. Cf. further Smp. 205a1–3 (note
τέλος a3) and Bury’s note; Phdr. 277a3–4.” Cf. Bury, Symposium of Plato, 106 (on Smp. 205a3):
“Because it is recognized that εὐδαιμονία constitutes in itself the ethical τέλος or ‘summum
bonum’; cp. Clit. 410e ἐμπόδιον τοῦ πρὸς τέλος ἀρετῆς ἐλθόντα εὐδαίμονα γενέσθαι.” Bury’s next
citation (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.7; 1097a33–34) is apt; the one that precedes it isn’t.
235
 Whatever the merits of his Plato-interpretation, Stemmer proves to be an effective and incisive
interpreter of Aristotle in Peter Stemmer, “Aristoteles’ Glücksbegriff in der Nikomachischen
Ethik: Eine Interpretation von EN I, 7.1097b2–5.” Phronesis 37, no. 1 (1992), 85–110; note that
the Eudaemonist Shortcut is found here as well (106n76).
236
 Phdr. 277e4–a4 (H. N. Fowler translation; Slings cites the italicized portion as per the previous
note): “Socrates: Yes, Phaedrus, so it is; but, in my opinion, serious discourse about them [sc. ‘of
both justice and the others’] is far nobler, when one employs the dialectic method and plants and
sows in a fitting soul intelligent words which are able to help themselves and him who planted
them, which are not fruitless, but yield seed from which there spring up in other minds other words
capable of continuing the process for ever, and which make their possessor happy, to the farthest
possible limit of human happiness.”
237
 Ap. 36e9–10 (Fowler): “Socrates: For he [sc. the Olympic victor] makes you seem to be happy,
whereas I make you happy in reality.” Note the connection of this passage to εὐεργετεῖν τὴν
μεγίστην εὐεργεσίαν at Ap. 36c4.
 510 Chapter 5

our dreams. If there were not a Critias to be stopped and a city to be saved
from tyranny, exhorting others to care for themselves might be enough. But it
doesn’t satisfy Cleitophon or answer his Question, and it didn’t satisfy Plato.
Not merely the δίδαγμα but the ἔργον of Justice is required (409b3–c1),238
and that means to εὐ-εργετεῖν—hence the culminating subjunctive of εὖ
πραττώμεν—whatever the personal cost of doing so may be.
Like everyone who has caught sight of the Beautiful in Symposium, Plato’s
reach exceeded his grasp. But even if he could not perform the required ἔργον
in his lifetime, he could leave behind the discourses that would preserve the
immortal seed from which it would grow in others, not for the sake of his
happiness, not even for ours, but in the light of the Idea of the Good. Using
our self-centered concern for happiness—that is, the GoodE—as nothing
more than a springboard, Plato’s Socrates, “having become both beautiful
and new” (Ep. 314c4), would simultaneously point πρὸς τέλος ἀρετῆς while
being exactly what Cleitophon recognized that he was and had been from the
start: an obstacle to the Eudaemonist Shortcut, the Εὖ Πράττειν Fallacy, and
thus what we would now be offered along the Shorter Way. By giving birth
in the Beautiful to the challenge of the Cave, and thus making imaginable the
very essence of Justice, Plato prompted us to fight ourselves free from the
obstacles that he knew from experience we needed to overcome, and from a
preoccupation with our barely known Self in particular. At the crisis of the
Republic, he would challenge us to εὖ πράττειν—not “to be happy” but “to do
all things for the benefit of all” (410b2–3)239—in the certainty that some of us
would follow the Longer Way, a harder journey back down to the shadows,
and only made possible by our prior Ascent to the Good.

238
 Despite the fact that Cleitophon has already started to learn about justice—hence his confusion
about it—and that Cleitophon’s Question asks “where do we go from here,” he is merely seeking
a “Socratic” δίδαγμα, much like what Benson calls “(robust) virtue-knowledge,” rather than what
Socrates will offer him and Plato will offer us: a return to the Cave as its ἔργον (409b6).
239
 Cf. Larry Miller on Heather Heyer (May 29, 1985–August 12, 2017): “She was always there for
everybody.”

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 Bibliography

Adam, J. and A. M. Adam (eds.). Platonis Protagoras; With Introduction, Notes and
Appendices. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1893.
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 Index
abbreviations, xiii-iv. See also virtue/
virtues
Academy, passim; entering, 452; and
the Idea of the Good, 323n367;
located in Athens, 268; purpose of,
286
acronyms, 188
Adam, Adela, xl, 70, 322
Adam, James, xl, xliii, 70, 322, 480,
489
Adams, Don, 27
Adeimantus, liii, 50, 269, 358, 465, 483
Adkins, W. H., 173, 209–11, 282–83,
309–10, 313, 315, 412
Aeschylus, 358
Ahbel-Rappe, Sara, xiv, xviii, xx, lv, 3,
22, 368, 382
Alain (Daniel Brustlein), xliv-v
Alain (Émile Chartier), 238, 264
Alcibiades Major. See Index locorum
Alcibiades Minor. See Index locorum
Allegory of the Cave, xviii-xx, xxviii,
xxxiv-v, lxiii, 4, 7, 17, 31, 47–48,
50–51, 186, 213–14, 267, 334, 359,
412, 417, 468, 483, 487; action of
the maxim in, 221; maxim of the
action in, 221, 468; and Shorter
Way, 344
Alline, Henri, 481
549
ambiguity, xxiii, 15, 53, 57, 60, 65–67,
71, 77, 83–84, 92–93; 95, 97, 99,
102, 168–69, 171, 282, 294, 297,
315, 317, 350, 407, 420, 437, 447;
and the dative, 171, 317; detection
of, 297; of the Good, xxiii; and
Prodicus, 57n255; properly protreptic
use of, 84n354; as Vieldeutigkeit, 92;
of εὐ πράττειν, 77, 168, 171, 294,
315, 350, 447; of κακῶς λέγειν, 420;
of σώφρον, 282; 15; of τῶν καλῶν,
407; of ὠφέλιμον, 169, 317
Amompharetus, 194
Anacreon, 390
Anagnostopulos, Georgios, 29, 35, 497
Anagnostopoulos, Mariana, 408
Anderson, Mark, 200, 234
Andrewes, A., 480
Annas, Julia, xxix-xxx, xxxiii-iv, xlvii-
viii, 19, 29, 34, 41, 48, 52, 93–94,
276, 328, 436, 440, 463, 472–76,
481, 484, 487, 489, 493–94; Three
Questions of, 473–75
Antisthenes, 500
Anton, J. P., xlviii, lvii, 67, 92
Anytus, 126, 129, 234, 370–71, 386,
401, 420, 444, 459, 479
Apelt, Otto, xvii, 96, 438
Apology of Socrates. See Index locorum
550 Index
Aristides the Just, 181, 190–93, 202,
206, 268–70, 372, 478–79
Aristides the Younger, 121, 372–73,
376, 385–86, 389, 391–96, 398, 404,
434
Aristophanes, 161, 206, 259–60, 423,
479–80
Aristophanes, Plato’s, 10, 20, 23, 25,
96, 106
Aristotle, xviii-xx, xxviii, xxxix-lxvii, 2,
19, 27–28, 35, 37, 41, 43–47, 49, 53,
58, 64, 85, 93–94, 128–29, 133, 137,
155, 184, 216–17, 256, 268–69, 271,
274–75, 286, 293–94, 302, 306, 316,
337, 377, 384–85, 387, 405, 413,
421–23, 427, 436, 449, 451, 456–58,
473, 477–79, 484–87, 493, 495–96,
499, 508; Athenian Constitution,
184, 477–79; Eudemian Ethics, xlv,
lxvi, 385, 387, 496; Magna Moralia,
li-iv, lvii, lix, 496; Metaphysics,
xxxix-xl, xlv, xlvii, xlix, lix, 427,
436; Nicomachean Ethics, xxviii,
xxxix, xliii, xlv, xlviii-ix, lv-viii,
lxvi, 128, 216, 302, 306, 496, 509;
Physics, xlvii, l; Poetics, xli; Politics,
xviii, xliii, l-li, liii, lxvii, 384, 487;
Protrepticus, 508; Rhetoric, xlix,
128, 485; Sophistical Refutations,
xxix
Arnim, Hans von, 19–20, 23, 53–55,
92–93, 156
Artaxerxes, 403
Ascent to the Beautiful, xxin27; why
it precedes Ascent to the Good, 38,
51–52, 71, 295
Ast, Friedrich, passim
Athenian History, knowledge of (KAH),
186–89, 193, 195, 197–98, 200, 204,
209, 223, 235, 237, 258, 260, 321,
489
Athens, passim, 249, 355, 391
Athens Quartet, 260–62, 268, 372, 478
Aubenque, Pierre, 68
Ausland, Hayden, lv, 116
Austin, Emily, 241, 243, 274, 328–30,
341, 367–68
Ayres, Lewis, 388
Babut, Daniel, 276, 346
Bailly, Jacques, 373, 404
Balansard, Anne, xxi
Bambrough, Renford, 427
Bandini, Michele, xx
Barbarić, Damir, 273
Barnes, Jonathan, xviii
Barney, Rachel, xxviii-ix, 278, 296–97,
302, 472
Bartlett, Robert, xxiv, 304
basanistic pedagogy, xxxvi-vii, xlii,
xlvii, l, 2, 11–12, 32, 41–42, 62–64,
68, 76, 84–85, 92, 114, 116, 145,
155, 198, 208, 221–22, 239, 284,
299, 346, 422, 451; and secondary
literature, 155n139
Beare, John, 385
beautiful things are difficult (χαλεπὰ τὰ
καλά), 317. See also Index verborum
Beck, R. Lloyd, 437
Becker, Alexander, 279
Bedu-Addo, J., 432, 453
Belfiore, Elizabeth, 104
Benardete, Seth, 241, 374
Bénatouïl, Thomas, 243
Benitez, Eugenio, xlii
Benson, Hugh, 71, 133, 424–30, 433,
438–41, 466–68, 494, 499, 510
Beresford, Adam, 304
Bertini, G., 482
Beversluis, John, xxxv, 110, 256
Bibauw, Jacqueline, 480
Blondell, Ruby, 94, 242
Blössner, Norbert, 460
Bluck, Richard, 120, 314–15, 317, 406,
431, 450–51
Bobonich, Christopher, 128, 146, 255
Bolotin, David, 53, 99
Bonitz, Hermann, 239
Bordt, Michael von, 53, 58, 86–87
Bosch-Veciana, Antoni, 92
 Index
Boyarin, Daniel, 264, 403
Boys-Stones, George, 134, 481
Bregman, Jay, 369
Bremer, John, 264
Brennan, Tad, 278
Brickhouse, Thomas, 68, 74, 243, 272,
276, 282, 288, 330–31, 378–85, 416,
418–19, 421
Brisson, Luc, 18, 55, 64, 101, 116, 178,
207, 251, 273, 449, 459
Brittain, Charles, 278
Brochard, Victor, 324
Brown, Leslie, 304
Brownson, Carleton, 400, 402, 407, 411
Bruell, Christopher, 186
Brünnecke, Heinrich, 500
Burchell, Graham, 161
Burger, Ronna, xl, lx
Burnet, John, xix, 342, 361, 462
Burnyeat, Myles, xv, 10, 144, 146, 174,
228, 398
Bury, R. G., 21, 102, 509
Bussanich, John, xx
Buzzetti, Eric, 245, 369
Cain, Rebecca, 84
Cairns, Douglas, 15
Calder, William, 463
Callicles, 113, 115, 128, 185, 190, 216,
223, 225–26, 232–70, 274, 276–88,
292, 294, 299–300, 306–7, 312, 328–
31, 335–46, 349, 351–57, 359–69,
371, 391–92, 405, 411–12, 455, 498;
and Athens, 235, 238, 242, 248–49,
258n131, 267; as obdurate, 233–34,
237–38, 254, 258; reader as Plato’s,
287, 353
Calogero, Guido, 302
Calvert, Brian, 372
Campbell, Ian, 272
Campbell, Lewis, xxi
Carone, Gabriela, 46, 234, 241, 251,
331, 368
Cattanei, Elisabetta, xl
Centrone, Bruno, 376, 381
551
Cephalus, 121, 223–24, 226–27, 229,
329–30, 359
Chaerephon, 339, 391, 469
Chance, Thomas, 60, 67, 81
Character, Play of, 55, 92–118, 130,
144, 148, 152, 186, 194, 209, 248,
267, 304, 390, 448, 454, 469, 489,
498; as body of each dialogue, 194.
See reader’s response; experience
gained through, 267; most important
for Plato, 62; why questions about
it multiply, 390. See also Anytus,
Aristides the Younger, Callicles,
Chaerephon, Charmides, Cleinias,
Cleitophon, Critias, Crito, Ctesippus,
Demodocus, Dionysodorus,
Hippothales, Laches, Lysis,
Menexenus, Meno, Nicias, Polus,
Theages, Thucydides the Younger
Charalabopoulos, Nikos, 303
charity, misplaced, 64, 67, 451–52;
editorial version of, 81
Charles, David, 128
Charmides, 108–11, 118, 151–52,
167–68, 174, 182, 201, 203, 205,
207, 211, 235, 253, 258–59, 267,
269, 305, 345, 375, 391, 398, 455,
498
Charmides. See Index locorum; and
Alcibiades Major, 175, 211; and
Cleitophon, 178; and Euthydemus,
153, 176; and Herodotus, 202,
205; and Protagoras, 305; and
Shorter Way, 182, 208, 209–10; and
Thucydides, 202–5 ; and Xenophon,
192, 205–12, 397; benefitting in,
163; blushing in, 108–9; ἔρως in,
109–12; follows Laches, reasons
why/indications that: (1) literary
twins, 122–23; (2) short virtue-
dialogues, 123, 130; (3) Athenian
History, 123, 130, 183–211; (4)
unity of virtue (UV) as knowledge
of good and bad (KGB), 130–31,
172; (5) future (K-F)/sequence of
552
tenses, 173, 179–80; (6) doctors,
152, 162, 170n208; (7) tyranny, 162;
(8) prophets and prophecy, 161; (9)
mutual dependence on Symposium,
198–201; (9) degree of difficulty,
xxxiv, 122–23, 208; (10) not called
Nicias and Critias, 56, 123; (11)
Odyssey allusion, 123n15; (12)
modeling not defining virtues, 129;
(14) assumes what Laches explains,
149; (15) ἀρετή-ὠφέλιμον switch,
166; (16) benefitting, 181n236; (17)
gymnasium setting, xxix, 54; (18)
from Thucydides to Xenophon, 208;
Happy City in, 174, 176–77, 182,
186, 228, 278, 365; as reductio ad
tyrannidem, 162, 222, 327; Self-
Benefitting Doctor in, 176, 181, 327,
364, 505; Socrates’ Dream in, 148,
152, 175–76, 186, 278
Cherniss, Harold, 439, 442, 453, 456–
57, 485, 490
Chernyakhovskaya, Olga, xx
Chion of Heraclea, xii
Christianity, 51, 336, 350, 419
Chroust, Anton-Hermann, xlviii-ix,
lvii-ix
Chu, Anthony, 29
Cicero, xx, 225–26, 269, 349
Cimon, 260–61, 372, 478
Clay, Diskin, 246
Cleary, J. J., 119
Cleinias, 35, 55–56, 59–60, 62, 68–69,
72, 74–76, 78–84, 89, 101–3, 106,
108–9, 111–12, 114–15, 117–18,
132–34, 138, 284–85, 443, 452, 455,
466, 475, 503–5
Cleitophon, historical, 477–480, 483;
Cleitophon, Plato’s, xxvii, 223, 424,
462, 464–71, 474–77, 482–83, 485,
488, 493, 498–500, 502, 504–10; as
ἔλεγχος-wielding, 476, 504 See also
Cleitophon’s Question
Cleitophon. See Index locorum;
Cleitophon’s Question in, 474,
Index
476–77, 483, 488–89, 499, 506,
510; completes the pre-Republic
dialogues, 506; confusion
engendered by, 505; and dialectical
necessity of Socratism, 505; and
First Protreptic, 501–9; and Gorgias,
346, 365; as incomplete, 234, 506–7;
and Protagoras, 102n401, 497–98;
and Thrasymachus-Response Theory,
463–66, 474, 481; as incomplete,
234, 506–507; Cleitophon’s Question
in, 474, 476–77, 483, 488–89,
499, 506, 510; completes the pre-
Republic dialogues, 506; confusion
engendered by, 505; follows
Euthydemus-Meno, reasons why/
indications that: (1) critique of First
Protreptic and its Meno Doublet, 466,
505; (2) disambiguating ὠφέλιμον,
470–71; Slings, 505; follows Meno,
reasons why/indications that: (1)
virtue as διδάκτον, 466, 505; (2)
virtue as ἀσκητόν, 466; (3) Benson’s
Clitophon’s Challenge, 424–25; (4)
Slings, 505n221; Socrates’ Silence
in, 482
Cobb, William, 390
Coby, Patrick, 322
Cohen, Maurice, 53, 66–67, 87, 93, 123,
162, 170
Colen, José, 468
Collobert, Colleen, 328
Cooper, John, xxxiii, lxii-iii, lxvi, 17,
48–49, 273–74, 412, 419, 466, 484
Copp, David, 29
Corcoran, Clinton, 189
Corey, David, 57
Cornford, F. M., 13–14, 29, 188, 270,
338, 450
Cossutta, Frédéric, 194
Costello, Willie, 249
Cotton, Anne, xxiv
Couvreur, P., 32
Crates, 374
Cratylus. See Index locorum
 Index
Critias, 40, 56, 108–11, 118, 123, 129,
148, 151–52, 155, 162, 164–70, 172,
174–75, 177–78, 180–86, 188–89,
192, 195, 197, 200, 203–12, 219,
222–25, 227, 239, 246, 253, 258,
267, 269, 278, 291, 305, 327, 345,
391, 412, 455, 469, 479–81, 498,
504–5, 510; abiding influence on
Plato of, 208
Critias. See Index locorum
Crito, 55, 57, 84, 106, 114–18, 120–21,
124, 134–35, 142, 284–85, 392,
443, 469, 490, 498, 504; as the
philosopher’s friend, 116
Crito. See Index locorum
Crombie, I. M., 30, 62, 84, 120, 123,
308, 315, 328, 387, 453
Cron, Christian, 239
Cronos, 329
Cropsey, Joseph, xxxiv, 17
Ctesippus, 55–59, 61–62, 66, 95,
101, 106, 108–9, 111–18, 120,
125, 132, 391, 455, 498; as Iolaus,
114–18; self-control of, 115. See also
Euthydemus, Mystery Interlocutor in
Curzer, Howard, 19, 27, 86
Cyrus the Great, 207, 481
Cyrus the Younger, 398, 400,
409
Dakyns, H. G., 207
Dalfen, Joachim, 244, 248, 250, 252,
259, 265, 280, 307
Damon, 121
Dancy, Russell, liv, 35, 65, 296
Danzig, Gabriel, 207–8, 211–12
Darius, 262–63
dative, xxviii, 1, 15, 17, 73, 164, 167,
169–71, 220–21, 229, 245, 296–98,
317, 332, 348, 408, 417, 420, 446,
457, 471–73; disambiguating, 245;
ethical, 17, 417; of interest, 17,
296–97; of self-interest, 417, 473;
un-ethical, 417, 420, 446, 471–73
Davidson, Donald, 29, 309
Davis, Michael, 374
553
deadpan reading (literalism), xlii, xlix,
lxii, lxiv, 37, 39, 41, 43, 53, 75, 88,
113, 115, 218, 226, 233, 271, 302,
308, 313, 316, 322, 323, 342, 387,
430
deception, deliberate, xxxvii, xlii, 38,
54, 62–63, 231, 302, 488
deliberate/deliberately, xxiii, xxx,
xxxvii, xlii, lvi, lxiii, lxvii, 2–5, 8,
12, 18, 38, 41, 51, 52, 65–66, 93–94,
97, 115, 125, 135, 145, 154–55, 184–
84, 221, 227, 284, 297, 299, 307,
315, 321, 324, 333, 345, 357, 383,
389, 394, 407, 420–22, 428, 431–32,
447, 449–53, 479–80, 487, 492, 497,
502, and “logographic necessity,”
125. See also fallacy, deliberate use
of, deception, deliberate, and self-
contradiction, deliberate
Deman, Thomas, xlviii-ix, lvii-viii, 385
Democritus, 478
Demodocus, 121, 375–76, 390, 394
Demosthenes, 269
Denyer, Nicholas, xxi, xxxiii, 10, 27,
106, 217, 246, 318, 462
Derrida, Jacques, 226
Destrée, Pierre, 17, 255, 328, 380
Detienne, Marcel, 63
Devereux, Daniel, 143–44, 146, 278,
369, 451–52
dialogue (real) between Plato and
student, xxxv
Dieterle, Reinhard, 122
Dimas, Panos, 71, 74, 308, 457
Dionysodorus, 57, 62, 82, 108, 114,
122, 250
Dittenberger, Wilhelm, 65
Divine Dispensation. See θεία μοίρα
Divine Sign (of Socrates), 127, 199,
227–28, 235, 370, 373, 377–80, 382–
84, 386–92, 394, 396, 398, 423–24,
505; as conscience, 424; as Socratic
Paradox, 423–24; Socratists prefer to
ignore, 199, 375, 423; and “Socratic”
theory of motivation, 227
Dixsaut, Monique, 234
554
Dobbs, Darrell, 196
Dodds, E. R., 84, 126, 209, 215, 232,
234–35, 237–39, 242, 251, 263–65,
270–72, 282–83, 291, 294–95, 301,
307, 336, 338–39, 343–44, 356, 493,
499
Döring, Klaus, 388, 392, 462
Dorion, Louis-André, xx, lvii, 207, 278,
377, 422
Dover, Kenneth, 184, 201, 412, 479
Doyle, James, 368
dramatic details and Reading Order,
125–26
Duke, E. A., xix
Dümmler, Ferdinand, 462
Düring, Ingemar, lx, 508
Dustin, Christopher, 374
Ebert, Theodor, 384, 449n318, 490
Ebrey, David, 161, 433
Eckert, Wilhelm, 93
Edmonds, Radcliffe, 328
Effe, Bernd, 205
El Murr, Dimitri, 134, 481
Emlyn-Jones, Chris, 147, 193
Engler, Maicon, xiv, xli
Epinomis. See Index locorum
Erastai. See Index locorum
Erbse, Hartmut, xvii
Erler, Michael, xvii-vii, 1, 22, 54, 162,
173, 251, 273, 304, 449, 451, 459,
462
eudaimonism, xxviii, 17, 41
Εὐ Πράττειν Fallacy. See Index
verborum; and Santas Circle,
168n195; and Shorter Way,
288–89; as true, 269n162
Euripides, 206, 224, 368
Euthydemus. See Index locorum;
and Alcibiades Major, 71, and
Euthydemus; and Sophist, 61–62,
119, 131; as beginning of six-
dialogue series, 120, 129, 131, 139,
208; as fallacy-filled dialogue, 30;
and Meno. See Meno; as quicksand,
Index
85, 222, 492–93; as transitional, xv,
37, 285; as wrong place to look for
serious arguments, 35, 80, 85, 504;
chronological problem of, 119–20;
Crito’s Interruption in, 117–18,
120, 134, 142, 284–85, 490, 504;
equivocation instruction in, 60,
67, 69, 77, 84; eristic-detecting
instruction in, 140–41; First
Protreptic in. See First Protreptic;
follows Lysis, reasons why/
indications that: (1) Ctesippus, 55–
59, 120, 125; (2) eristic, 56–58, 60,
120, 141; (3) ἔρως and erotic quartet,
54–55, 101–2; (4) μεταξύ-based
philosophy, 69, 83, 87–88, 90, 156,
475; (5) fallacy, 55; (6) equivocation,
58, 65, 116; (7) Lyceum, 54–55, 120;
(8) Thrasyllus, 59; (9) outgrowing
boyhood, 55; (10) theory follows
practice, 59, 65; (11) obligation
to ἐραστής, 107n414; (12) what is
most dear? 86; (13) First Friend as
εὖ πράττειν, 31; Key Passage in, 84;
Mystery Interlocutor in, 118, 120,
134–36; non-existent σοφία in, 74,
80, 84, 138, 142; Second Protreptic
in, 114, 117, 142, 187, 492, 501,
503; sequence of tenses emerges in,
142; Socrates’ use of fallacy in, 77,
138; Vanishing Passage in; see First
Protreptic; what a child could know
in, 61, 66–68, 72, 74, 84, 135, 141.
See also First Protreptic
Euthyphro. See Index locorum
Everson, Stephen, 143
fallacy, deliberate use of, 3, 53–92
passim, 56–57, 62–63, 65, 74, 76,
86, 90, 94, 123, 153, 155, 170, 176,
222, 224, 268, 286, 294, 350, 385,
421–22, 508; Plato’s words for, 63.
See also ἀπάτη
Farquharson, A., 432
Field, G. C., xvii, lxvii
 Index
Figal, Günter, lxv
First Protreptic (in Euthydemus), 30,
34, 49, 52, 64–91, 101–7, 112–18,
132–33, 137–38, 142, 146–47, 155,
169, 178, 198, 284, 288, 290, 335,
387, 405, 414, 441, 443–44, 446,
452, 454, 459, 475–76,
491–94, 497, 501–509; active readers
and, 118; and Alcibiades Major,
70–71, 78; and Aristotle, 385, 508;
and Charmides, 178; and Cleitophon,
506; and Gorgias, 290; and Lysis,
85–89, 91, 198, 475; and Meno, 101,
133, 169, 405, 414, 443–44, 446,
452, 454, 459, 475–76, 491–93, 505;
and primer on equivocation, 67, 77;
and Protagoras, 70, 74, 78, 441;
and Symposium, 85, 102–6, 198,
475; and systematic Socratism, 30,
34, 75, 80, 101, 105, 112, 142, 492;
and Xenophon, 72–73; “big three”
in, 113; deadpan reading of, 75, 88,
113, 115, 387; deliberate deception
in, 64, 67, 69, 73–74, 77, 80, 84,
103, 114, 132, 155; εὖ πράττειν in,
69–71, 77, 83–84, 103, 105, 113,
284, 288, 507; fallacy-rife context of,
132; justice in, 78–79, 81, 114, 494;
most compromising moment in, 67,
113, 335, 497; non-existent wisdom
in, 73–74, 80, 82, 102; reductio ad
cinaedum in, 105; Santas Circle in,
83, 88; unity of virtue in, 40–41, 80,
132–33; Vanishing Passage in, 101–
5, 107, 109, 113; virtue in, 74–75,
79–80, 83, 132–33, 492, Vlastos on,
285, 503–4. See also Cleitophon, and
First Protreptic, εὐτυχία
Ferejohn, Michael, 148, 150, 405
Fermani, Arianna, xl
Ferrari, Franco, 369
Ferrari, John, 4
Fichte, G. F., 153
Fine, Gail, lxi, 40, 143, 460, 490
555
Fitzgerald, William, xlix, lviii
Fleming, Katie, 238
Foley, Richard, 10, 196, 216
Foucart, Paul, 480
Foucault, Michel, 161
Franklin, Lee, 168, 428
Frede, Dorothea, 304
Frede, Michael, xxxiv-v, 120
Freis, Richard, 239
Friedländer, Paul, 139, 219–26, 229,
233, 237, 256, 305, 439, 456–57,
461, 463–65, 481
Fröhlich, Bettina, 153
Fussi, Alessandra, 300, 363, 368
Future, intrinsic epistemic opacity of,
87–88, 147, 154, 158, 183, 330;
knowledge of (K-F), 150n115, 154,
157–61, 173, 179–80, 188, 209, 227,
330–33, 414, 492, 505. See also
“Tenses, Sequence of”
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 154
Gaiser, Konrad, 404, 435, 437, 463,
487, 500, 505
GB Equation (equation of the good
and the beautiful), xxix-xxx, 1–3,
8–15, 18, 21, 23, 31, 38, 68, 70–71,
85, 229–31, 245, 289, 295–96, 298,
310–11, 313, 315–16, 408, 421,
471–72; and BP-GP Equations, 38,
and Prodicus, 62; and “Second GB
Equation,” 15n54, and the GoodE,
xxix, 13, 289, 298, 311; and the
GoodT, 229, 298; importance of,
9–10, 309; Irwin on, 31; Polus,
Protagoras, and Alcibiades on, 311
Geffcken, Johannes, 301
Gentzler, Jyl, 365
Gerson, Lloyd, xxxv, lxiii, lxv, 495
Gianfrancesco, Luciano, 211
Giannantoni, Gabriele, 376
Giannopolou, Zina, 17
Gifford, Edwin, 58, 81, 101–2
Gill, Christopher, 7, 80, 134, 481
556 Index
Gill, Mary Louise, 7
Glaucon (Plato’s brother), liii, 50, 112,
224, 269, 358, 384, 392, 429, 465,
474, 483, 489
Glidden, David, 58, 60, 93
Goldin, Owen, xiv
Goldschmidt, Victor, 500
Gómez-Lobo, Alfonso, 28, 37, 43, 384
Gomme, A. W., 200
Gomperz, Theodor, 122
Gonzalez, Francisco, lxv, 55, 83, 99–
100, 118, 122, 183, 328, 397, 466
Gordon, Jill, xxxv, 104, 443
Gorgias. See Index locorum; Ad
Hominem Speech in, 243–250,
257, 265–66, 269, 279, 285, 338,
340, 349, 364; and Ion, 261; and
justice, 127–28, 221, 225, and
Justice, 356; and Laches, 160, 330;
and Platonic pedagogy, 339; and
rhetoric, 128; and sophomores, 265;
and [Thrasymachus], 482; Argument
of the (Missing) Action in, 249; as
battleground, 225, 240, 246, 256,
272; as incomplete (head-less), 234,
239; as mixed-message, 239, 272–
74, 292, 331, 360; as virtue-dialogue,
127–28; backward-pointing in, 338–
39; Battleground of Socratism in,
272–73, 275; Callicles as Touchstone
in, 251, 265, 269; Callicles’ Great
Speech in, 238, 240, 242, 246,
258, 260, 265–66; Callicles/Plato
Hypothesis (CPH) in, 250–264,
269, 355, 368–69, 371; Callicles’
Question in, 255, 278, 339, 345, 349,
357, 364; Choice Passage in, 338–40,
343–45, 349; Doctor on Trial in, 129,
220–21, 326, 505; Feigned Dialogue
in, 285, 287–95, 297, 299–300, 338,
355, 357; Final Myth in, 226–27,
229, 254, 312, 328–31, 334–35, 337,
346–47, 349, 355–56, 368, 371, 505;
follows Charmides, reasons why/
indications that: (1) opposite doctors,
220–23, 326, 330, 364, 505; (2)
Plato, 253, 262; (3) Rhetorical Triad,
330; see also Gorgias, Rhetorical
Triad in; (4) tyranny, 222–23,
330; (5) Εὐ Πράττειν Fallacy, 284,
289; (6) Chaerephon, 339, 469; (7)
virtue-dialogues; see Gorgias, as
virtue-dialogue; (8) temperance, 278,
283–84, 291; (9) War, 185; (10)
head, 235, 246; (11) future, 159;
(12) double questions, 162n172;
(13) benefitting, 167, 181, 246;
(14) active/passive, 181; (15) ἔρως,
55n245; (16) drinking, 109n120; (17)
Doctor Socrates; 203, 254; Callicles
and Critias, 238–39; Four-Part
Analogy in, 214–16, 280, 298, 300,
358; Golden Sentence in, 251–62,
269, 321–22, 325, 330, 339, 348;
golden truths (3) in, 229; Irwin on.
See Irwin, Terence, praised; length
and centrality of, 128–29, 213; most
striking claim (PP-1) in, 128–29,
221, 226–27, 231, 251–52, 267, 312,
338–41, 343, 345, 350, 357–58,
403; New Question in, 341–43, 345,
354; Penner’s Passage in, 169n198,
272, 331–33, 339, 345, 367, 399;
Performative Self-Contradiction in,
225–26; Platonic Paradoxes (1-4)
in, 226–27, 229, 231, 251–54, 256,
267, 312, 338–41, 343, 345–50, 352,
357–60, 364, 403, 410, 470; Plato’s
development in, 286; Protagoras
Moment in, 307–8; Rhetorical Triad
in, 252–53, 258, 260, 269, 289,
330, 359; Selbstanklage in, 251–52,
255, 322, 336, 360; silences in, 224,
234–35, 342; σκόπος of, 219–20,
223, 225, 237, 239, 249, 251, 257,
363; Socratic rhetoric in, 224, 258;
Symposium mountain-peak in, 365;
Tyrant’s Triad in, 235n63, 333;
Vlastos Passage in, 287, 327, 338–
39. See also Gorgias, Performative
 Index
Self-Contradiction in, Gorgias,
σκόπος of, and most striking claim
in, Gorgias, and Thrasymachus-
Response Theory, Gorgias, Callicles/
Plato Hypothesis in
Gorgias, 126, 214, 223–27, 229, 234,
248, 254, 258, 287, 300, 339, 370,
385, 392, 401
Gosling, Justin, 36, 112, 148, 218,
245, 257, 301, 308; and the Golden
Sentence in Grg., 257n138
Gould, John, 7, 39, 338
Gourevitch, Victor, 469
Gower, Barry, lxvii
Graham, Daniel, xlix, 161
Grant, Alexander, lvii
Greene, William, 137, 216, 431
Grewal, Gwenda-lin, 374
Griffin, Michael, xxxii
Griswold, Charles, 57, 125, 352
Gros, Frédéric, 161
Grube, G. M. A., 443, 463–65, 470
Gundert, Hermann, 374, 503
Guthrie, W. K. C., lxvii, 13, 54, 56, 65,
83, 124, 141, 188, 219, 227, 251,
301, 303, 450
Hackforth, Reginald, 233, 235, 462
Hadot, Pierre, 424
Hall, Edith, 202
Hall, Robert, 447
Halper, Edward, xxxix
Halverson, John, 239
“hammering,” 125
Hardy, Jörg, 196, 208, 326–27
Hare, R. M., 309, 427
Harrison, Simon, 29, 468
Hartmann, Nicolai, xxi
Hathaway, Ronald, 239
Havlíček, Aleš, 223, 369
Hawtrey, R. S. W., 54, 69–71, 74, 81,
132, 135, 138–41
Hegel, G. W. F., 430
Heidegger, Martin, 375, 485, 503
557
Heine, Heinrich, 200
Heitsch, Ernst, 63, 124, 460n350
Helfer, Ariel, xxiv-v, 161
Henrich, Dieter, 154
Herrmann, Fritz-Gregor, 15
Hermann, Karl, xxi
Highet, Gilbert, 264
Hildebrandt, Kurt, 96, 194
Hippias Major. See Index locorum
Hippias Minor. See Index locorum
Hippothales, 23, 30, 54–55, 57, 94–97,
100–101, 104–5, 107–8, 111–12,
115, 249
Hobbes, Thomas, 263–64
Hobbs, Angela, 7, 181, 257, 305
Hoerber, Robert, xx, 54, 196, 397, 401,
489
Hooper, Anthony, 25
Horn, Christoph, 369
Howland, Jacob, 25
Huffman, Carl, 280
Hutchinson, Douglas, xxxiii, lx,
466
Hyland, Drew, 109, 123
Hypothetical Method (in Meno), 132–
33, 279, 369, 406, 425–27, 429–31,
433, 437–38, 440–50, 453, 458, 460,
465–67, 475, 488, 491, 495, 498
Idea of the Good, passim (as the
GoodT); and dative, 296–97; as
the Philosopher’s Stone, 277; as
underdetermined, 6
Ion. See Index locorum
Ionescu, Christina, 440, 453
Irani, Tushar, 368
Irwin, Terence, xiv, lxiv, 2, 4, 26–34,
37–38, 40, 43, 48, 51–52, 71, 76,
83, 143, 147–52, 165, 179, 216,
241, 251, 270–78, 282–84, 286,
291–93, 300–301, 307, 326, 331,
333, 337, 341–42, 381, 387, 409,
412, 417, 419, 492; golden sentence
of, 83; nearly golden sentence of, 31;
558
praised, 271–77, 282–83, 291–93,
300
Isocrates, 124, 259
Iwata, Naoya, 432
Jackson, Henry, lx, 427
Jaeger, Werner, 238, 264, 266
Janaway, Christopher, 11
Janell, Walther, 387
Jedrkiewicz, Stefano, 423
Jenks, Rod, 250, 273–74, 368
Jinek, Jakub, 223, 369
Jirsa, Jakub, xxxiii
Johnson, Barbara, 226
Johnson, David, 207
Johnson, Marguerite, xxxiii, 321
Jones, H. S., xv
Jones, Russell, 73, 83
Jorgenson, Chad, xlii, 279
Jowett, Benjamin, 39
Joyal, Mark, 376–77, 381, 385–90, 393,
395, 397
Judeo-Christian, 51, 336
Judson, Lindsay, xx, 301, 404, 437, 440,
459
Kahn, Charles, xvii-viii, xxxi, xxxiii,
xxxv, lxii-iii, lxv, 18, 42, 54, 64,
145, 198, 220–21, 243, 246, 273,
298, 301, 312, 323–25, 349, 351,
358, 368, 404, 422–23, 425, 461,
498, 505
Kallendorf, Craig, 238
Kamtekar, Rachana, xx, lv, 3, 243, 272,
368, 382, 416, 458, 465
Kant, Immanuel, xli, 12, 20, 41, 51,
143, 163, 336, 419
Kapp, Ernst, lix-x, lxiii, 323n368, 435
Karasmanis, Vassilios, xx, 301, 404,
425n216, 427, 433, 443
Kastely, James, 226
Kato, Shinro, 116
Kaufer, David, 341
Kaufmann, Walter, 336
Kenyon, F. G., 477–78
Index
Kerford, G. B., 244
Kesters, H., 462
Keulen, Hermann, 139
Kidd, I. G., 388
Klagge, James, xxxiv
Klein, Jacob, 443
Klosko, George, 55, 61, 145, 242, 270,
334, 367–68
Kobusch, Theo, 162
Koch, Isabelle, xxi
Kohák, Erazim, 121, 214
Konstan, David, 200
Krämer, Hans, xliv-vi, 139, 279, 435
Kraut, Richard, 17, 39, 41, 45, 381–82,
412, 430
Kremer, Mark, 482
Krüger, Jens, xxxvii
Kunert, Rudolfus, 463
Laches, 121–22, 124, 141, 144–45,
154–58, 162, 166–67, 189–96, 198–
200, 250, 267, 291, 327, 455, 498
Laches. See Index locorum; and
Alcibiades Major, 161; and
Charmides, 209; and Gorgias,
291; and Herodotus, 191–94; and
Isocrates, 124; and Menexenus, 123;
and Protagoras, 128, 145–46, 148,
305, 325; and Symposium, 189–90,
198–200; and Theages, 121; and
Thucydides, 193–97; as harmonious,
122; as reductio on K-F, 157–58;
as comparatively simple, xxxiv,
122; Courage as Part of Virtue
(CPV) in, 146–47, 150, 153–57;
direct narration in, 123; follows
Euthydemus, reasons why/indications
that: (1) fighting in armor, 124–25,
132; (2) fathers and sons, 118,
120–21; (3) misology, 121–22, 124,
141; (4) gymnasium setting, xxix,
54, 124; (5) ring-composition, 121;
(6) foolish confidence, 128; (7)
future, 87–88, 147; (8) doctors, 158;
(9) temperance, 159; (10) dialogue
 Index 559

names, 57, 114; future knowledge Lysias, Plato’s, 112, 250, 464, 480, 498
(K-F) introduced in, 142–43; and Lysis, 20, 22–24, 54–55, 57–58,
Lysis, 87–88; Terminal Argument of, 93–102, 104–108, 111–13, 249, 267,
146–47, 150, 153–54, 156, 158, 161. 391, 396, 455, 498; as coquettish
See also Charmides, follows Laches, boy-toy, 97
Future Lysis. See Index locorum; active/
Laks, André, 456 passive φίλον in, 21, 67, 94–95,
Lamb, W. R. M., 70, 75, 79, 90–91, 107; blushing in, 93–95, 97;
103, 106, 109, 122, 126, 136, 138, ἕτερον/ἕτερον doublet, 61; First
151, 153, 159, 165–66, 169–71, 177– Friend in, xxvi, 18–20, 22, 28,
78, 181, 216–17, 236, 242–44, 247, 31–32, 34–35, 40, 52–53, 85–91,
250, 254, 261–62, 266–67, 279, 281, 155, 177, 187, 218; as σοφία,
306–7, 320–21, 339, 352–54, 358– 86–88; as φιλοσοφία, 88–89, 91;
61, 365, 369, 371, 412, 423n206, as the Beautiful or the Idea of the
445, 453–54, 458–59 Good, xxvi, 89; follows Symposium,
Lamm, Julia, xxi reasons why/indications that: (1)
Lampe, Kurt, 374 Lyceum, xxiv-v, xxvii, 54, 125;
Lampert, Laurence, xxiv, 203, 253–54, (2) ἔρως/erotic setting, 23, 30,
305 54–55, 102, 105; (3) μεταξύ-based
Landy, Joshua, 64 Philosophy, 19, 75, 83, 86–87, 90,
Landy, Tucker, 182 156, 475; (4) Diotima of Mantinaea,
Lane, Melissa, 29, 468 21, 23, 107n415; (5) slippery καλόν,
Laws. See Index locorum 21–22; (6) Aristophanes’ Speech, 19,
Lear, Gabriel, xxix 23, 25, 96; (7) parents and children,
Lee, E. N., 39, 381 20, 24, 58, 107n413; (8) Penner and
Leisegang, Hans, 373 Rowe, 18–19, 22; (9) von Arnim
Lesher, J. H., xxix, 3 vs. Pohlenz, 19–20; (10) vision-test
Lesses, Glenn, 27 on τὸ καλόν, xxvi, 22, 25–26, 32,
Letters. See Index locorum 85–86, 89, 96; (11) GB Equation,
Levenson, Carl, 113 21, 23; (12) one thing/one opposite,
Levin, David, 67 21, 24; (13) Diotima on οἰκεῖον,
Levine, David, 203, 331 23; (14) ladders, 22; (15) φιλόν as
Levy, David, 352 loving back, 91–92; (16) First Friend
Lévystone, David, 145, 456 as ἀγαθόν, 31; Penner and Rowe’s
Lidauer, Eva, 114 “package” in, 34–36; silence of Lysis
Liddell, Henry, xv in, 95–97; thought-experiment in,
Lisi, Francisco, 22, 223, 369 86–90
Lloyd, G. E. R., 434–35, 499
Lloyd, Janet, 63 Mabbott, J. D., 7
Lodge, Gonzalez, 263 McAvoy, Martin, 110
Long, A. A., 382 McBrayer, Gregory, xiv, 209
Lopes, Daniel, 274 McCabe, Mary Margaret, 80, 95, 119–
Love, Jeff, 375 20, 131, 134, 141, 173–74, 329
Lycurgus (of Athens), 269 McCoy, Marina, 226
Lysias, 259, 480 MacKenzie, Mary. See McCabe
560
McKim, Richard, 206, 352
McPherran, Mark, lix, 84, 203, 323,
380–81
Macleod, C. W., 202
McTighe, Kevin, 169, 272, 331, 367
Maier, Heinrich, xlviii-ix, lviii-lxi
Mann, Thomas, 185, 190
Manuwald, Bernd, 146
Mara, Gerald, 259
Marathon, 202, 262–64
Markus, R. A., 13, 29
Mavrogordatos, George, 200
Meineck, Peter, 200
Melian Dialogue; Melos, 185, 202,
261–62, 264, 345, 383
Menexenus, xxxiv, 22, 54–62, 66, 92–
102, 105, 107, 109, 113, 118, 120,
132, 391, 455, 498
Meng, Michael, 375
Menexenus. See Index locorum;
and Athenian History, rhetorical
highpoint of, 499
Menn, Stephen, 432
Meno, 103, 135–36, 138, 141, 223, 309,
311–12, 371, 377, 391, 397–423,
426, 433, 441, 444, 446–48, 450–56,
460, 465, 498–99, 504
Meno. See Index locorum; Acropolis
Treasury in, 445–49, 453, 455, 460;
and Euthydemus, 120–21, 131–39,
169n201; see also First Protreptic,
and Meno; and Gorgias, 126, 399,
410; and Protagoras, 404, 420, 499,
504; and Republic, 424–60; and
Socratism, 492; and Symposium,
414–15; and Xenophon, 397–424;
Bridge Too Far in, 444, 446, 449,
452, 454, 459; definition of shape
in, 135–36; eristic moment in, 135;
follows Theages, reasons why/
indications that: (1) θεία μοῖρα,
369; (2) Trial of Socrates, 129;
(3) Sequence of Tenses, 179, 228,
375; (4) Athens Quartet, 372, 478;
(5) Xenophon’s Anabasis, 398;
(6) History, 130; (7) 92a7-b4,
Index
126; (8) Anytus anticipated: καλοὶ
κἀγαθοί, 370; (9) Conversation with
Anytus anticipated: sophists, 370;
Geometrical Problem in, 404, 431–
33, 437; Hunting for Hypotheses in,
429–31, 450, 458–60; Hypothetical
Method in, 424–60; Meno Doublet
in. See First Protreptic, and Meno;
Second Part of the Divided Line
in, 428–31; Socratic Paradox in,
397–424; Tale of Two Schools in,
448–49, 475. See also Symposium,
and Meno
Merkelbach, R., 480
Meyerhoff, Hans, 139
Meyers, Judith, 433
Michelini, Ann, 55, 114–16, 122
Migliori, Maurizio, xl, 166, 459
Miltiades, 260, 262, 372, 478
Mineo, Melanie, 369
Mittelstrass, Jürgen, 435
Mojsisch, Burkhard, 162
Monoson, S. Sara, 200, 397
Moon-Heum, Yang, 435
Moore, Christopher, lvii
Moore, John, 184
Moors, Kent, 216
Morrison, Donald, xx, lvii, 4, 33, 207,
377
Moss, Jessica, 273
Most, Glenn, 456
Mourelatos, Alexander, 39, 122, 380–81
Mueller, Ian, 430, 438–40, 456
Müller, Gerhard, xvii, 422
Muses, xl-xli, 114, 261
music/musical, xxvii, xxix, xxxix-xliii,
xlvi-vii, xlix, lxiii, lxv-vii, 2, 14, 69,
108, 121, 129, 141, 183, 286, 288,
305, 326, 342, 368, 376, 379, 396,
422, 489, 498, 508
Mutschmann, Hermann, 122
Mytilene, 383
Nagel, Werner, 161
Nails, Debra, xiv, xvi, xxix, 3, 184, 201,
237, 239, 259–60, 401, 440, 479
 Index
Narcy, Michel, 67–68, 84, 118, 137,
243, 376, 398, 445, 451
Natali, Carlo, lx
Natorp, Paul, 122
Nehamas, Alexander, 10, 381, 383, 424,
449
Neoplatonism, xxxiii, 186–87
Nicias, 40, 56, 123, 129, 142, 144, 148,
150, 152–57, 161–62, 166,
179–81, 188–90, 192–94, 196–98,
200, 205, 209, 246, 391, 455, 469,
478, 496, 498, 504–5
Nichols, Mary, 12
Nietzsche, F. W., 209, 234–35, 238,
240–41, 254, 256, 264, 270,
335–36, 355, 411
Nightingale, Andrea, xviii, 17, 56, 153,
242, 368, 480
Nikulin, Dmitri, xlv
noblesse oblige, 247, 249
Notomi, Noburo, 166, 178
Nussbaum, Martha, 120, 387, 485
Nygren, Anders, 12–14
O’Brien, Denis, 398
O’Brien, Michael, 301, 497
Oldenberg, H., 463, 465
Olympiodorus, xxi, xxxii, xli, 219
O’Meara, Dominic, xxxiii, 278
One and the Many, Problem of the,
xlvii, 84, 139, 143, 177, 183, 404–5,
408, 494
Opsomer, Jan, 393
O’Rourke, Fran, xl
Orton, Jane, 425
Ostwald, Martin, 39, 479
Owen, G. E. L., 17, 42–43, 120, 131,
484–85, 487
Owenites, 17, 42, 460, 484, 486, 488
Palmer, John, 280, 358
Palmerston, Lord, xlv
Pangle, Lorraine, 23, 497
Pangle, Thomas, 275, 357, 374, 391
561
Parmenides. See Index locorum
Partenie, Catalin, 255
Paul, 12
Pausanias (Athenian), 102–4, 106, 111–
12, 115, 304, 392, 498
Pausanias (Spartan), 192–93, 202
Pavlu, Josef, 393
Peck, A. L., 62
Pellegrin, Pierre, 7
Penner, Terry, xxviii-ix, xliii, xlvi, liv-
vi, lxiv-v, 3–7, 9–11, 14–15, 17–25,
27–29, 31–52, 59–60, 65, 73, 80, 83,
86–87, 97–98, 100, 105, 107–108,
143, 147, 149, 151–163, 165–66,
168–69, 172, 179, 196, 269, 272–73,
275, 288–89, 301, 310, 326, 328,
331–39, 345, 367, 399, 408–409,
414–20, 422, 427, 435, 471–73, 484,
286, 489–93, 497; and Christopher
Rowe, liv-vi, lxv-vi, 3, 5, 17–19,
310, 408; and Pennerism, 39–41,
172, 326–27, 420; and Penner’s
Passage, 272, 331–33, 339, 345,
367, 399; as “most radical Socratist,”
lxv-vi, 3, 11, 15, 40, 42, 46–47;
as principal member of PTI, lxiv,
28–29; as student of Owen and Ryle,
42–43, 484, 487; Golden Footnotes
of, lvi, 46–47, 50, 417; on Allegory
of the Cave, xxix, 4n15, 417n186; on
morality, xlvi, 40–41, 326, 419–20;
on truth of Socratism, 29, 39–40,
327. See also Rowe, Christopher
Pennerite/Pennerism, 29, 31, 39–42, 46,
51, 82, 158, 272, 326–27, 331, 333,
414, 418–19, 422, 471, 473, 486,
493, 497
Pericles, 123, 185, 260–61, 372, 478
Phaedo. See Index locorum
Phaedrus. See Index loco rum
philosophy, passim; as “between
knowledge and ignorance,” lix
Phocion, 269
Planeaux, Christopher, 197, 200–202
562
Plataea, 191–93, 201–202, 351
Plato, passim; and Athens, xxxi, 249,
261, 267–68, 355; and death, 160;
and the Idea of the Good, xxxi; and
reader’s soul, 64, 196, 240; and
School of Hellas, 95; and sex, 112;
and student’s progress xxiii, xxix,
xxxii, 66; as Aristocles, 266; as
Callicles, 234–270; as difficult to
know, 45; as elitist, 247, 270, 314;
as his own eloquent accuser, 258;
as history teacher, 185; as musical,
xlvii, 2; as Platonist according to
Aristotle, xliii; as playful, xxxii,
xlvii, 94–95, 226; as poet, 95; as
suspicious, 270; as swan, xlii; as
tinkering, xxxii, 126; narrative
strategy of, 108–10; thirty-five
dialogues of, xxxiii, lxiii, 267, 326
Platonic hermeneutics, 189
Platonism, xxxi-ii, xxxiv-v, xliii-v, l-liii,
lxii, lxvi-vii, 4–6, 14–15, 18, 20,
29, 37, 41–42, 45–46, 49, 52, 127,
131, 161, 186–87, 189, 229, 238–39,
275–76, 279, 312, 349, 398, 417–19,
427, 436–38 460, 484, 488, 490,
504; and Alcibiades Major, xxiv,
279; and Aristotle, xliii, lxvii, 484–
85, 508; and Cook Wilson, 436–37,
and Owen, 42, 131, 460, 484; and
Recollection, 398, 490; and Strauss,
189, 484; and Vlastos, 14, 490; and
Tübingen, 487; battleground of,
275, 427; bedrock of, 20; double-
envelopment of, xliv; middle period,
xlii, xliv, 417–18; Palmerstonian,
xlv, 47, 331; prizing free, lxii; riddle
of, 186–87; Socratism as springboard
to, 130, 504
Plotinus, 186, 269
Plutarch, 190, 206, 269, 393,
397, 478
Pohlenz, Max, 19–20, 23, 53–55, 92–93,
122, 374
Index
Polemarchus, 112, 223–25, 229, 232–
33, 350, 469–70, 483
Polemo, 374
Polus, 126, 214, 223–25, 229–33,
236–37, 247–48, 251–52, 258, 287,
296–300, 307, 309, 311, 330, 338–
39, 342–43, 346, 352, 370, 385
Posidonius, 269
Pownall, Frances, 206, 210
Pradeau, Jean-François, xxxiii
Press, Gerald, 390
Prichard, H. A., 4–5, 7–10, 12, 14, 40,
42–43, 50, 275, 284, 412, 484
Price, A. W., 85, 508
Prinzipienlehre (the One/Indefinite Dyad
doctrine of “the unwritten teachings”),
xlv-vi, lxii, 139, 279, 435, 485
Prior, William, xxviii
Proclus, xxi
Prodicus, 57, 59–60, 62, 106, 126, 136,
187, 385, 390
Protagoras. See Index locorum; and
Charmides, 325–27; and Gorgias,
245, 300; and Laches, 325–27; and
PTI, 36, 39, 271, 479; and Vlastos,
39, 43, 146, 286, 327; fallacious
interpretation of Simonides in, xxxvi,
lxii, 40, 43, 70, 78, 110, 299, 302,
304, 307, 318–22, 351, 359, 385,
420, 505; Hesitation of Protagoras
in, 309, 312, 315, 318; Interrupted
Argument in, 78–79, 309; Repeat
Performance Theory (RPT) of,
304–305, 312, 317, 323–28, 390,
466, 497; Socratic Paradox in, 302;
testing in, xxxvi, 63, 313 ; Triple
Equation in, xxv, 233, 245, 295, 307,
421; unwilling praise in, 319–22
Pyrilampes, 259–60
Quiggan, E., 385
Rabieh, Linda, 196
Raeder, Hans, xvi
 Index
Ramsey, Reuben, 321
Rankin, David, lxv
Reading Order of Plato’s Dialogues,
passim; as ancient concern, xxi,
as Platonic cosmos, 280; principal
advantage of, 130
reader’s response, xxxii, xliii, lxvii, 11,
36, 47–48, 54, 67–68, 182, 192, 196,
236; as soul of each dialogue, 194,
196
Redfield, James, 109
Rees, D. A., li
Reeve, C. D. C., lxii
Rendall, Steven, 234
Republic. See Index locorum; Allegory
of the Cave in. See Allegory of
the Cave; City of Good Men Only
in, 182, 221–22; contains most
important deliberate falsehood in
the dialogues, 221; Divided Line in,
xxix, 14, 46–47, 117, 120, 133–34,
213–17, 246, 277, 280, 406, 424–60,
466, 495, 498, and Shorter Way,
46–47, 217; first-, second-, and
third-order audiences of, 482–83;
follows Cleitophon, reasons why/
indications that: (1) Socrates’
Silence/Cleitophon-Response
Theory, 482; (2) Cleitophon, 464;
(3) answers Cleitophon’s Question,
477, 489; (4) Thrasymachus, 464; (5)
Thrasyllus, 461–62, 476; (6) justice
as ἔργον, 468, 477, 483, 510; (7) τὸ
μετὰ ταῦτα λόγος, 476; (8) passing
torches, 477; (9) Simon Slings, 462;
(10) Lysias, 464; gravitational pull
of, 120, 365; Shorter Way in, liii, lxi-
ii, 1, 4, 27, 43, 46–48, 50, 52, 127,
130, 150, 157, 182, 208–13, 215–18,
223, 228, 231–32, 237, 270–299,
301, 305, 315–16, 344, 349–51, 355–
56, 360, 368, 406, 427, 429–30, 438,
448, 456, 458, 465–66, 473–74, 483,
489, 493, 498, 510; and Charmides,
182; and Second Part of Divided
Line, 46–47, 217, 429–30, 498, as
563
“main argument,” xxvii-ix, 489,
echoes Charmides, 182, eudaemonist
basis of, 228, 237, precursors of, 448
Reshotko, Naomi, xiv, xlvi, 29–30,
38, 41, 51, 82, 163, 408, 414; as
Pennerite, 29, 414
rests, playing the, xl, lxvi-vii, 342
Rick, Hubert, 205
Rickless, Samuel, 497
Ridgeway, William, 385
Rider, Benjamin, 19, 68, 72, 80, 83, 97;
praised, 97n388
Riegel, Nicholas, xxix
Riginos, Alice, xvi, xli-iii, 276, 478
Rist, John, 373
Ritter, Constantin, 96
Robb, Kevin, 390
Robinson, Franklin, 346
Robinson, David, 53, 62, 65, 67, 85
Robinson, Richard, 62–63, 425, 439–40,
442, 453. See also Robinson’s
Retreat
Robinson’s Retreat, 440–41, 444, 453,
455, 457–58, 467, 495
Romilly, Jacqueline, 145, 184, 326
Rorty, Richard, 39, 122
Rose, Lynn, 444
Ross, W. D., xx, xxviii, xlvii, xlix, lviii
Rowe, Christopher, xii, xix, liv-vi, lxiv-
vi, 3–5, 7–27, 29, 31–32, 34–38,
40–41, 43–45, 47, 49, 51, 59–60,
65, 83, 85–87, 91, 97–98, 100, 103,
105, 107–108, 143, 151–52, 154–55,
163–65, 167–69, 172–75, 202, 245,
255–56, 273, 279, 301, 310, 326,
328, 331, 335, 347, 408, 412–15,
417–19, 462, 464, 468–72, 474, 482,
489, 491–93, 501; and Cleitophon,
468–72; and Gorgias, 273; and H.
A. Prichard, 5, 7; and Meno, 491–93;
and moral bankruptcy of Socratism
in its most radical form, 414; and
Symposium, 3–5, 7–10; and Terry
Penner. See Penner, Terry; as gifted,
clever, and erudite, lvi; as most
radical Socratist, lxv, 418
564
Roochnik, David, 83, 216
Rose, Lynn, 444
Rose, Valentin, lx
Routh, Martin, 102, 106
Rudebusch, George, xix, 29, 194, 196,
497; as Pennerite, 29
Russell, Daniel, 67, 73, 76, 82, 85, 328
Ryle, Gilbert, 42, 112, 119, 217, 303,
312, 484, 487; as student of John
Cook Wilson, 484
Sachs, David, 4, 38, 47–48, 50, 277,
284, 349
Salcedo Ortíz, Eduardo, 121
Sallis, John, 450
Samb, Djibril, 89
Santas Circle/circularity, 35–36, 40,
49, 64, 80, 82–83, 85, 88, 146, 164,
168, 172, 177, 459, 467, 492, 502,
505; and εὖ πράττειν, 168n195, 177;
squaring the, 49, 64, 177
Santas, Gerasimos, xlvi, 29, 35–40,
48, 52, 56, 122, 147, 173, 196, 318,
331, 381, 414, 418–19, 497. See also
Santas Circle
Saunders, Trevor, 423
Saxonhouse, Arlene, 108, 232, 258,
262, 368
Schaeffer, Denise, 374
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, xxi, xxxiii,
384, 461, 468, 470, 500, 506
Schliesser, Eric, 302
Schmid, Walter, 122–23, 171–72, 178,
182, 195–96, 207–8, 214
Schneider, Gustav, 96
Schofield, Malcolm, xiv, 29, 243, 368,
468, 485
Schorn, Stefan, 462
Schriftkritik (“the critique of writing” in
Phaedrus), xlv, 101, 328
Schultz, Anne-Marie, 94, 108, 110, 116
Schulz, Walter, 154, 228
Schwab, Whitney, 460
Scodel, Ruth, xiv
Index
Scolnicov, Samuel, xxiv, 69, 73, 139,
207, 503
Scott, Dominic, xxxv, 10, 174, 241,
263, 367–69, 372, 398, 431, 440,
448, 450–53, 490
Scott, Gary, xxxiii
Scott, Robert, xv
Sedley, David, xiv, xviii, 153, 255, 328,
330, 346–47, 462, 481
Segonds, A., xxi
Segvic, Heda, 6, 272, 293, 338, 446
self-contradiction, deliberate, xlii, 9, 34,
52, 222, 299, 307–8, 318, 320, 328,
346, 348, 368, 417, 419–22, 441–42,
449, 460, 497; inadvertent, 146;
performative, 226, 449
Self, knowledge/ignorance of, 38n169,
161, 174, 183, 219, 228, 256–57,
424, 510
Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi, Georgia, 67,
69, 74, 82, 84, 132
Sharma, Ravi, 425
Sharples, R. W., 425, 431
Shaw, J. Clerk, 241, 269, 301, 308, 352,
371
Sheffield, Frisbee, xxix, 3, 25
Shorey, Paul, 65, 95, 170, 434, 486
Simonides, 351. See also Protagoras,
fallacious interpretation of Simonides
in,
Singpurwalla, Rachel, 30, 163
Slings, Simon, xix, 462–64, 468–71,
475–76, 478, 480–82, 486, 488, 493,
499–509; tribute to, 500
Smith, Nicholas, lvii, lxi-ii, 44, 68, 71,
74, 160, 243, 272, 276, 288,
330–31, 378, 381–85, 416,
418–19, 421
Smyth, Herbert, 99–100
Snider, Eric, 364, 371
Socrates, passim; and wondering about
Socrates, 378; as (other-regarding)
doctor, 182n238, 222, 331, 349, 358;
as narrator, 68, 94, 108, 110–11; as
 Index
paradox, 423; making sense of, 377;
models courage and self-control,
118; Plato’s, xx
Socratism, systematic, 19, 26–53, 67,
75–76, 80, 151, 279, 286, 320, 443,
491; and Euthydemus, 26, 30, 49, 52;
and revisionism, 41–43; and Socratic
ignorance, 162–63; as springboard,
42; as true, 39
Socratists, lxii-vi, 3, 6, 8, 11, 15, 27,
29–33, 35–37, 44, 46–47, 52, 56, 73,
80, 85, 88, 101, 103, 105, 111–12,
123, 127, 129–30, 132–33, 142–44,
146–48, 152, 155, 163, 165–69,
172–73, 176–77, 188, 194, 198–200,
218, 245–46, 255, 271–75, 279,
282–83, 286, 288, 291–94, 298, 302,
308, 314, 318, 323, 326, 328, 331,
333, 339, 344, 350, 375, 387, 403,
407, 417–19, 423, 425, 429, 446,
449, 457, 469, 471, 473, 484, 487,
491–93, 496–98, 500–501, 503–4,
507; and Meno, 403, 429, 457, 491;
and revisionists/unitarians, 418;
more radical, lxiv, 147–48, 271,
282, 291, 314; most radical, lxv-vi,
3, 6, 11, 15, 88, 148n103, 155, 165,
169, 172–73, 176, 218, 245–46, 272,
275, 288, 292, 308, 326, 331, 350,
417–18, 471, 473, 491–92, 498; and
Vlastos, lxiii, 146, 271; when they
never sound less Socratic, 36. See
also Socratism, systematic
Sophist. See Index locorum
Soreth, Marion, 131
Spartolus, Battle of, 200
Speusippus, 269
Sprague, Rosamond Kent, xiv, 57–58,
60, 62–63, 66, 69, 74, 83, 86, 97,
117, 122–23, 175, 199, 318, 462
Stahl, Hans-Peter, 202, 447
Stanford, William, 66
Statesman. See Index locorum
Stauffer, Devin, 128, 216, 239, 251, 341
Stefanini, Luigi, 461, 503, 505
565
Steidle, Wolf, 200
Stemmer, Peter, xxviii-ix, lxv, 4, 151,
166, 173, 215, 229–30, 248, 257,
276, 296, 336, 364–65, 368, 385,
412, 425, 427–28, 456, 471, 509
Stern, Paul, 186
Sternfeld, Robert, 432, 453
Stickler, Florian, 112
Stokes, Michael, lviii, lxiii
Straussians, 17, 374, 469, 482n117, 484,
487
Strauss, Leo, xxxiv, 113–14, 125, 189,
200, 275, 374n30, 469, 484–85, 487,
503
Sullivan, J. P., 301
Svoboda, Michael, 232, 260
Symposium. See Index locorum; as
prior to: (1) Lysis. See Lysis, follows
Symposium; (2) Euthydemus, 75, 91,
102, 106; (3) Laches, 121, 198–99;
(4) Charmides, 200–2; (5) Gorgias,
296–98, 365; (6) Theages, 374,
392–93; (7) Meno, 408, 414–15; (8)
Cleitophon, 509; (9) Republic, xxviii,
5–6, 51–52, 296; Eudaemonist
Shortcut in, 21, 85, 105–7, 130, 140,
155, 182, 198, 218, 222, 228, 245,
297, 331, 357, 408, 414–15, 418,
472, 492–93, 509–10; GB Equation
in, 1–10; and Shorter Way, 1, 130;
gravitational pull of, 120, 365
Szlezák, Thomas, 101, 137
Tarán, Leonardo, 12
Tarnopolsky, Christina, 232, 251–52,
273
Tarrant, Dorothy, 376
Tarrant, Harold, xvi, xxi, xxxiii, 58,
120, 321, 448, 451, 481
Tatham, M. T., xxxv
Taylor, A. E., xlix, 54
Taylor, C. C. W., lviii-iv, 27–28, 36–37,
40–41, 43, 52, 143, 146–48, 218,
221, 257, 301, 306, 308–19, 328,
419, 427, 485; and Protagoras, lxiv,
566 Index
28, 36, 147, 306, 308–19; and PTI,
36, 218, 308; and Santas Circle, 37,
52; praised, 315
Teloh, Henry, 62
“Tenses, Sequence of,” 158, 179, 193,
227–28, 424
Tessitore, Aristide, 113–14
Teixera, João, 147
Theaetetus. See Index locorum;
Theages. See Index locorum; and
Alcibiades Major, 370, 374, 387–88;
and Apology of Socrates, 373, 376,
383–84, 389–90; and Charmides,
374–75, 396; and Euthydemus, 378–
79; and Ion, 395 and Laches, 121,
370, 372; and Protagoras, 370, 372,
385; and Republic, 373, 376, 390;
and Socratism, 127; and Symposium,
374, 392, 396; and Theaetetus, 373–
76, 378, 388–89, 392–96; as riddle,
374, 378, 389, 396; authenticity
of, 395–96; backwards-pointing
allusions (BPA) in, 373, 389–92,
394, 396; follows Gorgias, reasons
why/indications that: (1) Gorgias
and Polus, 225, 370, 385; (2) School
of Tyrants, 126, 225; (3) Athens
Quartet, 372, 478; (4) Trial of
Socrates, 129, 349–50, 389–90; (5)
War/KAH, 396–98; (6) Mystery of
Theages’ Character, 391; (7) Mystery
of Callicles’ Conversion, 371; (8)
Degree of Difficulty, 392; (9) Ring-
Composition, 121; (10) Relief, 123;
(11) Sequence of Tenses, 375; (12)
δύναμις vs. ἀδικεῖν, 376n39; won’t
be returning to canon anytime soon,
375. See also Joyal, Mark
Theages, 126, 370–73, 375–76, 385–86,
389–91, 394, 477; and character-
reading, 391
Theramenes, 478–80
Thesleff, Holger, xvi, 54, 110, 217, 303
Thirty Tyrants, 167, 185–86, 192, 202,
205, 207–8, 210, 225
Thompson, E. Seymour, 15, 74, 371,
406, 431, 466
Thompson, W. H., 124, 270, 282, 283–
84, 291, 307
Thrasyllus, xix-xxi, xxiii-iv, xxvii,
xxxiii, 27, 59, 123, 127, 325, 461,
476
Thrasyllus (Athenian general), 398, 480
Thrasymachus, 50, 108, 170, 223, 229,
233, 237, 464, 468–69, 474, 483,
498, 505–6
[Thrasymachus], 219–23, 326–27, 461–
66, 474, 480–82
Thucydides, xxxvii, 70–71, 100, 118,
121, 123, 148, 183–85, 188, 190–92,
194–95, 197, 201–9, 226, 230, 232,
258–59, 261–64, 321, 370, 372, 391,
397–98, 478–79
Thucydides the Younger, 121, 370, 372,
391
Tigerstedt, E. N., 305
Timaeus. See Index locorum
Trabattoni, Franco, 94
Trivigno, Franco, 241, 367–68
Trump, Era of, 254, 396, 477, 479
Tsouna, Voula, 173
Tübingen School, xx, xliv-v, xlviii, lxi-
ii, lxv, 1, 101, 405, 484, 487, 503
Tuckey, T. Godfrey, 84, 173, 178
Tulli, Mauro, 22
Tuozzo, Thomas, 178–79, 208
Turner, Chris, 194
Umphrey, Stewart, 152
Unity of Virtue, parallel with the One,
xlvi, 84
Vander Waerdt, P. A., li-iv, 37
Versényi, Laszlo, 3, 6–7, 87, 350, 431
Vasiliou, Iakovos, 5, 425, 468
Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 63
virtue/virtues, passim; and craft analogy
(CA), 28; and knowledge of the
future (K-F), 157; and means-ends
structures (MES), 332; and self-
 Index
benefit (SB), 181, 187, 204, 211,
219, 222–23, 228–29, 233, 244,
246–47, 269–70, 275, 355, 364, 446;
and Socratic Paradox (SP), 29; as
knowledge (K), xlvi; as knowledge
of goods and bads (KGB), 28, 40;
courage as part of (CPV), 146;
identity of (IV), 143; instrumentality
of (IOV), 16; knowledge necessary
for (KNV), 40; knowledge sufficient
for (KSV), 40; unity of the (UV),
xlvi
Vlastos, Gregory, v, xv-xix, xxvi, xlv,
lvi, lxii-v, lxvii, 4, 11–14, 17,
26–29, 31, 34, 36, 39–40, 43–46, 52,
55–56, 58, 73–74, 82–83, 85, 94,
101, 122, 132, 143–50, 153, 158,
177, 179, 188–89, 194, 196, 200,
216, 218, 221, 229, 233, 260–61,
270–71, 273, 276, 279, 285–87,
291, 293, 296–99, 301, 306, 308,
313, 318, 326–27, 338–39, 375–85,
419, 421, 423–25, 449, 457, 467,
469, 487, 490–92, 495–97, 499,
503–504, 509; and acronyms, 188;
and Aristotle, lxiv-v, 43–44, 46,
384–85; and Arno Press, 58n259;
and author, v, xiii, 85, 287, 377,
469; and basanistic pedagogy,
145; and Charmides, 177n223;
and disembodied arguments, 94,
189; and Divine Sign, 375–384;
and Eudaemonist Axiom, xix, lxiii;
and Euthydemus, xv, 101, 285–86,
490, 503–4; and Gorgias, 229, 285,
287, 296–99, 327, 338–39; and
Irwin, 26–27, 34, 40, 52, 271, 326;
and Julius Caesar, 144n77; and
Laches, 144–50, 153, 158, 179; and
Lysis, xxvi, 285; and Meno, 101–2,
327, 433, 457, 490–92, 495–97,
499; and Platonism, 14n51, 490;
and Protagoras, 39, 43, 46, 158,
270–71, 301, 306, 313, 327, 497; and
Socraticism, lxiii; and Symposium,
567
12–14, 17; and Theages, 375–76;
and Vietnam, 384; and Vlastosians,
lxiii, 20, 55–56, 203, 327, 419, 487;
and “what Plato was trying to say,
144; and Xenophon, 44, 261, 375,
377, 384; as closer to Plato, 52; as
lovable/admirable, 144, 381; favorite
passage of, 287, 327, 338–39;
Golden Footnote of, 495–97; moral
excellence of, 147n100; on the
paradox of Socrates, 423n203, 381,
on self-predication, lxvii; passion for
the ἔλεγχος of, 384
Voegelin, Eric, 256
Voigtländer, Hanns-Dieter, xliv
Vorwerk, Matthias, 251–52
Wallace, R. W., 121
Wehrli, Fritz, 254
Weiss, Roslyn, xiv, xlviii, 50, 55, 89,
217, 301, 333, 367, 378, 380, 416,
440–42, 448, 453
Weiss, Yale, 133
White, F. C., 282, 285, 289, 293
White, Nicholas, 48, 278, 412
Whittington, Richard, 199
Wieland, Wolfgang, 162, 430
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von,
238, 305, 463–64, 468,
482
Wildberg, Christian, 368
Wilde, Oscar, 331
Wilkes, Kathleen, 435, 444
Wilson, J. Cook, 5, 42, 417, 436–38,
440, 484
Wiser, James, 226
Witte, Bernd, 169–70, 175, 205–6, 208,
211
Wohl, Victoria, 479
Wolfsdorf, David, xxi, 272, 331, 411,
431–32, 437, 440, 453, 455,
458
Woodruff, Paul, 139, 298, 317, 378–79,
381, 405
Woolf, Raphael, 368
568 Index

Xenocrates, 269 Zehnpfennig, Barbara, 153, 223

Xenophon, xx, xlviii, lvii, lix, lxi, 25,
44, 72–73, 77, 103, 182–84, 188,
192, 200, 205–9, 260–61, 275, 375–
77, 384, 387, 391, 397–404, 407–13,
415, 419, 422–23, 454, 470–71,
477–82, 485, 493, 501
Xerxes, 262
Youtie, H. C., 480
Yunis, Harvey, 260
Zeus, 78, 87, 110, 156, 178, 242, 263,
329, 361, 454
Zeyl, Donald, 126, 301
Ziegler, Konrat, 282
Zuckert, Catherine, 115, 120
Zyskind, Harold, 432, 453
 Index verborum
ἀεί, 12, 15, 140–42, 252, 360, 362–63,
379, 385
ἀγαθόν, xxviii, lii-iii, 1, 5, 12, 14–17,
31, 64, 80–83, 85–86, 106, 151,
156, 169, 178–79, 181, 190–91,
210–12, 229–31, 233, 244–45,
247, 256–57, 267–79, 287, 294,
296, 298, 306, 309, 311, 314–15,
320–21, 353–54, 358, 361–62,
364, 370, 445–46, 458–60, 499,
502
ἀγών, lx-lxi, 110, 312
ἀδικεῖν, 190, 221, 231–32, 262, 340–41,
343, 348, 350, 358, 399, 402–3,
410, 413; ἐθέλειν ἀδικεῖν, 402–3,
410, 413
ἀδικεῖσθαι, 221, 231–32, 348, 350, 358,
403, 410
αἴσχιον, 231–32
αἰσχρόν, 101–3, 161, 167, 204, 231,
247, 262, 310–13, 363, 384
ἀκρασία, xlix, lvii-viii, lxi, 37, 39, 47,
52, 279, 302, 473, 493
ἄλλος τις, 235–36
ἀντιλογικοί, 21, 58
ἀπάτη, xlii, xlvii, 63, 105, 265
ἀπατηλός, 63
ἀποκρίνου, 231–32, 354
ἀπορία, 21, 25, 94, 142, 502
569
ἅπτεσθαι, 392, 395, 404
ἆρα μή, 93, 99, 179–80
ἀργός, 137–38
ἀρετή, lii-iv, 16, 74–75, 79–80, 82–84,
91, 106, 121–22, 132–33, 166,
168, 190, 204, 244, 246–47, 281,
283, 291, 305, 326, 361–64, 371,
385, 399, 410, 415, 452–55,
458–59, 466–67, 475–76, 482,
493–94, 499, 506, 508–10;
εἴδωλα ἀρετής, 16, 415
ἀσκεῖν, 361–65
ἀσκητόν, 444, 448, 455, 466
βάσανος, xxxv, 32, 63, 239–40, 287,
411
βλαβερόν, 166–67, 169
βλαβερῶς, 167, 171, 176
βλάπτειν, 346, 348, 412–13, 469–70
βοηθεῖν, 230, 232, 339–40
βούλησις, 168–69, 338, 340–41, 345
γενέσθαι αὐτῳ, 412, 414–16
δαιμόνιον, 370, 373–74, 383, 388,
393–94, 396, 424
δέοντα, 170–73, 182, 195, 220, 227,
230, 468–69
δῆμος, 241–43, 248–49, 260, 267, 279
δημοσίᾳ, 358–59
δημοσιεύειν, 354
διάγραμμα, 134, 136–37
570 Index verborum
διαλεκτικοί, 134–36
δίδαγμα, 468, 510
διδακτόν, 74–75, 79, 102, 132–33, 369,
371, 444–45, 448, 450–55, 458,
466, 475, 496–97
δίκαιον, 230, 262, 265, 278–79, 359–60,
362–63
δικαιοσύνη, 283–84, 363, 365, 466, 469,
477, 493, 499
δίκην διδόναι, 128, 226, 229, 251,
253–54, 329, 339, 348, 359, 399,
403, 410
δύναμις, 338, 340–43, 345, 351, 371,
374, 376, 388, 392
ἐγώ, 117, 287, 294, 306–7
εἴδωλον, 16, 415
ἔλεγχος, 285–86, 328, 377, 384, 425,
476, 504
ἐπαναβασμός, 1, 11
ἐπίβασις, 11–12, 14, 422, 429
ἐπιστήμη, 74, 103, 124, 132–33, 138,
142–43, 151, 155, 165, 179, 181,
238, 283, 385, 451, 453–55,
458–60, 475, 499, 502–3
ἔργον, 137–38, 165–68, 170, 181,
353–55, 360, 468–69, 471,
476–77, 483, 502, 510
ἐριστικοί, 56, 58, 135–36, 138
ἕρμαιον, 240, 242, 368
ἔρως, 12–13, 55, 59, 90–92, 102, 107–8,
111–12, 115, 168, 198, 241–43,
249, 267, 355–57, 362, 374
εὐδαιμονεῖν, 73, 76–77, 80, 151, 178,
290, 361–62, 507
εὐδαιμονία, liii, lv, 10, 30–31, 52, 220,
347, 351, 354, 499, 508–9
εὐεξία, 214–16, 277, 281, 290
εὖ ἔχειν, 214, 216, 277, 290
εὐλαβητέον, 348, 350, 357–58, 364
εὐπραγία (εὐπραξία), 69–72, 78
εὖ πράττειν, xxxvii, 19, 30, 66, 69–73,
76–79, 81–85, 101, 103, 105, 113,
137, 142, 144, 146, 148, 151, 168,
171–82, 218, 231, 269, 277, 284,
286, 288–91, 294–96, 305, 311,
314–15, 317–18, 350–51, 356,
408, 417, 421, 447, 452, 459, 471,
492, 494, 501, 507–10
εὖ πραττώμεν, 77, 471, 507, 510
εὐτυχία, 34, 67–70, 72, 74–78, 81, 84,
90–91, 103, 105, 113, 142, 147,
218, 335, 385–86, 468, 497
ἐφάπτεσθαι, 16, 392, 415
ἤθος, 250, 267–68
θεία μοῖρα, xxx, 369–73, 383, 386–87,
396, 412, 446, 460, 492, 497
θεός, 247, 370, 387–88
ἰδέα, ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ, 17
ἰσότης, ἡ γεωμετρική, 216
κακῶς ποιεῖν, 346, 348, 420, 470–73,
383, 386–87, 396, 412, 446, 460,
492, 497
καλόν, xxv, xlv, 1, 5, 15, 21–23, 56,
61, 71, 90–91, 96, 106, 109, 128,
144–45, 155, 160, 165–67, 194,
196–98, 204, 229–31, 233,
245–47, 256–57, 265, 289,
296–98, 309–11, 313–14, 320,
351, 471, 490
καλὸς κἀγαθός, 190–91, 247, 267–70,
320, 354, 361–62, 364, 370
καλῶς πράττειν, 70–71, 73, 75, 77, 144,
294–95, 350–51, 408
καταβατέον, 248, 269, 380
κατέβην, 351, 355, 380, 420, 458, 472,
482
κεφαλή, 203, 235, 239, 250
κολάζεσθαι, 250–51
κολακεία, 214, 359
κόσμος, xlv, 215, 277, 279–82, 290
λόγος, l-li, lviii, 10, 25, 92, 137–38,
199–200, 234–37, 243, 250–51,
280, 287, 299, 302, 306–307,
338–39, 343, 355–58, 357–58,
361–65, 369, 371, 375–76, 476
μάθημα/μαθήσις/μαθητῆς/μαθητόν, 58,
70, 166, 297, 444–45, 448–49,
452–53, 466
μαντεύεσθαι, 21, 167
μάντις, 161, 179, 188, 193
 Index verborum
μεταξύ, 69, 86–91, 97
μιαρέ, ὦ, 151, 165, 225
μισόλογος/φιλόλογος, 121–22, 141
μῦθος, 235, 329, 356
οἰκεῖον, 5, 23–25, 96, 100, 106, 155–56,
198, 234–35, 250, 267, 436–37,
475
ὅρα, 244, 246, 248
ὁρμή, 12, 14, 429, 447
ὄφελος, 16, 164, 166, 352, 417
πάτρις, 252, 254, 258, 260–61, 322
πολιτικός, 186, 236, 249–50, 266, 269–
70, 352, 354–55, 369, 371
πολλοί, οἱ, 92, 154, 190, 211, 241, 244,
262, 278–80, 316
πράττειν τὰ πολιτικά, 260, 267, 352–53,
373, 379–80, 383, 477
σκοπός, 219–20, 223, 225, 237, 239,
249, 251, 257, 363
σοφία, 64, 67–68, 72–92, 101–103, 106,
113–14, 121–22, 127, 132–33,
137, 142, 155–56, 386, 443, 452,
459, 466, 475, 494, 499, 502–3
σοφός/ἀμαθής, 69, 90, 156
σύμφερον, 128, 230, 356, 360, 468–69,
471
συνουσία, 353–54, 370, 378, 385–86,
390–96, 480, 498
Σωκράτης, ὁ, xlix-li, lix
σωφροσύνη, 166–67, 171–72, 174,
181–82, 198, 207, 211–12,
283–84, 294, 443–44, 494
571
τάξις, xlv, 215, 277, 279–82, 290
τέχνη, xxvi-vii, xl-xli, lxvi, 7, 28, 33,
72, 134, 170, 181, 189, 220, 223,
226, 242, 244–47, 256, 281, 327,
340–45, 351–52, 386–87, 420,
468, 493, 500, 502
τύραννος, 222–23
ὕπουλος, 254, 261–62
φίλον, 21, 58, 61, 67, 86–93, 116,
370
φιλονικία/φιλονικῶς/φιλόνικος, 287,
354–55
φιλοσοφία, 20, 52, 79, 86–92, 95,
100
φύσις, 198, 262, 444–45, 448–49,
452–53
φωνή, 373, 424
χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά, xxv, l, 38, 98, 191,
257, 296, 384, 402
χρηστέον, 338–39, 357, 359–60,
363
ὠφελεῖν, 15, 166–67, 181, 220–21,
229, 250, 379–80, 412–13, 447,
470–71
ὠφελεῖσθαι, 220–21, 229, 231, 234,
250–51, 447
ὠφέλιμον/ὠφελίμως πράττειν, 15, 73,
79, 164–67, 169–73, 176, 180–81,
196, 204, 211, 219, 221, 223,
227, 229, 245, 296, 298, 317–18,
417, 443, 446–47, 460, 468–69,
471–72, 475, 502
 Index locorum

Alcibiades Major 115b1-6, 78 116b11, 70

115b1-9, 340 116b13, 71
103a4-6, 374 115b1-c1, 308 116c1-2, 70, 295
103a6, 370 115b1-c2, 311 116d3, 78, 356
105d5, 388 115b1-c9, 161 117c6-e5, 174
105e5, 388 115b1-116b2, 71 117c7, 174
105e6-106a1, 388 115b1-c5, xxvi 117d2, 174
106a1, 388 115b2, 70 117d11, 174
106d4-5, 448 115b5, 160, 231 117e2, 174
106d4-6, xxx 115b5-7, 160, 350 117e4, 174
106d10-e3, 83 115b5-c2, 232 117e5, 174
109b3-6, 82 115b9, 160, 231 118b9-c1, 191
109e1-110a1, 456 115d7, xxv, 38, 233, 295, 118c6, 121
109e7, 83 313 125a1-15, 195
111a1-4, xxxiii 115d10-13, 308 125a8-10, 195
113d1-116e1, 471 115e6-7, 351 127a14, 210
113d5-6, 230 116a6, 70 127a14-d3, 210
114e7, 78 116a6-8, 340 127c7, 210
114e7-116e1, xxv, 295 116a6-b2, 295 127d7, 210
115a-c, 257 116a6-b5, 311 127e1-2, 210
115a1-16, 295 116b, 84, 295 127e9, 210
115a6-10, 350 116b2, 70, 144 128e10-129b3, 424
115a6-16, 311 116b2-3, 295, 408 129a2-10, 228
115a6-b4, 296 116b2-5, 70, 231, 471, 129e7-130a2, 228
115a11-16, 295 509 130d8-e6, 329
115a11-c5, 160 116b2-6, 174 132e7-133a5, 174
115a13, 70 116b2-12, 71 135c10-d1, 104
115b1-2, 70 116b5, 295 135d3-6, 370
115b1-4, 230 116b7, 70 135d6, 388

573
574 Index locorum

Alcibiades Minor 31d5-e1, 383 161a11, 179

34a1, 389 161b6, 168
139a7-c1, 21 36c4, 509 161b8, 151, 225
139c6-8, 195 36d9-10, 509 161c2, 208
141c-e, 334 36e9-10, 509 162b9-d6, 110
141d5-e2, 185 38b7-10, 116 162b10-d4, 111
141e3-142b1, 134 42a2-5, 227 162b10-d6, 108
143a7-c7, 90 162c3, 278
144b11-c8, 77 Charmides 162c3-4, 208
144d5, 84 162d4, 174
145a6-b3, 195 153b3-5, 201 163a7, 168
145c2, 84 153c7, 181 163a10-c8, 168
145d10, 195 153d4-5, 109 163c3, 169
145e8-9, 84 154a3, 109 163c3-8, 195
146e1, 84 154a3-6, 109 163c5-6, 167
150e6, 104 154a8-b2, 206 163d7, 168
154b2, 109 163e1, 168
Apology of Socrates 154b8, 253 163e10, 168, 294
154b8-c5, 109 164a1-b2, 169
20d8, lix 154b10-d6, 109 164a9-c6, 163, 209
21d7-8, xxxiv 154e4-155a7, 208 164b3, 195
23a7, lix 155a4-7, 109 164b3-6, 172
23b2-4, 83 155a6, 109 164b3-10, 170
25c5-e5, 327 155a8-158c4, 331 164b3-c6, 220
25c8-e5, 163 155b3-5, 203 164b8-9, 173
28b6-d9, 384 155b3-6, 109, 208 164b11-c7, 171–73
28b8, 164 155b4, 235 164e7, 161
28c1-d9, 384 155c5, 253 165d1-2, 165
28c4, 384 155c5-e3, 278 165e5-166a11, 183
28d5-9, 162 155c7-e3, 109 166b9-c3, 173
28d5-29a2, 194 155c8, 174 167e1-9, 168
28d6, 384 155d3-e3, 110 167e4-5, 169
28e9, 384 156d4-6, 201 169a7-d8, 164
29a2-b2, 160 156d4-157c6, 203 169b4-5, 167
29a5-b2, 227 156d6, 204 169b5, 181
29b6-7, xxxiv 157a-c, 149 170c6-d4, 173
29b8-c1, 159 157b1-2, 265 170c9-d3, 494
30b, 492 157c4, 265 170d1-3, 138
30c-31a, 251 157e5-6, 205 171b9, 176
31d2-4, 227, 389 158a2-6, 259 171d1-172a5, 174
31d2-5, 373 158c1, 235 171d2-172a3, 176
31d2-e1, 379 158c5, 108 171d2-4, 173
31d4, 383 158c5-7, 109 171d6, 174
31d4-5, 389 160d6, 174 171d8-e5, 175–77
31d5, 373, 380 161a4, 123 171d8-e7, 278
 Index locorum 575

171e1, 174 174c9-d7, 166 409d2-410a6, 502

171e2, 174 174d4, 167, 181 409d6, 476
171e3, 174 174d6-e3, 181 409d9, 476
172a1, 84 174d7, 166 409e10-410a6, 467, 505
172a3, 177 174e2, 179 410a6, 469
172b1, 179 176a6-c4, 118 410a7-b3, 346
173a-d, 148 176b9-c6, 375 410a8-b1, 469
173a7-8, 152 410b1, 470
173a7-d7, 174–75 Cleitophon 410b1-3, 229
173b8, 253 410b2-3, 510
173c, 161 406a1-4, 498 410c7, 464
173c3-4, 179 406a2, 464 410e, 509
173c3-7, 179 406a3, 464 410e4, 464
173c4, 179 406a6, 464 410e5, 507
173c6, 161 407a1, 502 410e5-8, 466–67, 506–10
173c6-7, 179 407a9-e2, 502 410e7, 467, 507
173c7-d5, 177, 179 407b, 466 410e7-8, vii, 178, 490, 509
173d1, 176 407b1-8, 464
173d3-4, 176 407b3-7, 466 Cratylus
173d4, 148 407d2-3, 499
173d6, 148 407d2-e2, 499 384b2-c1, 57, 59
173d6-7, 178 407d3-4, 499 427d4-8, 487
173d7, 148 407d6, 102, 498 428a5, 275
173d8-e1, 178 407d6-7, 499 437c5-d8, 316
173e6-7, 179 408c2-3, 471
173e7, 180 408c4, 477, 493, 502 Crito
173e10, 179 408c4-7, 502
173e10-174a6, 179–80 408c5, 476 47e7-48d6, 309
174a1, 161 408c5-6, 178, 209, 496 48a5-b9, 409
174a4-6, 147, 152, 193 408c6-7, 469 48b5, 180, 309
174a6-b3, 180 408c7-d6, 476–77 48b7-8, 351
174a10-11, 179 408c9, 476–77 49c4-5, 267
174b-c, 165 408d1-4, 488 51a-c, 251
174b5, 180 408d2-6, 469 53e5-54a10, 460
174b7, 180 408d5-6, 509
174b8, 180 408d7-e1, 476 Epinomis
174b9, 180 408d7-e2, 476
174b10, 180 408e1-2, viii, 488, 499 991a7-b1, 326
174b11, 179, 225 408e2-3, 468 992b6-7, 406
174b11-c3, 150–51, 165 408e10, 476
174b11-d7, 152 409a4, 209, 496 Erastai
174c2-3, 179 409a7-b6, 468
174c3-8, 165 409b6, 468, 510 133a1-b6, 357
174c3-d7, 152, 165 409c1-3, 464 134b4, 108
174c9-d1, 181 409c2-3, 469 134c6, 215
576 Index locorum

Euthydemus 279c7-8, 77–78 282c5-7, 103

279d6-7, 34, 67, 84 282c7-8, 103
271a1, 55, 59 279d7, 90 282c8-d2, 91
271a1-5, 116 279d7-8, 68 282c8-d3, 75
271b4-5, 106 279d8-e2, 69–70 282d4-5, 506
271c5-272d1, 83 280a6-8, 73–74 282d8-283a4, 80, 82
271d4, 124 280b1-3, 75–76 283a1-7, 502
272b10, 56 280b3-6, 76 283c3-8, 475
272e1-4, 378 280b3-281b4, 49 283e7-284b2, 63
272e3-4, 199, 227, 378 280b5-c1, 471 288d7, 475
273a7-b1, 115 280b6, 73, 290, 507 288d8-289c8
273a8, 106 280b8-d7, 169 289c6-7, 114, 134
273c7, 124 281a6-c3, 133 289c6-8, 114
273d8-9, 122 281b2-4, 70 289c8-9, 117
273e3-4, 124 281b6-c3, 70 289c8-290d8, 504
274a6-11, 122 281b8-c3, 137 289d2-7, 117, 134
274e3-275a7, 79 281c1-2, 133 290a6-10, 117
275a9-b2, 115 281c1-4, 441 290a7-8, 117
275b1, 504 281c1-8, 452 290b-c, 490
275c7-d2, 114 281c2, 137, 452 290b-d, 285
275d3-4, 60, 87 281c4-8, 133 290b1-2, 114, 134
275d6, 108 281c6, 81, 443 290b3, 117
276d7, 138 281c6-7, 81, 133 290b3-d8, 504
277d4, 69 281c6-e2, 443 290b3-e2, 114
277e3-278a5, 67 281c7, 137 290b7-10, 134
277e3-278a7, 105 281d2-e2, 81 290b7-c6, 117
277e4, 59 281d6, 443 290b7-d8, 84
278a6-7, 60 281e2-5, 83 290b10-c3, 137
278d1-e2, 79–80 281e3f., 74 290b10-c6, 117, 187, 435
278d2-3, 114 281e3-5, 19, 34, 441 290b10-c7, 183
278d5-e3, 103 281e4-5, 81, 88, 443 290b10-c9, 134
278e-282d, 15 282a1-2, 103 290c7-9, 118
278e3, 19, 286, 505, 507- 282a2-4, 103 290c9-d8, 117
508 282a4-5, 103 290e1-2, 115, 120, 284
278e3-5, 279 282a5-6, 103 290e1-6, 117
278e3-279a1, 76–77 282a7, 101–102 291b8-c1, 502
278e3-282d3, 30 282a7-b6, 101–102 291e1, 502
278e4-5, 285 282b-c, 466 292a8, 502
279a2-3, 78 282b1, 109 292a11, 502
279b1-2, 78 282b3, 102 292b1-2, 441, 443
279b2-3, 78 282b4-5, 103 292d8-e1, 502
279b4-c1, 78–79 282b4-6, 103 292e6-293a1, 502
279b5, 81, 443 282b5-6, 103 293d5, 138
279c1, 78 282b6-c2, 102–103 293e, 250
279c1-8, 68 282c1-8, 74–75 295a-302e
279c4-280b3, 386 282c4-5, 103 295b2, 140
 Index locorum 577

295b2-296d4, 140 450a6, 215 468a5-b1, 332

295c4-7, 136 451a8-b4, 217 468b4-8, 332
295c6, 140 451c1-5, 407 468b8-c1, 332
295d1, 140 453e2-454a1, 407 468c1-7, 332
295e5, 141 455d8-e6, 260 468c7, 232
296a1, 140 456a7-b5, 226 469d1-2, 236
296a5-7, 140 459d1-5, 298 468d6, 232
296b5-6, 140 460a-c, 272 469b8-c2, 221
296b7, 140 460c7, 339 470b2-3, 236
296c1f., 139 460e2-3, 339 470c9-471d2, 223
296c4-d4, 141–42 462b10-e1, 300 471b1-6, 109
296c8, 140 463a1, 214 471d-e, 307
297a1-8, 114 463b1, 214, 359 472b3-c2, 236
297a4, 250 463b1-6, 214–15 472b6-8, 250
297a8, 82 463e3-464a1, 214 472c2-9, 236
297c1, 113 464a1, 214 472c6-d1, 236
297c7-8, 114 464a1-b1, 215 472e4-7, 226
297d1-2, 113–14 464a2, 214 472e5-7, 250
300c1-d7, 357 464a3-4, 358 473a4, 339
300d6-7, 114 464a3-6, 214 473d3-475e6, 352
301a4, 61 464a3-b1, 216 473d7-e1, 403
301c1, 84, 90 464a7-b1, 214 473e-474a, 251
303a5, 114 464b7-c3, 214–15 474b, 307
303a6, 114 464c3, 493 474c-d, 311
303c4-304b5, 83, 113 464c3-5, 214 474c4-d2, 231, 296
304d4-306d1, 124, 187 464c3-d3, 300 474c4-476a2, 232
305a8-b3, 116 464c5, 214 474c7-8, 232, 350
305c6-7, 57 465a4, 214 474c9-d2, 229
305c6-d2, 57, 353 465b6-c3, 214 474d, 317
305c6-306d1, 187 465b7, 214, 216 474d3-e1, 297
305c7, 187 465d5-6, 220 474d3-e4, 232
306a1-c5, 187 466a-468e, 272, 331 474d3-e7, 296
306a5, 187 466a4-468e5, 272, 331- 474d4, 297
306b2-3, 187 33, 339, 345, 367, 399 474d5-475c7, 300
306b4-c5, 187 466a9-468e5, 169 474d6, 298
306b6-c4, 118 466b4, 399 474d7, 298
306c3-4, 187 466b11-c2, 223, 236 474e1-7, 317
306d2-307a2, 116 466b11-467a10, 162 474e2, 297
307a1-2, 116 466e3, 399 474e3, 298
467c-468e, 272 474e6, 297
Gorgias 467c-468e, 272 474e7, 298
467c5-468c8, 499 475a1-2, 297
447a1-2, 250 467c5-468e5, 339 475a2-4, 297
447a1-4, 128, 225 467e-468d, 332 475a3, 298
448e8, 339 468a-b, 272 475a7, 298
449b2-3, 386 468a5-6, 499 475d2, 339
578 Index locorum

475d5, 232 480d6-e4, 348 486b4-c2, 339

475e475a3, 299 480e1-2, 339 486d2-4, 411
475e9-476a2, 250 480e5-7, 410 486d2-7, 238
476a, 299 480e5-481a2, 470 486d2-e3, 242
476a2-6, 250 480e5-481b1, 339 486d2-e6, xxx
476a7-8, 250 480e5-481b5, 255, 339, 486d2-e7, 63, 240, 242,
476b3-477a4, 231 346-51 246, 269
476d, 317 480e6, 229, 346, 357, 470 486d4-487a3
477a3, 250 480e6-7, 350 486d6-7, 391
477a5-6, 250 480e7, 357–58 486e3, 239, 368
477c8, 339 480e7-481a3, 345 486e5-6, 238, 360
478a6-7, 255 480e8, 346 486e6, 239
479c1-4, 128 480e8-481b1, 229 487b7-d4, 259, 270
480a1-2, 258, 339 480e8-481b5, 347 487c, 259
480a1-5, 252 481a-b, 347 487c2, 259
480a2, 250 481a3-5, 345 487c3-4, 259
480a6-b2, 252, 254 481a5-6, 345 487d6, 339
480b, 251 481a6-b1, 345 487d7-e3, 360
480b-d, 255 481b4-5, 339 487e1-3, 238
480b1, 470 481b6-7, 288, 293, 339 488b8-c8, 262
480b1-2, 254 481b6-c4, 255 489b2, 339
480b2, 261 481b7, 339 491c6-7, 278
480b3, 339 481c1-4, 412 491d, 272
480b7-9, 252 481c5-d5, 357 491d1-3, 278
480b7-c5, 251 481d1-5, 115, 259 491d4-9, 278
480b7-d6, 224, 250–62, 481d3-4, 115 491d10, 277–78
269, 321–22, 325, 481d5, 259 491d10-e1, 278, 300
330, 339, 348 482c4, 363 491e, 248
480b7-d7, 251 482d7-e2, 232 491e2-6, 279
480b7-d9, 252 482e2-483a4, 405 491e5-7, 237
480b8, 258, 261, 322 482e5-6, 260 491e5-492c8, 237
480b9-c3, 252 483a8-b4, 356 492a6, 339
480c, 252 483a8-b4, 339 492a8-b1, 300
480c1, 253 483c1-6, 216 492a8-c1, 290
480c1-2, 322 483c6-e1, 262 492d1-5, 237
480c2, 211, 223, 258 483c7-484c3, 238 492d5, 237
480c2-3, 261 483e1-4, 263 492e7-493a1, 228
480c3, 322 483e5-484b1, 264–65 492e7-493c7, 237
480c3-4, 253 483e6, 265 493a1-3, 228, 231
480c3-7, 253 483e6-484a5, 235 493c3-d3, 238
480c5, 261, 322 484c5-d7, 267 493c6-d3, 237
480c7-d3, 256 484d1-2, 268 493e, 272
480d3-4, 261 485d1-e2, 266 494e4, 105, 305, 396
480d3-7, 257 486a7-d1, 243 494e7-8, 306
480d4, 357 486b1-c3, 328 494e9-495a2, 306
 Index locorum 579

494e9-495a4, 306 506c5-507c9, 277 507c8-508b2, 280

495a2-4, 306 505c10-d4, 235 507c9-508b3, 338
495a5-b1, 306 505e3-506a3, vii 507c9-509d7, 338
495a7, 339 505e3-506a5, 284 507d6-e6, 272
495b, 307 506b6-c1, 284 507d8-508b1, 291
495b2-3, 307 506b8-c1, 285 507e, 280
495d3, 260 506b8-c9, 294 507e1, 282
495e2-5, 305 506c4, 232 507e3-6, 280
496c6, 339 506c5, 284 507e6-8, 280
497a8, 339 506c5-7, 299 507e6-508a4, 280
498a5-6, 260 506c5-507a3, 282 507e8-508b3, 280
500a6, 344 506c5-507c7, 277, 280– 508a3, 280
500c4, 353 95, 297, 299–300, 508a4-8, 277, 280
500c4-7, 353 338, 355, 357 508a6, 216
500c7-8, 353 506c7-9, 289 508a8-b3, 280, 284
500d2-4, 355 506c8, 289 508b, 255
500d6-e2, 256 506c9-d1, 281 508b3, 339
502e, 251 506c9-d6, 289 508b3-7, 357
503c1-3, 260 506d-e, 282 508b3-c1, 338
503c3-4, 339 506d2-8, 281 508b3-e6, 338
503d1, 344 506d5, 283 508b7, 357
503d5-504a5, 276 506d7, 215 508e6, 338–39
503e6, 215 506e1-507a3, 281 508e6-509a7, 240, 287,
503e6-504a10, 277 506e2, 215 289, 338–39
503e7-8, 279 507a, 282 509a7-b3, 339
503e8-504a1, 280 507a-b, 283 509a7-b5, 339
504a7, 215 507a-c, 272 509b3, 339
504a7-d1, 280 507a1, 291 509b3-d2, 340
504b6, 339 507a4-7, 282 509b4, 340
504d3, 280, 291 507a7, 282, 285 509b7, 340
504d4-7, 235 507a7-9, 289 509c3, 340
504d3-e2, 291 507a7-b1, 289–90 509c6-510a10, 340
505c3-4, 234, 250, 352 507a7-c7, 291 509c8, 340
505c3-5, 250 507a8, 294 509d2, 340
505c5-9, 234 507a8-e3, 272 509d2-5, 341
505c6-7, 300 507b-c, 272 509d3, 340–41
505c7-8, 300 507b1, 294 509d6, 340
505c10-d4, 235 507b1-4, 290 509d7, 342–43
505d4-7, 235 507b4-8, 291 509d7-e2, 340–41
505d5-e4, 272 507b8, 272, 291 509d7-e3, 342
505d6, 284 507c, 275 509d7-e7, 292
505d6-508b3, 277 507c3, 294–95 509d7-510a5, 256, 338-
505e3-506a3, 287 507c3-5, 84, 177, 231, 45, 349
505e4-5, 295 295 509d8-e2, 371
505e5, 285 507c8-9, 284 509e2, 232
580 Index locorum

509e2-7, 342 513c4-d1, 341 522a6-7, 359

509e3, 232 513c7, 249, 260 522b4, 359
509e3-510e5, 343 513c7-d1, 241 522b8-9, 359
509e4, 339 513c8-d1, 341 522c4-6, 167
510a6, 338 513c8-d5, 249 522d8-e1, 359
510a6-511c3, 338 513d2-3, 249 523a1-3, 227, 356
511a5-7, 247 513d3-4, 249 523a1-524a7, 224, 254,
511b1-5, 243 513d5, 249 312, 328–337
511b1-c5, 247 513e5-514a3, 352 523a5-b4, 348
511b3-5, 167 513e7, 339 523b2, 351
511b3-513c3, 341 514a1, 268 523b4, 347
511b4, 268 515a1-2, 260 523b4-e6, 329
511b7-513c3 515a1-7, 353 523d1, 347
511c4-5, 244 515a1-b5, 270 523d2-4, 329
511c4-513c3, 242–50, 515a6, 268 523e2-6, 348
257, 265–66, 269, 515a7-b5, 354 523e8-524a7, 348
279, 285, 335, 338, 515b1, 232 524d8, 347
340, 349, 364 515b6-c4, 354 525b2-4, 334
511c7, 244 515c1, 232 525b8, 330
511c9-512b2, 165 515c2-4, 339 525c1-3, 334
512a2-b2, 160, 243 515c3, 232 525c7, 330
512c3-d1, 243 515d1, 260 525d1-6, 334
512c3-d2, 243 515d1-517a6, 260 526a3-b4, 190, 268
512d, 244 515e13, 268 526a6-b3, 190
512d2-8, 244 516e9, 339 526a7, 268
512d6-e5, 276 517a3, 339 526e1-527a4, 361
512d7, 245 518a7-b1, 268 527a1-4, 328–29
512d8-e5, 247 518c4, 268 527a2-3, 356
512e, 248 518e1-519a7, 261 527a3, 361
512e1, 250 519a2, 291 527a4, 356
512e5-513a7, 248 519d5, 232 527a5, 356
513a, 265 520a6, 232 527a5-8, 227
513a2, 249 520b3, 493 527a6-7, 356
513a6-7, 340 520c4-d2, 126 527a8-9, 356
513a7-b3, 340 521b5, 350 527a9-b1, 356
513a7-b6, 242 521c1-2, 350 527b1-2, 356
513b3-6, 338 521d6-8, 352, 371 527b2, 356
513b5, 249 521d6-e2, 266 527b2-5, 358
513b5-6, 260 521e2-3, 220 527b2-c4, 227, 251, 357-
513b6, 259 521e2-522a7, 277 60
513b6-c3, 250 521e2-522c3, 220 527b5-6, 358
513b8, 266 521e5, 220 527b7-c1, 359
513c, 250 521e6-522a3, 220 527c1-3, 359
513c-d, 335 522a4, 220 527c3, 359, 363
513c4-6, 241, 341 522a6, 220 527c3-4, 360
 Index locorum 581

527c4-6, 360–61 533b8, xl 192b9, 291

527c6-d2, 361 534b1, 261 192c5-193d8, 165
527c7, 356 534b8, 396 192c8, 194
527d1-2, 268 535a3-5, 395 192d4-5, 166
527d2, 364 536b4-d3, 396 192d7-8, 166–67
527d2-5, 362 541c7-d2, 184 192d8, 194
527d3, 364 542a5, 95 192d10, 194
527d5-e1, 363 192e1-2, 194
527e1-5, 362 Laches 192e2-5, 194
527e4, 364 192e6-193a2, 195
527e5-7, 353, 365 178a1, 124 192e7, 195
527e7, 234, 270, 357 179a1-b6, 118 193a3-9, 195
179d2-5, 191 193a3-b4, 144
Hippias Major 179e 125 193a4, 167
180d1, 121 193a4-5, 193
286c5-d2, 284, 317 181a7-b1, 121, 193 193a6, 193
297c3-d1, 313 181a7-b4, 121 193a9, 291
298d6-299d3, 245 181b1-4, 193 193b5-c12, 145
298e7-299a6, 313 181b4, 193 193c2-8, 167
299a1-6, 38 181c9, 125 193c9, 167
299a3-6, 232 181e1, 165–66 193d1, 199
299a5-6, 297 182a7, 166 193d1-7, 167
299d2-3, 245 184b1-3, 166 193d2, 167
299d2-6, 253 185b-d, 149 193d7, 199
302a2-5, 183 187e10-188a2, 196 193e8-194a5, 199
302a4-5, 407 188a, xxxv 194a4, 199
302d3-7, 245 188a3, 196 194c7, 156
302d4-5, 245 188b5, 196 194c7-d7, 156
303c8-d1, 103 188c4-189b7, 121 194d, 496
304e8, xxv, 10 188c5-6, 121 194e4, 156
188c6-d2, 122 194e8, 156
Hippias Minor 188d3, 121 194e11-195a1, 156
188d6-8, 121 195b3-e4, 209
363b1-4, 56 188d8-e4, 121 195c7-d5 158
365e6-366b7, 317 189b5, 121 195c7-d9, 160, 165
367a2-5, 38, 105 189e3-190b5, 281, 371 195c12-d2, 152
367d6-e7, 136 190a1-b5, 168 195d1-5, 158
375d8-376a3, 341 190c8-d1, 153 195d8-9, 227
190e1-2, 195 195e1, 161
Ion 190e5, 250 195e3, 161
191b6-c7, 193 195e3-196d6, 161
530d3, 396 191b8-c6, 202 196a5, 161
531d, 250 191d6-e1, 200, 328 196d1-2, 227
531d11, 250 191d6-e6, 158–59 196d5, 161
532c2, xl 191d6-e6, 328 197d1-4, 121
582 Index locorum

197e10-198b4, 153 Lysis 212b3-5, 60

198b2-c8, 227 212b6, 60
198c9-199a9, 227 203a1, 55, 59 212d1-8, 91
198d1-199a9, 193 204b5, 108 212d7-8, 88
198e2-199a5, 161 204b5-c3, 107 213c9, 94
198e4, 161 204c3, 108 213d1, 93, 180
199a2, 161 205d5-206a4, 97 213d1-2, 93
199b9-e4, 161 205d6, 208 213d1-3, 99
199c5-d1 227 205e1, 97 213d1-214a2, 98
199e3-12, 153 206b9-c3, 101 213d2, 94
200b5, 121 206c3, 249 213d3, 93, 95, 108
201b2-3, 123 206d1, 100 213d3-4, 208
206d3-4, 109 213d3-5, 94
Laws 206e7-8, 183 213d6-7, 95, 98
206e9-207a3, 99, 106 213d6-e1, 98–99
697c5-701c4, 202 207a6-7, 94 213d7, 100
709b1-d4, 386 207a7-b2, 94 213e1-3, 99
709e6, 387 207b1-2, 109 214e2-215c4, 53
757b1-c7, 216 207b6-7, 96 214e5-215a3, 53
812d4-e5, xlii 207b8-c2, 99 215a6-b7, 53
812d4-e7, lxvi 207c3-4, 99 215b3-9, 19
812e5, xlii 207c5-6, 99 215b6, 86
812e6, xlii 207c8-9, 99 216a6-b4, 21
875c-d, 238b 207c10, 116 216a7, 20
962d1-964a4, 494 207c10-12, 99 216b8-9, 19
963c5-d2, 405 207d1-4, 96, 100 216c2, 58
963c5-964a5, xlvi 207d2-4, 94 216c2-3, 19
964a3-5, 405 207d4, 100 216c6-7, 21
965b7-c3, 406 209c3-210c5, 195 216d2, 21
965b7-e2, 405 210b7-d4, 24 216d2-3, 19
210c1-d1, 20 216d3, 21
Letters 210c2, 24 216d3-4, 21, 58
210c5-8, 196 216d5, 21
314c4, 351, 510 210c5-d2, 107 216d5-217a2, 21
315b1-3, 507 211a2-5, 208 218a2-6, 20, 156
324d1, 211, 258 211c7-9, 97 218a2-b1, 90
324d1-3, 208 211a2-4, 97 218a2-b3, lix, 69, 87
334e1, 351 211a3, 396 218b1, 88
334e1-3, 351 211b7-c9, 57 219b2-3, 65
341c4-d2, 421 211b8, 56 219b5-6, vii, 103
341c7-d1, 365 211c3, 97 219c5-d2, 89
342c2-3, 437 211c4-5, 56–57 219d5-220a1, 20
344a2-c1, 64 211c5, 58 219e2, 116
344b1-3, 75 212a8, 60 220b1, 86
352b3, 507 212a8-213c9, 58 220b4, 61, 86
363a7, 57 212b1-5, 59–60 220b7-8, 85
 Index locorum 583

220b8, 89 70a2, 455 77c2-7, 410

220c1-d7, 86 70a5-b2, 397 77c4-7, 413
220d4-7, 86 70a6, 410 77c7-8, 412, 416
220d5, 89 70b, 401 77c7-d4, 412
220d6, 89 70b2-5, 407 77c8, 413
220d8-e6, 87 70b4-5, 396 77d1-6, 447
220e3, 61 70c3-71a1, 386 77d4-6, 499
220e4-5, 87 71c, 126, 401 77d7-e4, 412–13
220e6-221a5, 87–88 71e2-5, 410 77e5-78a5, 416
221a1, 95 72a6-7, 405 78a4-b2, 398, 411
221e2-3, 23 72a6-74a10, 403 78a5, 499
221e3, 23 74a6-10, 405 78a6-b2, 399, 402
221e3-222a4, 96 74b2-76a7, 404 78b1-2, 399
221e5, 95 75b10-11, 135 78b4-6, 399
221e5-222a4, 96, 105 75c-d, 135 78b7, 399
221e7, 95 75c5-d6, 404 78c3-7, 399–400
221e7-222a3, 104 75c8-d7, 135 78c7, 407
222a1, 104 75d7-76a7, 135 78c7-d3, 400
222a4, 95 76a8, 407 78d2-6, 493
222a4-b2, 100–101 76a9, 136 78c1-5, 405
222a6, 96 76a9-c2, 406 78d1-7, 403
222a6-7, 25 76b, 401 79d1-e4, 404
222a6-b1, 104 76b2-5, 407 78d2-6, 493
222b1-2, 96 76b8, 407 78d4-79a6, 405
222b6-c1, 53 76c1-2, 407 78d7-d3, 400
223b1-2, 100 76c4-e2, 406 78d8-e1, 404
76e3-77a5, 406 79a7-8, 404
Menexenus 76e6, 401 79a9-10, 406
76e8-9, 435 79d1-e4, 404
234a4-b4, 58 77a-b, 336 79e5-6, 404
236b5, 123 77a-77b, 15 79e7-80a8, 404
236c5-10, 96 77a5-b1, 405–406 80a7, 404
238d3-8, 447 77a7, 406 80b1-d1, 404
246a2-4, 499 77a8, 406 80b2-3, 404
246e7-247a2, 499 77b, 312, 405 80b5, 404
247a4-6, 38, 499 77b-78b, 309, 311 80d-e, 138
247b7, 447 77b2, 404 80d1-8, 404
249d3-e2, 57 77b2-5, 399 80e1-3, 135
249d12-e2, 116 77b2-78b2, 168, 337, 80e2, 56, 138, 141
398, 404, 418–19 81a5-86c7, 398
Meno 77b2-78b6, 411 81c7-d5, 452
77b4, 399, 407 81c9-d5, 371, 444, 490
70a1-2, 441 77b6-7, 309, 408 81c9-e1, 138
70a1-4, 364, 397, 444, 77b6-78b2, 412, 499 81d6, 141
448 77b7-c2, 409 81e3-82a3, 452
584 Index locorum

82a, 401 87d4, 444 89b1-8, 445

82b9-85b7, 456 87d4-6, 441 89b2-3, 446, 455
82c1, 435 87d4-8, 443 89b4, 312, 445
86a4-87a1, 432 87d6-8, 460 89b9-c4, 453
86b6-c2, 137 87d8-e1, 281, 446, 453 89c2-4, 453
86c7-d2, 426, 444 87e-88e, 132, 89c3, 455
86c9-d2, 453 87e1-2, 446 89c5-10, 454
86d1, 444, 448 87e1-89a2, 169, 317 89c5-e9, 449
86d3-6, 456 87e2-89a2, 447 89d1-6, 455
86d3-e1, 426, 465 87e3, 443–44, 446 89d4, 442, 455
86e1-4, 426 87e5-88a4, 471 89d4-8, 459
86e1-89c6, 406 87e5-88d3, 49 89d6-e4, 445
86e3, 425 87e5-88a4, 471 89d6-e9, 459
86e4-5, 433 87e5-88e4, 443 89e1-3, 441
86e4-b2, 404 87e5-89a7, 15, 460 89e9-10, 444
86e4-87b2, 429–41 87e6, 447 90b4-94e2, 444
86e5-87a7, 136 88a4, 447 91a6-b8, 370, 386
86e5-87a7, 136 88a6, 444 91e6-7, 498
86e6, 435 88a7, 446 92a7-b4, 126
87a1-b2, 433–38 88b1-6, 443 92e4, 370
87a2, 324 88b3-4, 443 93b2-94e2, 372
87a3-4, 435 88b5, 443 94a1, 190
87a4, 434 88b6-7, 443 94c1, 190
87b-c, 439, 452 88b7, 443 94e3, 420
87b2, 455 88b8, 443 94e3-5, 410
87b2-4, 494 88c1-3, 447h 94e3-95a1, 444
87b2-c4, 444, 450 88c2-4, 441, 94e6, 420
87b2-c10, 429 88c3, 458 95a1, 234
87b2-89e9, 133 88c4, 495 95a5, 420
87b3-4, 456, 459 88d6-89a2, 444 95b9, 420
87b5, 495 88d7, 444 95b10, 420
87b5-6, 132–33 88e5, 444 95c4, 420
87b5-7, 441 88e6, 444 95c9-96a4, 420
87b5-c1, 443 89a1-2, 443 96a3-4, 420
87b7-c1, 371 89a2, 443–44, 446 96b6-c10, 444
87b8, 452 89a3, 454 96e3, 447
87b8-c1, 451 89a3-4, 443 96e7, 446
87c1-10, 458 89a3-5, 444–45, 448 96e7-97a1, 446
87c2-3, 456 89a4-5, 454 96e7-97a5, 447
87c5, 443 89a5-6, 444 97a9-c2, 447
87c5-6, 133 89a5-7, 444, 446, 449, 97c4-5, 460
87c5-d5, 452 452, 454, 459 98c5, 446
87c5-89c5, 398 89a6, 452 98c5-8, 446
87c11-d4, 458 89a6-c4, 449 98c8-10, 446
87d3, 444, 446–47 89b1-7, 445 98c9, 446–47
 Index locorum 585

98c10-d2, 446 Phaedrus 311b1, xxxvi, 63, 313

98d3, 446 312a2, 108
98d4-e9, 446 227a1, xxiv 312d5-7, 58
98d7-8, 446 237a4-5, 305 312d6-e5, 420
98e10, 447 242b-c, 378 313a1-314c2, 449
98e10-100a2, 446 242b8-d2, 374 313a8, 81
99b11, 447 243b4-7, 305 313b4, 420
99e4-100a7, 369 249e3-4, 407 314a, 248
99e6, xxx, 369, 371 257b3-4, 225 314e3-b8, 217
99e6-100b4 258e6-259d9, xli 315a1, 305, 498
100a1-2, 266 261d6, xxv 315a1-2, 207
100a2, 352 261d6-e4, 59 315c2-5, 259
100a2-b1, 445 261d6-262d1, 252 315d6-e3, 106
100b2-4, 371 261d10-e2, 72 315d7-e3, 103
100b4, 371 261d10-e4, 93 315d9-e1, 106
100b4-c2, 371 261e4, 63, 253 316a4-5, 183, 207
100b7, 396 261e5, 105 316a5, 305, 498
261e6, 63 316a6, 10
Parmenides 264a, 250 318a2-3, 370
264a5, 250 318a3-4, 385
129d8-e1, 59 264b7, l, 125 318a7, 385
130e1, 68 265a2-3, 105, 112 318a9, 385
135e8-136a3, 426 266d9, l 318c2-4, 385
136b5-c5, 441 267b10, 126 318d3-4, 385
143a7, 394 274e7-9, 117 319a1, 191
158c2, 394 275d9, 305 319a6-7, 420
165a8, 394 276e4-277a4, 509 319a10-b3, 441
165b6, 394 277a3-4, 509 319d7-320a3, 370
321d1, 82
Phaedo Philebus 323b2-7, 82, 410
323c3-8, 452
59b9, 101, 116 13c5, 245 323c3-324a1, 448
60d8-61b2, 379 15b1-2, 495 323c5-8, 441
61a3-8, 379 23d7, 274 323c6-7, 371
64a6, 329 28c6-e2, 17 325a1, 404
67d8, 329 30a5-c8, 306 325a1-3, 404
67e6, 329 325a7-c4, 236
69a6-9, 53 Protagoras 325b7-c1, 308
81a2, 329 327e3-328a1, xxxiii
96a5-98c2, 17 309a1-2, 111, 313 328a1, xxiv
100b3-7, 429 309a1-b2, 183 328c3-4, 497
101d8, 178 309a1-b5, 104 328e3-5, 9
115a3-9, 221 309a1-b9, 327 329c4-6, 404
118a7-8, 159 309a6, xxxvi 329c5, 183
118a17, 192 309a6-b2, 320 329e4, 404
118e7-8, xxxiv 310a8, xxxiv 329e5-6, 81, 497
586 Index locorum

330c2-332a1, 290 343c6-7, xxxvi 347d2-6, xxxvi

331c4-d1, 307 344a4-5, 140 349b1-2, 127
332a-333b, 282 344b1, 420 349b5-6, 62
332a3-c3, 231 344e7, 70 349c8-d1, xxxvi
332c3-4, 167 344e7-345a2, 295 349e3-8, 194
332c3-6, 231, 311 345a1, 70 349e8-350a5, 145
332c8-9, 21, 69 345a2, 70 351-360, 148
332e4-333e1, 78 345a3, 70 351b1-3, 292
333b3-4, 316 345a4, 70 352b1-c7, 316
333b8-334a2, 317 345a8-b2, 70 351b3-d7, 499
333c5-7, 307 345b8-c2, 322 351b4, 180
333c6, 307 345c1, 53, 320 351b5, 309
333c8-9, 282 345d3-5, 319 351b7-c1 lx
333d3-334a3, 78 345d4, 318 351b7-d7 lx
333d7, 70, 82 345d5, 319 351c1-2, 309–16
333d7-8, 295, 317 345d6-e4, 420 351c2-3, 279
333d8-e1, 79 345d6-e6, 505 351c7-d7, 497
333d8-334c6, 446 345d8, 420 351d4, 331
333d9-e1, 164 345d8-9, 318 351e5, 306
333e5-334b7, 15 345d9-e3, xxxvi, lviii 352a1-6, 331
334a3-c6, 164 345d9-e4, 300, 318 352a1-c7, 306
334a3-c8, 317 345e1-2, xxx, 318, 420 352a4-b2, 391
335a4, lx 345e4-5, 319 352a8-c7, 316
335b1-2, 316 345e4-346b8, 319 352b1-c7, lx, 316–17
335c3-9, 234 345e5-6, 319 352b3-c2, 306
335e4, 364 346e6-346a1, 320 352c1-2, lviii, 496
336e1-2, 313 346a-b, 252 352c1-d4, 497
337c1-4, 57 346a1-3, 321 352d1, 306
337c7-d3, 260 346a1-b5, 319 352d4-e4, 300
338e2-5, 316 346a3, 320 352d4-353a6, 102, 499
339b7-10, 420 346a3-b1, 321 352d4-353c8, 407
339b8, 307 346a5, 319, 322 352e5-357e8, 499
339b9, 420 346a5, 319 353a5, 407
339b9-10, 307, 420 346b1-2, 320 353c9-355a5, 499
339c7-d9, 110 346b1-5, 321 355b3-c1, lx, 300
339d9, 420 346b2, 320, 322 355b3-c8 lx
339e5-347a5, xxxvi 346b3, 319 356d3, 245
340b4-5, 359 346b5, 320 356d7-e2, 155
340b4-6, 328 346b5-8, 319 356e2-8, 245
340e8-341b5, 57 346b6-7, 319, 321 356e5-6, 245
341a4, 57 346b7, 320 356e6-357a1, 217
341b5-d9, 420 346b7-8, 319 357a6-7, 245
341d6-9, xxxvi 347a5, 420 357c-e, lviii
341d9-e4 347b8-348a9, 98 358a3-4, xxxvi
342a1, xxxvi 347c3-e7, 319, 328 358a5-6 lx
 Index locorum 587

358a5-b3, 204, 316 335c7, 346 419a1-421c6, liii

358b3, 310 335d12-13, 346 422d8-e6, 406
358b3-6, 310 335d12-e1, 229 422e, 406
358b6-c1, lviii 336c-d, 468 427e6-428a8, 430
358c6-d2, 38 336c6-d4, 464 429b-431c, 272
358d1-2, 409 336d1-2, 469 429c-430b, 150
358d4, 497 336e7, 237 432b3-433c3, 438
359e1-360a6, 295 340a3-b8, 464 432d8-433b2, 438
359e3-360a3, 311 342e7-11, 220 433a8, 182
359e3-360a8, xxv 342e8-9, 278 433d8, 182
359e4, 310 344d7-e3, 237 434c4-435a4, 38, 208
359e5, 310 347d2-8, 221 435a1-4, 421
360a2-3, 310, 497 347d6-8, 221 435a2-3, 365
360a3, 233, 245, 310 346e3-5, 170 435a5-c2, 430
360a4-5, 307 346e3-7, 220 435a6-9, 430
360a5-6, 307 347d2-8, 182, 221 435b1-3, 430
360d4-5, 150 347d6-8, 156, 247 435b4-8, 430
360d6, 343 347d8, 129 435c9-d4, 208
360e3, 354 349e1-6, xxxix 435d2-3, lii, 214
361a-b, 466 349e2, xxxix 437a5, 430
361b, lvii 350d3, 108 442e4-443a10, 344
361b6, 496 353e-354a, 84 443c9-444a2, 290
361b7-8, 494, 497 351e1-354a2, 177, 231 443e1-2, 279, 406
361b7-c2, 452 352d6-7, 237 444e1, 216
361b8, 496 353e1-354a9, 173 503e-505a, 15
353e5, 180 504b2, 214
Republic 354a1, 180 504c1-8, 447
354b4-6, 465 505a3-4, 417
327a1, 351 361b5-8, 358 505a4, 48, 73, 164, 471
327c2, 197 361b7-8, 411 505a5, 471
328a3-4, 365, 477 361c1-d3, 358 505a6-b1, 417
328b7-8, 464 361c1-362a2 505a7, 16
330d4-e2, 227 361e1-362a2, 411 505b5-6, 281, 306
330d4-331a1, 226 361e4-362a2, 51, 358 505b5-11, 64
330d5-6, 329 363d6-e3, 358 505b8-10, 164, 441
330d6, 330 367e4, 465 505b8-11, 153, 460, 468
330d7-8, 329 368c8-370b7, 465 505c2-3, 49
331c1-e2, 224 368d2-5, 465 505c6-9, 85
332d7, 346 368e2-3, 465 505d2-506a8, 15
334d4, 229, 346 369e3-370a4, 438 506d1-e3, 16
335a6-b1, 229 369e3-370b7, 465 506e1, 447
335a6-c7, 346 399a1-b3, 121 509d6-8, 215–16
335a8, 346 400b1, 121 510b4-6, 277
335a8-9, 346 409a1-e3, 123 510b4-8, 46, 431
335a9-b5, 346 413e1, 64 510c, 217
588 Index locorum

510c3-4, 217, 428 520e1-521a4, 47 263c5-6, lix

510c3-5, 427, 495 520e4-521a2, 268, 355, 283b4-5, lix
510c4-5, 432 420, 477 284b7, 57
510d2-3, 438, 442 521a3-4, liii, 411 293a6-e6, 162
510d5-511a2, 434 522e5-523a3, 407 293d4-5, 236
510d7-8, 435 524e2, 406 296d-e, 238
510e2-511b4, 459 524e5-525a3, 407 298b6, 236
511a4-b1, 429 525b1-43, 407 309a2, 236
511a6, 429 525d5-8, 407
511b2-c2, 429 525d8-e3, 406 Symposium
511b4, 429, 466 525d9-e1, 406
511b4-5, 429 525d9-e3, 406 173a2-3, 12
511b5, xxix, 10–12, 155, 526e2, 407 175c6-d7, 374
447 526e3-5, 407 175c6-e2, 396
511b5-c1, 456 526e7-9, 407 175c8, 392
511b6, xxxv, 442 530a4-8, 280 175d5, 392
511b7-c1, 440 530d7-9, 280 176a4, 103
511c1, 441 531c10, 280 177d7-e1, 163
511d3, 394 533b5-c6, 438 177d7-e3, 106
511d5, 394 533c3, 430 178d4-e3, 204
511d8, 394 533c8-d9, 456 179b-c, 12
515a7, 369 533c9, 430, 442 179b4-180b8, 13
515c4-e2, 490 533d6, 394 179b5-d2, 11
515d1, 369 533d6-9, 394 179c1, 13
516c8-d2, 334 534b8-d1, 16, 428 180b4-5, 10
516c8-d7, 158 534c1, 26, 42, 484 180b7, 10
516d4-e2, 385 534c2, 456 180b8, 10
517a4-6, xix 534c4, 15 182a1-3, 102
517a4-7, 221 539d9-e2, 304 182a3, 105
517c4-d7, 387 539e3-4, xviii 184b6, 105
518d3-7, 351 599b6-7, 247 184b6-c7, 103
519d8-9, liii, 456 611c4-5, 228 184c4-7, 102
519e1-520a5, liii 614b2-621b7, 226 184d2-5, 105
519e2, 417 620a3-8, xxxix 184d5, 103
520a8, xviii 621d2-3, 77, 471 188d8, 10
520b1-2, xviii 189d2, 10
520b5, 228 Sophist 192b5-c2, 96
520b5-c3, liii 195d6-196a1, 22
520b5-c5, 287 251b8-c2, 54 196c4-8, 102
520b5-d5, 269 254d14-e3, 62 201b11-c3, 9
520b6-7, xxxiv 201c1-2, 3, 8, 14
520b8, 488 Statesman 201e6-202b5, 21
520c1, 248, 483 202a2-10, 69
520e1, xviii, 384, 456 262a3-263c6, lix 202d13-e2, 374
520e1-2, 50, 417 263b6-10, lix 203a4-6, 82
 Index locorum 589

203b1, 14 206b3-7, 14 211d8-212a7, 1, 52

204a1-b2, 20 206b5-6, 13 211e1, 1
204a1-b5, 87 206b7-8, 13–14 211e1-3, 5
204a8-b2, 90 206c, 25 211e2, 297
204b2-5, 91 206e1-2, 14 211e2-3, 10
204b4-5, 87 206e2-3, 8–9, 13 211e3, 14
204d1-2, 14 206e5, 9, 13–14 212a2-7, 415
204d1-209e4, 14 206e7-207a4, 140 212a2-7, 16
204d4-11, 415 207a2, 10, 15 212a3-6, 92
204d4-e7, 1, 9 207a7-c1, 20 212a4, 10, 16, 53
204d7, 412 207a8, 20 212a6, 370
204d8-9, 1 207b2-6, 490 214e11-215a1, 63
204d10-11, 13 207b7, 20 215d6-e1, 504
204e, 9 207c2-4, 14 216a5-6, 477
204e1-2, 3, 7, 9, 12, 207d3-e1, 52 216d2-3, 407
14–15 207d7, 52 219b3-c2, 106
204e1-7, 472 208c1-e1, 11 219b3-d2, 106, 396
204e2-205a3, 12 208e4, 10 219b7-c1, 396
204e5-205a8, xxx 208e5, 10 219d1-2, 104
204e6, 10 209a3-4, 41 219d3-7, 198
204e6-7, 311 209a5-b4, 92 219d3-221c1, 121, 198
205a1-3, 509 209b8-c2, 92 220a1, 199
205a1-7, 141 209e2, 92, 95 220a6, 199
205a2-4, 472 209e4, 13 220a7, 200
205a2-8, 2 209e5-210a2, 13 220c5, 190
205a3, 472, 509 209e5-212a7, 18 220c5-e2, 197
205a5-8, 415 210a-212a, 11 220d7-e2, 201
205a5-b3, 357 210a1-2, 11 220e7-221c1, 189
205a5-b4, 107 210a1-4, 14 221a2, 189
205a7, 140 210a4, 365 221a5-6, 190
205e-206a, 14 210a4-b6, 297 221a7-b1, 190
205e5-206a1, 23 210a7-8, 92 221b1, 189
205e5-7, 23 210c1-3, 92 221b1-7, 190
205e7-206a12, 14–15 210d3, 53 221b4, 190
206a1, 15 210d3-4, 365 221b7, 189
206a1-2, 5, 7–9, 13–14 210δ4, 22 222b1-2, 207
206a6, 15 210d4-6, 10, 92 223d3-6, 253
206a6-7, 15 210e, 13 223d10, 54
206a7, 15 211b1-2, 15, 472
206a8, 15 211c3, 1, 10–11, 297 Theaetetus
206a9, 15, 140 211c4, 297
206a9-13, 140 211c4-5, 297 150b6-c3, xxx
206a10, 15 211c5-6, 297 150c7-151a5, 388–89
206a11-12, 12–13, 15 211c6, 297 150c8, 387
206b, 14 211d2, 61 150d5, 396
206b1-3, 10 211d8-e4, 52 150d7-8, 396
590 Index locorum

150d8, 396 126c5-6, 370 130a3, 394

150d8-e8, 393 126d1-3, 372 130a4-5, 372
150e1-151a5, 378 126d1-7, 370 130a4-e4, 121, 376
150e3, 404 126d2, 370 130a4-e5, 389, 392–95
150e3-4, 398 127a3, 370 130a5, 190
150e8-151a1, 389, 393 127b2, 420 130a6, 394
150e8-151a5, 373, 392- 127c2, 390 130a6-7, 398
95 127d2-128b6, 370 130a7, 398, 404
151a3-4, 371 127e5-6, 370 130a8-b1, 190, 372
151a4, 387 127e8-128a1, 225, 385 130b1-2, 391
151a5-b1, xxx 127e8-128a7, 126 130b2-3, 395
151b1-6, 388 128b7-c4, 370 130b8-c1, 391
155d2-4, 328 128c7, 370 130c1-4, 404
156e9-157b1, 328 128c8-d2, 383 130c2, 398, 404
157c4-6, 313 128d, 385 130c2-3, 376, 395
167b7-d2, 169 128d2, xxx, 369 130c8, 392
176b1, 187 128d2-3, 370 130d4, 396
198a, 217 128d2-5, 227, 373, 389 130d4-e4, 374, 395
128d2-130a4, 389 130d5, 394
Theages 128d3-5, 373 130d5-e3, 404
128d4, 383 130d7, 404
120e7, 394 128d7-129d8, 370 130e1-3, 376
121c8-d1, 127 128d7-129e3, 227 130e3, 392, 394
122a5, 390 128d8-129a1, 225, 375, 130e4, 392
122b2-6, 116 398 130e5-7, 370
123b2, 127 128e6-8, 398 130e5-10, 386
124d2-4, 185 129c8-d2, 383, 398 130e6, 387
124d2-125a2, 223 129d1-130e4, 388 130e7-10, 370
124e11-125a2, 126, 225 129d4-6, 398 130e8-10, 385
125a2, 401 129e1, 374 130e10, 370
125d10-e4, 390 129e1-130a4, 389 131a1-7, 390
125e5-126a2, 390 129e1-130a5, 389 131a2, 392
126a2-3, 390 129e3, 370
126a5-11, 372 129e3-4, 371 Timaeus
126a10, 370, 372 129e7, 371, 396
126c3, 370 129e9, 394 17c1-19b2, li
126c5, 370 130a2-3, 392, 394 68d2-7, 406
 About the Author

Having been persuaded by Plato’s Republic that Justice requires the philosopher
to go back down into the Cave, William Henry Furness Altman devoted his pro-
fessional life to the cause of public education; since retiring in 2013, he has been
working as an independent scholar on the continuation of Plato the Teacher. Born
in Washington, D.C., where he was educated at the Sidwell Friends School, and
with degrees in philosophy from Wesleyan University, the University of Toronto,
and the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, he taught in public high schools
in Vermont, California, Mass­achusetts, ­Connecticut, and Virginia; between 1980
and 2013 he taught social studies, history, philosophy, English, drama, and Latin
as well as offered extra-­curricular instruction in Ancient Greek. He began pub-
lishing scholarly articles in philosophy, intellectual history, and classics in 2007;
his Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic, third of a five-volume study
of the reading order of Plato’s dialogues, was published by Lexington Books in
2012; by that reckoning, this book constitutes the second volume with the fourth
and fifth already published by Lexington in 2016 as The Guardians in Action:
The Pre-Republic Dialogues from Timaeus to Theaetetus and The Guardians on
Trial: The Reading Order of Plato’s Dialogues from Euthyphro to Phaedo. With
the publication of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second
Reich (Lexington, 2013) he completed “A German Trilogy” that includes Martin
Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration (Lex-
ington, 2012) and his first book, The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National
Socialism (Lexington, 2011). He subsequently edited Brill’s Companion to the
Reception of Cicero (2015) and The Revival of Platonism in Cicero’s Late Phi-
losophy: Platonis aemulus and the Invention of Cicero (Lexington, 2016). He has
two sons, Philip and Elias, two grandchildren, and is married to Zoraide; they cur-
rently divide their time between Florianópolis, the island capital of Santa Catarina
(Brasil), and Calais, Vermont.

591