Essential Dialogues of Plato (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Plato and Pedro De Blas

Essential Dialogues of Plato, by Plato, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.

Plato is one of those world-famed individuals, his philosophy one of those world-renowned creations, whose influence, as regards the culture and development of the mind, has from its commencement down to the present time been all-important.
— G. W. F. Hegel

Western philosophy starts with Socrates and his student Plato. By way of the dialectic that evolved between master and student, Plato invented the philosophical method of inquiry and analysis, and became the first to use a logical framework to ask—and try to answer—the eternal questions about ethics, politics, art, and life that still haunt humanity: What is virtue? What is justice? What is the ideal form of government? What is the individual’s relationship to the state? Do artists have a responsibility to society, or only to their own creative impulse? Plato explores these issues through a series of dialogues, records of supposed conversations between Socrates and other Greek aristocrats. Although Socrates is nominally the main speaker in all of them, only the earlier dialogues document his thoughts, while the latter ones present Plato’s own ideas.

What is often ignored in commentaries on Plato’s work is its unique literary form. The dialogues are neither dramas, nor stories, yet they are skillfully fashioned by means of characters, narrative events, dramatic moments, and perhaps most surprising, a great deal of humor. Along with such exemplars of Plato’s thought as Symposium, Apology, and Phaedrus, this volume includes the first three books of Plato’s Laws.

Pedro De Blas holds degrees in Law and Classics. He has worked as counsel for several international organizations, including the United Nations and the World Bank, and he is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Classics at Columbia University. He has taught classical languages and literature at Columbia, the CUNY Latin and Greek Institute, and New York University’s Gallatin School.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411432130

Plato

Plato (aprox. 424-327 BC), a student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, is commonly regarded as the centermost figure of Western philosophy. During the Classical period of Ancient Greece he was based in Athens where he founded his Academy and created the Platonist school of thought. His works are among the most influential in Western history, commanding interest and challenging readers of every era and background since they were composed.

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

The extraordinary range of Plato’s interests and his formidable command of the Greek language and cultural tradition make him appear as the inventor of philosophy, and make classical Athens appear as its birth-place. Yet some of the questions that Plato addressed had been opened in different ways by other thinkers elsewhere in the Greek world, many still remain open, and no systematic elaboration of his thought has proved possible—partly because Plato is almost never present, and he certainly never speaks in the first person in any of the dialogues that he wrote. Consequently, reading Plato’s dialogues is a rather unusual experience, perhaps more akin to reading drama than to reading philosophy, at least as the latter is conventionally understood today: On the one hand, we are drawn into the dialogues in order to witness discussions about the nature of love, the power of language, the best way to live one’s life, and the best way to face death, among many others; on the other hand, it takes a considerable interpretive effort to be reasonably certain about what Plato himself thought about these questions.

The open-ended nature of Plato’s dialogues has prompted other thinkers to continue the tradition of philosophical discussion for twenty-four centuries: Plato died a long time ago, but we still rely on ordinary language in order to deal with the most profound questions of human existence. Hence A. N. Whitehead’s famous characterization of the history of Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato, which is commonly taken as a praise of Plato but can also be taken as a description of a state of affairs that later thinkers have regarded as a problem (the list includes Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida). In this respect, I have assumed that the readers of this volume are less interested in taking sides in this controversy than in getting to know what the fuss is all about in the first place.

There can be little doubt that Plato’s claim to fame today is the utopian vision of the ideal city that Socrates (on whom more shortly) puts forward in the dialogue Republic. Many universities include this dialogue in their undergraduate reading lists, and it is the one most freq uently translated and printed in popular editions. Unfortunately, readers who do not go further in their exploration of philosophy or the ancient world may not read more by Plato than Republic, which is, in my opinion, misleading about what Plato was really up to, although that dialogue is admittedly an important and memorable work.

In the history of philosophy, other dialogues have been considered to provide readers with a better approach to Platonic philosophy. Sometimes this role has fallen to Timaeus, the dialogue about the origin and structure of the universe, or to Alcibiades (of disputed authenticity), which deals with the moral education of the eponymous Athenian military and political superstar. Recently, the scholarly attention paid to sexuality in the ancient world has caused the fascinating discussion of the nature of love in Symposium to be regarded as a suitable introduction to Plato’s thought.

The truth of the matter is that no single dialogue is the best way into Plato. Readers familiar only with Republic will soon discover that Plato dealt with important issues addressed in that dialogue more extensively elsewhere. For instance, the limits of verbal persuasion are more amply discussed in Gorgias, and both the discussion of the Ideas and the theory of knowledge become a lot more elaborate in the conversations that take place in Parmenides, Theaetetus, and Sophist. Moreover, those willing to venture into the dialogues that Plato wrote later in life (for example, Statesman and Laws) may come to pose themselves the question of whether Plato agreed with everything Socrates says in Republic about the ideal city and the ideal ruler.

Philosophical thought in general hardly ever follows a straight line or can be condensed at the rate of one work per author, but there is a peculiar networking quality to Plato’s writings: Only after reading (and rereading) enough of his dialogues can the reader form in his mind a tentative outline of Plato’s enterprise. Whitehead was right: To a large extent, the practice of philosophy (at least in the Western tradition) consists of striving toward an ever better definition of that enterprise, even if that means jettisoning part of the baggage during the journey. Any traveler knows, however, that the items you leave behind on your trip may be the ones you later find yourself most in need of

In view of all the above, it would be irresponsible to pretend that a sufficient discussion of even a selection of Plato’s dialogues can be contained in the span of this volume; therefore, I have limited the scope of this general introduction to what I consider an essential historical and cultural background for a first reading. In the individual introductions that immediately precede each of the dialogues, I have identified the speakers and suggested condensed outlines of the arguments, since a continuous reading of any but the shortest of the dialogues is too difficult for most of us in the beginning. Although a few critical insights are given, my aim has been to facilitate an intelligent and enjoyable first contact with the dialogues themselves, rather than to put forward interpretive views. Footnotes and endnotes follow the same principle. Readers who want to engage more deeply with the background and intricacies of Plato’s thought will find guidance in the recommendations for further reading.

Every author should be studied in the context of his time, and Plato wrote a very long time ago. Consequently, the dialogues lose a lot of their immediacy with readers who are not familiar with the cultural context of classical Athens. In this respect, it is not enough to say that the reading lens of history is always imperfect; especially when we read Plato for the first time, we should learn as much as we can about him and his world, or else we are certain to miss too much.

Who Was Plato?

A brief answer to this question is that Plato was a Greek philosopher whose lifetime bridged the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.a—a period often referred to by historians as classical Greece—but there are several reasons why the brevity of that answer is achieved only if we accept a good deal of inaccuracy.

First, the word Greek is generally used today of people or things belonging to Greece as a nation, and Greece as a nation did not exist in Plato’s time. The Greek world was then composed of a number of independent city-states (including Athens and Sparta) with different traditions, customs, laws, and political regimes whose main unifying trait was a common language, in spite of dialectal differences—much as English is today the common language of a Texas rancher, an engineer from Bangalore, and the British prime minister. Greeks referred collectively to speakers of other languages as barbarians (barbaroi) perhaps because any foreign language sounded to them like an unintelligible bar-bar. Whether or not this is a true etymology, to a large extent being Greek meant speaking Greek and understanding Greek cultural references in speech. Regarding their political allegiance, however, people in classical Greece thought of themselves as belonging to their respective cities: Greeks were first Spartans, Thebans, Corinthians, and so on. Plato himself was first and foremost an Athenian; as such, he was concerned with philosophical problems as they arose from human experience as seen from the perspective of a male Athenian aristocrat, although, to his credit, he shows a keen awareness of past and current cultural developments throughout the Greek world.

Second, the word philosopher is generally used today of a person who exphcates his or her own thoughts about a specialized set of questionsin sophisticated technical language. But Plato does neither of these two things: As noted earlier, Plato never speaks in the first person in his dialogues, and his characters conduct conversations about topics and in a language that would be understood by every educated Athenian. As C. Kahn explains in his Plato and the Socratic Dialogue (references to this and other modern works mentioned in this introduction are given in the section For Further Reading, at the end of this volume), Plato began his writing career within the conventions of the Socratic stories (sokratikoi logoi), a literary genre mentioned by Aristotle in his Poetics (1447b) that seems to have been individualized by the presence of Socrates as the main character. Nothing suggests that the dialogues were written for an intellectual audience only; on the contrary, some of their features, especially at the beginning of Plato’s career, suggest that Plato wrote for intellectuals and other readers at the same time.

Socrates (c.469-399) was an Athenian thinker who never wrote anything himself and was sentenced to death by his fellow citizens on the charge of corrupting their youth and standing outside the religious mainstream. It is difficult to form a clear idea of Socrates the man; our picture of him comes mainly from Plato’s dialogues,b Xenophon’s narrative accounts, and Aristophanes’ comedy Clouds, in which Socrates is presented as the leader of a Thinkery. For our purposes here, it will suffice to say that what makes Plato’s Socrates different from that of other writers is Plato’s own philosophical interests, which he sought to explore in the dialogical form that he himself helped to develop.

Third, Plato’s lifetime bridged the fifth and fourth centuries (c.427-c.347), and that places him at a crucial point in the history of Athens and of the Western world, as well as of the development of philosophical thinking and literary culture, two areas in which he was extremely influential. However, an awareness of Plato’s influence on other writers does not in and of itself help us better understand his writings. On the contrary, reading Plato through other philosophers can make initial comprehension more difficult, since later authors necessarily had to interpret Plato and often did so in questionable ways.

The business of literary criticism consists mainly of disentangling interpretive webs and offering new and better interpretations, hopefully without creating too many new entanglements in the process. But our business here is different: Readers meeting Plato for the first time will do well to bear in mind the truism that neither Plato nor his contemporarieswere aware that they lived in classical Greece, since the division of historical time into periods, centuries, and millennia is arbitrary and came only later. Our strategy, then, should be to gain information about Plato’s own historical perspective.

Athens in Plato’s Time

Plato was born into an aristocratic Athenian family during the Peloponnesian War (431-404). Given that a state of war in ancient Greece was the norm rather than the exception, this fact may not seem particularly relevant. But the war that Plato was born in the middle of was indeed of special significance, as was recognized by the historian Thucydides, whose work is our main source for the events. According to Thucydides, the union of all the Greeks against the Persian invasion led by Xerxesc (490-479) was shattered fifty years later by a struggle for hegemony in the Greek world. The ensuing armed confrontation would split that world in two: on the one hand, Sparta and its Peloponnesian allies, among whom oligarchic forms of government were common; on the other, Athens and the cities that remained in the alliance formed at the end of the Persian Wars and known as the Delian League, a group that can be characterized by more participatory or soft political systems, under the strong leadership of Athens.

The financial resources of the Delian League were severely diminished by a war of unprecedented duration, but private business seems to have benefited from a war economy. Although Athens basically remained an agricultural society, the Athenian port of the Piraeus saw an expansion of commercial enterprises, including some owned by metics, or displaced people (metoikoi), who settled in Athens during the fifth century as resident aliens excluded from political participation. Consequently, a notion of classical Athens as a placid community of poets and philosophers would be seriously misleading: Plato’s fellow Athenians undoubtedly lived in troubled times that involved significant demographic, economic, and political changes.

In the fifth century, political decisions in Athens had come to be taken with the participation of all male citizens in two main bodies: the Assembly and the Council. All male citizens, without distinction by wealth or birth, had the right to participate and vote in the decisions to be taken by the Assembly and in scrutinizing the chosen magistrates at the end of their term of office. A Council of 500 citizens (fifty from each of the ten Athenian administrative divisions known as demes) ran the day-to-day public affairs and prepared the meetings of the Assembly. The presidency (Prytaneis) of the Council rotated among the demes. The judicial system was also highly participatory: There were no judges in the modern sense, but cases were decided instead by the vote of a popular jury that may have had as many as 500 members in the most prominent cases. Such was, in a nutshell, the political regime that the emblematic Athenian leader Pericles praises in the famous passage of Thucydides’ history that is known as the Funeral Oration (Thucydides 2.35-46).

Because of the Peloponnesian War, the democratic system was briefly suspended in 411 and, after the defeat of Athens by Sparta, briefly replaced in 404 by an oligarchy known as the Thirty Tyrants, in which Plato’s relative Critias was very actively involved. Plato himself, however, kept out of this regime and out of active Athenian politics in general. Nevertheless, he was obviously very sensitive to the political and social transformations that were underway in Athens. Plato’s ideology was clearly conservative: In times of change, he tried to preserve and improve what he considered the intellectual and moral core of Athenian life. Whether or not we can fully work out Plato’s program and whether we can agree with it is hardly the point. In my opinion, his merit is to have identified the fracture lines of a great city and empire, and to have discussed the competing strategies that are available in order to deal, individually and collectively, with major upheavals in our surrounding reality and our own view of the world.

Democracy was restored in 403, but Athens faced a fundamental ideological division among its citizens, partly because the democratic system was an expensive one, and the financial burden that had been borne by the tribute-paying allies of the Delian League had now come to rest on the shoulders of a minority of wealthy Athenians. In addition, the supremacy of Athens in the Greek world was over; from now on, Athens would have to interact with other cities on a more level field. Eventually, Athens came under the Macedonian empire of Philip II and Alexander the Great, but these were developments that Plato did not live to see. During Plato’s lifetime, Athens remained an independent city-state with a culture that was very much its own.

Athenian culture was very deeply imbued with religion, but Athenian religion must be understood as a social phenomenon consisting mainly of collective practices in honor of the gods, rather than personal belief. As R. Parker says in his Athenian Religion, religious practices in Athens were a medium of association not between man and god, but between man and man. Religious practices assumed a good knowledge of mythology, since it was through myth that the Athenians got to know about their gods and heroes, of which they had many in common with the rest of the Greek world. Mythology, in this sense, included Hesiod’s Theogony (a poem about the origin of the world and the ascent of Zeus as the supreme god) and Works and Days, as well as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Homer was also used for educational and entertainment purposes, and he became the single most important literary reference of all the Greeks.

The Iliad, probably composed in the second half of the eighth century, is a lengthy epic poem describing the battle between Greeks and Trojans fought at the city of Troy in Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The leader of the Greek army is Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, who rallied kings from all over Greece to attack Troy in order to vindicate his brother Menelaus, king of Sparta, whose bride Helen, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the world as well as the daughter of Zeus, had been seduced and abducted by the Trojan prince Paris. While both Agamemnon and Menelaus were effective warriors, they were neither the strongest nor the cleverest men on the battlefield, and the Greek army suffered many setbacks because of their ineffective leadership. As the Iliad opens, Agamemnon’s pride leads him to offend and alienate Achilles, the Greeks’ finest warrior, by stealing his concubine. Achilles, filled with divine wrath, complains to his mother, the goddess Thetis, and withdraws from fighting. While out of combat, he wrestles with the knowledge of his fate: He will either live a long life if he stays away from war and glorious deeds, or die at Troy but win fame and glory. Without Achilles, the Greeks have little hope for victory and must rely heavily on their other key players, such as the aged but wise Nestor, who came to Troy with his son in order to serve as an adviser to the leaders, and wily Odysseus, the hero of the eponymous Odyssey, who was famous for his shrewd mind and stunning powers of persuasion.

On the Trojan side, Paris fought as one of fifty brothers, all sons of King Priam. While Paris was seen as a foppish dandy, an oriental prince spoiled by luxuries, his brother Hector was seen as the savior of the Trojans and the one hero who could save the city. All heroes in Homer are larger than life, but they are also flawed: Agamemnon is too proud; Odysseus’ cleverness and persuasion often border on deceit; Nestor persists in retelling the exploits of his youth at every given opportunity; and Achilles is too ready to sulk in his tent and whine to his mother when he is treated unfairly. Hector is the exception: Through his character, Homer constantly reinforces the horrors of war—Hector fights not in order to win glory but to save his city and family from destruction.

Achilles is finally persuaded to rejoin the Greeks in battle after his best friend, Patroclus, is killed by Hector. Patroclus and Achilles’ deep affection for each other, whether sexual or not, has been studied carefully as the archetypal friendship of Western literature. The poem’s action ends with the death of Hector at Achilles’ hands and his funeral among the Trojans. In the Odyssey and other sources, including fifth-century tragedy, we learn of the death of Achilles at Troy, the victory of the Greeks through the trick of the Trojan Horse, and the difficult return journeys (nostoi) of the victorious Greeks to their respective cities.

The most difficult and celebrated story of such returns is the Odyssey, which chronicles the ten-year journey that Odysseus makes in order to return to his home in Ithaca and to his faithful wife, Penelope. (Penelope keeps hoping for his return and staves off her many suitors by the stratagem of postponing her new marriage until she finishes a piece of weaving, which she works on during the day and undoes at night.) Odysseus’ journey takes him in a wide circuit around the Mediterranean; it includes sea wrecks and difficult encounters with witches and monsters, as well as a visit to the underworld, all of which he alone survives out of his entire crew, thanks to his gift of persuasiveness and his determination.

One cannot emphasize enough the essential role of Homer for an understanding of the ancient Greek world. I cannot think of a single American equivalent: Homer was to the Greeks what the Bible, Holly-wood’s movies, and Dr. Seuss’ books are to American culture, all in one. The sociological effect of the 1980s television broadcast in India of the epic poem Ramayana may provide a closer comparison: According to some reports, political meetings were scheduled outside the show’s viewing time, during which life in the whole country came to a halt; celebratory music was heard, incense burnt atop TV sets, and phones were not answered.d The factual details may be discussed endlessly, but there is enough evidence for the strong grip of the story on the imagination of a country that regards it as an integral part of its religious, moral, political, and literary backbone, as well as for the critical voices that advocated a modern-day perspective on it.

Myth also provided the basis for the plots of many of the tragedies that were produced during religious festivals, the most important of which was the yearly Athenian one known as the City Dionysia (the main festival in honor of the god Dionysus) . During their heyday in the fifth century, these festivals would last several days, from dawn till dusk, and would feature poetic competitions: Of the three tragic trilogies produced at each of these festivals, one would be chosen as the winner, as would one of the five comedies that were also produced on this occasion.e The dramatic competitions engaged the collective memory of the city, and their staging and attendance were both a religious and a civic duty; the City Dionysia was the largest annual gathering in Athens. It is not altogether surprising that, as A. W Nightingale has shown in her Genres in Dialogue, Plato’s dialogues are much closer relatives of Athenian stage writing than earlier scholars had recognized.

During the fifth century, Athens also witnessed a considerable rise of the individuals known collectively as Sophists, although we must note that the Greek word sophistes simply means expert, and we do not know that it was used in Athens with any other meaning. We do know that the most celebrated Sophists were not Athenians, but visited Athens from other cities, and made money there by charging fees to those who retained their services in order to be trained to excel in public life by means of persuasive speech, which Plato considered a threat to the pursuit of truth by means of rational argumentation.

Very little has survived from the work of the Sophists, but many of them appear in Plato’s dialogues, and some of them were thinkers in their own right. It is clear that Plato recognized that fact, judging from the prominent role that he gave in his dialogues to Protagoras of Abdera or Gorgias of Leontini, who confront Socrates in discussions about the possibility of teaching political virtue and the morality of rhetorical training, respectively. The well-respected and bigmouthed speaker Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, the polymath Hippias of Elis, and Prodicus of Ceos, who seems to have been very interested in linguistic theory and in the ascription of fixed meanings to words (much in the way of our modern dictionaries), are also featured as speakers in several dialogues.

In addition to writing dialogues, Plato founded the Academy, which came to be known by that name because it was located near a grove that had been consecrated to the hero Academus, and which would keep its doors open until the first century B.C.E. The Academy was an institution of higher learning, but it is surely wrong to assume that its early members spent most of their time reading and discussing Plato’s dialogues. The Academy was the place of work of individuals like the mathematician Eudoxus of Cnidus (c.408-c.354), and there are reasons to believe that the study of mathematics played an importantrole. Nevertheless, as A. W Nightingale also discusses in her Genres in Dialogue, an allegiance to the Academy probably set any intellectual at odds with another very important school of thought in fourth-century Athens. The school in question is that of Isocrates (436-338), another Athenian writer who stayed out of active politics and tried instead to influence their course by means of rhetorical instruction and speech-writing. Isocrates’ views on rhetoric, however, are different from those of the Sophists: He disapproved of rhetorical skills geared solely toward winning an argument, but, in contrast with Socrates, he demanded that clear benefits, including that of rational persuasion, be derived from the practice of philosophy. He also had Panhellenic political views that were at odds with Plato’s uncompromising belief in Athenian supremacy. Isocrates’ gift as a writer cannot be compared with Plato’s, but the current reevaluation of his thought is a welcome contribution to a better understanding of the development of philosophy in classical Athens and of Plato’s role therein. Initially, philosophia is defined both by Plato and by Isocrates as something other than what the Sophists did: It is more than the techniques required to win an argument, the ascription of fixed meanings to words, or the drafting of good constitutions for the colonies. And it is Athenian, not foreign.

Aristotle (384-322) studied at the Academy for about twenty years, and he stands witness to Plato’s philosophical stature in his deliberate efforts to present his own thinking as an improvement on Plato’s. Plato himself, however, was more concerned with the teachings of the Sophists and with the work of the thinkers that were active before him, who are commonly referred to as the pre-Socratics.

The Pre-Socratics

The title pre-Socratics is a conventional way to lump together many Greek thinkers who lived before or at the same time as Socrates and whose work we know from relatively scarce fragments, derived mostly from quotations by other writers, especially by Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus (c. 371-c. 287). That title, however, must not be taken to imply that they all formed a school or lived in the same place, or even that they were contemporaries.

The lifetimes of the pre-Socratics span the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., and their locations spread over a wide geographical area of the ancient Greek world: several cities in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), the Greek islands, southern Italy, and Sicily. Partly because we have only fragments of their works, their thought is difficult to understand, let alone to summarize. In very general terms, they were concerned with mathematics and the physical world; even those of the pre-Socratics who were interested in ethical questions refused to seek explanations based on the doings of the gods but relied instead on rational argumentation. In this sense, and together with the medical writings of Hippocrates of Cos (of imprecise date), the pre-Socratics can be considered the precursors of what we call Greek philosophy.

Some of Plato’s writings show an obvious interest in Pythagorean doctrines, and it is clear that he gave a great deal of thought to the work of Parmenides of Elea, whom he made converse with Socrates during a visit of the Elean thinker to Athens around 450, for which the dialogue named after him is the only evidence. Parmenides is of particular significance for an understanding of Plato’s philosophical project, since he was the author of a poem about the Way of Truth and the Way of Appearance that is essential for an understanding of the development of the notion of rational thought and, consequently, distinguishes him as the most important of the pre-Socratics, in spite of his undeniable obscurity, which may have dumbfounded even Plato at times.

More generally, we can think of Plato’s writings as a point of inflection between the rise of the scientific thinking of the pre-Socratics and the development of philosophy as a specialized activity that would begin to split into different branches thanks to Aristotle’s talent for systematization. Readers interested in the work of the pre-Socratics will find a selection of their fragments (and of those of the Sophists) in the recent translation by R. Waterfield published under the tide The First Philosophers.

General Features and Chronology of Plato’s Dialogues

In contrast with the pre-Socratics, who wrote very often in verse, Plato responded to the rise of political debate, court cases, and historical writing in Athens with the use of philosophical prose in the genre of the Socratic dialogue. The dialogues are part and parcel of the development of prose as a literary genre aimed at readers, rather than hearers, although they obviously rest on a resemblance to the oral nature of poetry, which was either recited or performed in the theater. Consequently, Plato’s prose is very far from the prose of philosophers like Kant or Russell: Plato’s dialogues are full of colloquialisms, proverbs, puns, fanciful etymologies, unusual exclamations (for example, by the dog, often out of Socrates’ mouth), mythological allusions, and myths invented by Plato himself in order to explain a point to readers without philosophical training or to address questions that cannot be reduced to rational terms. In addition, the dialogues are peppered with frequent quotations from epic, lyric, and tragic poetry, as well as with names of well-known people and places, and references to historical events. Since all these elements must be regarded as an integral part of the arguments, I have tried to help the reader through the maze by means of this introduction, the individual introductions to each of the dialogues, and the footnotes and endnotes in this volume, for which Debra Nails’ The People of Plato has been a tremendous help. I have tried to provide as much information as was possible within the limits of this series and without becoming obtrusive; accordingly, topography and the Greek gods and heroes are dealt with only minimally here; readers with a geographical interest may refer to Robert Morkot’s The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Greece and, as far as myth is concerned, to the many good retellings that are available of the origins, attributes, and actions of the Greek gods, including my favorite, J.-P. Vernant’s The Universe, the Gods, and Men.

Every reader of Plato would like to know the order in which the dialogues were written. Unfortunately, even computerized analyses of the Greek text of the dialogues have failed to yield a generally agreed sequence of composition. The dialogues themselves do not give us enough indications of their relative chronology, and we cannot trust the occasional internal references to contemporary events for dating purposes other than the dramatic dates of the dialogues, since Plato sets many of them in the past—Socrates and many of the Sophists featured in the dialogues were dead for most of Plato’s lifetime. We must also note that the arrangement in tetralogies by Thrasyllus,f to which some editors have kept, is not to be taken as a guide for chronological purposes either.

Nevertheless, some stylistic differences, together with changes in topics and mode of argumentation, have yielded a conventional grouping of the dialogues into early, middle, and late, although there is some disagreement about a few dialogues. The twenty-six dialogues that are generally recognized as authentic can be grouped as follows:g

Early

1. Apology, Crito

2. Ion, Shorter Hippias (also known as Lesser Hippias or Hippias Minor)

3. . Gorgias, Menexenus

4. Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Protagoras

5. Meno, Lysis, Euthydemus

6. Symposium, Phaedo, Cratylus

Middle

Republic, Phaedrus, Parmenides, Theaetetus

Late

Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus, Critias, Laws

Some of the early dialogues are often called aporetic because they leave the interlocutors (and the readers) at a loss (aporia) regarding the conclusion about the issue under examination (for example, lying in Shorter Hippias; best training of the youth in Laches). Nevertheless, one comes away from reading these early dialogues with a clear idea of the difference between the search for definitions by means of philosophical discussion, on the one hand, and idle talk, on the other.

Also in the early dialogues, Socrates often confronts Sophists about topics on which they were famous experts. The mode of Socratic argumentation is known as elenchus (examination by means of refutation); it consists mainly of Socrates’ preliminary admission of a statement from his interlocutor and his subsequent deduction of several other statements that eventually lead to a contradiction with the first, from which it follows that the first must be wrong. The reader will no doubt soon recognize that this is an annoying way of practicing philosophy, and perhaps Plato expects to create such annoyance as an indirect explanation of the reaction that Socrates provoked in his fellow citizens. In any event, the elenctic mode of argumentation is consistent with Socrates’ claim that he neither knew nor taught anything (a recurring Socratic statement) but simply aimed to discover the truth with the help of his interlocutors, who were never charged tuition fees.

The middle dialogues are clearly a transitional phase: Republic still displays Socrates and his elenctic method very prominently, and takes his particular version of dialectical discussion to its ultimate consequences, which are expounded one night at a businessman’s house in the Piraeus, away from the Agora, while a festival in honor of the Thracian goddess Bendis that has never been seen before in Athens takes place outdoors, featuring a spectacular torch-race on horseback attended by a gathering of young men (Republic 328a).h Phaedrus is a discussion of the value of rhetoric and writing, and Parmenides is a consideration of the problem of Being that exceeds by far in complexity the metaphysics of previous dialogues. Theaetetus adumbrates the philosophical methodology of the late period with a re-elaboration of the theory of knowledge that will be continued in Sophist.

In the late dialogues, Plato departs from the Socratic elenchus and develops a new system of division, in which he seems to have been especially interested later in life. The question-and-answer way of conducting the conversation is never completely abandoned, but in dialogues like Statesman (perhaps the best example of this method), it seems to give way to an effort in precise philosophical definition that is closer to a modern notion of the task of a philosopher. Philebus contains a very interesting assessment of the role of pleasure in life that is very often overlooked. Timaeus is Plato’s contribution to cosmology, and was historically very influential. Laws, the last of Plato’s dialogues, is the closest that Plato came to a continuous exposition of philosophical views as applied to real-world problems.

The lack of a precise chronology should not be taken as a stumbling block in the reading of Plato, for the dialogues, from Apology to Laws, are clearly interconnected. In fact, one should read the early dialogues again after becoming acquainted with the middle and late ones, since this is sometimes the only way to understand why some of the Socratic questions that appear early on are dealt with in one particular way versus another. When proceeding in this manner, it is also interesting to see what is left out from the discussion in the early dialogues and taken up in later ones. In this respect, scholars have asked themselves the question of whether Plato had all the dialogues planned out from the beginning or had little idea of where his thinking and his writing would take him. In my opinion, that question is ultimately irrelevant; what matters are the connections between the dialogues, whether planned or unplanned.

One more thing needs to be said before moving on to the dialogues themselves: Plato could not anticipate that some of the contents of his writings, such as Socrates’ mention of the final judgment in the afterlife (Gorgias 523a-524a), would later coalesce with philosophical and religious doctrines that have held immense sway. Christian thought in particular drew heavily on Plato, with the result that, in the work of authors like Gregory of Nyssa (c.330-c.395 C.E.), it is hard to tell whether Platonism has adopted a Christian face or Christian thought has become Platonic. However, one must keep in mind that Christianity and Platonic philosophy should not be conflated; this is true at the general level, as well as at the specific one that has to do with the use and translation of certain Greek words. For example, the Greek word that is often translated as virtue (aretē) does not mean Christian virtues such as faith, hope, and charity, but refers to personal characteristics, like cunning or physical strength, that are needed in order to excel in one’s undertakings.

Nevertheless, it is true that Plato is responsible for bringing the moral aspects of virtue (in the Greek sense) into philosophical debate; therefore, from the historical point of view, the conceptual demarcation of cardinal Christian virtues like temperance and fortitude is philosophically indebted to Plato. Similar considerations apply to his doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the judgment in the afterlife.

On This Selection

The publication of Republic in a separate volume of the Barnes & Noble Classics is a fortunate event, since it has allowed this selection to be wider than usual in a book of this kind. Still, given space limitations, I have opted to select dialogues that are crucial for an understanding of Plato’s political thought, rather than his metaphysics or his theory of knowledge. I have also tried to enable the reader to compare Plato’s different philosophical stances throughout his life.

A few words are in order about the sequence to be followed in the reading. It makes sense to begin with the early dialogues, in order to gain some familiarity with the character of Socrates and his style of argumentation. Accordingly, I have first presented Ion, Shorter Hippias, and Laches, as representatives of the kinds of Socratic questions that may have sparked Plato’s interest in his master.

For the rest, however, I have not kept to the chronological groupings, and I have next presented three dialogues on love, rhetoric, and writing (Symposium, Gorgias, and Phaedrus). My arrangement of these three is meant to help in the reader’s appreciation of the thematic unity of Phaedrus, which has often proved difficult to elucidate.

The third group of dialogues in this volume concerns the prosecution and death of Socrates (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo) . Given their dramatic continuity, it seems natural to read them in a row, although Phaedo stands out among these four early dialogues because of its complexity: It presents Socrates’ theory of knowledge, an intimation of the Ideas, the proof of the immortality of the soul, and a myth of judgment in the afterlife, all of them topics to which Plato returns in other dialogues.

The fourth and last group of dialogues in this selection features three different works on virtue and politics, two topics that can be traced here from the early dialogue Protagoras to the late dialogue Statesman, which I personally regard as the crucial dialogue for a correct understanding of Platonic political thought, and the first three books of Laws. Some readers may find it interesting (and eye-opening) to read Republic between Protagoras and Statesman, in a sequence that not only is coherent with the generally agreed chronology but also shows Plato taking great pains to deal with the possibility that the best way of life may, in fact, be learned during our lifetime by applying rational thought to the evolving needs of a society, as opposed to relying on the immutable truth that is known only to philosophers. The end product of this particular one of Plato’s many philosophical efforts is Laws, his last and longest dialogue, from which Socrates is completely absent, and in which an ideal legal code is laid out in painstaking detail.

Stephanus Numbering

The numbers and letters in the margin of this edition correspond to those of the edition of the Platonic dialogues prepared by Henri Estienne (Stephanus is his Latin name) in 1578. Since most scholars use Stephanus numbering when they refer to passages in Plato, the reader should become comfortable with it as soon as possible. However, since the arrangement of the dialogues in this edition does not follow Stephanus’ own order, the numbering is not necessarily consecutive from one dialogue to the next. Note also that the Stephanus numbering corresponds to a text in Greek, so there may be minor occasional discrepancies in the lettering between this and other modern language editions, due to the different turns of phrase of the respective translators.

Note on the Translation

Plato had an extraordinary gift to marshal the linguistic resources of the Greek language with remarkable ease and to inimitable effect. As a result, even the best translation necessarily remains painfully distant from the original. For an advanced reader of Plato, and indeed of any Greek author, learning Greek is a much better investment of time and energy than the search for a perfect translation that will never exist.

The landmark rendition into English by Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893) is still serviceable for introductory purposes and has been used in this edition, with corrections proposed by Paul Shorey in the American Journal of Philology 13 (1892) and others that I have deemed necessary in order to take into account Greek texts to which Jowett did not have access. Finally, and in line with Jowett’s ruling concern about readability, I have also edited the English when it seemed too different from current American idiom.

In the preparation of this edition, I have often turned to the Greek texts of J. Burnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1900-1907), except for Gorgias, where I have used the one of E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), and for Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, and Statesman, where I have benefited from the recent edition by E. A. Duke, W F. Hicken, W S. M. Nicoll, D. B. Robinson, and J. C. G. Strachan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Acknowledgments

Several faculty members and fellow doctoral students at Columbia University have helped me greatly to complete this project. I owe a special debt to James Coulter, Suzanne Said, Elizabeth Scharffenberger, Jackie Elliott, and Michael Mordine. I am also grateful to Jeffrey Broesche and his staff for carrying the burden of book production. Henry Nardi, my longtime friend and independent Americanist, deserves personal thanks for his encouragement, as does my brother Miguel, for keeping me grounded, and Silvia, who knows a lot more than I do about Greek poetry and mythology, and could get tired of Plato without getting tired of me.

Pedro de Blas holds degrees in Law and Classics. He has worked as counsel for several international organizations, including the United Nations and the World Bank, and he is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Classics at Columbia University. He has taught classical languages and literature at Columbia, the CUNY Latin and Greek Institute, and New York University’s Gallatin School.

I. SOCRATIC QUESTIONS

003

ION

Introduction

THIS SHORT DIALOGUE PORTRAYS a conversation between Socrates and the rhapsode Ion, who is otherwise unknown to us. We know that rhapsodes were singers of Homeric epics and that they probably also lectured to their audiences about the interpretation of Homer’s poetry. The dialogue tells us that Ion is from the city of Ephesus (530a) in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), and we know that this city was under Athenian control at that time. We also know that the Athenian fleet had been lost at that time in the Sicilian expedition,¹ and that Athens was in the process of appointing foreign generals as a result of an acute shortage of military personnel; therefore, the discussion of whether excellence as a rhapsode is an indication of ability as a general (540d—542a) is not as surprising as it may seem, and Socrates’ admission in the last lines of the dialogue of the divine nature of the rhapsode’s inspiration should not be mistaken for a stock praise of Ion’s gift.

The dialogue can be structured as follows:

• (530a—533c) Is the performance of poetry a skill that requires knowledge?

• (533d—536d) What is poetic inspiration?

• (536e-542b) Rhapsodes do not possess true skill but are divinely inspired.

ION

SOCRATES. Welcome, Ion. Have you come to us now from your native city of Ephesus?i

ION. No, Socrates; but from Epidaurus, where I attended the festival of Asclepius.j

530

SOC. And do the Epidaurians have contests of rhapsodesk at the festival?

ION. O yes; and of all sorts of musical performers.

SOC. And were you one of the competitors—and did you succeed?

ION. I won first prize, Socrates.

SOC. Well done; I hope that you will do the same for us at the Panathenaea. l

b

ION. I will, god willing.

SOC. I often envy the profession of a rhapsode, Ion; you always wear fine clothes, and looking as beautiful as you can is part of your art. In addition, you are obliged to be continually in the company of many good poets; and especially of Homer, who is the best and most divine of them; understanding him, and not merely learning his words by rote, is a thing to be envied greatly. And no man can be a rhapsode who does not understand the meaning of the poet, for the rhapsode ought to interpret the mind of the poet to his hearers. But how can he interpret him well unless he knows what he means? All this is to be envied greatly.

c

ION. Very true, Socrates; interpretation has certainly been the most laborious part of my art; and I believe I am able to speak about Homer better than any man: Neither Metrodorus of Lampsacus, nor Stesimbrotus of Thasos, nor Glaucon, nor any one else ever, had as good ideas about Homer as I have, or as many!²

d

SOC. I am glad to hear you say so, Ion; I see that you will not refuse to acquaint me with them.

ION. Certainly, Socrates; and you really ought to hear how exquisitely I render Homer. I think that the Homeridaem should give me a golden crown.

SOC. I will take the opportunity of hearing your embellishments of him at some other time. But now I would like to ask you a question: does your art extend to Hesiod and Archilochus,n or to Homer only?

531

ION. To Homer only; he is enough, I think.

SOC. Are there any things about which Homer and Hesiod agree?

ION. Yes; in my opinion there are many.

SOC. And can you interpret better what Homer says, or what Hesiod says, about the matters in which they agree?

ION. I can interpret them equally well, Socrates, when they agree.

SOC. But what about matters in which they do not agree?—for example, about divination, of which both Homer and Hesiod have something to say.

b

ION. Very true.

SOC. Would you or a good prophet be a better interpreter of what these two poets say about divination, not only when they agree, but when they disagree?

ION. A prophet.

SOC. And if you were a prophet, would you be able to interpret them when they disagree as well as when they agree?

ION. Clearly.

SOC. But how did you come to have this skill about Homer only, and not about Hesiod or the other poets? Does not Homer speak of the same themes which all other poets handle? Is not war his great argument? and does he not speak of human society and of intercourse of men, good and bad, skilled and unskilled, and of the gods conversing with one another and with mankind, and about what happens in heaven and in the world below, and the generations of gods and heroes? Are not these the themes of which Homer sings?

c

d

ION. Very true, Socrates.

SOC. And do not the other poets sing of the same?

ION. Yes, Socrates; but not in the same way as Homer.

SOC. What, in a worse way?

ION. Yes, in a far worse.

SOC. And Homer in a better way?

ION. He is incomparably better.

SOC. And yet surely, my dear friend Ion, in a discussion about arithmetic, where many people are speaking, and one speaks better than the rest, there is somebody who can judge which of them is the good speaker?

ION. Yes.

SOC. And he who judges of the good will be the same as he who judges of the bad speakers?

e

ION. The same.

SOC. And he will be the arithmetician?

ION. Yes.

SOC. Well, and in discussions about the wholesomeness of food, when many persons are speaking, and one speaks better than the rest, will he who recognizes the better speaker be a different person from him who recognizes the worse, or the same?

ION. Clearly the same.

SOC. And who is he, and what is his name?

ION. The physician.

SOC. And speaking generally, in all discussions in which the subject is the same and many men are speaking, will not he who knows the good know the bad speaker also? For if he does not know the bad, neither will he know the good when the same topic is being discussed.

532

ION. True.

SOC. Is not the same person skilful in both?

ION. Yes.

SOC. And you say that Homer and the other poets, such as Hesiod and Archilochus, speak of the same things, although not in the same way; but the one speaks well and the other not so well?

ION. Yes; and I am right in saying so.

SOC. And if you knew the good speaker, you would also know the inferior speakers to be inferior?

b

ION. That is true.

SOC. Then, my dear friend, can I be mistaken in saying that Ion is equally skilled in Homer and in other poets, since he himself acknowledges that the same person will be a good judge of all those who speak of the same things; and that almost all poets do speak of the same things?

ION. Why then, Socrates, do I lose attention and go to sleep and have absolutely no ideas of the least value, when any one speaks of any other poet; but when Homer is mentioned, I wake up at once and am all attention and have plenty to say?

c

SOC. The reason, my friend, is obvious. No one can fail to see that you speak of Homer without any art or knowledge. If you were able to speak of him by rules of art, you would have been able to speak of all other poets; for poetry is a whole.

ION. Yes.

SOC. And when any one acquires any other art as a whole, the same may be said of them. Would you like me to explain my meaning, Ion?

ION. Yes, indeed, Socrates; I very much wish that you would: for I love to hear you wise men talk.

d

SOC. I wish we were wise, Ion, and that you could truly call us so; but you rhapsodes and actors, and the poets whose verses you sing, are wise; whereas I am a common man, who only speaks the truth. For consider what a very commonplace and trivial thing is this which I have said—a thing which any man might say: that when a man has acquired a knowledge of a whole art, the enquiry into good and bad is one and the same. Let us consider this matter; is not the art of painting a whole?

e

ION. Yes.

SOC. And there are and have been many painters good and bad?

ION. Yes.

SOC. And did you ever know any one who was skilful in pointing out the excellences and defects of Polygnotusothe son of Aglaophon, but incapable of criticizing other painters; and when the work of any other painter was produced, went to sleep and was at a loss, and had no ideas; but when he had to give his opinion about Polygnotus, or whoever the painter might be, and about him only, woke up and was attentive and had plenty to say?

533

ION. No indeed, I have never known such a person.

SOC. Or did you ever know of any one in sculpture, who was skilful in expounding the merits of Daedalus the son of Metion, or of Epeius the son of Panopeus, or of Theodorusp the Samian, or of any individual sculptor; but when the works of sculptors in general were produced, was at a loss and went to sleep and had nothing to say?

b

ION. No indeed; no more than the other.

SOC. And if I am not mistaken, you never met with any one among flute-players or harp-players or singers to the harp or rhapsodes who was able to discourse of Olympus or Thamyras or Orpheus,q or Phemius the rhapsode of Ithaca, but was at a loss when he came to speak of Ion of Ephesus, and had no notion of his merits or defects?

c

ION. I cannot deny what you say, Socrates. Nevertheless I am conscious in my own self, and the world agrees with me in thinking that I do speak better and have more to say about Homer than any other man. But I do not speak equally well about others—tell me the reason of this.

SOC. All right, Ion; I will proceed to explain to you what I imagine

d

to be the reason of this. The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration. For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revelers when they dance are not in their right mind,³ so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they, like the bees, winging their way from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles. Many are the noble words in which poets speak concerning the actions of men; but like yourself when speaking about Homer, they do not speak of them by any rules of art: they are simply inspired to utter that to which the Muse impels them, and that only; and when inspired, one of them will make dithyrambs, another hymns of praise, another choral strains, another epic or iambic verses—and he who is good at one is not good at any other kind of verse: for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore god takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that god himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us. Tynnichusr the Chalcidian affords a striking instance of what I am saying: he wrote nothing that any one would care to remember but the famous paean which is in every one’s mouth, one of the finest poems ever written, simply an invention of the Muses, as he himself says. For in this way the god would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of god; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally possessed. Was not this the lesson which the god intended to teach when by the mouth of the worst of poets he sang the best of songs? Am I not right, Ion?

e

534

b

c

d

e

535

ION. Yes, indeed, Socrates, I feel that you are; for your words touch my soul, and I am persuaded that good poets by a divine inspiration interpret the things of the gods to us.

SOC. And you rhapsodes are the interpreters of the poets?

ION. There again you are right.

SOC. Then you are the interpreters of interpreters?

ION. Precisely.

SOC. I wish you would frankly tell me, Ion, what I am going to ask you: when you produce the greatest effect upon the audience in the recitation of some striking passage, such as the apparition of Odysseus leaping forth on the floor, recognized by the suitors and casting his arrows at his feet, or the description of Achilles rushing at Hector, or the sorrows of Andromache, Hecuba, or Priam,—are you in your right mind? Are you not carried out of yourself, and does not your soul in an ecstasy seem to be among the persons or places of which you are speaking, whether they are in Ithaca or in Troy or whatever may be the scene of the poem?

b

c

ION. That proof strikes home to me, Socrates. For I must frankly confess that at the tale of pity my eyes are filled with tears, and when I speak of horrors, my hair stands on end and my heart throbs.

SOC. Well, Ion, and what are we to say of a man who at a sacrifice or festival, when he is dressed in holiday attire, and has golden crowns upon his head, of which nobody has robbed him, appears weeping or panic-stricken in the presence of more than twenty thousand friendly faces, when there is no one despoiling or wronging him; is he in his right mind or is he not?

d

ION. No, indeed, Socrates, I must say that, strictly speaking, he is not in his right mind.

SOCc. And are you aware that you produce similar effects on most spectators?

ION. Only too well; for I look down upon them from the stage, and behold the various emotions of pity, wonder, sternness, stamped upon their countenances when I am speaking: and I am obliged to give my very best attention to them; for if I make them cry I myself shall laugh, and if I make them laugh I myself shall cry when the time of payment arrives.

e

SOC. Do you know that the spectator is the last of the rings which, as I was saying, receive the power of the original magnet from one another? The rhapsode like yourself and the actor are intermediate links, and the poet himself is the first of them. Through all these the god sways the souls of men in any direction which he pleases, and makes one man hang down from another. Thus there is a vast chain of dancers and masters and under-masters of choruses, who are suspended, as if from the stone, at the side of the rings which hang down from the Muse. And every poet has some Muse from whom he is suspended, and by whom