YOUNG SOCRATES: That’s certainly a fitting view to take.
VISITOR: Then do we recognize that it belongs to the statesman and the [d] good legislator alone to be capable of bringing this very thing about, by means of the music that belongs to the art of kingship, in those who have had their correct share of education—the people we were speaking of just now?
YOUNG SOCRATES: That’s certainly reasonable.
VISITOR: Yes, and let’s never call anyone who is incapable of doing this sort of thing by the names we are now investigating.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite correct.
VISITOR: Well then—is a ‘courageous’ soul that grasps this sort of truth [e] not tamed, and wouldn’t it be especially willing, as a result, to share in what is just, whereas if it fails to get a share of it, doesn’t it rather slide away76 towards becoming like some kind of beast?
YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite.
VISITOR: And what of the case of the ‘moderate’ sort of nature? If it gets a share of these opinions, doesn’t it become genuinely moderate and wise, so far as wisdom goes in the context of life in a city, while if it fails to get a portion of the things we’re talking about, doesn’t it very appropriately acquire a disgraceful reputation, for simplemindedness?
YOUNG SOCRATES: Absolutely.
VISITOR: And let’s not say, shall we, that this sort of interweaving and bonding, in the case of vicious men in relation to each other and good men in relation to the vicious, ever turns out to be lasting, nor that any sort of expert knowledge would ever seriously use it in relation to people like this?
YOUNG SOCRATES: No; how would it?
[310] VISITOR: What I propose we should say is that it only takes root, through laws, in those dispositions that were both born noble in the first place and have been nurtured in accordance with their nature; and that it is for these that this remedy exists, by virtue of expertise. As we said, this bonding together is more divine, uniting parts of virtue that are by nature77 unlike each other, and tend in opposite directions.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true.
VISITOR: Yes, and the remaining bonds, which are human, once this divine one exists, are perhaps not difficult at all either to understand, or to effect once one has understood them.
[b] YOUNG SOCRATES: How then, and what are they?
VISITOR: Those that consist in intermarriages and the sharing of children,78 and in those matters relating to private giving-away in marriage. For most people, in the way they handle these things, do not bind themselves together correctly with respect to the procreation of children.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Why so?
VISITOR: Is there any reason why anyone should seriously concern themselves with censuring the pursuit of wealth and forms of influence in such contexts, as if it were worth discussing?
YOUNG SOCRATES: None.
VISITOR: No; it would be more appropriate for us to discuss those people [c] who pay attention to family-types, and ask whether they are acting erroneously in some way.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Yes, that’s reasonable.
VISITOR: Well, they act out of entirely the wrong sort of consideration: they go for what is immediately easiest, welcoming those who are much like them, and not liking those who are unlike them, assigning the largest part of their decisions to their feelings of antipathy.
YOUNG SOCRATES: How?
VISITOR: The moderate, I think, look out for people with the disposition they themselves possess, and so far as they can they both marry from among these and marry off the daughters they are giving away back to [d] people of this sort.79 The type related to courage does just the same thing, seeking after the nature that belongs to itself, when both types ought to do completely the opposite of this.
YOUNG SOCRATES: How, and why?
VISITOR: Because it is in the nature of courage that when it is reproduced over many generations without being mixed with a moderate nature, it comes to a peak of power at first, but in the end it bursts out completely in fits of madness.
YOUNG SOCRATES: That’s likely.
VISITOR: And in its turn the soul that is too full of reserve and has no admixture of courageous initiative, and is reproduced over many generations [e] in this way, by nature grows more sluggish than is timely and then in the end is completely crippled.
YOUNG SOCRATES: It’s likely that this too turns out as you say.
VISITOR: It was these bonds that I meant when I said that there was no difficulty at all in tying them together once the situation existed in which both types had a single opinion about what was fine and good. For this is the single and complete task of kingly weaving-together, never to allow moderate dispositions to stand away from the courageous. Rather, by working them closely into each other as if with a shuttle, through sharing of opinions, through honors, dishonor, esteem, and the giving of pledges to one another, it draws together a smooth and ‘fine-woven’ fabric out of [311] them, as the expression is, and always entrusts offices in cities to these in common.
YOUNG SOCRATES: How?
VISITOR: By choosing the person who has both qualities to put in charge wherever there turns out to be a need for a single officer, and by mixing together a part of each of these groups where there is a need for more than one. For the dispositions of moderate people when in office are markedly cautious, just, and conservative, but they lack bite, and a certain sharp and practical keenness.
YOUNG SOCRATES: This too certainly seems to be the case.
VISITOR: And the dispositions of the courageous, in their turn, are inferior [b] to the others in relation to justice and caution, but have an exceptional degree of keenness when it comes to action. Everything in cities cannot go well, either on the private or on the public level, unless both of these groups are there to give their help.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite.
VISITOR: Then let us say that this marks the completion of the fabric which is the product of the art of statesmanship: the weaving together, with regular intertwining, of the dispositions of brave and moderate people—when the expertise belonging to the king brings their life together in [c] agreement and friendship and makes it common between them, completing [311c] the most magnificent and best of all fabrics and covering with it all the other inhabitants of cities, both slave and free; and holds them together with this twining and rules and directs without, so far as it belongs to a city to be happy, falling short of that in any respect.
[OLDER] SOCRATES:80 Another most excellent portrait, visitor, this one that you have completed for us, of the man who possesses the art of kingship: the statesman.
1. Reading de ge at a3.
2. Ammon, a great god of the Egyptians, had a famous oracle at Siwah, not far from Theodorus’ home city of Cyrene.
3. Reading panu mnēmonikōs at b6.
4. Reading kai at c3.
5. ‘Yesterday’ refers to the (fictional) occasion of the Theaetetus, ‘just now’ to that of the Sophist.
6. Reading ton politikon andra at b3.
7. In Greek, epistēmē. ‘Knowledge’ or ‘expert knowledge’ in this translation normally indicates the presence of this noun or of words deriving from the same root. The term ‘expertise’ by itself is reserved for technē. Where Plato speaks e.g. of the ‘kingly’ or ‘political’ epistēmē or technē, the translation shifts to ‘art,’ the traditional rendering.
8. ‘Class’, or occasionally ‘real class’, are reserved in this translation for eidos (as here), or genos, which is used synonymously in this role. (In the Sophist translation, eidos generally appears as ‘form’ or ‘type,’ genos as ‘kind.’) What the Visitor and Young Socrates appear to be doing when they ‘divide’ in each case—as here, with knowledge—is to divide a more generic grouping or ‘class’ into more specific sub-groups or ‘(sub-) classes’ (the claim being in each case that the ‘cut’ is made in accordance with actual divisions, existing in things themselves). A third, related, term is idea. It can be used to refer to what distinguishes a given class of things from others�
�its ‘character’—but can also substitute for eidos and genos as ‘class’/‘real class’. Conversely, eidos itself can be used synonymously with idea in the sense of ‘character’. Other terms that can play something like the role of eidos/genos as ‘class’ are phulon, literally ‘tribe’ (260d7), and phusis (306e11; cf. 278b2), which more usually serves as the standard term for ‘nature’. Puns on genos in the two senses of ‘family’/‘race’ and ‘class’ call for special measures: at 260d6, 266b1, it is ‘family or class’, at 310b10 ff., ‘family-type’. Other related terms used in the translation, like ‘category’ (as at 263d8) or ‘sort’ (as in ‘sort of expertise’), do not indicate the presence of any of these key Greek terms, but are supplied by the translator, simply to find natural English phrases to fill out elliptical Greek ones.
9. Alternatively: “In that case we shall take all these things together—the statesman’s knowledge and the statesman, the king’s knowledge and the king—as one, and put them into the same category?”
10. Reading kai mēn for kai gar at e9.
11. I.e., the ‘self-directing’ sort of expertise.
12. Reading koinēi at d4.
13. Reading onomazōmen at 2–3.
14. Alternatively: “You must always assert, Socrates, that this is what I say, rather than that other thing.”
15. Reading echonta for ’thelonta at a3.
16. I.e., the King of Persia.
17. Reading gar dē at e1.
18. Reading ou peri at e8.
19. Reading artion at e11.
20. Reading kolobon tina agelēn akeratōn at d4.
21. Reading diairōmen at a5.
22. See Theaetetus 147c ff.
23. In Greek mathematical parlance, ‘having the power of two feet’ is the way of expressing the length of the diagonal of a one-foot square (i.e., in modern terms, ); the expression reflects the fact that a square formed on this line will have an area of two square feet. The diagonal of this square will then ‘have the power’ of four feet—the ‘power of the diagonal of our power’ in the Visitor’s next remark. All this is for the sake of the pun on ‘power’ and ‘feet’: we humans are enabled to move by having two feet, while the members of ‘the remaining class’ from which we are being distinguished—pigs—have four. (On the mathematical use of ‘power’ see Theaetetus 147d–148b and n.)
24. I.e., pigs, as the Visitor makes clear in his next question, by punning on the Greek word for ‘pig’.
25. The swineherd.
26. See Sophist 227b.
27. Cf. Euripides, Orestes 986 ff.
28. A ‘golden age’ (cf. Hesiod, Works and Days 111–22), when everything necessary for the survival of human beings was provided without their having to work for it.
29. Alternatively, ‘world-order’; the idea of order is central to the Greek term.
30. Reading mēth’ holon at e9.
31. Alternatively: “at each of the two turnings.” (The word tr. ‘period’ in the text is elsewhere tr. ‘turning,’ i.e., reversal of the direction of rotation.) The translation in the text is based on the assumption that in the myth as a whole the Visitor envisages two eras during both of which the cosmos rotates, as it now does, from east to west (one era when it is under god’s control, one under its own inherent power), separated by a relatively brief period of rotation in the reverse direction (so that then the sun rises in the west and sets in the east). This reverse rotation begins immediately after the god releases control, i.e., at the outset of the time when the cosmos rules itself, and it ends when the cosmos gains sufficient self-possession to return to rotating in the normal, east-to-west direction. On this interpretation, the Visitor has just been describing the ‘earth-born’ people as existing during the relatively brief period of reverse-rotation, and Young Socrates now asks whether the golden age of Cronus also occurred during that time, or instead in the era that preceded it. The alternative translation fits with a different interpretation of the myth, which is that of most scholars. According to this prevailing interpretation the Visitor envisages, more simply, two alternating eras, one of west-to-east rotation (under god’s control) and one of the east-to-west rotation we are familiar with: this latter, for us normal, direction of rotation occupies the whole of the time when the cosmos is under self-rule. On this interpretation there is no intervening, brief period of reverse-rotation, so the Visitor’s description of the ‘earth-born’ people has placed them in the era of god’s control. Accordingly, Young Socrates is now asking whether the golden age of Cronus existed in that same era, or instead during the era we now live in.
32. Reading hōs d’au kata at d4.
33. Reading pantēi ta at d5.
34. On the interpretation assumed in the translation (see n. 31 above) these must be a different kind of ‘earth-born’ people from the previous ones (perhaps they are to be considered as produced from the earth instead as babies: cf. 272e, 274a). On the prevalent interpretation this is a second reference to the same earth-born people as before: we now learn that being born from the earth full grown was characteristic of human life for the whole period of god’s control of the cosmos.
35. Reading muthous hoioi at c7.
36. Alternatively: “… whom alone, because only he has charge of human rearing in accordance with the example of shepherd and cowherd, it is appropriate to think worthy of this name.”
37. See 261d.
38. Reading tōi ergōi at a7.
39. Reading kai sunamphō at c7.
40. See 268c1, and also 267e ff., 275b, 276b.
41. See 258e ff.
42. See perhaps Sophist 226b ff.
43. Reading technēn krokonētikēn at 282e14–283a1.
44. The Greek here is obscure. The Visitor will immediately explain—in d11–e1—the first of the two ‘parts’ of the expertise of measurement; the second emerges gradually at 284a5–b2, e2–8. See also 284c1 and d6, ‘the coming into being of what is in due measure’, and the reference at 285a1–2 to ‘an art of measurement relating to everything that comes into being’.
45. Reading hoi agathoi at e6.
46. I.e., in the Sophist.
47. I.e., probably, a way of ‘compelling the more and the less … to become measurable … in relation to the coming into being of what is in due measure’ (284b–c).
48. Reading panu at e6.
49. Reading prosagoreuōmen at e4.
50. Reading thremma. paraleipomen de at b2.
51. Cf. 281b.
52. At Athens, one of the ‘archons’ or chief magistrates had the title of King Archon.
53. Reading katadēlos hēmin at a3.
54. Petteia was a board game, resembling draughts or checkers.
55. 259b.
56. Retaining memimēsthai at e5.
57. Reading mentoi tina at a6.
58. Reading kai to at c5.
59. Retaining mē sumphora ē at e1.
60. Reading arti rhēthen at c5. The reference is to 293e.
61. Cf. 293c–d.
62. Iliad xi.514.
63. Revolving columns on which the laws were traditionally inscribed at Athens.
64. Reading alēthestata ge at a8.
65. Alternatively: “Well, wouldn’t those laws—written with the advice of people who know so far as is possible—be imitations of the truth on each subject?”
66. See 292e.
67. Reading eniote kathaper at a6.
68. Reading ephamen einai at d2.
69. See 291c.
70. That is, the appellation polis or ‘city’ gives rise to that of ‘statesmanship’, politikē.
71. Reading echthra … echeton at b10.
72. The word translated ‘sharpness’ can also refer to high pitch in sound.
73. Greek andreia, literally ‘manliness’. Bearing the literal meaning in mind helps to make more intelligible some of the applications of ‘courage’ suggested here and below.
74. Reading kai ta chrēsta at c5.
75. Reading
en tais psuchais at c7.
76. Reading apoklinei at e2.
77. Reading phusei at a5.
78. I.e., between families, through marriage.
79. Reading toioutous at d1.
80. The final words are attributed by many editors to the younger Socrates, but they seem perhaps a little authoritative for him, and it was after all old Socrates himself who set up the whole discussion in the beginning—both in the Sophist and in the Statesman.
PARMENIDES
Translated by Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan.
The great philosopher Parmenides is the central figure of this dialogue. He, not Socrates, directs the philosophical discussion—if Plato has a ‘spokesman’ here, it is Parmenides. Socrates is portrayed as a very bright and promising young philosopher—he is virtually a teenager, only just beginning his career in the subject—who needs to think a lot harder and longer before he will have an adequate grasp of the nature of reality: this Socrates is a budding metaphysician, not the purely ethical thinker of Apology and other ‘Socratic’ dialogues.
Accompanied by his disciple Zeno (originator of Zeno’s paradoxes), Parmenides has come on a visit to Athens. At Pythodorus’ house, after Zeno has read out his book (now lost) attacking the intelligibility of any ‘plurality’ of real things, Socrates questions Zeno and is then questioned by Parmenides about his own conception of reality as consisting of nonphysical, nonperceptible ‘Forms’ in which perceptible, physical entities ‘participate’. Parmenides raises six difficulties that Socrates’ view entails, including the celebrated ‘third man’ argument to which twentieth-century analytical philosophers have paid much attention. Concluding the first part of the dialogue, he explains the method of analysis which Socrates must now use in order to resolve them—Socrates’ efforts to articulate a theory of Forms have been premature. One must consider systematically not just the consequences of any hypothesis, but also those of its denial, and the method involves other complexities as well: one must systematically consider eight different trains of consequences, in order to decide finally what the right way of putting one’s thesis will be. In the second part of the dialogue, occupying more than two-thirds of its total length, Parmenides demonstrates this new method, using as his respondent not Socrates but one of the other young men present, Aristotle. (In choosing this name, Plato may have been alluding to the philosopher Aristotle, who began his own metaphysical work as a member of Plato’s Academy.) Considering the ‘hypothesis’ of ‘one being’, he works out a series of eight conflicting ‘deductions’ (plus a ninth, 155e–157b, added as an appendix to the first two) as to its metaphysically significant properties—its being, unity, sameness and difference, similarity and dissimilarity, motion and rest, place, time, and so on. It is left to Socrates, and to the reader, to infer just what use to make of these deductions in determining how best to formulate an adequate theory of Forms. Since the theory that Socrates presented at the beginning of the dialogue is plainly the one developed in Symposium, Phaedo, and Republic, this dialogue seems to be implying that that theory of Forms needs refurbishing and that, in demonstrating his method, Parmenides has shown us how to do that. Parmenides thus points forward to Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus, where Forms are further rethought.
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