ION: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: And what a woman who spins yarn should say about working [d] with wool?
ION: No.
SOCRATES: And what a man should say, if he’s a general, to encourage his troops?
ION: Yes! That’s the sort of thing a rhapsode will know.
SOCRATES: What? Is a rhapsode’s profession the same as a general’s?
ION: Well, I certainly would know what a general should say.
SOCRATES: Perhaps that’s because you’re also a general by profession, Ion. I mean, if you were somehow both a horseman and a cithara-player [e] at the same time, you would know good riders from bad. But suppose I asked you: “Which profession teaches you good horsemanship—the one that makes you a horseman, or the one that makes you a cithara-player?”
ION: The horseman, I’d say.
SOCRATES: Then if you also knew good cithara-players from bad, the profession that taught you that would be the one which made you a cithara-player, not the one that made you a horseman. Wouldn’t you agree?
ION: Yes.
SOCRATES: Now, since you know the business of a general, do you know this by being a general or by being a good rhapsode?
ION: I don’t think there’s any difference.
[541] SOCRATES: What? Are you saying there’s no difference? On your view is there one profession for rhapsodes and generals, or two?
ION: One, I think.
SOCRATES: So anyone who is a good rhapsode turns out to be a good general too.
ION: Certainly, Socrates.
SOCRATES: It also follows that anyone who turns out to be a good general is a good rhapsode too.
ION: No. This time I don’t agree.
[b] SOCRATES: But you do agree to this: anyone who is a good rhapsode is a good general too.
ION: I quite agree.
SOCRATES: And aren’t you the best rhapsode in Greece?
ION: By far, Socrates.
SOCRATES: Are you also a general, Ion? Are you the best in Greece?
ION: Certainly, Socrates. That, too, I learned from Homer’s poetry.
SOCRATES: Then why in heaven’s name, Ion, when you’re both the best general and the best rhapsode in Greece, do you go around the country giving rhapsodies but not commanding troops? Do you think Greece really [c] needs a rhapsode who is crowned with a golden crown? And does not need a general?
ION: Socrates, my city is governed and commanded by you [by Athens]; we don’t need a general. Besides, neither your city nor Sparta would choose me for a general. You think you’re good enough for that yourselves.
SOCRATES: Ion, you’re superb. Don’t you know Apollodorus of Cyzicus?
ION: What does he do?
SOCRATES: He’s a foreigner who has often been chosen by Athens to be [d] their general. And Phanosthenes of Andros and Heraclides of Clazomenae—they’re also foreigners; they’ve demonstrated that they are worth noticing, and Athens appoints them to be generals or other sorts of officials. And do you think that this city, that makes such appointments, would not select Ion of Ephesus and honor him, if they thought he was worth noticing? Why? Aren’t you people from Ephesus Athenians of long standing? And [e] isn’t Ephesus a city that is second to none?
But you, Ion, you’re doing me wrong, if what you say is true that what enables you to praise Homer is knowledge or mastery of a profession. You assured me that you knew many lovely things about Homer, you promised to give a demonstration; but you’re cheating me, you’re a long way from giving a demonstration. You aren’t even willing to tell me what it is that you’re so wonderfully clever about, though I’ve been begging you for ages. Really, you’re just like Proteus,9 you twist up and down and take many different shapes, till finally you’ve escaped me altogether by turning yourself [542] into a general, so as to avoid proving how wonderfully wise you are about Homer.
If you’re really a master of your subject, and if, as I said earlier, you’re cheating me of the demonstration you promised about Homer, then you’re doing me wrong. But if you’re not a master of your subject, if you’re possessed by a divine gift from Homer, so that you make many lovely speeches about the poet without knowing anything—as I said about you—then you’re not doing me wrong. So choose, how do you want us to think of you—as a man who does wrong, or as someone divine?
ION: There’s a great difference, Socrates. It’s much lovelier to be [b] thought divine.
SOCRATES: Then that is how we think of you, Ion, the lovelier way: it’s as someone divine, and not as master of a profession, that you are a singer of Homer’s praises.
1. The sons of Homer were a guild of rhapsodes who originally claimed to be descendants of Homer.
2. Natural magnets apparently came from Magnesia and Heraclea in Caria in Asia Minor, and were called after those places.
3. Bacchus worshippers apparently danced themselves into a frenzy in which they found streams flowing with honey and milk (Euripides, Bacchae 708–11).
4. Iliad xxiii.335–40.
5. Iliad xi.639–40 with 630.
6. Iliad xxiv.80–82.
7. Odyssey xx.351–57; line 354 is omitted by Plato.
8. Iliad xii.200–207.
9. Proteus was a servant of Posidon. He had the power to take whatever shape he wanted in order to avoid answering questions (Odyssey iv.385 ff.).
MENEXENUS
Translated by Paul Ryan.
Menexenus was also known in antiquity as Funeral Oration; Aristotle cites it once in his Rhetoric under that title. Here Socrates recites to Menexenus an oration for the annual ceremony when Athens praised itself and its citizens fallen in battle for the city. Several such speeches survive, including the celebrated oration of Pericles in Thucydides, Book II. Socrates himself alludes to this famous speech, claiming that its true author was none other than Aspasia, Pericles’ intellectually accomplished mistress. He also claims her as his own rhetoric teacher—not that rhetoric ever was her profession!—and in fact as the author of the speech he is about to recite. Knowing that the time was at hand for the selection of this year’s speaker, Aspasia, in the usual manner of rhetoric teachers in ancient Greece, had her pupil commit to memory her own composition, as a model of what a funeral orator ought to say. The rest of the dialogue is then occupied with Socrates’ recitation.
It is usual in Plato for Socrates to disclaim personal responsibility, as here with Aspasia, for his excursions outside philosophy. One could compare especially Cratylus, where he playfully attributes his brilliant etymologizing to instruction and inspiration from Euthyphro (whose expert knowledge about the gods reported in Euthyphro thus included expert knowledge of the meanings of their names), and Phaedrus, with its appeal to the magical effects of the locale and to Socrates’ retentive recall of others’ speeches to explain his unaccustomed oratorical prowess. The reader is plainly to understand that this is being represented as Socrates’ own speech.
Is Plato the dialogue’s author? Aristotle, who cites it twice—not indeed naming Plato as author, but in the same way that he often cites Plato’s works, as well known to the reader—gives powerful testimony that he is. Modern scholars’ doubts have rested in large part on their inability to conceive what purpose Plato could have had in writing it. One purpose could be satirical, to show by exaggeration how trivial an accomplishment these rhetorical tours-de-force were; better, since Socrates’ speech is in fact a highly skilled oration of the genre intended (with all the overblown praise of Athens and the selective attention to history that that entails), is to think it may show (as indeed the Phaedrus claims) how very much better a skilled philosopher is at the composition of speeches than the usual rhetorical ‘expert’. Another ground for doubt has been found in the fact that Socrates carries his story of the Athenians’ prowess down to the so-called Corinthian war of 395–387, whose dead he is officially memorializing—long after Socrates’ death in 399. But that may only remind us that Plato’s, and the ancients’, literary conventions are not our own.
/>
Menexenus was a prominent member of the Socratic circle: he is reported as present for the conversation on Socrates’ last day (Phaedo), and he is one of the two young men Socrates questions about friendship in Lysis.
J.M.C.
SOCRATES: Where is Menexenus coming from? The market place? [234]
MENEXENUS: Yes, Socrates—the Council Chamber, to be exact.
SOCRATES: You at the Council Chamber? Why? I know—you fancy that you’re finished with your schooling and with philosophy, and intend to turn to higher pursuits. You think you’re ready for them now. At your age, my prodigy, you’re undertaking to govern us older men, so that your [b] family may carry on with its tradition of providing someone to look after us.
MENEXENUS: Socrates, with your permission and approval I’ll gladly hold public office; otherwise I won’t. Today, however, I went to the Chamber because I heard that the Council was going to select someone to speak over our war-dead. They are about to see to the public funeral, you know.
SOCRATES: Certainly I do. Whom did they choose?
MENEXENUS: Nobody. They put if off until tomorrow. But I think Archinus or Dion will be chosen.
SOCRATES: Indeed, dying in war looks like a splendid fate in many ways, Menexenus. Even if he dies a pauper, a man gets a really magnificent [c] funeral, and even if he was of little account, he gets a eulogy too from the lips of experts, who speak not extempore but in speeches worked up long beforehand. They do their praising so splendidly that they cast a spell over our souls, attributing to each individual man, with the most varied and beautiful verbal embellishments, both praise he merits and praise he [235] does not, extolling the city in every way, and praising the war-dead, all our ancestors before us, and us ourselves, the living. The result is, Menexenus, that I am put into an exalted frame of mind when I am praised by them. Each time, as I listen and fall under their spell, I become a different [b] man—I’m convinced that I have become taller and nobler and better looking all of a sudden. It often happens, too, that all of a sudden I inspire greater awe in the friends from other cities who tag along and listen with me every year. For they are affected in their view of me and the rest of the city just as I am: won over by the speaker, they think the city more wonderful than they thought it before. And this high-and-mighty feeling remains with me more than three days. The speaker’s words and the sound of his voice sink into my ears with so much resonance that it is only with [c] difficulty that on the third or fourth day I recover myself and realize where I am. Until then I could imagine that I dwell in the Islands of the Blessed. That’s how clever our orators are.
MENEXENUS: You’re forever making fun of the orators, Socrates. This time, though, I don’t think that the one who’s chosen is going to have an easy time of it; the selection is being made at the last minute, so perhaps the speaker will be forced practically to make his speech up as he goes.
[d] SOCRATES: Nonsense, my good man. Every one of those fellows has speeches ready-made, and, besides, even making up this kind of speech as you go isn’t hard. Now if he were obliged to speak well of the Athenians among the Peloponnesians or the Peloponnesians among the Athenians, only a good orator could be persuasive and do himself credit; but when you’re performing before the very people you’re praising, being thought to speak well is no great feat.
MENEXENUS: You think not, Socrates?
SOCRATES: No, by Zeus, it isn’t.
[e] MENEXENUS: Do you think that you could deliver the speech, if that were called for, and the Council were to choose you?
SOCRATES: In fact, Menexenus, there would be nothing surprising in my being able to deliver it. I happen to have no mean teacher of oratory. She is the very woman who has produced—along with a multitude of other good ones—the one outstanding orator among the Greeks, Pericles, son of Xanthippus.
MENEXENUS: What woman is that? But obviously you mean Aspasia?
[236] SOCRATES: Yes, I do—her and Connus, son of Metrobius. These are my two teachers, he of music, she of oratory. Surely it’s no surprise if a man with an upbringing like that is skilled in speaking! But even someone less well educated than I—a man who learned music from Lamprus and oratory from Antiphon the Rhamnusian1—even he, despite these disadvantages, could do himself credit praising Athenians among Athenians.
MENEXENUS: And what would you have to say if the speech were yours to make?
SOCRATES: On my own, very likely nothing; but just yesterday in my [b] lesson I heard Aspasia declaim a whole funeral oration on these same dead. For she heard that the Athenians, just as you say, were about to choose someone to speak. Thereupon she went through for me what the speaker ought to say, in part out of her head, in part by pasting together some bits and pieces thought up before, at the time when she was composing the funeral oration which Pericles delivered, as, in my opinion, she did.
MENEXENUS: And can you remember what Aspasia said?
SOCRATES: I think I can. Certainly I was taught it by the lady herself—[c] and I narrowly escaped a beating every time my memory failed me.
MENEXENUS: So why don’t you go ahead and repeat it?
SOCRATES: I’m afraid my teacher will be angry with me if I divulge her speech.
MENEXENUS: Have no fear, Socrates. Speak. I shall be very grateful, whether you’re pleased to recite Aspasia’s speech or whosever it is. Only speak.
SOCRATES: But perhaps you will laugh at me if I seem to you, old as I am, to go on playing like a child.
MENEXENUS: Not at all, Socrates. In any case, just speak the speech.
SOCRATES: Well, certainly you’re a man I’m so bound to gratify that I would even be inclined to do so if you asked me to take off my clothes [d] and dance—especially since we are alone. All right, listen. To begin with she spoke, I think, on the dead themselves—as follows:
“As for deeds, these men have just received at our hands what they deserve,2 and with it they are making the inevitable journey, escorted at the outset communally by the city and privately by their families. Now we must render them in words the remaining recognition that the law [e] appoints for them and duty demands. For when deeds have been bravely done, it is through an eloquent speech that remembrance and honor accrue to their doers from the hearers. Clearly, what is required is a speech that will praise the dead as they deserve but also gently admonish the living, urging their sons and brothers to imitate the valor of these men, and consoling their fathers, their mothers and any of their grandparents who may remain alive.
“Well then, what speech on our part would display that effect? Where [237] would it be right for us to begin our praise of brave men, who in their lives gladdened their families and friends through their valor and by their death purchased safety for their survivors? I think it appropriate to present their praises in an order the same as that in which they became brave—the order of nature: they became brave by being sons of brave fathers. Let us, therefore, extoll first their noble birth, second their rearing and education. After that, let us put on view the deeds they performed, showing [b] that they were noble and worthy of their birth and upbringing.
“The nobility of these men’s origin is rooted in that of their ancestors. The latter were not immigrants and did not, by arriving from elsewhere, make these descendants of theirs live as aliens in the land, but made them children of the soil, really dwelling and having their being in their ancestral home, nourished not, as other peoples are, by a stepmother, but by a mother, the land in which they lived. Now they lie in death among the [c] familiar places of her who gave them birth, suckled them, and received them as her own. Surely it is most just to celebrate the mother herself first; in this way the noble birth of these men is celebrated at the same time.
“Our land is indeed worthy of being praised not merely by us but by all of humanity. There are many reasons for that, but the first and greatest is that she has the good fortune to be dear to the gods. The quarrel of the gods who disputed over her and the verdict that settled it bear witness [d] to what we
say.3 How could it not be just for all humankind to praise a land praised by the gods? The second commendation that is due her is that in the age when the whole earth was causing creatures of all kinds—wild animals and domestic livestock—to spring up and thrive, our land showed herself to be barren of savage beasts and pure. Out of all the animals she selected and brought forth the human, the one creature that towers over the others in understanding and alone acknowledges justice and the gods.
“The fact that everything that gives birth is supplied with the food [e] its offspring needs is weighty testimony for this assertion that the earth hereabouts gave birth to these men’s ancestors and ours. For by this sign it can be seen clearly whether or not a woman has really given birth: she is foisting off an infant not her own, if she does not have within her the wellsprings of its nourishment. The earth here, our mother, offers precisely this as sufficient testimony that she has brought forth humans. She first [238] and she alone in that olden time bore food fit for humans, wheat and barley, which are the finest and best nourishment for the human race, because she really was the mother of this creature. And such testimonies are to be taken more seriously on earth’s behalf than a woman’s, inasmuch as earth does not mimic woman in conceiving and generating, but woman earth.
“She was not miserly with this grain; she dispensed it to others too. Later she brought olive oil to birth for her children, succor against toil. And when she had nourished them and brought them to their youthful [b] prime, she introduced the gods to rule and teach them. They (it is fitting to omit their names on an occasion like this: we know them) equipped us for living, by instructing us, earlier than other peoples, in arts for meeting our daily needs, and by teaching us how to obtain and use arms for the defense of the land.
“With the birth and education I have described, the ancestors of these men lived under a polity that they had made for themselves, of which it [c] is right to make brief mention. For a polity molds its people; a goodly one molds good men, the opposite bad. Therefore I must show that our ancestors were molded in a goodly polity, thanks to which both they and the present generation—among them these men who have died—are good men. For the polity was the same then and now, an aristocracy; we are now governed by the best men and, in the main, always have been since that remote age. One man calls our polity democracy, another some other [d] name that pleases him; in reality, it is government by the best men along with popular consent. We have always had kings; at one time they were hereditary, later elected.4 Yet in most respects the people have sovereign power in the city; they grant public offices and power to those who are thought best by them at a given time, and no one is excluded because of weakness or poverty or obscurity of birth, nor is anyone granted honors because of the corresponding advantages, as happens in other cities. There is, rather, one standard: he who is thought wise or good exercises power and holds office.
Complete Works Page 146