The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy

by A. A. Long

  Adeimantus’ discourse, though it maintains the same perspective as Glaucon’s, is presented as a eulogy of justice, albeit with the aim of showing that what counts is its appearance (365b). To the objection that it is difficult to escape detection from committing injustice, various expedients are available: in regard to human sanctions, people can have recourse to secret clubs, and to rhetoricians who teach the art of persuading juries of one’s innocence; as for the divine, one can suppose that there are no gods, or that they take no interest in human affairs, or that, if they do, they can be easily placated.6

  To strengthen his case that human nature is inclined to injustice, Glaucon inserts in his speech the famous story of Gyges’ ring. This enabled its possessor, a simple shepherd, to make himself invisible and so seize power by killing the king and becoming the founder of the dynasty of Croesus of Lydia (Rep. II 359c-360b). As is well known, Plato takes over a story told by Herodotus (I.8-13). In this latter account the wife of King Candaules forces Gyges to kill her husband and to take his place in order to punish Candaules for making Gyges look upon her extraordinary beauty. Herodotus’ narrative is designed to explain how Gyges came to acquire power, but it is noteworthy that the historian does not connect this event with the murder of the king.7 According to Herodotus, Gyges initially resisted the king’s wish but was forced to submit through fear of suffering something worse (I.9.1). Then, placed by the queen in a position where he had to choose between killing or being killed, he chose killing. Herodotus emphasizes this point twice (I.11.4; 12.1), but he also insists that Gyges had no real choice; this is the fundamental difference between his version and the one told by Glaucon. The choice appears forced and inevitable because the alternatives are extreme – his life or his death. The Gyges of Herodotus is not motivated by sexual desire or by a natural lust for power or by a calculation of his future advantage. There are more differences, then, than similarities between the two stories.

  To clarify the point, let us imagine that Herodotus’ Gyges had had a ring that made its wearer invisible. Given the way this story is told, it is reasonable to suppose that Gyges would have used his ring to enable him to flee, thereby avoiding transgression of his people’s laws (1.10.3). Glaucon’s Gyges instead uses the ring as his means of killing with impunity, and so, doing what he really wants to do with no risk. The point of this story is to show that any human being, in virtue of being human, would act similarly in analogous circumstances. In book ten of the Republic (612b), we find explicit confirmation of what every reader of Plato knows well: for the Platonic Socrates, the ring, as a symbol of impunity, has no value and no function. If Socrates had found himself in the situation of Herodotus’ Gyges, he would have unhesitatingly chosen suicide rather than committing injustice. We have only to think of Socrates’ discussions with Polus and Callicles in the Gorgias, or his refutation of the proposal in the Crito that he should save himself from unjust condemnation by violating the laws.

  The profound differences between the two Gyges stories enable us to focus on the principal point at issue in discussions of justice during the second half of the fifth century – the conception of human nature that is presupposed. I should like to suggest that one position, true to the spirit of Herodotus’ account, is in essence the thesis of Protagoras, whereas the version narrated by Glaucon is very close to the thesis of Antiphon.

  PROTAGORAS ON JUSTICE

  On the basis of Protagoras’ dates and what Plato says about him, we may reasonably suppose that he was the first thinker to deal extensively and authoritatively with the question of justice. Yet, it is difficult to ascertain in what work or works and in what form he treated the topic. The attribution to Protagoras of a work called Truth is based on a hint in Plato (Tht. 161c). On the evidence of Sextus Empiricus (M. VII.60), the same work was given the subtitle, Overthrowing arguments (Kataballontes logoi), but strangely enough, neither title is found in the catalogue of Protagoras’ works (D.L. IX.55). This is all the more surprising because the one thing we know about this work for certain is that it opened with the celebrated sentence: “Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are that they are, and of the things that are not that they are not.” (DK 80 B1). Possibly Protagoras’ so called Truth was one of the arguments contained in his two books of Opposing arguments (Antilogiai, D.L. IX.55), and the subtitle mentioned by Sextus referred to this collection.

  This difficult question has some importance for our topic because we are told that, according to the Peripatetic Aristoxenus, “virtually all of the Republic [i.e., Plato’s work] was written in Protagoras’ Antilogika” (D.L. III.37).8 Although this testimony is obviously polemical and of dubious historical value, it at least proves that Protagoras did treat the problem of justice at some length, even though we cannot be certain of his doing so in the work Plato calls Truth.

  As regards Antiphon, we happen to know rather more about his work On truth. The text was still being read and copied in the third century of our era. It was in at least two books and was cited by lexicographers as the work of Antiphon of Rhamnus.9 A number of significant fragments dealing with justice are preserved on papyri from Oxyrhynchus.10

  It is striking that the two sophists’ works share a common title, and this coincidence, together with what we know from other contemporary literature, makes it plausible to regard them as the exponents of two radically different views on human nature and the role of justice, elaborated probably within a decade of one another.

  Protagoras reflects the political and cultural climate of the middle of the fifth century when, in the aftermath of the Persian wars, the Athenians were consolidating their democratic regime.11 Antiphon is the most notable representative of a critique of law (nomos), which seems to reach its peak in the 420s and to reflect the events of the Peloponnesian War as described in Thucydides’ history.12 The questioning of nomos is shown most radically through the antithesis with nature (physis). This perspective presupposes familiarity with the conceptual categories of philosophy (truth versus appearance) and also awareness of anthropology as transmitted to us through the earliest Hippocratic treatises and the work of Thucydides.

  If we leave aside the section of the anonymous treatise Dissoi logoi (Twofold arguments) on justice and injustice that some have conjecturally attributed to Protagoras,13 the best evidence of his position comes from Plato. Early on in Plato’s Protagoras, the character so called treats the issue of justice extensively in myth and in argument. Important too is Plato’s later dialogue Theaetetus. The dramatic date of this dialogue, the year 399, postdates the life of Protagoras; although he is not a living character in the Theaetetus, he is imagined to be speaking at one point (166a-168c) and his philosophy is discussed in great detail. Two features of this dialogue, which readers often forget, are relevant to our subject. First, Plato dates it just before the time when the Athenian democracy condemned Socrates to death. Secondly, the dialogue contains a so-called digression, strategically placed in the middle (172c-177b), the theme of which (and Plato emphasizes its great importance) is the contrast between justice and injustice.

  In starting, as we should, with the Protagoras, we need to bear in mind that interpretation of Protagoras’ words in that dialogue has a significant bearing on our reading of the Theaetetus; according to some scholars, though by no means all, the Protagorean theses in the two works are incompatible.

  Invited by Socrates to prove that virtue is teachable, Protagoras starts by expounding his famous myth (320c-322d). When the time was ripe for mortal races to be generated, the gods charged Prometheus and Epimetheus with the task of organizing them and giving them their appropriate faculties (dynameis). Because Epimetheus bungled the distribution, by using up all the faculties on the other animals, humanity came into the world without any means of self-preservation. So Prometheus stole fire and technology from Hephaestus and Athena, and gave them to man. Yet in spite of these gifts, human beings were not in a position to survive as a species because the other animals were to
o strong. Their first attempts at socialization as a means of survival failed because they lacked the art of politics and also, for that reason, the art of organizing themselves militarily.

  Troubled at this situation, Zeus sent Hermes to earth with the mission to distribute to all humans aidôs and dikê, “mutual respect and justice,” that is, the basic principles of social life. It is this possession, rather than technology (necessary though that is as the human means of securing what animals get directly from nature), which chiefly distinguishes human beings from other creatures, and which enables them not to succumb to the law, prevailing in the animal world, that it is the strongest who survives, a law that would destroy the human race. The distribution of these capacities was accompanied by a decree from Zeus: whoever does not participate should be killed as a menace to the community.

  According to this story then, aidôs and dikê are attributes common to all normal human beings. They do not represent the natural state of individuals, taken in isolation, but they are to be taken as natural to human beings in so far as man has become a social being. Wherever cohabitation exists, there these two attributes are present notwithstanding the unjust behaviour of individuals who might cause one to have doubts about this (Prot. 327cd.).

  It is hardly a coincidence that the kernel of this myth is already present in Hesiod’s famous words (Works and Days 274-80):

  Perses, fix these things in your mind, pay heed to justice and cease to give any thought to violence. This is the law that Zeus has drawn up for humans, that fish and beasts and birds should devour one another, for they have no justice; but to humans he has given justice (dikê), which is by far the best of things.

  Protagoras’ myth adapts Hesiod’s theme to his own time. For Protagoras, law (or rather its abstract grounds, mutual respect and justice), far from conflicting with human nature, provides the only conditions under which security is guaranteed for human beings, that is, a civil society. Law in this conception coincides with utility or with what is beneficial to the human species in general. Leaving myth and turning to history, Protagoras finds his general principle articulated in the nomoi (standard norms or legal statutes) that every community establishes for its own advantage. Justice consists in respect for these norms. Thanks to them and the way the members of a society are inculcated accordingly from the time they are born, the individual’s interest is absorbed into the collective interest, guaranteed by it and in some sense facilitated by it (Prot. 327b): the individual is protected as such and as a part of a group.

  The tight connection between individual and group (or, to use Aristotle’s language, the fact that man is a social animal) is clearly formulated by Socrates in the defence he offers to Protagoras in the Theaetetus (166a-168c, especially 167a-c). If a group of individuals unites its specific judgements in a communal judgement, the latter takes on the same incontrovertible status that applies to the individual’s perception of anything, such as the temperature of the wind or the flavour of honey. That which appears “just” and “fine” to every community is so for as long as the community decides so. But the content of what is just and fine varies from community to community, in the same way as, with individuals, perceptions vary from one to another (cf. Prot. 334ab). And, as an individual’s perception may not always be useful to the subject (in the case of illness, for example, the disagreeable experience of finding honey bitter may cause someone to call in a doctor), so Protagoras, by operating on the body politic (just like a doctor on a human body) can establish as just and good for each city what is useful to it. Given the premise that what is lawful and what is just coincide, Protagoras provides himself with the grounds for his educational mission, which he calls “the art of good deliberation” (euboulia, Prot. 3186-319a) and which is equivalent to “advantageous” deliberation. The concept presupposes a direct intervention to modify the mental state of the subject or subjects, but the individual or the group remains the instigator of its own decisions (just as each individual, whether healthy or sick, remains the measure of its own perceptions, whether they are advantageous or harmful).

  In the light of all this it seems legitimate to draw two conclusions: first, for Protagoras the community’s decision – or what the community holds valid – coincides with what is just, and injustice therefore is violating the community’s nomoi. Second, the content of the individual’s perception and thought is generated by the peculiar connection between himself and things, and he is the measure of things because no one else can replace his perception and experience of reality; similarly, the connection between the set of nomoi (that which appears in common) and the group that produces them as such is incontrovertible. Yet, as the individual’s state can be damaged and generate a condition needing medical treatment, so the body politic can generate a damaging system of law or justice and require the “wise man’s” intervention, with his knowledge of how to restore the unity temporarily broken between what is legal or just and what is advantageous.

  Thus the relationship between the group and what is legal, just, and advantageous is directly analogous to the individual’s relation to things. The group is the measure of what is just and unjust, and the content of these varies from people to people in the same way as each individual’s experience may contrast with that of any other.

  We can see how, then, in the eyes of Protagoras a democratic constitution could represent the political system in which, more than any other, collective and individual interests coincide. Such a system places all individual citizens in a condition of “equality before the law” (isonomia).14 That concept is expressed in the speech Herodotus gives to Otanes when he defends democracy (III.80.6), and it is most significantly paralleled in Pericles’ funeral oration (Thucydides II.37.1-3). There Athenian culture is praised for the liberty its citizens enjoy, and also for the communal respect paid to the principles of community life. Pericles seems to imply that dikê and aidôs, which Protagoras calls “the gifts of Zeus,” are supremely manifest in the behaviour of Athens’ citizens, which therefore serves as a confirmation for the general validity of Protagoras’ myth.

  We should note, however, that Plato’s Socrates in the Theaetetus refutes the applicability to values of the analogy between the doctor and the sophist that he offered Protagoras as a defence against his rudest critics. The sophist, he argues, is the representative of a widespread opinion (72ab), and “Even those who do not fully accept Protagoras’ reasoning take some such view of wisdom,” or hold in other words that, “in regard to justice and injustice, or piety and impiety, none of these exists by nature or has any reality of its own, but what appears collectively to people to be so is true at the time when it appears and for as long as it appears.” In short, what is valid for a person’s physical states (where to be healthy is “according to nature” and to be sick is “contrary to nature”) cannot apply to values: once we enter the world of nomos, of convention, there is no longer anything to guarantee the connection between justice, legality, and interest (individual and collective) which Protagoras deceives himself that he can safeguard. This Platonic theme motivates the “most important discourse” (in the dialogue’s so-called digression, 177c) on the difference between the public speaker and the philosopher with its antithesis between justice as practised in daily life and justice per se (175c). Plato evidently wanted to draw attention to what he saw as the inevitable results of Protagoras’ relativism and educational mission; for all his good intentions, Protagoras could not prevent the community’s ruin.

  THUCYDIDEAN INTERVAL

  Thucydides’ history is the best testimony to this degenerative process. Pericles’ optimistic propaganda in the funeral speech is flanked by a very disenchanted and dispassionate analysis of human nature and its motivations.15 Here is a selection of some of the most famous passages.

  In describing the dissemination of the plague at Athens, Thucydides comments on the way “lawlessness” (anomia) resulted from the disruption of normal life (II.53):

  No fear of god or
law of man had a restraining influence. As for the gods, it seemed to be the same thing whether one worshipped them or not, when one saw the good and the bad dying indiscriminately. As for offences against human law, no one expected to live long enough to be brought to trial and punished. (tr. Rex Warner)

  In the chaotic situation produced by the plague, the demands and impulses of individual nature surfaced, and thus they exposed the purely conventionalist character of the social norms on which the Athenians, in Pericles’ words, prided themselves.

  Thucydides makes similar points when he analyses the effects of civil war at Corcyra (III.82-83). There too the disruption of normal life caused the emergence of elementary needs and unleashed selfassertive impulses that overturned traditional values. “War,” he observes, “is a stern teacher,” a teacher that imposes itself with violence and especially teaches people to give free rein to the violence that nestles in each one of us.

  The same pessimism about human nature is expressed by Diodotus during his debate with Cleon on the fate of Mytilene. Diodotus asserts that punishment16 and the death penalty in particular are powerless to inhibit human nature from violating law (III.45)17:

  People still take risks when they feel sufficiently confident. No one has ever yet risked committing a crime which he thought he could not carry out successfully. The same is true of states. None has ever yet rebelled in the belief that it had insufficient resources… Cities and individuals alike, all are by nature disposed to do wrong, and there is no law that will prevent it, as is shown by the fact that men have tried every kind of punishment, constantly adding to the list, in the attempt to find greater security from criminals.