34Plato gives vent to a similar assessment: “And they say that they have made the city great!” he has Socrates reflecting on looking back on the political leaders of the last fifth of the fifth century, including Pericles. “But that the city is swollen and festering, thanks to those early leaders, that they don’t notice. For they filled the city with harbors and dockyards, walls, and tribute payments and such trash as that, but did so without justice and self-control” (Gorgias 518e–519a).
35“It is a culturally-based Athenoconcentric notion of Hellenicity that is central to the doctrine of ‘Panhellenism’—a term coined by modern scholars to describe the various appeals made by late fifth- and early fourth-century intellectuals to foster Hellenic unity and to submerge interstate differences in a common crusade against the ‘eternal enemy,’ Persia.” Jonathan M. Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Herodotus, in a famous passage of The Histories (Book 8, 144), speaks of to hellēnikon, or Hellenicity, and specifies as its elements shared blood, shared language, shared culture, and shared religion. He offers the term and its analysis in the context of relating the response the Athenians gave to their Spartan allies during the second of the Persian Wars, when the Spartans were concerned that the Athenians might be on the verge of making a separate peace with the Persians. Don’t worry, the Athenians say. We’d never do such a thing, not even if it were to our distinct advantage, because of to hellēnikon. But of course Herodotus is writing in the post–Persian Wars years, when the notion of to hellēnikon has emerged in tandem with Athenian hegemony.
36Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 11, 41.1., trans. Paul Woodruff.
37“All Hellas is the funeral monument of Euripides; yet the Macedonian ground holds his bones, since there he met with the end of his life. But his fatherland was the Hellas of Hellas, Athens.” This is cited in “The Classical Tragedians from Athenian Idols to Wandering Poets,” by Johanna Hanink, in Beyond the Fifth Century: Interactions with Greek Tragedy from the Fourth Century BCE to the Middle Ages, edited by Ingo Gildenhard and Martin Riverman (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), p. 54.
38See Mogens Herman Hansen and Thomas Heine Nielsen, eds., An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
39See E. Ruschenbusch, “Die Bevölkerungszahl Griechenland in 5 und 4 Jh’s,” in Zeitschriften für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 56 (1984): 55–57.
40Cleisthenes broke up the ancestral Attic tribes in 510 B.C.E. and established local residence as the qualification for voting. This proved to be the most essential reform in putting Athens on the road to democracy, and even today the parts of our world still dominated by tribal arrangements are resistant to democracy. The successive reforms, as important as they were—the abolishing of property qualifications for suffrage, the universal eligibility among citizens for holding office, the popular courts having judgment over the conduct of magistrates, and the payment for office holding (so that the poorer citizens, the thētes, could afford to miss work in order to cast their votes), as important as they were, only complete the process begun by Cleisthenes. Some date the start of democracy a bit earlier, to the time of Solon, earlier in the sixth century B.C.E., and his reforms, which eased the debt burdens of farmers by abolishing the practice of borrowing against one’s own freedom. Democracy developed by innovative accretions in Athens, so it is impossible to put a precise date on when it began. Many of Solon’s reforms managed to survive the tyrannies of Pisistratus and his two sons, who were succeeded by Cleisthenes.
41See Jonathan Hall, Hellenicity, for an interesting discussion of whether the Athenians thought their superiority a matter of nature or nurture and how the discussion shifted over time.
42See, for example, the many writings of Niall Ferguson, such as Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin, 2012); or Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
43What the age gap was between Plato and his older brother we don’t exactly know. See Debra Nails, The People of Plato, pp. 154–156.
44Memorabilia III, 6.
45See Ruby Blondell, The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 190–226.
46Blondell, Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues, p. 190.
47See chapter ε for more details of Alcibiades’ kleos-saturated life.
48We could also invoke the second law of thermodynamics. There are fewer states of the world that are beneficial than those that are harmful; it is easier to damage and cause harm than to create and cause good.
49The prisoner’s dilemma, which Plato has Glaucon anticipating, involves the following scenario. You and your partner in crime have been arrested, and you’re each put in solitary and cannot communicate with each other. The prosecutor offers you a deal. The police don’t have enough evidence to convict you, so they’re counting on one of you to rat out the other and will reward you with your freedom if you do, while your unfortunate partner will be sent away for ten years. Or vice-versa: If you stay loyal to him while he rats you out, then you go away for ten years while he walks. If each of you implicates the other, then you’ll both get six years. But if you both remain loyal, the police can only convict you of some lesser charge, and the two of you will be out in a year. You’re best off if you desert a loyal partner, worst off if you’re the one deserted, and still badly off if you both desert; cooperating is the least bad outcome for the two of you combined.
50This is the river Lethe—which means “forgetfulness” or “oblivion,” one of the five rivers that flow through the underworld of Hades.
51Socrates’ atopia is referred to by Alcibiades at Symposium 215a, and 221d. Socrates is described as atopos at Gorgias 494d, and atopotatos (superlative adjective) at Theaetetus 149a and Phaedrus 230c.
52See p. 379 below.
δ
PLATO AT THE 92ND STREET Y
(illustration credit ill.5)
Bringing together the country’s foremost thought leaders, educators and experts to exchange ideas and inspire action in the global community, the 92nd Street YM/YWHA is a hub for innovative discussion that informs, influences, and drives our culture forward.
Join us at the Y for what promises to be the highlight of the season. Zachary Burns, beloved columnist for the newspaper of record, will lead a discussion on “How to Raise an Exceptional Child.” With Zach will be best-selling author Mitzi Munitz, author of Esteeming Your Child: How Even the Best-Intentioned Parents Violate, Mutilate and Desecrate Their Children; Sophie Zee, best-selling author of The Warrior Mother’s Guide to Producing Off-the-Charts Children, and Plato, best-selling author of The Republic.
BURNS: I want to thank all of you in the audience for coming out on this blustery, snowy evening. It’s a real testament to the three outstanding panelists up here onstage with me that not only is there not a single empty seat in the room, but we’ve had to accommodate the large overflow audience in additional rooms where they’re watching the discussion on closed-circuit TV.
But it’s no wonder that so many would brave a blizzard to hear tonight’s exchange. Not only are we privileged to have with us three internationally acclaimed authors who have written extensively and controversially on the subject of child-rearing, but the subject itself is one that’s guaranteed to provoke visceral reactions. It doesn’t require the meme of the selfish gene to remind us that every generation is heavily invested in wanting their children to do well in life, what my grandparents used to call naches foon der kinder, naches from the kids. Wait a minute. Do I need to translate naches? It’s Yiddish and there’s no exact English equivalent. Anyone?
ZEE: Doesn’t it mean the pride that parents feel in the achievements of their children?
BURNS, laughing: You really are an overachiever, aren’t you?
ZEE, laughing: Well, I’m married to a Jewish man. I have a Jewish mother-in-law. Audience
laughter. Zee smiles radiantly.
BURNS: That’s Sophie Zee, folks, and it’s my privilege as moderator for tonight’s event to formally introduce her and her fellow panelists. Of course, they’re all so accomplished that if I were even to begin to do justice to their résumés we would have to camp out here all night, which, given the weather forecast, we may have to do anyway. Still, I know you’re eager to hear from them, so I’ll limit myself to the high points, particularly those that apply to tonight’s discussion. I, by the way, am Zack Burns, a lowly journalist. Scattered audience laughter.
Dr. Mitzi Munitz, sitting immediately to my left, was born in Vienna, where she trained as a psychoanalyst, although after twenty years of practice she renounced psychoanalysis as colluding in the same vicious power structure of exploitative parenting as the rest of society does. Dr. Munitz’s ideas have profoundly changed the culture of child-rearing, heightening our recognition of the more subtle forms that the victimization of children can take and encouraging people to look back on their own childhoods in search of the abuse they may have suffered. One critic has described Dr. Munitz as “the missing link between Freud and Oprah.”1 Esteeming Your Child, which has sold a whopping 800,000 copies—
MUNITZ: My apologies, Mr. Moderator, but here I must correct you. Esteeming Your Child has sold one million copies to date and been translated into more than thirty languages.
BURNS: Esteeming Your Child, which has sold a truly whopping million copies, will be on sale after tonight’s event, together with Dr. Munitz’s most recent book, Post-Traumatic Distress Disorder: Another Name for Life.
Seated to the right of Dr. Munitz is Sophie Zee. Professor Zee is a first-generation American who was born in Palo Alto, California, and attended Stanford University and then went on to Stanford Law School, where she is now the Fracas Professor of Law. Professor Zee is the author of several learned books and case studies, but the book that catapulted her to international fame is The Warrior Mother’s Guide to Producing Off-the-Charts Children. Talk about controversy! This book ignited a firestorm, not just coast to coast but all around the world—
MUNITZ: Excuse me, but I must again interrupt, since, despite this international notoriety that you are describing, I remain unfamiliar with this author and her work and must ask whether the title was intended as satire. Because it does not seem possible that after my ground-breaking discoveries concerning the psychopathology of everyday parenting that anybody could, in earnest seriousness, put forth in a non-ironic mode such a thesis as seems suggested by a literal reading of this title.
BURNS: You see, ladies and gentlemen, I didn’t lie to you! I promised you controversy, and we’ve got controversy before I’ve even finished the introductions! Let’s hold off having Professor Zee answer your question, Dr. Munitz, at least until we get through with these preliminaries. Professor Zee was recently chosen as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World—
MUNITZ, muttering: Ach, too bad for the world.
BURNS: And of course her book will be available for sale and signing immediately after our event. And now I turn to our last panelist, Plato. It’s just Plato, isn’t it? Not Dr. Plato?
PLATO: That’s right.
BURNS: But of course you’ve been teaching for most of your professional life. So I suppose it’s only right to call you Professor Plato.
PLATO: Plato would be sufficient. Plato is what I’m called.
BURNS: Plato it is then! Plato has long been hailed as one of the most creative and influential thinkers in the history of Western thought. Indeed, some have argued that all of philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato, which is high praise indeed. He was born in Athens, Greece, a city where he has spent the bulk of his life and where he informally studied as a young man under the famous philosopher Socrates. Plato was so impressed with Socrates’ thinking—even though, as I understand it, Socrates never published a single book or journal article—that he abandoned his hopes of becoming a dramatist and poet and instead became a philosopher. I think Dr. Munitz may have some questions to put to you regarding your parents’ reactions to those two choices, poetry and philosophy.
MUNITZ: I do indeed have many urgent questions to put to Plato concerning his parents. Plato presents to me as a classic case of intellectualization in order to cauterize the deep wounds inflicted during his impressionable early life.
BURNS: In good time, Dr. Munitz, in good time. To continue, Plato is the author of at least twenty-six works—I know there are people who want to attribute even more works to you, but you’ve remained noncommittal. Looks questioningly at Plato, as if hoping Plato will reveal whether Alcibiades I and II, Hipparchus, Amatores, Theages, the Greater Hippias, Minos—not to speak of any of the thirteen letters, including the tantalizing seventh—are apocryphal, but Plato maintains his inscrutable mien. Ah, well, I suppose the mystery will not be solved at the 92nd Street Y this evening. All of Plato’s works are written in his signature dialogue style, and a good number have been hailed as masterpieces, including his best seller, the Republic, which will be on sale, together with all of his other works to date, following our discussion and which I figure is on more college syllabi than any other book ever written. Any idea how many copies the Republic has sold, Professor Plato?
PLATO: Please, just Plato. And no, I have no idea at all how many copies the Republic has sold. But we could google it. I have my laptop right here. Plato reaches for the computer shoved under his seat.
BURNS: Oh, no, that’s okay, Plato, no need to google right now. I was just curious. Any idea how many languages it’s been translated into?
PLATO: I’m afraid I lack that knowledge as well. Into English and Latin, I know.2
BURNS: I should say so! I first read the Republic—and it was in English, I’m ashamed to admit, not the original Greek—when I was a freshman at Columbia, right across town, and it was on the syllabus for our mandatory course in CC, or Contemporary Civilization. In fact, the Republic was one of the first books we read—right after the Iliad and the Odyssey—during that amazing year of studying the classics that set the contemporary stage. If anyone would have told me back then that someday I’d actually get to speak to the author and have the opportunity to pepper him with questions, I would have told him that was nuts. And you know what? It is nuts! Audience laughter.
Anyway, as successful as Plato has been in the publishing arena he’s also a celebrated teacher. Not only did he found his own university, the highly ranked Academy, but he has continued to teach there, which is refreshingly at odds with tales we hear emanating from our own top-tier universities, where undergraduates often never lay eyes on the celebrity professors. I’ve heard tell that Plato’s public lecture on “the Good” is legendary. And in these days when parents start saving for their kids’ college educations when the student is in utero, the Academy somehow manages to charge no tuition. That’s a grand total of zero dollars or, I suppose I should say, euros, assuming that Greece is still in the Eurozone—though does it make a difference whether it’s euros or dollars when the amount is zero? That’s the sort of conundrum made for a philosopher, I guess. Perhaps your colleague Parmenides?3
PLATO: Perhaps.
BURNS: Another interesting feature of the Academy is that it has only one entrance requirement, namely geometry.4 Or to put it in terms familiar to an American, you don’t require the verbal SAT, only the math SAT, which would certainly have put me at a disadvantage! But I don’t hold that against you! Also—this was something that I was surprised to learn—your Academy is one of the only elite institutions that was co-ed from the very beginning. Co-ed, zero tuition, and only one SAT: you must be swamped with applications!
PLATO: Actually, we’re not.
BURNS: Really? That surprises me. Some of you may have seen a recent article, published by my own esteemed employer, reporting the findings of two economists who did a long-range study which found that good teachers make a lifelong impact on their students’ lives that reach fa
r beyond mere academics into all kinds of quality-of-life dimensions, including higher earnings.5 Just one truly outstanding fourth-grade teacher could make a world of difference for her students, significantly improving their chances of going on to college, avoiding mistakes like drugs and teenage pregnancy, and earning an average of $4,600 more over their lifetime. I know, amazing, isn’t it? And I think this finding demonstrates something I’ve been arguing for years, in my own small journalistic way, which is the fundamental importance of developing good character during childhood and the way in which good role models are essential in the development of good character.
MUNITZ: Yes, but how is one to say who are the good and who the disastrous role models, when every authority figure assumes the right to impose itself on the vulnerable young?
BURNS: A good question, Dr. Munitz, and one that I remember was close to the central question Plato set out to answer in the Republic, with his whole idea of the philosopher king—do I have that right, Plato? That the philosopher-king is held up as the best role model?
PLATO: Well, it’s a little more complicated.
BURNS: Well, yes, of course, it is very complicated.
PLATO: I hope not as complicated as all that. Just complicated enough, and no more.
BURNS: Well, yes, of course, I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. The point I’m just trying to make, in these purely introductory remarks, is that Plato himself, in his own life narrative, presents a dramatic demonstration of what a difference the right mentoring makes in character development. Plato’s teacher, Socrates, had a lifelong impact on him and he in turn mentored Aristotle, who, as I’m sure you all know, went on to phenomenal success and, in fact, even started up his own rival university just down the road from you. The Lyceum, right?
Plato at the Googleplex Page 22