by Plato
A rival reading suggests itself. Perhaps Meno was too quick to accept Socrates’ reversal of the earlier conclusion, the one arrived at by arguing ‘from a hypothesis’, that being good is knowledge and can be taught. Plato's readers who are familiar with some other works (Protagoras, Euthydemus) and who remember the earlier argument (77 – 8) that no one can want what they know will harm them, will recognize in the argument for the equation of being good with knowledge some familiar Socratic themes: being good always benefits you; only knowledge is consistently beneficial, since other good things (such as health, wealth and even quick-wittedness) can do you harm as well as good. When Socrates purported to think that an absence of conventional teachers proves a thing unteachable, perhaps he was testing Meno, testing him to see if he had retained the lesson from the experiment with the slave, that true teaching – certainly in the ethical sphere – is when you are helped to work out something for yourself, not when some paid teacher or other authority figure tries to din it into you.
Further Reading
Books marked with a dagger are accessible to the general reader with no background knowledge of philosophy
Texts and Commentaries
Burnet, J., Platonis Opera, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903). The Greek texts of Protagoras and Meno are in vol. 3; a new edition is expected soon.
Adam, J., and A. M. Adam, Platonis Protagoras, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905). Text with introduction and commentary (Greek-readers only); appendix on the Simonides song.
Bluck, R. S., Plato's Meno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). Text with introduction and scholarly commentary (Greek-readers only); appendix on the geometrical ‘hypothesis’.
Hamilton, E., and H. Cairns, eds, The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). Includes W. C. K. Guthrie's translations of the Protagoras and the Meno.
Hubbard, B. A. F., and E. S. Karnofsky, Plato's Protagoras: A Socratic Commentary (London: Duckworth, 1982). Translation with commentary in the form of questions.
Lamb, W. R. M., Plato: Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924). Vol. 2 of the Loeb edn of Plato; a Greek text and facing translation.
Sharples, R. W., Plato: Meno (Warminster: Aris and Phillips Ltd, 1985). Greek text and facing translation, with introduction and commentary (partly) aimed at students of Greek.
Taylor, C. C. W., Plato: Protagoras, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Translation with useful philosophical commentary (Greek not required).
Thompson, E. S., The Meno of Plato (New York and London: Garland, 1980 [1901]. Text and commentary (Greek-readers only).
Plato, Socrates and the Sophists (General)
Benson, H., ed., Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)
Diels, H., and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 vols, 6th edn (Berlin: Zurich and Hildersheim, 1985). Contains the surviving fragments of the sophists (in Greek).
Dillon, J., and T. Gergel, The Greek Sophists (London: Penguin Classics, 2003 ).† Contains useful information on the sophists, Hippias, Prodicus and Protagoras.
Grube, G. M. A., Plato's Thought, with new introduction, bibliographic essay and bibliography by Donald J. Zeyl (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980)†
Guthrie, W. K. C., A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 3: The Fifth Century Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Also available in two parts: The Sophists and Socrates.†
——, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 4: Plato: The Man and His Dialogues, Earlier Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)†
Irwin, T., Classical Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)†
——, Plato's Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) Kahn, C. H., Plato and The Socratic Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Kraut, R., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Contains a large general bibliography.
Popper, K., The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. I: The Spell of Plato, new edn (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2003)†
Robinson, R., Plato's Earlier Dialectic, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953)
Taylor, C. C. W., Socrates: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)†
Vlastos, G., Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
——, Socratic Studies, ed. M. Burnyeat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Waterfield, R., The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists, Translated with Commentary, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)†
Williams, B., Plato: The Invention of Philosophy (London: Phoenix, 1998). A short introduction.†
Books and Articles Useful for Further Study of Protagoras
Davidson, D., ‘How is Weakness of the Will Possible?’, in Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)
Gosling, J. C. B. and C. C. W. Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982)
Hutchinson, G. O., Greek Lyric Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Contains a text and commentary on the Simonides song.
Irwin, T., ‘Socrates the Epicurean?’, Illinois Classical Studies 11 (1986), pp. 85 – 112; also in Benson, 1992, pp. 198 – 219
Lombardo, S., and K. Bell, Plato, Protagoras (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1992). Translation with an introduction by M. Frede.†
Nussbaum, M. C., The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Penner, T., ‘The Unity of Virtue’, Philosophical Review 82 (1973), pp. 35 – 68
Rudebusch, G., Socrates, Pleasure and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Vlastos, G., ‘The Unity of the Virtues in the Protagoras’, Review of Metaphysics 25 (1971 – 2), pp. 415 – 58; also in Platonic Studies, 2nd edn, (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
——, ed., Plato's Protagoras (Indianapolis and New York: Liberal Arts Press Inc., 1956). Benjamin Jowett's translation, revised by M. Oswald, with an introduction by Vlastos.†
Books and Articles Useful for Further Study of Meno
Bowra, C. M., Pindar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Burnyeat, M., ‘Examples in Epistemology’, Philosophy 52 (1977), pp. 381 – 98
Day, J. M., ed., Plato's Meno in Focus (London: Routledge, 1994). Translation and essays on several topics in the Meno.
Demas, P., ‘True Belief in the Meno’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 14 (1996), pp. 1 – 32
Devereux, D., ‘Nature and Teaching in Plato's Meno’, Phronesis 23 (1978), pp. 118 – 26
Fine, G., ‘Inquiry in the Meno’, in The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 2002 – 26
Leibniz, G. W., ‘Discourse on Metaphysics,’ in Philosophical Essays, trans. R. Ariew and D. Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989)
Nehamas, A., ‘Meno's Paradox and Socrates as a Teacher’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 3 (1985), pp. 1 – 30; also in Benson, 1992, pp. 298 – 316
Pinker, S. How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997; London: Penguin Books, 1998) †
Scott, D., Recollection and Experience: Plato's Theory of Learning and its Successors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Vlastos, G., ‘Anamnesis in the Meno’, Dialogue 4 (1965), pp. 143 – 67; also in Day, 1994, pp. 88 – 111
Weiss, R., Virtue in the Cave, Moral Inquiry in Plato's Meno (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
White, N. P., Plato on Knowledge and Reality (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976)
A Note on the Translations
The text used for these translations is John Burnet's Oxford Classical Text (1903), except in a few places, which are marked with asterisks. There is a full list of these minor changes in the Appendix. The superscript numbers refer
to endnotes, which contain historical and biographical information, as well as occasional philosophical points. The notes are mostly intended for students; I advise first-time readers to pay no attention to them. The dialogues are best read without interruption. The section breaks are my own, not Plato's, and the numbers and letters in the margins refer to pages and columns in the standard edition of Stephanus (Henri Etienne) of 1578. The alternative titles of the dialogues are ancient, but we do not know if they go back to Plato himself.
Roughly speaking, these translations are similar in both style and approach to the ones by W. C. K. Guthrie (1956) that they replace in this series, except that I have converted some of the traditional terminology into more modern equivalents. I mean traditional terms such as virtue, vice, temperance, justice (for dikaiosúne), wisdom (for sophía) and various others. So, in non-technical passages without much philosophical vocabulary, my translations are often fairly similar to Guthrie's; in the more philosophical passages they are very different, and in those places this version aims to be easier to understand. I have followed Guthrie in his (usual) aim of using clear, normal and more or less idiomatic English in the belief that that is the best route to accuracy.
The traditional renderings of Greek philosophical vocabulary just mentioned are not accurate or literal. No translator who uses them claims that they are. They are often based so closely on the original Latin translations that they require a knowledge of Latin to be fully understood. In other cases, they are the earliest English renderings, first devised in the sixteenth century. They are used, in spite of their inaccuracy, because of the important advantages of continuity with medieval philosophy, as well as with the huge body of scholarly commentaries and articles on these and other Greek texts. So I should alert the reader to the fact that I have decided not to use them here (or at any rate not all of them), and instead to translate the Greek terms into standard English, without any regard for either the Latin equivalents or the earlier English tradition. The same policy has been followed, to varying degrees, in other translations of Plato and seemed reasonable here partly because there are plenty of English translations of these two dialogues that do use the traditional terminology, so there wasn't any point in writing another one.
The problem with the traditional terms is that they are, in some cases, obsolete or moribund (or never truly adopted) as English words, and therefore very unclear (e.g. temperance, virtue, munificence), while in other cases they are widely used in modern English but have shifted in meaning over the centuries, to the point of being inaccurate in the special roles that we impose on them in these texts (e.g. justice, happiness, wisdom, evil, fine, political). The result of these two effects is a strange hybrid that tends to be extremely difficult to understand, making it correspondingly difficult to follow Plato's arguments at all closely.
Besides the Latin-based philosophical terminology, it is common in translations of Plato (even the most recent) to find a form of English that is, more generally, latinized. This is partly a matter of stylistic consistency, partly an aesthetic preference. By ‘latinized' I mean, loosely, that high-register (often latinate) words and phrases – tolerate, compose, proceed, engage in discussion, assert, investigate, inquire, respond, benefit, commit injustice – are disproportionately favoured over more ordinary and common equivalents – put up with, put together, go on, talk, say, look into, ask, answer, do good, do wrong. In this version, I have also tried to present the tone and register of the original accurately, which means tending more to the second sort of vocabulary. Plato took care to capture the register and feel of spoken Greek, at least most of the time. Ideally, an English version should not contain too much that an English speaker could never say and should generally favour common forms. High-register English, by definition, contains things that we do not say, or which, if used in spoken language, make the speaker sound pompous or strange. That makes it a poor representation of Plato's style. A more demotic register also brings the small accidental bonus of often making the translation of particular terms more literal.
A few examples will show what I mean. Here the higher-register versions are taken from Guthrie's or Benjamin Jowett's translations of the two dialogues. The final column represents a style I try to use much, though not all, of the time.
Greek literal Jowett or Guthrie here
légein to say J, G: to assert, to contend to say
sképsasthai to look at J: to investigate to look into
eis-bállein to throw in G: to insert to throw in
apo-rrhoaí from-flowings J, G: effluences out-flowings
dia-lek-tikó-teron more-talk-through-ish-ly G: more conducive to discussion; J: more in the dialectician's way in a more talk-it-through kind of way
hos émoi dokeí As it looks to me G: on my submission if you ask me
Plato's philosophy, in Greek, is (for the most part) clearly written and deliberately easy to follow, with strong and intelligible lines of thought, even if he sometimes makes very striking and unusual claims. For that reason, I take the goal of any translation of any particular term, phrase or idiom to be this: that it should systematically produce good sense from the sentences and arguments that use it in the original language. So it is the resulting English versions, taken in their entirety, that should make it clear why I opted for this or that particular word or idiom. All other arguments about how some term or other should be translated are secondary. To give one example: the common claim that areté means ‘excellence’ (rather than ‘virtue’) is sometimes regarded by students of Greek philosophy as being well established by a wide range of considerations, linguistic, historical and cultural. In reality, it is simply based on the fact that there are contexts in Greek philosophy and literature in which that translation seems to make good sense of the claims being made. But that means, obviously, that it is answerable to the same rule in the opposite case: in the many contexts in which it doesn't make sense of the claims being made, it should be regarded as a bad translation. The traditional vocabulary (for the reasons given above) often fails to make good sense; indeed it often fails to make any sense at all – but we make excuses for it, as we might for old friends, because of the powerful bonds of tradition and familiarity. So it is a misconception that using that vocabulary makes a translation more disciplined.
The principle adopted by some translators (for the sake of simplification, but also sometimes wrongly associated with literalism) that any important Greek term should always be translated the same way allows far too much freedom, in my view. In those common cases where a term has three or four distinct meanings or uses, that policy gives the translator licence to translate it in a single, reflex manner, regardless of how well that makes sense of the text.
Some translations, out of caution, leave actual Greek words in the English text or use established translator's jargon, or close copies of original idioms, that are unclear, because they simply stand in for the Greek rather than translating it. Those translations call on readers to have a pretty good knowledge of Greek vocabulary and idiom. My reservation about such translations is that they are therefore only fully intelligible to people who don't need them and probably aren't reading them; also, that it doesn't seem quite right for a translator to make so much effort to avoid translating. At the very least, that approach would be of no use to general readers. It was my aim to translate the text fully and to enable both the general reader and the student to follow the arguments closely and to understand these two very accessible dialogues without too much trouble. Accordingly, this version calls on readers only to know English and to rely fully on my understanding of Greek vocabulary and idiom. For that reason, and because of my modernization of the traditional vocabulary, some scholars might disagree with some of the renderings here. Disagreements of this kind between translators are inevitable, whatever the method of translation, and unremarkable. The Glossary, and several of the notes, try to alert scholarly readers to such things in more detail.
PROTAGORAS
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sp; or
The Sophists
Characters
SOCRATES, a philosopher (here aged about thirty-five); the narrator of the main dialogue
FRIEND, to whom Socrates narrates the main dialogue
HIPPOCRATES, a young Athenian; a friend of Socrates; keen to be a pupil of Protagoras
SLAVE, doorkeeper of Callias
Inside Callias’ house:
PROTAGORAS, a famous sophist from Abdera, just arrived in Athens (here aged about sixty)
CALLIAS, the richest man in Athens; stepson of Pericles; patron of sophists; Protagoras' host
ALCIBIADES, ward of Pericles; friend of Socrates (here aged about eighteen)
CRITIAS, a wealthy Athenian; an amateur philosopher; a friend of Socrates (also Plato's uncle)
PRODICUS, a sophist from Ceos; an expert on verbal distinctions; a friend of Socrates
HIPPIAS, a sophist from Elis; a polymath
Characters played by Socrates during the dialogue:
SIMONIDES, the famous songwriter from Ceos
MOST PEOPLE, ‘ordinary’ people; only interested in pleasure (according to Socrates)
A LOUT, a rude interrogator, otherwise somewhat like Socrates
ENDING, the ending of the discussion, personified
The dialogue is set in Athens, in about 432 BC, just before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. Athens is at the height of its power in the Aegean and is the intellectual and artistic capital of Greece. The main dialogue takes place in a spacious, colonnaded courtyard inside Callias' house.
FRIEND: There you are, Socrates.1 Where've you been? Or is it [309 a] obvious? You've been hunting, haven't you? Chasing around after that ripe young Alcibiades.2 I don't blame you; I saw him just the other day, and he's still a beautiful man, I'll give you that – man, mind you, Socrates (just between you and me): he's getting a little bit of a beard these days.
SOCRATES: So what if he is? I thought you were a fan of Homer