Complete Works (169 page)

Everyone agreed this was the thing to do. Protagoras wanted no part of it, but he had to agree to ask questions, and when he had asked enough, to respond in turn with short answers.

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So he began to ask questions something like this: “I consider, Socrates, that the greatest part of a man’s education is to be in command of poetry, by which I mean the ability to understand the words of the poets, to know when a poem is correctly composed and when not, and to know how to either, because he will do the same as we would and be superfluous. analyze a poem and to respond to questions about it. So my line of questioning now will still concern the subject of our present discussion, namely virtue, but translated into the sphere of poetry. Now, Simonides somewhere says to Scopas, the son of Creon of Thessaly:

For a man to become good truly is hard,
[b]

in hands and feet and mind foursquare,

blamelessly built …

Do you know this lyric ode, or shall I recite it all for you?”

I told him there was no need, for I knew the poem, and it happened to be one to which I had given especially careful attention.

“Good,” he said. “So, do you think it’s well made or not?”

“Very well made.”

“And do you think it’s well made if the poet contradicts himself?”

“No.”

”Take a better look then.” [c]

“As I’ve said, I’m already familiar enough with it.”

“Then you must know that at some point later in the ode he says:

Nor is Pittacus’ proverb in tune

however wise a man he was.

Hard it is to be good, he said.

“You do recognize that both these things are said by the same person?”

“I do.”

“Well, do you think that the latter is consistent with the former?”

“It seems so to me,” I said (but as I said it I was afraid he had a point there). “Doesn’t it seem so to you?”

“How can anyone who says both these things be consistent? First, he [d] asserts himself that it is hard for a man truly to become good, and then, a little further on in his poem he forgets and criticizes Pittacus for saying the same thing as he did, that it is hard for a man to be good, and refuses to accept from him the same thing that he himself said. And yet, when he criticizes him for saying the same thing as himself, he obviously criticizes himself as well, so either the earlier or the later must not be right.”

Protagoras got a noisy round of applause for this speech. At first I felt [e] as if I had been hit by a good boxer. Everything went black and I was reeling from Protagoras’ oratory and the others’ clamor. Then, to tell you the truth, to stall for time to consider what the poet meant, I turned to Prodicus and, calling on him, “Prodicus,” I said, “Simonides was from your hometown, wasn’t he? It’s your duty to come to the man’s rescue,
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so I don’t mind calling for your help, just as Homer says Scamander called Simoïs to help him when he was besieged by Achilles:

Dear brother, let’s buck this hero’s strength together.
¹⁵

So also do I summon your aid, lest to our dismay Protagoras destroy [b] Simonides. But really, Prodicus, Simonides’ rehabilitation does require your special art, by which you distinguish ‘wanting’ from ‘desiring’ and make all the other fine distinctions that you did just a while ago. So tell me if you agree with me, because it’s not clear to me that Simonides does in fact contradict himself. Just give us your offhand opinion. Are becoming and being the same or different?”

“Good heavens, different.”

“All right. Now, in the first passage, Simonides declared as his own opinion that it is hard for a man truly to become good.”

[c] “That’s right,” Prodicus said.

“Then he criticizes Pittacus not for saying the same thing as himself, as Protagoras thinks, but for saying something different. Because Pittacus did not say that it is hard to
become
good, as Simonides said, but to
be
good. As Prodicus here says, being and becoming are not the same thing, [d] Protagoras. And if being is not the same as becoming, Simonides does not contradict himself. Perhaps Prodicus and many others might agree with Hesiod that it is difficult to become good:

The gods put Goodness where we have to sweat

To get at her. But once you reach the top

She’s as easy to have as she was hard at first.”
¹⁶

Prodicus applauded me when he heard this, but Protagoras said, “Your rehabilitation, Socrates, has a crippling error greater than the one you are correcting.”

“Then I’ve done my work badly,” I said, “and I am the ridiculous sort of physician whose cure is worse than the disease.”

“That’s exactly right,” he said.

[e] “That’s exactly right,”

”How so?” said I.

“The poet’s ignorance would be monumental if he says the possession of virtue is so trivial when everyone agrees it is the hardest thing in the world.”

Then I said, “By heaven, Prodicus’ participation in our discussion
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couldn’t be more timely. It may well be, Protagoras, that Prodicus’ wisdom is of ancient and divine origin, dating back to the time of Simonides or even earlier. But although your experience is very broad, it does not seem to extend to this branch of wisdom, which I have been schooled in as a pupil of Prodicus. And now it appears that you do not understand that Simonides may well have not conceived of the word ‘hard’ as you do. In much the same way Prodicus corrects me each time I use the word ‘terrible’ to praise you or someone else, as, for example, ‘Protagoras is a terribly [b] wise man.’ When I say that, he asks me if I am not ashamed to call good things terrible. For terrible, he says, is bad. No one ever speaks of terrible wealth, or terrible peace, or terrible well-being, but we do hear of terrible disease, terrible war, and terrible poverty, ‘terrible’ here being ‘bad.’ So perhaps the Ceans and Simonides conceived of ‘hard’ as ‘bad’ or something else that you do not understand. Let’s ask Prodicus. He’s just the right person to consult on Simonides’ dialect. Prodicus, what did Simonides [c] mean by ‘hard’?”

“Bad.”

“Then this is why he criticizes Pittacus for saying it is hard to be good, just as if he had heard him say it is bad to be good. Right, Prodicus?”

“What else do you think Simonides meant, Socrates? He was censuring Pittacus, a man from Lesbos brought up in a barbarous dialect, for not distinguishing words correctly.”

”Well, Protagoras, you hear Prodicus. Do you have anything to say [d] in response?”

“You’ve got it all wrong, Prodicus,” Protagoras said. “I am positive that Simonides meant by ‘hard’ the same thing we do: not ‘bad,’ but whatever is not easy and takes a lot of effort.”

“Oh, but I think so too, Protagoras,” I said. “This is what Simonides meant, and Prodicus knows it. He was joking and thought he would test your ability to defend your own statement. The best proof that Simonides [e] did not mean that ‘hard’ is ‘bad’ is found in the very next phrase, which says:

God alone can have this privilege.

He cannot very well mean that it is bad to be good if he then says that God alone has this privilege. Prodicus would call Simonides a reprobate for that and no Cean at all. But I would like to tell you what I think
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Simonides’ purpose is in this ode, if you would like to test my command (to use your term) of poetry. If you’d rather, though, I’ll listen to you.”

Protagoras heard me out and said, “If you please, Socrates,” and then Prodicus, Hippias, and the others urged me on.

“All right, then,” I said, “I will try to explain to you what I think this poem is about. Philosophy, first of all, has its most ancient roots and is most widespread among the Greeks in Crete and Lacedaemon, and those [b] regions have the highest concentration of sophists in the world. But the natives deny it and pretend to be ignorant in order to conceal the fact that it is by their wisdom that they are the leaders of the Greek world, something like those sophists Protagoras was talking about. Their public image is that they owe their superiority to their brave fighting men, and their reason for promoting this image is that if the real basis for their superiority were discovered, i.e., wisdom, everyone else would start cultivating it. This is top secret; not even the Spartanizing cults in the other cities know about [c] it, and so you have all these people getting their ears mangled aping the Spartans, lacing on leather gloves, exercising fanatically and wearing short capes, as if Sparta’s political power depended on these things. And when the citizens in Sparta want some privacy to have free and open discussions with their sophists, they pass alien acts against any Spartanizers and other foreigners in town, and conceal their meetings from the rest of the world. [d] And so that their young men won’t unlearn what they are taught, they do not permit any of them to travel to other cities (the Cretans don’t either). Crete and Sparta are places where there are not only men but women also who take pride in their education. You know how to test the truth of my contention that the Spartans have the best education in philosophy and [e] debate? Pick any ordinary Spartan and talk with him for a while. At first you will find he can barely hold up his end of the conversation, but at some point he will pick his spot with deadly skill and shoot back a terse remark you’ll never forget, something that will make the person he’s talking with (in this case you) look like a child. Acute observers have known this for a long time now: To be a Spartan is to be a philosopher
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much more than to be an athlete. They know that to be able to say something like that is the mark of a perfectly educated man. We’re talking about men like Thales of Miletus, Pittacus of Mytilene, Bias of Priene, our own Solon, Cleobulus of Lindus, Myson of Chen, and, the seventh in the list, Chilon of Sparta. All of these emulated, loved, and studied Spartan culture. You [b] can see that distinctive kind of Spartan wisdom in their pithy, memorable sayings, which they jointly dedicated as the first fruits of their wisdom to Apollo in his temple at Delphi, inscribing there the maxims now on everyone’s lips: ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Nothing in excess.’

“What is my point? That the characteristic style of ancient philosophy [c] was laconic brevity. It was in this context that the saying of Pittacus—
It
is hard to be good
—was privately circulated with approval among the sages. Then Simonides, ambitious for philosophical fame, saw that if he could score a takedown against this saying, as if it were a famous wrestler, and get the better of it, he would himself become famous in his own lifetime. So he composed this poem as a deliberate attack against this maxim. That’s how it seems to me.

“Let’s test my hypothesis together, to see whether what I say is true. If [d] all the poet wanted to say was that it is hard to become good, then the beginning of the poem would be crazy, for he inserted there an antithetical particle.
¹⁷
It doesn’t make any sense to insert this unless one supposes that Simonides is addressing the Pittacus maxim as an opponent. Pittacus says it is hard to be good; Simonides rebuts this by saying, ‘No, but it is hard for a man to become good, Pittacus, truly.’ Notice that he does not say [e] truly good; he is not talking about truth in the context of some things being truly good and other things being good but not truly so. This would create an impression of naivete very unlike Simonides. The position of ‘truly’ in the verse must be a case of hyperbaton. We have to approach this maxim of Pittacus by imagining him speaking and Simonides replying, something like this: Pittacus: ‘Gentlemen, it is hard to be good.’ Simonides:
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‘What you say is not true, Pittacus, for it is not being but becoming good, in hands and feet and mind foursquare, blamelessly built—that is hard truly.’ This way the insertion of the antithetical particle makes sense, and the ‘truly’ feels correct in its position at the end. Everything that comes after is evidence for this interpretation. The poem is full of details that testify to its excellent composition; indeed, it is a lovely and exquisitely [b] crafted piece, but it would take a long time to go through it from that point of view. Let’s review instead the overall structure and intention of the ode, which is from beginning to end a refutation of Pittacus’ maxim.

“A few lines later he states (imagine he is making a speech): ‘To become good truly is hard, and although it may be possible for a short period of [c] time, to persist in that state and to be a good man, as you put it, Pittacus, is not humanly possible. God alone can have this privilege,

But that man inevitably is bad

whom incapacitating misfortune throws down.

“ ‘Whom does incapacitating misfortune throw down when it comes to, say, the command of a ship? Clearly not the ordinary passenger, who is always susceptible. You can’t knock down someone already supine; you can only knock down someone standing up and render him supine. In the [d] same way, incapacitating misfortune would overthrow only someone who is capable, not the chronically incapable. A hurricane striking a pilot would incapacitate him, a bad season will do it to a farmer, and the same thing applies to a doctor. For the good is susceptible to becoming bad, as another poet testifies:

The good man is at times bad, at times good.

“ ‘But the bad is not susceptible to becoming bad; it must always be bad. So that when incapacitating misfortune throws down a man who is capable, [e] wise, and good, he must “inevitably be bad.” You say, Pittacus, that it is hard to be good; in fact, to become good is hard, though possible, but to be good is impossible.

Faring well, every man is good;

Bad, faring ill.

“ ‘What does it mean to fare well in letters; what makes a man good at
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them? Clearly, the learning of letters. What kind of faring well makes a good doctor? Clearly, learning how to cure the sick. ‘Bad, faring ill’: who could become a bad doctor? Clearly, someone who is, first, a doctor and, second, a good doctor. He could in fact become a bad doctor, but we who are medical laymen could never by faring ill become doctors or carpenters [b] or any other kind of professional. And if one cannot become a doctor by faring ill, clearly one cannot become a bad one either. In the same way a good man may eventually become bad with the passage of time, or through hardship, disease, or some other circumstance that involves the only real kind of faring ill, which is the loss of knowledge. But the bad man can never become bad, for he is so all the time. If he is to become bad, he must [c] first become good. So the tenor of this part of the poem is that it is impossible to be a good man and continue to be good, but possible for one and the same person to become good and also bad, and those are best for the longest time whom the gods love.’