Complete Works (170 page)

“All this is directed at Pittacus, as the next few lines of the poem make even clearer:

Therefore never shall I seek for the impossible,

cast away my life’s lot on empty hope, a quixotic quest

for a blameless man among those who reap

the broad earth’s fruit,

[d]
but if I find him you will have my report.

This is strong language, and he keeps up his attack on Pittacus’ maxim throughout the poem:

All who do no wrong willingly

I praise and love.

Necessity not even the gods resist.

This is spoken to the same end. For Simonides was not so uneducated as [e] to say that he praised all who did nothing bad willingly, as if there were anyone who willingly did bad things. I am pretty sure that none of the wise men thinks that any human being willingly makes a mistake or willingly does anything wrong or bad. They know very well that anyone who does anything wrong or bad does so involuntarily. So also Simonides,
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who does not say that he praises those who willingly do nothing bad; rather he applies the term ‘willingly’ to himself. He perceived that a good man, an honorable man, often forces himself to love and praise someone utterly different from himself, one’s alienated father perhaps, or mother, or country. Scoundrels in a similar situation are almost happy to see their parents’ or country’s trouble and viciously point it out and denounce it [b] so that their own dereliction of duty toward them will not be called into question. They actually exaggerate their complaints and add gratuitous to unavoidable hostility, whereas good men conceal the trouble and force themselves to give praise, and if they are angry because their parents or country wronged them, they calm themselves down and reconcile themselves to it, and they force themselves to love and praise their own people. I think that Simonides reflected that on more than one occasion he himself had eulogized some tyrant or other such person, not willingly but because [c] he had to. So he is saying to Pittacus: ‘Pittacus, it is not because I am an overcritical person that I am criticizing you, since,

enough for me a man who is not bad

nor too intractable, who knows civic Right, a sound man.

I shall not blame him,

for I am not fond of blame.

Infinite the tribe of fools,’

the implication being that a censorious person would have his hands full blaming them.

‘All is fair in which foul is not mixed.’

The sense here is not that all is white in which black is not mixed, which [d] would be ludicrous in many ways, but rather that he himself accepts without any objection what is in between. ‘I do not seek,’ he says,

‘for a blameless man among those who reap

the broad earth’s fruit,

but if I find him you will have my report.’

The meaning is that ‘on those terms I will never praise anyone, but I am happy with an average man who does no wrong, since I willingly

praise and love all’—

—note the Lesbian dialect form of the verb ‘praise,’ since he is addressing [e] Pittacus—

‘all who do no wrong’

(this is where the pause should be, before ‘willingly’)

‘willingly

I praise and love

but there are some whom I praise and love unwillingly. So if you spoke something even moderately reasonable and true, Pittacus, I would never
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censure you. But the fact is that you have lied blatantly yet with verisimilitude about extremely important issues, and for that I do censure you.’

“And that, Prodicus and Protagoras,” I concluded, “is what I think was going through Simonides’ mind when he composed this ode.”

[b] Then Hippias said, “I am favorably impressed by your analysis of this ode, Socrates. I have quite a nice talk on it myself, which I will present to you if you wish.”

“Yes, Hippias,” Alcibiades said, “some other time, though. What should be done now is what Socrates and Protagoras agreed upon, which is for Socrates to answer any questions Protagoras may still have to ask, or if he so chooses, to answer Socrates’ questions.”

[c] Then I said, “I leave it up to Protagoras, but if it’s all right with him, why don’t we say good-bye to odes and poetry and get back to what I first asked him, a question, Protagoras, which I would be glad to settle in a joint investigation with you. Discussing poetry strikes me as no different from the second-rate drinking parties of the agora crowd. These people, largely uneducated and unable to entertain themselves over their wine by [d] using their own voices to generate conversation, pay premium prices for flute-girls and rely on the extraneous voice of the reed flute as background music for their parties. But when well-educated gentlemen drink together, you will not see girls playing the flute or the lyre or dancing, but a group that knows how to get together without these childish frivolities, conversing [e] civilly no matter how heavily they are drinking. Ours is such a group, if indeed it consists of men such as most of us claim to be, and it should require no extraneous voices, not even of poets, who cannot be questioned on what they say. When a poet is brought up in a discussion, almost everyone has a different opinion about what he means, and they wind up arguing about something they can never finally decide. The best people
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avoid such discussions and rely on their own powers of speech to entertain themselves and test each other. These people should be our models. We should put the poets aside and converse directly with each other, testing the truth and our own ideas. If you have more questions to ask, I am ready to answer them; or, if you prefer, you can render the same service to me, and we can resume where we broke off and try to reach a conclusion.”

[b] I went on in this vein, but Protagoras would not state clearly which alternative he preferred. So Alcibiades looked over at Callias and said, “Callias, do you think Protagoras is behaving well in not making it clear whether he will participate in the discussion or not? I certainly don’t. He should either participate or say he is not going to, so we will know how he stands, and Socrates, or whoever, can start a discussion with someone else.”

[c] It looked to me that Protagoras was embarrassed by Alcibiades’ words, not to mention the insistence of Callias and practically the whole company. In the end he reluctantly brought himself to resume our dialogue and indicated he was ready to be asked questions.

“Protagoras,” I said, “I don’t want you to think that my motive in talking with you is anything else than to take a good hard look at things that continually perplex me. I think that Homer said it all in the line,

Going in tandem, one perceives before the other.
¹⁸
[d]

Human beings are simply more resourceful this way in action, speech, and thought. If someone has a private perception, he immediately starts going around and looking until he finds somebody he can show it to and have it corroborated. And there is a particular reason why I would rather talk with you than anyone else: I think you are the best qualified to investigate the sort of things that decent and respectable individuals ought [e] to examine, and virtue especially. Who else but you? Not only do you consider yourself to be noble and good but, unlike others who are themselves decent and respectable individuals yet unable to make others so, you are not only good yourself but able to make others good as well, and you have so much self-confidence that instead of concealing this skill, as others do, you advertise it openly to the whole Greek world, calling yourself
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a sophist, highlighting yourself as a teacher of virtue, the first ever to have deemed it appropriate to charge a fee for this. How could I not solicit your help in a joint investigation of these questions? There is no way I could not.

“So right now I want you to remind me of some of the questions I first asked, starting from the beginning. Then I want to proceed together to [b] take a good hard look at some other questions. I believe the first question was this: Wisdom, temperance, courage, justice, and piety—are these five names for the same thing, or is there underlying each of these names a unique thing, a thing with its own power or function, each one unlike any of the others? You said that they are not names for the same thing, that [c] each of these names refers to a unique thing, and that all these are parts of virtue, not like the parts of gold, which are similar to each other and to the whole of which they are parts, but like the parts of a face, dissimilar to the whole of which they are parts and to each other, and each one having its own unique power or function. If this is still your view, say so; if it’s changed in any way, make your new position clear, for I am certainly not going to hold you accountable for what you said before if you want [d] to say something at all different now. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were just trying out something on me before.”

“What I am saying to you, Socrates, is that all these are parts of virtue, and that while four of them are reasonably close to each other, courage is completely different from all the rest. The proof that what I am saying is true is that you will find many people who are extremely unjust, impious, intemperate, and ignorant, and yet exceptionally courageous.”

[e] “Hold it right there,” I said. “This is worth looking into. Would you say courageous men are confident, or something else?”

“Confident, yes, and ready for action where most men would be afraid.”

“Well, then, do you agree that virtue is something fine, and that you offer yourself as a teacher of it because it is fine?”

“The finest thing of all, unless I am quite out of my mind.”

“Then is part of it worthless and part of it fine, or all of it fine?”

“Surely it is all as fine as can be.”

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“Do you know who dives confidently into wells?”

“Of course, divers.”

“Is this because they know what they are doing, or for some other reason?”

“Because they know what they are doing.”

“Who are confident in fighting from horseback? Riders or nonriders?”

“Riders.”

“And in fighting with shields? Shieldmen or nonshieldmen?”

“Shieldmen, and so on down the line, if that’s what you’re getting at. Those with the right kind of knowledge are always more confident than those without it, and a given individual is more confident after he acquires it than he was before.”

[b] “But haven’t you ever seen men lacking knowledge of all of these things yet confident in each of them?”

“I have, all too confident.”

“Is their confidence courage?”

“No, because courage would then be contemptible. These men are out of their minds.”

“Then what do you mean by courageous men? Aren’t they those who are confident?”

[c] “I still hold by that.”

“Then
these
men who are so confident turn out to be not courageous but mad? And, on the other side, the wisest are the most confident and the most confident are the most courageous? And the logical conclusion would be that wisdom is courage?”

“You are doing a poor job of remembering what I said when I answered your questions, Socrates. When I was asked if the courageous are confident, I agreed. I was not asked if the confident are courageous. If you had asked [d] me that, I would have said, ‘Not all of them.’ You have nowhere shown that my assent to the proposition that the courageous are confident was in error. What you did show next was that knowledge increases one’s confidence and makes one more confident than those without knowledge. In consequence of this you conclude that courage and wisdom are the same thing. But by following this line of reasoning you could conclude that strength and wisdom are the same thing. First you would ask me if [e] the strong are powerful, and I would say yes. Then, if those who know how to wrestle are more powerful than those who do not, and if individual wrestlers became more powerful after they learn than they were before. Again I would say yes. After I had agreed to these things, it would be open to you to use precisely these points of agreement to prove that wisdom is strength. But nowhere in this process do I agree that the powerful are strong, only that the strong are powerful. Strength and power are not
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the same thing. Power derives from knowledge and also from madness and passionate emotion. Strength comes from nature and proper nurture of the body. So also confidence and courage are not the same thing, with the consequence that the courageous are confident, but not all those who are confident are courageous. For confidence, like power, comes from skill (and from passionate emotion and madness as well); courage, from nature and the proper nurture of the soul.”

“Would you say, Protagoras, that some people live well and others [b] live badly?”

“Yes.”

“But does it seem to you that a person lives well, if he lives distressed and in pain?”

“No, indeed.”

“Now, if he completed his life, having lived pleasantly, does he not seem to you to have lived well?”

“It seems that way to me.”

“So, then, to live pleasantly is good, and unpleasantly, bad?” [c]

“Yes, so long as he lived having taken pleasure in honorable things.”

“What, Protagoras? Surely you don’t, like most people, call some pleasant things bad and some painful things good? I mean, isn’t a pleasant thing good just insofar as it is pleasant, that is, if it results in nothing other than pleasure; and, on the other hand, aren’t painful things bad in the same way, just insofar as they are painful?”

“I don’t know, Socrates, if I should answer as simply as you put the [d] question—that everything pleasant is good and everything painful is bad. It seems to me to be safer to respond not merely with my present answer in mind but from the point of view of my life overall, that on the one hand, there are pleasurable things which are not good, and on the other hand, there are painful things which are not bad but some which are, and a third class which is neutral—neither bad nor good.”

“You call pleasant things those which partake of pleasure or produce [e] pleasure?”