Complete Works (189 page)
So as I was saying, when Rhadamanthus the judge gets hold of someone like that, he doesn’t know a thing about him, neither who he is nor who his people are, except that he’s somebody wicked. And once he’s noticed that, he brands the man as either curable or incurable, as he sees fit, and dismisses the man to Tartarus, and once the man has arrived there, he [c] undergoes the appropriate sufferings. Once in a while he inspects another soul, one who has lived a pious life, one devoted to truth, the soul of a private citizen or someone else, especially—and I at any rate say this, Callicles—that of a philosopher who has minded his own affairs and hasn’t been meddlesome in the course of his life. He admires the man and sends him off to the Isles of the Blessed. And Aeacus, too, does the very same things. Each of them with staff in hand renders judgments. And Minos is seated to oversee them. He alone holds the golden scepter the way Homer’s [d] Odysseus claims to have seen him,
holding his golden scepter, decreeing right among the dead.
27
For my part, Callicles, I’m convinced by these accounts, and I think about how I’ll reveal to the judge a soul that’s as healthy as it can be. So I disregard the things held in honor by the majority of people, and by practicing truth I really try, to the best of my ability, to be and to live as [e] a very good man, and when I die, to die like that. And I call on all other people as well, as far as I can—and you especially I call on in response to your call—to this way of life, this contest, that I hold to be worth all the other contests in this life. And I take you to task, because you won’t be able to come to protect yourself when you appear at the trial and judgment I was talking about just now. When you come before that judge,
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the son of Aegina, and he takes hold of you and brings you to trial, your mouth will hang open and you’ll get dizzy there just as much as I will here, and maybe somebody’ll give you a demeaning knock on the jaw and throw all sorts of dirt at you.
Maybe you think this account is told as an old wives’ tale, and you feel contempt for it. And it certainly wouldn’t be a surprising thing to feel contempt for it if we could look for and somehow find one better and truer than it. As it is, you see that there are three of you, the wisest of the Greeks of today—you, Polus, and Gorgias—and you’re not able to prove [b] that there’s any other life one should live than the one which will clearly turn out to be advantageous in that world, too. But among so many arguments this one alone survives refutation and remains steady: that doing what’s unjust is more to be guarded against than suffering it, and that it’s not
seeming
to be good but
being
good that a man should take care of more than anything, both in his public and his private life; and that if a person proves to be bad in some respect, he’s to be disciplined, and that the second best thing after being just is to become just by paying one’s [c] due, by being disciplined; and that every form of flattery, both the form concerned with oneself and that concerned with others, whether they’re few or many, is to be avoided, and that oratory and every other activity is always to be used in support of what’s just.
So, listen to me and follow me to where I am, and when you’ve come here you’ll be happy both during life and at its end, as the account indicates. Let someone despise you as a fool and throw dirt on you, if he likes. And, yes, by Zeus, confidently let him deal you that demeaning blow. Nothing [d] terrible will happen to you if you really are an admirable and good man, one who practices excellence. And then, after we’ve practiced it together, then at last, if we think we should, we’ll turn to politics, or then we’ll deliberate about whatever subject we please, when we’re better at deliberating than we are now. For it’s a shameful thing for us, being in the condition we appear to be in at present—when we never think the same about the same subjects, the most important ones at that—to sound off as though we’re somebodies. That’s how far behind in education we’ve fallen. So [e] let’s use the account that has now been disclosed to us as our guide, one that indicates to us that this way of life is the best, to practice justice and the rest of excellence both in life and in death. Let us follow it, then, and call on others to do so, too, and let’s not follow the one that you believe in and call on me to follow. For that one is worthless, Callicles.
1
. The setting of the dialogue is not clear. We may suppose that the conversation takes place outside a public building in Athens such as the gymnasium (see the reference to persons “inside” at 447c and 455c).
In the exchange that opens the dialogue, Callicles and Socrates are evidently alluding to a Greek saying, unknown to us, the equivalent of the English phrase, “first at a feast, last at a fray.” Cf. Shakespeare,
Henry IV, Part 1
, Act 4, Sc. 2.
2
. Gk.
epideiknusthai
. An
epideixis
was a lecture regularly given by sophists as a public display of their oratorical prowess.
3
.
Iliad
vi.211.
4
. Themistocles and Pericles were Athenian statesmen of the fifth century
B.C.
5
. Alternatively, “ … it’s something of which you claim to have made a craft.”
6
. Gk.
empeiria
, translated “experience” at 448c.
7
. The translation here follows the mss, rejecting Dodds’ emendation.
8
. Anaxagoras’ book began with the words “All things were together,” describing the primordial state of the universe.
9
. The King of Persia, whose riches and imperial power embodied the popular idea of supreme happiness.
10
. See
Symposium
215a–219d.
11
. Homer,
Iliad
ix.441.
12
. Here and just above Callicles again quotes or adapts Euripides’
Antiope
.
13
. Dodds: “A bird of messy habits and uncertain identity.”
14
. Catamite: passive partner (esp. boy) in homosexual practices (
Oxford Dictionary of Current English
).
15
. At 468b.
16
. At 464b–465a.
17
. Gk.
d
ē
m
ē
goria.
A cognate noun,
d
ē
m
ē
goros
, was translated “crowd pleaser” at 482c, where the cognate verb
d
ē
m
ē
gorein
was translated “playing to the crowd.”
18
. There are variances in the mss in the text of the last two lines of Socrates’ previous speech and this response. The translation follows one ms, while the other mss, with a conjectural addition of Dodds’, would yield this: “SOCRATES: … and not those that make him worse—and this seemed to us to be a matter of craft—can you say that any of these men has proved to be such a man? CALLICLES: For my part, I don’t know what I would say. SOCRATES: But if you look carefully you’ll find out. Let’s examine the matter calmly, then, and …”
19
. Epicharmus was a comic poet; the source of the line is not known.
20
. Cf. 467c–468e.
21
. A region along the southern shore of the Black Sea.
22
. A drachma is six obols. In 409–406
B.C.
the standard daily wage of a laborer was one drachma.
23
. That is, causing an eclipse.
24
. At 500b.
25
. Apparently a reference to the formulaic expression, “wild and not just,” which occurs three times in the
Odyssey
(vi.120; ix.175; xiii.201).
26
. The
prytanis
was that member of the officiating tribe in the Council chosen daily by lot to preside over the Council and the Assembly.
27
.
Odyssey
xi.569.
Translated by G.M.A. Grube.
Meno’s is one of the leading aristocratic families of Thessaly, traditionally friendly to Athens and Athenian interests. Here he is a young man, about to embark on an unscrupulous military and political career, leading to an early death at the hands of the Persian king. To his aristocratic ‘virtue’ (Plato’s ancient readers would know what that ultimately came to) he adds an admiration for ideas on the subject he has learned from the rhetorician Gorgias (about whom we learn more in the dialogue named after him). What brings him to Athens we are not told. His family’s local sponsor is the democratic politician Anytus, one of Socrates’ accusers at his trial, and apparently Anytus is his host. The dialogue begins abruptly, without stage-setting preliminaries of the sort we find in the ‘Socratic’ dialogues, and with no context of any kind being provided for the conversation. Meno wants to know Socrates’ position on the then much-debated question whether virtue can be taught, or whether it comes rather by practice, or else is acquired by one’s birth and nature, or in some other way? Socrates and Meno pursue that question, and the preliminary one of what virtue indeed
is,
straight through to the inconclusive conclusion characteristic of ‘Socratic’ dialogues. (Anytus joins the conversation briefly. He bristles when, to support his doubts that virtue can be taught, Socrates points to the failure of famous Athenian leaders to pass their own virtue on to their sons, and he issues a veiled threat of the likely consequences to Socrates of such ‘slanderous’ attacks.)
The dialogue is best remembered, however, for the interlude in which Socrates questions Meno’s slave about a problem in geometry—how to find a square double in area to any given square. Having determined that Meno does not know what virtue is, and recognizing that he himself does not know either, Socrates has proposed to Meno that they inquire into this together. Meno protests that that is impossible, challenging Socrates with the ‘paradox’ that one logically cannot inquire productively into what one does not already know—nor of course into what one already does! Guided by Socrates’ questions, the slave (who has never studied geometry before) comes to see for himself, to recognize, what the right answer to the geometrical problem must be. Socrates argues that this confirms something he has heard from certain wise priests and priestesses—that the soul is immortal and that at our birth we already possess all theoretical knowledge (he includes here not just mathematical theory but moral knowledge as well). Prodded by Socrates’ questions, the slave was ‘recollecting’ this prior knowledge, not drawing new conclusions from data being presented to him for the first time. So in moral inquiry, as well, there is hope that, if we question ourselves rightly, ‘recollection’ can progressively improve our understanding of moral truth and eventually lead us to full knowledge of it.
The examination of the slave assuages Meno’s doubt about the possibility of such inquiry. He and Socrates proceed to inquire together what virtue is—but now they follow a new method of ‘hypothesis’, introduced by Socrates again by analogy with procedures in geometry. Socrates no longer asks Meno for his views and criticizes those. Among other ‘hypotheses’ that he now works with, he advances and argues for an hypothesis of his own, that virtue is knowledge (in which case it must be teachable). But he also considers weaknesses in his own argument, leading to the alternative possible hypothesis, that virtue is god-granted right opinion (and so, not teachable). In the second half of the dialogue we thus see a new Socrates, with new methods of argument and inquiry, not envisioned in such ‘Socratic’ dialogues as
Euthyphro, Laches,
and
Charmides
.
Meno
points forward to
Phaedo,
where the thesis that theoretical knowledge comes by recollection is discussed again, with a clear reference back to the
Meno,
but now expanded by the addition of Platonic Forms as objects of recollection and knowledge.
J.M.C.
M
ENO
: Can you tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught? Or is it not
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teachable but the result of practice, or is it neither of these, but men possess it by nature or in some other way?
S
OCRATES
: Before now, Meno, Thessalians had a high reputation among the Greeks and were admired for their horsemanship and their wealth, but now, it seems to me, they are also admired for their wisdom, not least [b] the fellow citizens of your friend Aristippus of Larissa. The responsibility for this reputation of yours lies with Gorgias, for when he came to your city he found that the leading Aleuadae, your lover Aristippus among them, loved him for his wisdom, and so did the other leading Thessalians. In particular, he accustomed you to give a bold and grand answer to any question you may be asked, as experts are likely to do. Indeed, he himself [c] was ready to answer any Greek who wished to question him, and every question was answered. But here in Athens, my dear Meno, the opposite is the case, as if there were a dearth of wisdom, and wisdom seems to have departed hence to go to you. If then you want to ask one of us that
[71]
sort of question, everyone will laugh and say: “Good stranger, you must think me happy indeed if you think I know whether virtue can be taught or how it comes to be; I am so far from knowing whether virtue can be taught or not that I do not even have any knowledge of what virtue itself is.”
I myself, Meno, am as poor as my fellow citizens in this matter, and I [b] blame myself for my complete ignorance about virtue. If I do not know what something is, how could I know what qualities it possesses? Or do you think that someone who does not know at all who Meno is could know whether he is good-looking or rich or well-born, or the opposite of these? Do you think that is possible?
M
ENO
: I do not; but, Socrates, do you really not know what virtue is? [c] Are we to report this to the folk back home about you?
S
OCRATES
: Not only that, my friend, but also that, as I believe, I have never yet met anyone else who did know.
M
ENO
: How so? Did you not meet Gorgias when he was here?