Complete Works (83 page)

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: How, and why?

V
ISITOR
: Because it is in the nature of courage that when it is reproduced over many generations without being mixed with a moderate nature, it comes to a peak of power at first, but in the end it bursts out completely in fits of madness.

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: That’s likely.

V
ISITOR
: And in its turn the soul that is too full of reserve and has no admixture of courageous initiative, and is reproduced over many generations [e] in this way, by nature grows more sluggish than is timely and then in the end is completely crippled.

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: It’s likely that this too turns out as you say.

V
ISITOR
: It was these bonds that I meant when I said that there was no difficulty at all in tying them together once the situation existed in which both types had a single opinion about what was fine and good. For this is the single and complete task of kingly weaving-together, never to allow moderate dispositions to stand away from the courageous. Rather, by working them closely into each other as if with a shuttle, through sharing of opinions, through honors, dishonor, esteem, and the giving of pledges to one another, it draws together a smooth and ‘fine-woven’ fabric out of
[311]
them, as the expression is, and always entrusts offices in cities to these in common.

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: How?

V
ISITOR
: By choosing the person who has both qualities to put in charge wherever there turns out to be a need for a single officer, and by mixing together a part of each of these groups where there is a need for more than one. For the dispositions of moderate people when in office are markedly cautious, just, and conservative, but they lack bite, and a certain sharp and practical keenness.

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: This too certainly seems to be the case.

V
ISITOR
: And the dispositions of the courageous, in their turn, are inferior [b] to the others in relation to justice and caution, but have an exceptional degree of keenness when it comes to action. Everything in cities cannot go well, either on the private or on the public level, unless both of these groups are there to give their help.

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: Quite.

V
ISITOR
: Then let us say that this marks the completion of the fabric which is the product of the art of statesmanship: the weaving together, with regular intertwining, of the dispositions of brave and moderate people—when the expertise belonging to the king brings their life together in [c] agreement and friendship and makes it common between them, completing
[311c]
the most magnificent and best of all fabrics and covering with it all the other inhabitants of cities, both slave and free; and holds them together with this twining and rules and directs without, so far as it belongs to a city to be happy, falling short of that in any respect.

[O
LDER
] S
OCRATES
:
⁸⁰
Another most excellent portrait, visitor, this one that you have completed for us, of the man who possesses the art of kingship: the statesman.

1
. Reading
de ge
at a3.

2
. Ammon, a great god of the Egyptians, had a famous oracle at Siwah, not far from Theodorus’ home city of Cyrene.

3
. Reading
panu mn
ē
monik
ō
s
at b6.

4
. Reading
kai
at c3.

5
. ‘Yesterday’ refers to the (fictional) occasion of the
Theaetetus,
‘just now’ to that of the
Sophist.

6
. Reading
ton politikon andra
at b3.

7
. In Greek,
epist
ē
m
ē
. ‘Knowledge’ or ‘expert knowledge’ in this translation normally indicates the presence of this noun or of words deriving from the same root. The term ‘expertise’ by itself is reserved for
techn
ē
. Where Plato speaks e.g. of the ‘kingly’ or ‘political’
epist
ē
m
ē
or
techn
ē
, the translation shifts to ‘art,’ the traditional rendering.

8
. ‘Class’, or occasionally ‘real class’, are reserved in this translation for
eidos
(as here), or
genos
, which is used synonymously in this role. (In the
Sophist
translation,
eidos
generally appears as ‘form’ or ‘type,’
genos
as ‘kind.’) What the Visitor and Young Socrates appear to be doing when they ‘divide’ in each case—as here, with knowledge—is to divide a more generic grouping or ‘class’ into more specific sub-groups or ‘(sub-) classes’ (the claim being in each case that the ‘cut’ is made in accordance with actual divisions, existing in things themselves). A third, related, term is
idea
. It can be used to refer to what distinguishes a given class of things from others—its ‘character’—but can also substitute for
eidos
and
genos
as ‘class’/‘real class’. Conversely,
eidos
itself can be used synonymously with
idea
in the sense of ‘character’. Other terms that can play something like the role of
eidos
/
genos
as ‘class’ are
phulon
, literally ‘tribe’ (260d7), and
phusis
(306e11; cf. 278b2), which more usually serves as the standard term for ‘nature’. Puns on
genos
in the two senses of ‘family’/‘race’ and ‘class’ call for special measures: at 260d6, 266b1, it is ‘family or class’, at 310b10 ff., ‘family-type’. Other related terms used in the translation, like ‘category’ (as at 263d8) or ‘sort’ (as in ‘sort of expertise’), do not indicate the presence of any of these key Greek terms, but are supplied by the translator, simply to find natural English phrases to fill out elliptical Greek ones.

9
. Alternatively: “In that case we shall take all these things together—the statesman’s knowledge and the statesman, the king’s knowledge and the king—as one, and put them into the same category?”

10
. Reading
kai m
ē
n
for
kai gar
at e9.

11
. I.e., the ‘self-directing’ sort of expertise.

12
. Reading
koin
ē
i
at d4.

13
. Reading
onomaz
ō
men
at 2–3.

14
. Alternatively: “You must always assert, Socrates, that this is what I say, rather than that other thing.”

15
. Reading
echonta
for
’thelonta
at a3.

16
. I.e., the King of Persia.

17
. Reading
gar d
ē
at e1.

18
. Reading
ou peri
at e8.

19
. Reading
artion
at e11.

20
. Reading
kolobon tina agel
ē
n akerat
ō
n
at d4.

21
. Reading
diair
ō
men
at a5.

22
. See
Theaetetus
147c ff.

23
. In Greek mathematical parlance, ‘having the power of two feet’ is the way of expressing the length of the diagonal of a one-foot square (i.e., in modern terms,
); the expression reflects the fact that a square formed on this line will have an area of two square feet. The diagonal of this square will then ‘have the power’ of four feet—the ‘power of the diagonal of our power’ in the Visitor’s next remark. All this is for the sake of the pun on ‘power’ and ‘feet’: we humans are enabled to move by having two feet, while the members of ‘the remaining class’ from which we are being distinguished—pigs—have four. (On the mathematical use of ‘power’ see
Theaetetus
147d–148b and n.)

24
. I.e., pigs, as the Visitor makes clear in his next question, by punning on the Greek word for ‘pig’.

25
. The swineherd.

26
. See
Sophist
227b.

27
. Cf. Euripides,
Orestes
986 ff.

28
. A ‘golden age’ (cf. Hesiod,
Works and Days
111–22), when everything necessary for the survival of human beings was provided without their having to work for it.

29
. Alternatively, ‘world-order’; the idea of order is central to the Greek term.

30
. Reading
m
ē
th’ holon
at e9.

31
. Alternatively: “at each of the two turnings.” (The word tr. ‘period’ in the text is elsewhere tr. ‘turning,’ i.e., reversal of the direction of rotation.) The translation in the text is based on the assumption that in the myth as a whole the Visitor envisages two eras during
both
of which the cosmos rotates, as it now does, from east to west (one era when it is under god’s control, one under its own inherent power), separated by a relatively brief period of rotation in the reverse direction (so that then the sun rises in the west and sets in the east). This reverse rotation begins immediately after the god releases control, i.e., at the outset of the time when the cosmos rules itself, and it ends when the cosmos gains sufficient self-possession to return to rotating in the normal, east-to-west direction. On this interpretation, the Visitor has just been describing the ‘earth-born’ people as existing during the relatively brief period of reverse-rotation, and Young Socrates now asks whether the golden age of Cronus also occurred during that time, or instead in the era that preceded it. The alternative translation fits with a different interpretation of the myth, which is that of most scholars. According to this prevailing interpretation the Visitor envisages, more simply, two alternating eras, one of west-to-east rotation (under god’s control) and one of the east-to-west rotation we are familiar with: this latter, for us normal, direction of rotation occupies the
whole
of the time when the cosmos is under self-rule. On this interpretation there is no intervening, brief period of reverse-rotation, so the Visitor’s description of the ‘earth-born’ people has placed them in the era of god’s control. Accordingly, Young Socrates is now asking whether the golden age of Cronus existed in that same era, or instead during the era we now live in.

32
. Reading
h
ō
s d’au kata
at d4.

33
. Reading
pant
ē
i ta
at d5.

34
. On the interpretation assumed in the translation (see n. 31 above) these must be a different kind of ‘earth-born’ people from the previous ones (perhaps they are to be considered as produced from the earth instead as babies: cf. 272e, 274a). On the prevalent interpretation this is a second reference to the same earth-born people as before: we now learn that being born from the earth full grown was characteristic of human life for the whole period of god’s control of the cosmos.

35
. Reading
muthous hoioi
at c7.

36
. Alternatively: “… whom alone, because only he has charge of human rearing in accordance with the example of shepherd and cowherd, it is appropriate to think worthy of this name.”

37
. See 261d.

38
. Reading
t
ō
i erg
ō
i
at a7.

39
. Reading
kai sunamph
ō
at c7.

40
. See 268c1, and also 267e ff., 275b, 276b.

41
. See 258e ff.

42
. See perhaps
Sophist
226b ff.

43
. Reading
techn
ē
n krokon
ē
tik
ē
n
at 282e14–283a1.

44
. The Greek here is obscure. The Visitor will immediately explain—in d11–e1—the first of the two ‘parts’ of the expertise of measurement; the second emerges gradually at 284a5–b2, e2–8. See also 284c1 and d6, ‘the coming into being of what is in due measure’, and the reference at 285a1–2 to ‘an art of measurement relating to everything that comes into being’.

45
. Reading
hoi agathoi
at e6.

46
. I.e., in the
Sophist
.

47
. I.e., probably, a way of ‘compelling the more and the less … to become measurable … in relation to the coming into being of what is in due measure’ (284b–c).

48
. Reading
panu
at e6.

49
. Reading
prosagoreu
ō
men
at e4.

50
. Reading
thremma. paraleipomen de
at b2.

51
. Cf. 281b.

52
. At Athens, one of the ‘archons’ or chief magistrates had the title of King Archon.

53
. Reading
katad
ē
los h
ē
min
at a3.