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    The Portable Plato
    The Portable Plato
    The Portable Plato
    Ebook742 pages12 hours

    The Portable Plato

    By Plato and Scott Buchanan

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    Writing in the fourth century B.C., in an Athens that had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Plato formulated questions that have haunted the moral, religious, and political imagination of the West for more than 2,000 years: what is virtue? How should we love? What constitutes a good society? Is there a soul that outlasts the body and a truth that transcends appearance? What do we know and how do we know it? Plato's inquiries were all the more resonant because he couched them in the form of dramatic and often highly comic dialogues, whose principal personage was the ironic, teasing, and relentlessly searching philosopher Socrates.

    In this splendid collection, Scott Buchanan brings together the most important of Plato's dialogues, including Protagoras, The Symposium, with its barbed conjectures about the relation between love and madness, Phaedo and The Republic, his monumental work of political philosophy. Buchanan's learned and engaging introduction allows us to see Plato both as a commentator on his society and as a shaper of the societies that followed, who bequeathed to us a hunger for the ideal as well as a redeeming habit of humane skepticism.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Books
    Release dateMar 1, 1977
    ISBN9781101127490
    The Portable Plato
    Author

    Plato

    Plato (428−348 BCE) was a philosopher and mathematician in ancient Greece. A student of Socrates and a teacher of Aristotle, his Academy was one of the first institutions of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely regarded as the father of modern philosophy. 

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      The Portable Plato - Plato

      001

      Table of Contents

      THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY

      Title Page

      Copyright Page

      Introduction

      PROTAGORAS

      SYMPOSIUM

      PHAEDO

      THE REPUBLIC

      THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY

      Plato

      Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.) stands with Socrates and Aristotle as one of the shapers of the whole intellectual tradition of the West. He came from a family that had long played a prominent part in Athenian politics, and it would have been natural for him to follow the same course. He declined to do so, however, disgusted by the violence and corruption of Athenian political life, and sickened especially by the execution in 399 of his friend and teacher, Socrates. Inspired by Socrates’ inquiries into the nature of ethical standards, Plato sought a cure for the ills of society not in politics but in philosophy, and arrived at his fundamental and lasting conviction that those ills would never cease until philosophers became rulers or rulers philosophers. At an uncertain date in the early fourth century B.C. he founded in Athens the Academy, the first permanent institution devoted to philosophical research and teaching, and the prototype of all western universities. He travelled extensively, notably to Sicily as political adviser to Dionysius II, ruler of Syracuse.

      Plato wrote over twenty philosophical dialogues, and there are also extant under his name thirteen letters, whose genuineness is keenly disputed. His literary activity extended over perhaps half a century; few other writers have exploited so effectively the grace and precision, the flexibility and power, of Greek prose.

      Scott Milross Buchanan (1895-1968) taught philosophy and religion at the College of the City of New York, the University of Virginia, and Fisk University. During his nine years as dean of St. John’s College at Annapolis, Maryland, he helped inaugurate and implement its great books curriculum. His books include Possibility and Poetry and Mathematics.

      Each volume in The Viking Portable Library either presents a representative selection from the works of a single outstanding writer or offers a comprehensive anthology on a special subject. Averaging 700 pages in length and designed for compactness and readability, these books fill a need not met by other compilations. All are edited by distinguished authorities, who have written introductory essays and included much other helpful material.

      001

      PENGUIN BOOKS

      Published by the Penguin Group

      Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

      Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

      Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

      Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

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      Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

      Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pry Ltd)

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      Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads,

      Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

      Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

      Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

      Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

      First published in the United States of America

      by The Viking Press, Inc., 1948

      Reprinted 1957,1958,1959,1960,1961 (twice),

      1962,1963,1964,1965,1966 (twice).

      1967,1968,1969,1970,1971,1973 (twice), 1974, 1976

      Published in Penguin Books 1977

      Copyright 1948 by The Viking Press, Inc. Copyright @ renewed The Viking Press, Inc., 1976

      All rights reserved

      LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING PUBLICATION DATA

      Plato.

      The portable Plato.

      Bibliography: p. 41.

      1. Philosophy—Collected works. I. Jowett, Benjamin,

      1817-1893. 11. Title.

      B358.j-54346

      eISBN : 978-1-101-12749-0

      The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any

      other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.

      Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage

      electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

      http://us.penguingroup.com

      EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

      IN THE year 1948 the reading of Plato’s dialogues by a large number of people could make the difference between a century of folly and a century of wisdom for the world. Reading The Republic has made that difference at various times of crisis in the past. A young American who reads Plato now may sympathize with the youthful Alexander who must have shuddered to see the chaotic world that he was fated to conquer. Tutored by one of Plato’s pupils, Aristotle, Alexander read Plato. He gave a unique quality to the world that fell under his dominion: he was the first statesman in our tradition to see the world as one city. If there is a chance now of one political world without the dread necessity of conquest, it may come about partly because human virtue and political justice can still be seen in the mirror of Plato’s writings. Alexander was a conqueror and something less than a philosopher-king, but he did have the elements of a liberal education.

      For many people in the past the reading of Plato has been the beginning of their deep liberal education. Such education takes devious ways and it has many by-products, some good, some bad, all of them disturbing. The first and most obvious symptom that it is taking effect is an incorrigible urge to question things that have always been taken for granted. The second stage of the disturbance is a feeling of shame that such questions have never been asked before. Partial recovery from this blow to pride is achieved by a rally to the attack, the supposed enemy being conventional morality and opinion. The questions then come in Chinese puzzles, one inside the other, or in ranks, one behind the other in endless array. Apparently the conventions are easily routed, for they seem to melt away. Actually they have disguised themselves and changed sides, turning up everywhere as the assumptions behind the questions. The result at this point is panic, confusion, and paralysis.

      Bright boys in college blame their teachers and protest in anger when this happens to them. Only later do they know that a splinter of Socratic irony has lodged in their souls for which they will always be grateful. In a similar mood Mens, a grown man, reports his pain thus:

      O Socrates, I used to be told, before I knew you, that you were always doubting yourself and making others doubt; and now you are casting your spells over me, and I am simply getting bewitched and enchanted, and am at my wits’ end. And if I may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me both in appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have now torpified me, I think. For my soul and my tongue are really torpid, and I do not know how to answer you; and though I have been delivered of an infinite variety of speeches about virtue before now, and to many persons—and very good ones they were, as I thought—at this moment I cannot even say what virtue is. And I think you are very wise in not voyaging and going away from home, for if you did in other places as you do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician.

      And the Socratic response to the protest is not altogether comforting:

      As to my being a torpedo, if the torpedo is torpid as well as the cause of torpidity in others, then indeed I am a torpedo, but not otherwise; for I perplex others not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself. And now I know not what virtue is, and you seem to be in the same case, although you did once perhaps know before you touched me. However, I have no objection to join with you in the enquiry."

      So the reader of Plato joins Socrates in inquiry, as Sancho Panza joined Don Quixote, for adventures of the mind. And although there is a deep consent, like a fire kindled deep in the mind, there is always a tension between the squire and the knight-errant, the little man with proverbs for wisdom riding on a donkey and the knight with the piercing eye riding on a horse, those two parts of each human soul. The intellectual destiny that each of us has depends upon who gets the upper hand, knight or squire.

      Too often it is the squire that masters the knight and drags him off the unbeaten track. The record shows that readers of Plato become Platonists and ride donkeys. Seeing the battle with the conventions as the rivalry of opinions, they choose what seems to be the winner, call it the truth, and spend the rest of their lives in defense, challenging all comers. This was already happening before Socrates died. Some, noting the argument, recorded in the Protagoras, to show that pleasure is the good, set up the Cyrenaic School of philosophy which later combined with the atomism of Democritus to make the doctrine of Epicureanism. Others noted the opposing doctrine that the good is virtue, and virtue is knowledge, and became Cynics and later Stoics. It is true that these riders of Platonic donkeys have ruled islands, as the leaders of these schools did, and some of them ruled empires, as the Roman Stoics did, but the shock of reading Plato and touching Socrates has, as a piece of education, proved abortive in them. It may be that some of these caught the vision of the idea and, feeling its power, rode a horse, but they allowed the donkey to lead them down familiar roads where convention puts vision to sleep.

      There are, of course, those whose minds took fire from the inquiry concerning the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo, from the intellectual pursuit of love in the Symposium, or from the exploration of utopia in The Republic. These set out on adventures, tilted with illusions, and identified new realities. Such are Plotinus, Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, the builders of the Church, and the founders of the Italian city republics. These were followers of Plato, to be sure, but they were not Platonists. They found insights, not doctrines, in Plato. They built large worlds which they understood but did not try to rule.

      But there is great danger in reading Plato through the mediums that these Platonists and these followers of Plato contributed to the tradition. For the modem mind doctrine and influence suggest heroes and cults. Any persistent opinion gets traced back to a personal origin, and we depend upon history to explode or inflate the myth that results. Most of Plato, both influence and origin, has thus been reduced to a cloud, sometimes luminous and sometimes dark. The origins of his ideas are lost in pre-history; his influence in our civilization is at once weak and all-pervasive, as we now see it in the modem fog.

      It hardly need be said that Plato is a very eloquent writer, but this very fact should be a warning to the reader. Almost any current doctrine or movement of the day will begin to resonate with a Platonism as the Dialogues are read. It is all too easy to identify a character in a dialogue, or, worse, Plato himself, with one of these fragments of contemporary history, and it is often an effective device in teaching Plato to use temporarily such an aid to the student, but the equation should be erased before it becomes a label or a cliché. Plato the Anglo-Catholic, the mathematical physicist, the totalitarian, the rationalistic atheist; these are the impostures of the last generation of Plato readers, all of them plausible, all of them deeply misleading, and, worst, all making the simple direct reading of the dialogues impossible. A recently arrived European scholar, teaching a freshman class in Plato, reported in a kind of ecstasy that the boys thought Plato was talking to them. This, he added, would be impossible in Europe, where Plato may still be the inspirer of an ideology or even the revered leader of a party.

      One of the banes of our time, as it was of Plato’s time, is party scholarship, which splinters subject-matters and grinds texts into dust. The profession of philosophy is particularly susceptible to the party spirit. The cure for it is the rebirth of wonder in a man’s mind. One of the means to such rebirth is the direct, simple, rapid reading of Plato. It seems likely that Aristotle was thinking of Plato when he said that philosophy begins in wonder.

      I would therefore advise the present reader to stop reading this introduction at this point and turn to the dialogues. I promise him that the rest will wait for him until he comes back with the confused curiosity that the wonder of the dialogues themselves engenders. I would add only one suggestion, similar to the museum guide’s direction where to stand as one views the pictures: Plato is the craftsman of a very superior dramatic art; the play is the thing.

      The secret of the power of these dialogues, the Protagoras, the Phaedo, the Symposium, and The Republic, is their dramatic wholeness. This is true of all the dialogues, but these have most often been chosen for their dramatic verve, and also because they contain most of Plato. The naming of the persons of the drama is a suggestion that the dialogues are dramas, and there is a further recognition of it in the theory that Plato was imitating the mimes, or short dramatic sketches, of Sophron. But this would lead one to suppose that Plato was sugar-coating high and difficult doctrine. This is not the case. His mind is always on the story, the narrative account of things done, the plot that is the soul of the conversation. It is not an accident that the highest philosophic teaching that Plato offers is not doctrine, but dialectic, a conversation in which ideas animate persons in search of wisdom. A dialogue, which is the practice of dialectic, is a historic event in which men with bodies, senses, passions, and thoughts live and move with purposes and willful intentions that involve even the reader in the highest and most serious human concerns. No thought is expressed except by a character, and no act is done without revealing an intention. This dramatic principle is realized throughout a dialogue and in the finest detail. There are no first acts where things are done and said merely to introduce a strange person; there are no interludes of humor merely to relieve the suspense; there are no episodes merely to summarize and to provide a spectacular end. There is nothing left unprocessed by dramatic workmanship. No poet except Shakespeare has more fully made people intelligible to themselves and to us.

      There is nothing that more powerfully threatens to destroy the dramatic imagination than an idea; it is often said that Shakespeare’s sure and integral dramatic touch is due to his ignorance of ideas and his exclusive attention to people. Of course this is utterly false unless it means that he was the master of that learned ignorance that is identical with wisdom. The thought in Shakespeare is as high and as low as men go, and the same thing Can be said of Plato. Nevertheless, the threat of ideas in drama is real, and it is only the master who successfully copes with them as his essential materials.

      Aside from what may be attributed to native genius, Plato had great aids to confirm his dramatic bent. No people had a more dramatic common life than the Greeks, which is as much as to say that the Greeks as a people had a dramatic sense of life. This sense is most impressively expressed in the two great historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, who report the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, respectively. Herodotus, who brings almost all of the religious ideas of his world to bear on his narrative of events, often skeptically and humorously, builds a towering and broad-based structure out of all the materials in the known world, and the secret of the structure is the Greek tragic view of life. Not only is the great arching pattern the tragedy of the Persian Empire, but every constituent episode is a small tragedy with its parts welded together with choral lyrics and comments. The amazing thing is that there is little evidence that this was his literary intention. He moves freely in the medium of popular thought, and at times seems to be merely the loquacious compiler of everyday stories. He merely records the sights that people had of themselves. Thucydides, in a much less richly imagined recollection, rises to greater tragic heights in a more tightly and powerfully reasoned plot in his account of the Peloponnesian War, of which Athens herself is the hero. In this dramatic pattern Thucydides seems to know, as we now know both from him and others, that the Peloponnesian War is the prototype and presiding spirit of all crises in Western culture. It has never been repeated, but every great incident has been an imitation of it. Thucydides did not write colloquially and facilely, as Herodotus did, but he speaks in full confidence that he will be understood by people acquainted with the style and principles of the great plays.

      Plato as a youth must have heard both Herodotus and Thucydides recited in public, but he also lived in a community that continued to move and think in the mediums that the historians used. There is evidence to make us suppose that Plato conceived his philosophic assignment as the attempt to understand the mysteries that the tragic history of Greece presented. The assignment to himself of this problem was a far greater aid than the ton or so of pre-Socratic philosophic treatises of which we have only the fragments.

      The other great aids to dramatic imagination are perhaps more incisive and germane, the poems of Homer and the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. The wholeness of Homer’s world and the integrity of his characters are miracles of poetic conception even for us. They were for the Greeks, of course, a bible, a manual carried in memory or in a tunic pocket everywhere and always. In Plato’s own lifetime a Homeric quotation was proverbial and aphoristic wisdom, like Spanish proverbs from the time of Cervantes until now. There is internal evidence that it was this use and wont in the Greek familiarity with Homer that set one of the basic loci of Plato’s thought. In the Meno, one of the so-called Socratic dialogues, Socrates is made to say in one of his most emphatic speeches that, although he is uncertain about most things, there is one thing that he will fight for as long as he lives, and that is that there is a valid distinction with a difference between opinion and knowledge. This distinction is both a problem and the first step in method for Plato throughout the dialogues, and one of his favorite devices is to have Socrates lay down a Homeric quotation as a touchstone beside any expression of opinion by a character in the dialogue. Opinion is somewhere between ignorance and knowledge; it is belief held when one does not know, but a belief within which there may be hidden some clarifiable and certain knowledge. Homer as quoted is the measure of such a matter of knowledge. There is no doubt here of the original wisdom of Homer or of the common man, but the mere second-hand expression, the myth, the unexamined meaning of it in the mouth of an Athenian, is the typical run of current Greek popular thought. So it gets extended to the so-called empirical wisdom of the artisan, the craftsman, the property owner, the soldier, the priest, the lawyer, and the political leader. As one must analyze the Homeric quotation, so must one analyze and criticize the common sense of every man, to get rid of the ambiguity, to eliminate the ignorance, and to save the spark of knowing that is in it. The common man and the poet utter oracles, and it is the pious man’s duty to inquire what of reality is being expressed. Socrates is a midwife who helps the pregnant common man to deliver his ideas. As Homer speaks for all men, so all men speak like Homer, and it is the business of Socrates to thrash and winnow the grains of truth from the perennial harvests of opinion in the market place.

      That there is knowledge in poetry is not an original discovery of Plato, nor should it be news to us; practically all the philosophers before Plato wrote in verse, and we still have so-called philosophical poets. But only the mind of a playwright would find both wisdom and poetry in the talk of the ordinary man, and for the proper winning of such wisdom a character like Socrates would have had to be invented if he had not existed.

      There are many other lesser poets with whom Plato was familiar, some that he quotes, criticizes, and even makes fun of, but it is the great tragic and comic poets that possess and move his mind. As Homer supplies the raw material of his craft, so Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes set the aim and the method of the dialogues.

      Tragedy has a misty and perhaps a mystical origin. The anthropologists tell a story of prehistoric rituals connected with plant,. animal, and human fertility in which the god Dionysus is killed in the autumn, his flesh scattered on the fields as a kind of divine manure, and he is reborn in the spring as a child. He is both the prototype of the tragic hero and the god to whom sacrifices were made when the imitative plays were performed in the Greek theatrical festivals of Plato’s time. There is some evidence that the plays were popular presentations of both the Orphic and the Eleusinian mysteries, to which only the select few belonged as to rival state churches. There is heavy evidence that they were the canonical forms for theological speculation, in that they were serious attempts, only partially successful, to justify the ways of the gods to men. These may be heavy afterthoughts of modem scholarship to explain the simple spontaneous power that the tragedies still have even for us, but there is no doubt that their effects are not exaggerated in such estimates of their origins. Whether it was religious faith, common opinion, or just wonder at human affairs, the Greek mind found the tragic ordeal an effective purge of mystery and a savior of wonder.

      The story or myth ran to a type. A good man is possessed by an idea, a plan, and a purpose. In his steps to carry it out, he becomes entangled in circumstance until there comes a step, difficult and ominous, but necessary if he is to be true to himself. Actually the step contains a destructive contradiction that he does not fully see. He hesitates to take it, but feels and thinks that he can choose no other; it is a choice that is not a choice. The step leads to the failure of his purpose, the crushing of his character, often of his person. But in this catastrophe and calamity he loses the blindness of his resolved action and sees himself and the world in a new light. Plays with such master-plots were written in trilogies in which the first play set the situation for the second and the second for the third, and the three were finally followed by a so-called satyr-play which gave a comic allegorical version of the three preceding episodes. The stories chosen for this treatment were usually familiar legends, though sometimes original constructions. They were reminiscences leading to recognitions.

      The most illustrious example of these probing myths is the story of Oedipus, the prehistoric King of Thebes, as it is presented in Sophocles’ play, Oedipus the King. The first recording of the story in writing is in Homer,¹ Odysseus reciting:

      And I saw the mother of Oedipodes, fair Epicaste, who wrought the monstrous deed in ignorance of mind, in that she wedded her own son, and he, when he had slain his father, wedded her, and straightway the gods made these things known among men. Howbeit he abode as lord of the Cadmeans in lovely Thebe, suffering woes through the baneful counsels of the gods, but she went down to the house of Hades, the strong warder. She made fast a noose on high from a lofty beam, overpowered by her sorrow, but for him she left behind woes full many, even all that the Avengers of a mother bring to pass.

      This and other things like it are seen by Odysseus as if mirrored in a sacrificial pool of blood when he visits the shades in Hades: a Homeric opinion.

      Sophocles makes Oedipus the protagonist and hero and uses the circumstance and sophistication of the folk tradition to focus and magnify the tragic essence of the folk tale. Upon the birth of Oedipus Laius, his father is warned by the Delphic oracle that he will be slain by his son. Oedipus is therefore exposed to die, but the shepherd in charge of the exposure passes him on to the king of Corinth who brings him up as his son. Rumors of his real origin disturb him and he goes to Delphi where he is told that he will kill his father and marry his mother. In horror he avoids Corinth, and on the lonely road to Thebes he quarrels with and kills an old man. On, reaching Thebes he answers the riddle of the Sphinx, who dies in defeat. This brings him to court, where he marries the queen, and becomes king. After they have had four children, there is a plague in Thebes, and the oracle’s word is that there is a pollution in the city causing the plague. Oedipus orders a search and pronounces punishment by exile for the unknown agent of the unknown crime. He conducts the search with passion, honesty, and persistence. Final suspicion of both himself and of his courtiers pushes him to the desperate end in which it is demonstrated that he is the criminal and cause of the pestilence. Jocasta, the queen, mother, and wife, hangs herself; Oedipus, the king, son, and husband, blinds and exiles himself.

      Sophocles’ play presents only the final action, the pestilence in the city and the search and discovery of its cause. The plot follows closely the machinery of judicial process, with Oedipus playing the parts of detective, prosecutor, judge, and finally guilty defendant. The tragic plot is complete, the action articulate and detailed. The final insight flows from complete collection and recollection of evidence. Catastrophe, the reversal of roles, and calamity, the destructive consequence, are completely reasoned and willed. The end is purgation of passion and clarification of mystery. The name Oedipus is usually accepted to mean swollen-foot, indicating the wound-scar that resulted from the manner of the infant’s exposure and that serves as mark of recognition of personal identity in the play, but it could equally mean He who learned his roots, the man who knew himself.

      The story in this form presents a thoroughly Greek man who devoted himself to honesty with himself and justice for all, a king of men. There is the persistence and subtlety of Odysseus combined with a passionate acceptance of the burden of civilized justice. Sophocles puts his sure finger on the deep mystery and still deeper contradiction that genuine just government contains. The man sins and knows it and takes responsibility for it at last. One is reminded of the king-plays of Shakespeare where the study of this paradox is encyclopedic.

      It is not by chance that Plato in the Apology and the Crito casts Socrates as an Oedipus, a master of life as his name indicates, who reasonably and willingly accepts his condemnation to death. Socrates, the hero-protagonist of the dramatic demonstration of justice in The Republic, uses his own trial, as he has used his whole life, to inquire and to find the answer to the riddle of the Delphic Oracle which had said that he was the wisest man in Greece; has killed his father, the city, by charming the youth away from conventional citizenship to the higher aims of the state; and married his mother, the laws, which have nourished and protected him in his mission. There is a different content in the Platonic riddle of Socrates, and tragedy has worked for a different end on a higher level, but the character and plot are the same. The end of the reminiscence is purgation and insight for all.

      Aristotle says that Oedipus the King is the perfect tragedy, and for Aristotle this means that it is the most thorough realization of the potentiality that lies in the tragic pattern. One reason that it is so good is that the story of Oedipus is one of the best stories in the world; it is still fermenting, not only in the Oedipus complex of Freudian psychology, but in the moral patterns that enable the literary artist to see life steadily and whole. As Freud suggests, it is the hidden story of every man, no matter what the degree of sublimity or sublimation its articulation and purgation achieve. Another reason that it is a good tragedy is that Sophocles was a good work man. He had inherited from Aeschylus the dramatic tools for probing mystery and paradox, the notions of necessity, or fate, the hybris or arrogance of men that incurs the jealousy of the gods, the strict rigor of plot that binds action and thought into a chain of rational choices by the hero, and the inevitability of catastrophe in the kind of human goodness that learns from experience. Sophocles had turned tragedy into a powerful engine of inquiry which must have heightened the sense of spiritual adventure in every Greek’s mind. Socrates is quoting Sophocles when he says in the Apology that the unexamined life is no life at all for a man. Plato learned most of what he knew about dialectic from Sophocles.

      Plato learned a great deal from the other tragic poets. The relation of reason to necessity in Aeschylus’s sea of troubles becomes cosmology in the Timaeus. The diabolic anarchy of man living merely under natural law, as it is presented in the Orestes trilogy, gives tragic power to the account of the rise and fall of civil government in the eighth book of The Republic. But perhaps the most characteristic lesson that Plato learned from these poets was the distinction between natural things in the fleeing shadow of time and the world of unchanging ideas. The tragic hero is the type of all things in nature; he comes into being and he passes away. His career is an embodiment of unchanging qualities, the realization of eternal and therefore incessantly recurring ends and goods. His growth is a blind and perhaps mad transmigration into the world of ideas, and his passage is a fall and a forgetting of the things that prevented understanding. Out of the loss and the suffering, wisdom. It is said that Socrates collaborated with Euripides; if so, Euripides studied the suffering, and Socrates chiseled out the wisdom. The Euripidean plays, as they reflected the religious, moral, and political breakdown of Athens, passed on the tragically worked material of the time to Plato for his new dramaturgy, for which Socrates was needed as the foil.

      There is a legend that before Plato met Socrates he was a comic poet, imitating and rivaling Aristophanes in the theater. There is strong historical presumption that this is not the fact, but like most legends about Plato there is light in it for the kind of curiosity that wants to know the ingredients of the dialogues. Plato was certainly a comic poet in the dialogues, and this is true not merely of the surface gaiety and the teasing results, but also of the deep vision into his human and ideal material. No matter how serious and apparently tragic the data are, there always is the penetration of love and irony. These two ubiquitous qualities in the dialogues are the great comic virtues. For the best view of this quality of comedy in Plato, see the speech that Plato has Aristophanes make on love in the Symposium. Aristophanes himself could have done no better, and yet Plato must have hated him for the fatal effects his Clouds had on the life of Socrates. There are signs even where this matter is directly discussed that Plato belongs with Aristophanes to the charmed circle of those who have achieved comic wisdom. The ironist is understood best when he is being misunderstood; he understands misunderstanding. In this comic way Plato and Aristophanes are rival poets.

      The purpose or end of tragedy was the purgation of pity and terror, as Aristotle said in his Poetics, not just any pity and terror, but that special blend of the two great passions that accompany heroic action. The hero of Homeric times and of later Greek poetry was the inspired lover of great deeds and fame. His discernment of the necessity of great deeds and the virtues that gave him courage to face them were evidence of divinity in the man, and the moment of decision, when the hero plunged into a sea of troubles, was the high point of tragic narrative. The Greeks had a word for it —hybris. It names a quality of pride, arrogance, defiance, and madness, and the resulting great deeds were admired, feared, and pitied because they obviously incurred the jealousy of the gods. Audiences sat transfixed by the stubborn blindness and the fateful irony of the hero’s inevitable choice. The hero’s equally courageous and willing acceptance of reversal, of calamity, and of the judgment of gods and fate, that events seemed to pronounce, purged and enlightened both hero and audience. Such dramatic instruction was the invigorating education of the Greeks. After a century of such education they were ready for the advanced studies that comedy provided. In Aristophanes another Muse is managing the stage.

      It is as if the tragic hero had split into two persons. In a tragedy he was both protagonist and antagonist; he gave himself wholly to his vision, and then at the height of his blind commitment had to accept destructive and transforming light. In comedy this agony is carried by two persons, the hero and the villain, often with the aid of seconds. The heavy darkness of tragedy gives way to lightness and light, and the machinery of the mystery works and plays before all eyes. This is not to say that the burden of pity, fear, and sin is dumped, but rather that laughter and tears are added to it. The magic by which this takes place is the sophistication which tragedy has made possible. In place of the blind pride of the demigod-hero, there is pretense, ironic pretense on the part of the hero, and mischievous or diabolic pretense on the part of the villain or villains. The two pretenses brought together in the action accomplish a purgation, sometimes with more thoroughness and light than in any tragedy.

      Aristophanes discovered the full range of pretense and, in a variety of roles, filled his stage with impostors: the bragging soldier, the learned or pedantic doctor, the magician cook, the flattering parasite, the aged politician, the retired business man, the foolishly wise young man, the lascivious old woman, and the treacherous slave. Most of these claim to know or to do more than they are able, but one, and sometimes more, claims to know less and do less than he actually does. This is the comic mixture, buffoonery and irony lighting and burning each other up.

      There is the theory that comedy arises from the same rites of fertility for man, beast, and crop from which tragedy arises. It is supposed that a god is born, dies, and is resurrected. There is a mother at the birth, a bride at the resurrection, and a struggle with an antagonist at the death, perhaps a medicine-man at both death and resurrection, and these explain the categories of impostorship. There is the theory that the ritual in this case is concerned with the exorcism of devils. Be this as it may, it does not in itself determine the depth and brilliance of the ordeal by laughter, which can reach down to slapstick or up to theology.

      As tragedy seems to have to move on high ground with creatures like men occasionally being transfigured into deities, as the closing episodes of the trilogies sometimes show them, comedy seems to have complete freedom of situation, material, and style. It is, for instance, very easy to turn a tragedy into a comedy; delivery in a slightly mocking tone of voice can do it with even the best specimens. Inspired madness seems to have a quick affinity with bombast, as the schoolboy translator of Aeschylus well knows. There are consequently comic parodies of tragedies and melodramas. But there can be vulgar comedies dealing in pornography and petty violence, backyard quarrels between housewives, intrigue between gossipy old men, satires on historical and current heroes, battles of giants and political ideologies such as we have today without a much-needed author. This range of versatility, set beside the rather narrow dignity of tragedy, should not confuse us; their dramatic ends are the same, and their successes mutually dependent. Tragedy impregnates and delivers; comedy lets the brood of offspring live.

      The level on which a comedy moves is determined essentially by the powers that can be planted in the hero. To his audience he must appear part fool; in himself he must have either the confidence of a very energetic ignorance, or great restraint in the exercise of his intelligence. Simple naivete and omnivorous curiosity make the best ironic buffoon. The hero undertakes some trivial or commonplace project, is beset by imposture and illusion. By irony, or inquiry, as the Greek word eironeia indicates, he moves or transforms the illusions progressively until they disappear. Either curiosity or wit will accomplish the puncture. Magic or just imagination may suffice, and laughter is the sign of success. The original project may never be accomplished, or others may successively or endlessly take its place, but the pure gold of comic wisdom and charity precipitates almost unnoticed. There is a tradition of folk comedy that is said to keep us sane. It has familiar figures in it, such as Punch and Judy, Pulcinella, Pierrot, Harlequin, and Domino, the clowns in the circus, the faces on playing cards, and the now stock figures of Hollywood movies. We attend the sideshows at country fairs, go to the circus and opera, play bridge, and do our daily comics or our weekly movies, not because we are patrons of the arts but because we need the shadowy repetition of the ancient ritual to renew our lives.

      But the catalyst in this human alchemy is the ironic hero who holds the secret for all the other characters in the play and for his audience. He has somehow received the sign, as Socrates did from the Delphic oracle, that he is wise, he has taken it as a riddle, and has looked for the answer. The answer is that he will be wise if he learns that he knows nothing. These are stage directions for the comic actor; he is to play the fool. So much will make a comedy provided he does not completely discount the truth or probability of his folly. If, as Socrates did, he lends his folly an ever-deepening truth, he will raise the comedy as far as his learning ignorance will go with him. This is the secret of the writing and the reading of the Platonic dialogues. They are comedies, and Socrates is the archetypal comic hero of all time.

      The key to the comic character and the ironic role of Socrates in the dialogues is in the inscription borrowed by Socrates from the temple of Apollo at Delphi and appropriated by him as the ruling principle of his life: Know thyself. He coupled this with a hypothesis, also provided by the Delphic oracle, that he was the wisest man in Greece. He reported these two facts to his judges in the Apology, and interpreted them to mean what he had discovered for himself: he was wise because he knew that he did not know. I know that I do not know contains a pun as it is pronounced in Greek. As it is written with a choice of accents, spacing and emphasis, it can mean three things:

      1. I know that I do not know.

      2. I know what I do not know.

      3. I know whatever I do not know.

      It can even mean I know because I do not know. It suggests that the study of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.

      The punning proverb is a powerful formula if it is taken, as Socrates took it, as a hypothesis to be verified by a life of inquiry. It is also a powerful piece of ironic thought to be put to use in comic drama. In the early dialogues it is tried on professional poets, priests, military men, and politicians, whose opinions blossom quickly into a pretense of knowledge. It is tried on professional wise men, the sophists who are the professors of the day, and whose scholarship, as always, pretends both knowledge and humble ignorance. It is tried on starry-eyed young men who, like sophomores, underestimate the difficulty and cost of the quest for wisdom. In the later dialogues it is tried on seasoned, if not wise, men who shed their protective pretense before competent questions. The test for competent questions is of course: Does the questioner know the ignorance that his question expresses?

      There is a great variety in these trials by irony. With bombast Socrates was irritatingly humble and gentle; with the clever irresponsible sophist he outdid the sophistry; with the evil stupid man he was patient and diabolic; with the stupid good man he was gentle and mock-respectful; with the practical man he was playful with the commonplace; with the young man he was devastatingly critical and eloquently imaginative; with the honest man he was unremittingly explorative. There is pretense in all these roles that Socrates takes, but the pretenses, amounting often to outrageous deception and absurdity, are measured and matched to willful ignorance and bad temper in the opponent impostor. Socrates is always good-tempered, understands his opponent’s bad temper, and has his eye on the argument and where it leads.

      The beginning reader of the dialogues is often irritated and repelled by the behavior of Socrates and his conduct of the argument, and often this is not cured by repeated reading. This is partly because one cannot help but identify one’s own opinions and sometimes one’s deepest convictions with the apparently sincere beliefs of one or another of the impostors. The dialogues, like psychoanalytic procedures, set up resistance in the reader. On the other hand the beginning reader sometimes falls in love with Socrates and leaves his critical guard down, believing everything that Socrates says, and fighting everything that his opponent says. Again there is a psychological transference that blinds the reader to the dramatic truth. To the seasoned reader of Plato there is a great variety of result to be noted and weighed. One of the formulated rules of scholarship is to note first what is said in a dialogue, and then quite separately to note what is done; these are called, respectively, the logos and the ergon. The method gets results in penetration, and therefore is a good rule for stalled beginners, but it has a fatal flaw in that it cuts the drama in two, and does not accommodate the two views. Paul Shorey’s rule, exemplified in his book What Plato Said, to collect sayings of various characters to make a unified Platonic doctrine, is worse, although it has been the scholar’s temptation always and has filled the tradition with straw Platonisms. Plato himself says he has no doctrine, and he makes Socrates say the same for himself over and over again—with irony. One should remember Bernard Shaw, spending most of his waking life that is not spent in writing, telling the world in his inveterate comic way that he has no doctrine. It was noticeable, on the occasion of the recent Shaw revival, that dramatic critics have begun to catch up and laugh with Shaw at the doctrine of the life force and the superman.

      But there is always a serious question left to the reader and the spectator of comedy. Characters and perhaps ideas have been presented in a kind of contest for survival, but they have undergone a sea-change, sometimes disintegration, other times thorough transfiguration. Their disappearance or their survival seems to prove nothing, except perhaps that thought and laughter are irresponsible and frivolous. Such is the case with much in the reading of Plato: all men, including Socrates, prove to be sophists; all ideas, including ideas about ideas, can be refuted or discredited.

      Myself when young did eagerly frequent

      Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument

      About it and about; but evermore

      Came out by the same door where in I went.

      These lines were written by a man who could, and probably did, understand Plato, for he was a mathematician, and Plato when he was not a poet was a mathematician. Undoubtedly Omar also understood the powerful corroding skepticism of Socrates—and knew the comic force of his rule of life.

      There is no doubt that the great theme of both tragedy and comedy is death. The original event from which the theory of the origin of tragedy and comedy is drawn seems to have been a human sacrifice, sometimes reinterpreted to symbolize the death of a god. But the ritual and the dramas always present a resurrection, sometimes in tragedy the deification of the hero, sometimes in comedy the marriage of the hero to a god. The deeper and more comprehensive theme is rejuvenation, redemption, and transfiguration.

      The deeper plot can be found in Plato, more tightly woven and more subtle in its development. Men, like Homeric heroes, burst into the conversation with convictions, with causes, and with ideas to sell. They are led to the sacrificial altar by Socrates. They are stripped of their opinions and slaughtered by questions. This happens to Protagoras, Prodicus, and Hippias in the Protagoras, and to Cephalus, Polemarchus, and Thrasymachus in The Republic. But if the argument is followed closely, the refuted opinions return as rediscoveries and recognitions later in the conversation. They have become ideas understood rather than opinions held, and they can be built into a steady vision. The vision in the Protagoras discovers the deep connection between knowledge and virtue, and The Republic places justice as an eye in the soul. These discoveries are not doctrines; they can be refuted if they are entertained is propositions. They are principles, or, in the Greek sense, beginnings, to which thought returns again and again as it explores their embodiments.

      The popularly known doctrines of Plato, the theory of ideas, the myths of transmigration, reminiscence, and the immortality of the soul, Platonic love, and the philosopher-king, were not original discoveries of his. They were current ideas, or dug up from the past. His moral doctrines, his theological speculations, his atoms, and his mathematical physics and astronomy, these were current controversies. Even his own original myths are put in the mouths of soothsayers or Egyptian priests. All of them, without exception, are thrown into the dialectical hopper and processed without mercy. But they are saved and transformed into ideas through which human beings have seen the world for two thousand years. It was through them that he saw his own Greek world. A glance at it may help to see him and ourselves better.

      The great Persian army under Xerxes retreated from Greece in abject defeat at the battle of Salamis in 479 B.C. Up to the time of the Persian War what we call Greece was a scattering of island and coastal cities around the Aegean Sea, with an important outpost in southern Italy and Sicily. All but southern Italy and Sicily had rallied to repel the Persians, first early in the war at Marathon and then at Thermopylae and at Salamis. It was a victory for liberty against tyranny, as Herodotus told the Greeks in his history, and as they had vaguely understood it as they fought. For the following fifty years the little city-states flourished, most of them under amazingly free democracies with all that that meant in the free development of skills, the growth of trade, and the disciplines by which men learn to take responsibility for themselves and for each other. Many of the tragedies written during these years celebrated the struggle and heroism that went into the Greek discovery of government and polity; it was these men who made, and have taught us, the momentous distinction between government by laws and government by men.

      But during this time a complication was weaving itself into the lives of these men and these cities. Athens was becoming the center of trade, the controller of the market, the crossroads for the transportation of goods between east and west and between north and south. The protection of these routes from pirates justified the collection of tribute from the other cities, first in ships and then in money. Athens became the banker and the military power. The responsibilities and the powers of empire were being forced upon her. The constitution of Athens was good, the delegation of strong powers to representatives who were responsible to the people. Good men became better with these responsibilities, and their responsiveness extended to their lesser sister cities. Athens became the market place of ideas and the school of all Hellas, as Pericles, the Archon, later reminded his fellow-citizens.

      But the complications became more elaborate and the weights in the deliberations became heavier. The issues between Athens and the allies sharpened until it became necessary to play the Athenian populace against the sister cities. A city, sensitized to the quality of hybris in the theater, began to feel it in the government. There was talk of the failure of democracy to meet the day’s problems, and the plutocrats and the knights talked of oligarchy, a government by a few who could manage great power. The other cities became suspicious of sharp dealing and of less justice in the alliances. They too talked of oligarchy. Corinth and Sparta particularly became jealous of Athenian power and wealth.

      In 432 B.C. formal war was declared by Sparta at the instigation of Corinth on the occasion of an oligarchic revolt in Corcyra, an out-of-the-way colony in the Adriatic. Neither side wanted war, although Corinth thought it inevitable and wished to make it preventive of complete domination by Athens. Sparta was only half convinced; Athens temporized. The two large cities angled for allies among the smaller cities, then grabbed, and then conquered. There were very few head-on clashes in full-dress battle, and when the battles came they were indecisive. There were many mischievous raids. There were attempts at truces looking to permanent peace. Athens suffered early in the war from a plague that weakened all its resources and especially its manpower.

      After twelve years of this worsening situation with no decision, Athens, both from boredom and desperation, decided on a great military and naval expedition to gain the great city of Syracuse as ally. Ships were built and equipped, men were put aboard, and troops were mustered under the leadership of Nicias, who had grave doubts of the enterprise. Alcibiades, the favorite pupil of Socrates, who himself had been with Alcibiades in two of the larger battles of the war, and had saved Alcibiades’ life in one of them, was the leading spirit in the enterprise. But just before the expedition started Alcibiades was accused, probably politically and falsely, of defacing certain statues in the city. After he left with the ships, he was tried and condemned. From anger and shame as well as from desperation he abandoned the expedition and found his way to Sparta and was later found to be helping Spartans in the war. In spite of his many tomfooleries and obvious misbehavior he was probably the most brilliant mind and dashing soldier of his time.

      Without the very brilliance of mind and deed that he might have provided, the Athenians suffered one of the great defeats of all time at Syracuse. The ships and the men were destroyed.

      This defeat was followed by demoralization and disorder in Athens; there were oligarchic revolutions and counter-revolutions, each weaker and more confused than its predecessor. Ten years later Athens capitulated to the Spartans, the walls of the city were razed, and Athens never again became powerful.

      Socrates was born in the early days of the peace following the Persian War, and lived most of his life in the glory and brilliance of the Periclean Age. He saw the strains of empire in the growing power of Athens and in the dulling edge of decision in its personalities. His chief concern became the teaching of virtue, which is the theme of many of the dialogues. Plato was born four years after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, the year that Pericles died. He was a war-baby and saw only the dimming of the glory. He could have known Socrates only ten years, Socrates the living evidence of the glory and almost the only sign of its cause, a man concerned about human virtue. It was the trial and death of Socrates that stung Plato into the grasping of his life problem and his life work—to save the soul of Greece in purgatory.

      Aside from the political, military, and commercial struggles into which Athens was forced, there were many personal reactions to the crisis. Thucydides was exiled early in the war on a suspicion of having used an Athenian fleet for the protection of personal property. This forced withdrawal provided the occasion and the point, or points, of observation for the writing of the Greek super-tragedy. Alcibiades’ exile and quasi-treason moved a testing and inquiring mind into every theater of military and political action. Sympathetic reading of Alcibiades’ career might see in it the patriot, desperate and therefore mistaken, acting in any medium he could find at hand to bring about a broad political unity for all the Hellenic people, a federation of the city-states, which a hundred years before had been a lost cause in the Persian War. There may even be seen a touch of Socratic irony in Alcibiades’ provocative actions, which would throw a curious glow over his last meeting with Socrates on the eve of the departure of the Syracusan expedition as it is movingly recorded at the end of the Symposium. On ordinary reading, Alcibiades is of course the supposed evidence that Socrates corrupted the youth of Athens.

      But there is another eloquent example of the reaction of intelligence to the Athenian crisis. Aristophanes’ Birds was presented at the Dionysia in 414 B.C. just as the Athenian fleet set sail for Syracuse. It can be taken as a humorous celebration of a great adventure, but most readers with the advantage of hindsight see in it a deeper judgment of fate. It presents two Athenians, whose names mean Good Hope and Persuasion, leaving Athens to look for a new city where life can be lived simply, without bother. They consult the hoopoe bird, an individual of the species who had once been a man and had been transformed into a bird because of woman trouble. He has nothing to suggest, but Mr. Persuasion has a bright idea: why shouldn’t the birds found a city kingdom in the sky? The idea takes hold, and the birds build a walled city strategically placed between the earth and heaven so that messages from the gods can be intercepted and sacrifices from men can be seized. The air blockade works, and Mr. Persuasion is made King of Cloudcuckooland and endowed with all the authority, power, and glory of Zeus. This is accomplished with the help of Prometheus by a marriage of the new King to Basileia, the executive secretary of Zeus. This play was followed later by two so-called utopian plays, the Lysistrata, in which there is staged a women’s revolution with the aim of achieving peace through a Greek world federation, and the Ecclesiazusae, in which by another women’s revolution a regime of communism is set up in Athens.

      Scholars have never wanted to see any connection between Aristophanes, the comedian, and Plato, the philosopher; but then scholars have never been able to view philosophy with anything but a long pedantic face. Anyone who reads these plays and The Republic for what they are saying and talking about cannot but be enlightened by the comparison. Plato must have seen and read the plays. The Aristophanic embroidery on the Spartan trend in Athens must have teased Plato into the assignment to write The Republic, and lay it up as a pattern in heaven. A. J. Toynbee has made this point in his A Study of History. Incidentally Toynbee traces the phrase the kingdom of heaven from The Birds to the New Testament.

      Timaeus in the dialogue by that name says: But the race of birds was created out of innocent light-minded men, who although their minds were directed toward heaven, imagined, in their simplicity, that the clearest demonstration of the things above was to be explained by sight. The themes of flight and of sight in the dialogues, as associated with birds, souls, and cities, not to mention words and ideas, are signposts for the reader.

      Whatever the literary and scholarly genealogy of the dialogues may be, it seems clear that Plato’s reaction to the crisis was to save the soul of Greece by making Socrates its gay and gallant chief witness for all time. The temptation must have been strong to make him the tragic hero of the idea, but the real Socrates did not let that happen. He himself lifted the tragic pathos to the level of comedy; he made himself worse than the average man, and Aristophanes helped Plato raise him and his purposeful sophistry to the level of comic wisdom.

      The secret of comedy is vision, and its gift to mortals is insight. The vision is partly ocular and imaginative, but it contains idea, a Greek word derived from seeing; and in the combination there is intellectual vision. Mathematics is the sober comic view of the world, and another portable Plato should contain the dialogues that show this side of the philosopher. But comic poetry is the great maker of the visions behind visions that are called hypotheses. It is in the moving treatment of these aids to insight that Plato has for all time set the locus of philosophical thought. The philosophic method is dialectic as it grew and developed from Socratic ironical questioning of the opinion of the common man. Plato was a bird, the wise bird that sees in the night.

      But Plato’s own life is hard to see as a comedy. It has the weight and beauty of a tragedy. He came from families of the ruling aristocracy at the height of the Periclean glory. Through his father he was supposed to have been descended from Poseidon, the god of horses and of the sea. Through his mother he

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