Method and Politics in Plato's Statesman (Cambridge Classical Studies)

Among Plato's works, the Statesman is usually seen as transitional between the Republic and the Laws. This book argues that the dialogue deserves a special place of its own. Whereas Plato is usually thought of as defending unchanging knowledge, Dr Lane demonstrates for the first time how, by placing change at the heart of political affairs, Plato reconceives the link between knowledge and authority. The statesman is shown to master the timing of affairs of state, and to use this expertise in managing the conflict of opposed civic factions. To this political argument corresponds a methodological approach which is seen to rely not only on the familiar method of 'division', but equally on the unfamiliar centrality of the use of 'example'. The demonstration that method and politics are interrelated transforms our understanding of the Statesman and its fellow dialogues.

CAMBRIDGE CLASSICAL STUDIES General Editors

M. F. BURNYEAT, P. E. EASTERLING, M. K. HOPKINS, M. D. REEVE, A. M. SNODGRASS

METHOD AND POLITICS IN PLATO'S STATESMAN

METHOD AND POLITICS IN PLATO'S STATESMAN

M. S. LANE University Assistant Lecturer in History in the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of King's College

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The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, United Kingdom 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia © Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge 1998 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1998 Typeset in 11/13 pt Times New Roman and Greek New Hellenic A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data Lane, M. S. Method and politics in Plato's Statesman / M. S. Lane. p. cm. - (Cambridge classical studies) ISBN 0 521 58229 6 (hardback) 1. Plato. Statesman. I. Plato. Statesman. II. Title. III. Series. JC71.P314L36 1997 / 32o .oi - dc2i 97-6077 C I P ISBN 0 521 58229 6 hardback Transferred to digital printing 2005

AO

To my parents, elders, and teachers

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

page xi

Abbreviations and note on text

xii

Introduction. Method and Politics in Plato's Statesman Part I

i

Method Introduction The Sophisfs use of example and division The Statesman's use of example and division

13 21 33

The analysis of example Conclusions

61 75

Kinship and method Shepherding Weaving

Revising common sense: the delusions of the given Rhetoric and method

Part II The story as a fulcrum of the dialogue Introduction: story-telling and self-criticism Telling the story Zeus versus Kronos: autonomy versus authority The imperative of invention The necessity of narrative

Criticising the story

The insufficiency of narrative: remaining rivals Delusions of grandeur: Kronos as a 'great example' Delusions of grandeur: measured by the mean On the temporality of the kairos

Part i n Politics Introduction Rivalry revisited: subordination of the arts to the mastery of the kairos ix

33 40 46 75 89

99 101 101 III 114

117

117 119 125 132

137 139

CONTENTS

Rivalry renewed: the challenge and subordination of law 146 Two concepts of law: as mortmain and as memorandum 148 A third view: law as makeshift in the second-best regimes 155 Political knowledge as weaving 163 Weaving as political example: gender and simple unity in the Lysistrata 164 Weaving as political example: complex unity in the Statesman 171 Conclusions 182 Delusions of righteousness: the political significance of evaluative conflict 18 2 Delusions of righteousness: the political significance of authority and time 193 Select bibliography General index Index Locorum

203 218 224

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has emerged from a doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge which was supervised by Myles Burnyeat and Malcolm Schofield and examined, most constructively, by David Sedley and Christopher Gill. Many debts are recorded in the dissertation, including the financial support of the Marshall Aid Commemmoration Commission, the Harry S. Truman Foundation, and the Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship of Phi Beta Kappa, and the intellectual and moral support of valued friends and colleagues. My thanks once again to them all. Here I mention only those debts to individuals incurred in the writing of the present book. Foremost among these is that owed to Myles Burnyeat, who championed the book for Cambridge Classical Studies, and to the other editors of the series. Malcolm Schofield and M. M. McCabe very generously commented on a penultimate draft. Serving with Malcolm and Christopher Rowe on the editorial team of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought has kept me Platonically engaged while writing this book, as has the continuing camaraderie of Verity Harte. Alonso Tordesillas kindly invited me to participate in the work of the Centre d'etudes sur la pensee antique 'Kairos kai Logos'. Between completing the dissertation and completing the book I became a University Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of History and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. To Quentin Skinner and Jonathan Steinberg, who have chaired the Faculty during my time there, and to Patrick Bateson as Provost of King's, go my thanks for the support of their respective institutions, as to the colleagues and administrative staff thereof. Finally, warm gratitude to farflung family and friends and above all to A. L., who embodies loving care in the face of all exigencies. XI

ABBREVIATIONS AND NOTE ON TEXT

Works of Plato are cited from the edition of J. Burnet, Oxford Classical Texts series (Oxford, 1900-1903), now superseded for volume I by the revised edition of E. A. Duke, W. F. Hicken, W. S. M. Nicoll, D. B. Robinson, and J. C. G. Strachan (Oxford, 1995). Unless otherwise stated, I quote from the excellent recent translation of the Statesman by C. J. Rowe, an edition and translation to which I and other students of the dialogue are much indebted. Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Plato: Statesman, translated and edited by C. J. Rowe, Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1995. I have also quoted from the Loeb translation of the Sophist, reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Loeb Classical Library from Plato: Theaetetus and Sophist, volume vn, translated by Harold N. Fowler, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921.

The abbreviations for Platonic works are made clear in the text; the most often used are St. Statesman (Politicus in OCT) So. Sophist (Sophista in OCT) Works of Aristotle are cited from the edition of I. Bywater, W. D. Ross, W. Jaeger, Oxford Classical Text Series (Oxford, I897-I957)-

ABBREVIATIONS

The abbreviations for Aristotelian works used are as follows: Met. Metaphysics Pol. Politics N.E. Nicomachean Ethics LSJ DK

Liddell, H. G., R. Scott, H. S. Jones, eds. A. Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford, revised 1968) Diels, H. and W. Kranz, Vorsokratiker (Berlin, 10th edn, i960)

Xlll

INTRODUCTION

METHOD AND POLITICS IN PLATO'S STATESMAN As the discovery of truth and the direction of life are the twofold function of philosophy, so Plato saw a twofold counterfeit of his ideal educator and governor in the professors of wisdom and the public men of his time. The one corrupted inquiry with controversy, the other spoiled politics with faction. Lewis Campbell1

A colleague once remarked to me that the Statesman is a 'very lonely' dialogue. Interpreters as different as the dean of Anglo-American analytical scholarship, Gilbert Ryle, and a leading Straussian have found it wearying and rebarbative to read.2 It has won little reflected glory from the analytical attention paid to its companion the Sophist in the last thirty years.3 Some have taken it to be mainly a discourse on the method of division, itself a procedure of dubious import, and in any case presented more fully in the Sophist, Philebus and Phaedrus*. Others consider it essentially a discourse on 1 2

3

4

Campbell (1973) i, referring to the Sophist and the Statesman together in introducing his edition of both dialogues. Ryle (1966) 285 calls it 'this weary dialogue'. Benardete (1984) Vol ni.73 asks, 'Does the Statesman demand a special effort on our part not to grow tired?', though it should be said that unlike Ryle he finds this wearying quality to be part of the dialogue's message about the application of knowledge to politics. See also Grene (1950) 181: 'The Sophist and the Statesman are among Plato's work unique in that they are dull.' An exception is McCabe (1994). Studies in the Straussian tradition have tended to treat Theaetetus, Sophist and Statesman together: Benardete (1984), Klein (1977); see also Dorter (1994), though his discussion of the Statesman is mainly a summary of its text. A recent and welcome wave of studies of the dialogue includes the papers of the Third International Symposium Platonicum held in Bristol, 1992, selected in Rowe (ed.) (1995), with others in Nicholson and Rowe (1993); the translation introduced by Annas (1995), the masterful edition with commentary of Rowe (1995), and Rosen (1995). Miller (1980) is also thoughtful. Taylor (1961) 9 says that 'the really serious business of both dialogues' is with method rather than the identification of sophist, statesman, or philosopher. Ryle

INTRODUCTION

political theory, 5 though pallid beside the poignancy of the Apology and Crito, the vitriol of the Gorgias, the grandeur of the Republic, the monumentality of the Laws. Seldom have studies of the method and politics of the dialogue been combined in more than a consecutive way. 6 This book explores their intimate connection. Both the method and the politics of the Statesman hinge on the question of the authority of political expertise and how it is to be distinguished from rival forms of expertise rampant within the city. The statesman cannot be defined without distinguishing him from similar rivals, nor can he rule without using his knowledge to command these rivals within the city. In both cases a key rival is the rhetor. He is not banished from the city, but allotted a strictly subordinate role within it, while his concepts for argument and skills in politics are appropriated and revised in defining the statesman. To resolve the challenge of rivals requires a method of definition which appropriates the rhetorical notion of 'example', and a politics of the authority to command which appropriates the rhetorical notion of the 'kairos* or the appropriate action at a given moment. Both method and politics, moreover, strive to reform assumptions and puncture delusions about the evident worth of certain forms of expertise or political action. In its fundamental concern with the nature and authority of political expertise, the Statesman provides one answer to the problem posed in the second protreptic of the Euthydemus (288-92): what could be the subject matter of political expertise? After all, Socrates and Crito muse inconclusively

5

6

(1966) 285-6 sees whatever value the divisions have as the value of the dialogues: he considers division in the Statesman a demonstration 'for beginners only', compared to the more advanced Sophist. Contrast Rosen (1995) 2: the dialogue is 'a demonstration of the inappropriateness of diaeresis to the study of human affairs'. Skemp (1961) 67 finds the interest of the dialogue in the politics and the 'myth': he considers the divisions in the Statesman as at best 'a gentle satire' on the clumsy arrogance of the Academy youth. Taylor (1961) 192 is representative: '[T]he Politicus [the Latin name for the dialogue] has a double purpose. It is meant to provide a second and still more elaborate demonstration of the method of "division" . . . and also by leading us to a sound definition of the statesman, to enforce certain fundamental material points of constitutional theory.'

METHOD AND POLITICS IN PLATO'S STATESMAN

there, the 'kingly art' can't possibly know how to carry out the specialties of other experts, be they doctors or carpenters, as well as they can. Yet the kingly art, which is wisdom, must know how to use the goods these other specialists provide if they are to be beneficial rather than harmful. How can the kingly art know how to use what it does not know how to produce? And in virtue of what kind of knowledge, then, can the political expert (or possessor of the 'kingly art') 7 claim to rule? In the Republic, the philosophers are to rule not in virtue of any peculiarly political knowledge they possess, but rather in virtue of their synoptic and pervasive understanding of the Good. If the question were to be pressed, however, what specifically counts as political knowledge in the Republic, it is not clear what the answer would be. 8 This is the question which is pressed in the Statesman. Given how many forms of expertise there are in the city - cobblers, generals, navigators and so on - two questions must be asked about the postulate of a purely political expertise. First, what does it know? Second, how does it rule? The Statesman answers these questions (and so circumvents the problem of possession and use) by distinguishing between knowing what to do and knowing when to do it. In assigning to statecraft the unique role of commanding when each expert should perform his work and so coordinating the work of different experts, the dialogue emphasises time as the dimension of political action. Political expertise is neither meta-knowledge nor another species of knowledge, but rather knowledge of the relation 7

8

The Euthydemus talks only of 'wisdom' and the 'kingly art' (basilike techne) in this context. The Statesman alternates indifferently between 'politike episteme\ 'politike techne', and 'basilike technt, though it should be noted that the Sophist uses techne and never the sometimes more prestigious episteme for the dubious art of the sophist. I follow Rowe (1995) 1-2 in usually translating all the Statesman's terms by 'political expertise' while using 'statecraft' or 'the art of . . . ' in contexts where 'expertise' would be awkward. Note also Rowe's discussion ad loc. of the contrived technical formation of politikos (statesman), which he suggests may be a neologism. Myles Burnyeat has argued in lectures at Cambridge that the Euthydemus can be read as postdating and critically commenting on the Republic. His lectures stimulated my interest in the problem about the kingly art in the Euthydemus. However, the present argument does not depend on accepting any particular view about dating the dialogues.

INTRODUCTION

between other forms of knowledge and the temporal demands of the moment of action, or the kairos. Based on mastery of the kairos and command of the other experts, the political expert's authority is exalted against the static and inflexible authority of the written and unwritten laws. But at the same time, legal authority is defended against the vagaries of personal rule, whether of tyrant or faction, in the absence of a true political expert. It is this double move, first attacking and then offering a limited vindication to the law, which has led some scholars to identify a newly realistic attitude in the Statesman,9 one which is more favourable to democracy 10 (a law-abiding democracy being classed as better than any lawless regime), and which marks a transition toward the insistence on the rule of law rather than men which characterises the Laws. The eagerness to find evidence of softening and transition, 11 however, risks obscuring the uncompromising vindication of the nature, possibility, and authority of political expertise (in relation to its rivals) which I claim to be the central concern of the dialogue. Indeed, one advantage of my interpretation is that it rescues the Statesman from the halfway house of transition, dependent on a dating of the works impossible to establish with certainty, and finds in it a philosophical identity which is based rather on its pressing of certain questions which are not pressed so far or so hard - for whatever reasons - elsewhere in Plato. To say that the Statesman presses its own philosophical questions is not to say that its answers are wholly stable, or satisfactory from a modern perspective. The idea of certain 9

10

11

Annas (1995) exemplifies this view of the dialogue as, on the one hand, taking a new interest in the 'real world' (x) but, on the other hand, 'unstable because Plato has not yet thought through the degree of compromise that these new ideas demand' (xvi). Cf. also Barker (1918) 330: 'Plato makes his peace with reality . . . ' The question of whether the Statesman is really kinder toward democracy than other Platonic works will be looked at in the context of fourth-century debates in Part m. Annas (1995) xxii is again representative in viewing the dialogue as transitional: 'The Statesman is in some ways a record of complication and even confusion. But not only does it help us to see how we get from the Republic to the Laws, it is a record of the entanglements that only a very great and original thinker, defending and qualifying his boldest work at the same time, could get into.'

METHOD AND POLITICS IN PLATO S

STATESMAN

knowledge of the kairos founders on two difficulties: the multiple variables involved in having such knowledge, and the touchy problem of knowing how to recognise who does. The statesman must know precisely what needs to be done at every moment and by whom, surmounting the stunning difficulties of calculation of the future in a prospective judgment without the benefits of hindsight. Although concentrating on the practical and temporal knowledge of the statesman, the dialogue does not separate the unity of reason. 12 The Statesman recognises the need for reason to be practical but considers this still a purely intellectual achievement and one which can in theory be perfect. There is no place in this conception of practical reason for the lesser precision allowed it by Aristotle, nor for the latter's emphasis on the contribution of habituated perception and judgment to its success.13 Later political thought tended either to accept the Aristotelian version of practical reason or even to strip away all claims to reason from the practical effects of will or virtue. 14 The Statesman can claim, in this regard, very little influence on the subsequent history of political thought; even where its themes of temporal knowledge and decision are taken up, they are associated with the mild counsels of prudence rather than the knowing commands of the statesman. In insisting on an objective kairos knowable by the political expert, the Statesman even more than the Republic remains within the ambit of the Platonic agenda identified by Karl Popper: its question is not, 'How can we so organise political 12

13 14

Phronesis is occasionally mentioned in the Statesman but never denned or explicitly linked to knowledge of the kairos, while the claim that the statesman has episteme is never renounced: for these reasons I find no grounds for distinguishing the statesman's knowledge as a special form of practical wisdom, pace Rosen (1995) vii: '[t]he central theme of the Statesman is the relation between phronesis ... and techne\ Griswold (1989) 152-3 notes the cosmos' possession of phronesis in the Statesman's story (269di) but observes that the dialogue's focus on episteme and techne renders this 'rather far' from Aristotelian phronesis. Lear (1988) 170-4 gives a clear account of Aristotle's distinction. One version of seizing the moment was offered by Machiavelli's virtu, on which see Skinner (1978) Vol. 1, 128-38; other Renaissance conceptions emphasised the importance of virtue, in particular the virtue of temperance, in being able to act prudentially in line with the kairos; see the suggestive remarks in Hutson (1996).

INTRODUCTION

institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?' but rather 'Who should rule?' 15 The Republic had only asked this after identifying the needs of the soul, the city, and the relation of the virtues to knowledge. The Statesman takes for granted that the person with knowledge should rule, and goes on to ask, 'what does rule consist in, and how is knowledge related to rule?' and the theoretical interest of this question will concern us in this book. Still, it is significant that neither the Statesman nor any other Platonic dialogue asks a further question which might be thought to arise for a commitment to wise rulers: 'is there a way for non-experts to know who should rule?' We will see in Part in that the Statesman discusses what should happen when people meet with a true political expert, and even discusses why what should happen (recognition and obedience) might not, but offers no instruction beyond this as to how the people should discriminate between, as it were, a true and a false prophet. The comparison with prophecy is especially telling because at stake in the claim to know the kairos is the claim to know the future. To be told that one ought to submit to a true prophet, and even be told what such a true prophet would know and be able to do, is of little use if false prophets abound on every side. In this light it is not surprising that the Statesman has proved so infertile in later political thought. Though I hope to show that it is rewarding to think through, it has evidently been a difficult text to think with in the development of the tradition. Though lonely in its recalcitrance to readers, the Statesman is less genuinely singular than most other Platonic dialogues. It continues the conversation recorded in the Sophist begun when a 'stranger from Elea' is invited by Socrates and Theodoras to ascertain the relative worth of sophist, statesman, and philosopher (So. 216C-217C). This Stranger appears only here and conducts only these two discussions exploring two 15

Popper (1995) 120, a work written during the Second World War andfirstpublished in 1945. The question of whether Popper read Plato fairly notwithstanding, this is a ringing appeal to the liberal conscience.

METHOD AND POLITICS IN PLATO'S

STATESMAN

parts of the same question. Some have claimed that because the Theaetetus is also mentioned implicitly at the beginning of the Sophist, any interpretation of the pair must encompass it as well. 16 This claim requires examination. Theodorus opens the Sophist (216a) saying: 'Here we are once more, Socrates, as yesterday's engagement requires of us, and we have brought a visitor too.' 'Yesterday's engagement' almost certainly refers to the close of the Theaetetus describing a meeting between Socrates, Theodorus and Theaetetus, ended when Socrates leaves to meet his indictment and instructs Theodorus to meet him again the following dawn (2iod). But to insist too much on this back-reference creates some difficulties: are we then to assume that the framing claim of Euclides to be narrating the Theaetetus (i43a-c) encompasses the two unnarrated dialogues as well? 17 If not, then we have in the Sophist and Statesman a performed version of conversation, 18 while the Theaetetus narrates the previous day's events with the hindsight of several decades. Nor is the Theaetetus' topic explicitly linked to the next day's reunion. In this, as in the presence and leadership of the Stranger from Elea, Sophist and Statesman are tightly bound together to an extent much beyond the claimed chronological proximity of the conversation narrated in the Theaetetus. The extent of the textual connection between them justifies a common reading of the pair without prejudice to the possible connections of the Theaetetus or of other dialogues. Such a common reading is offered here only in part. I have not attempted a global interpretation of the two dialogues the epigraph is as stimulating a remark as I know on the subject - or the vexed question of the 'missing' philosopher. 19 16

17 18 19

Miller (1980) 1-2, Klein (1977) 3 and Benardete (1984) xvi, though the last acknowledges that the relation between the pair is closer. Dorter (1994) tries to argue for a quartet of 'Eleatic' dialogues, including the Parmenides on the basis of Socrates' remark to Theaetetus that he once met Parmenides as a young boy (Tht. 183c). Myles Burnyeat once asked me this. Perhaps conducted without a break: Dies (1935) vii. Sprague (1976) 100 and Klein (1977) 177 identify the statesman with the philosopher; Griswold (1989) 163 n. 13 seems to me right in observing, against them, that

INTRODUCTION

I have, however, attempted here to lay out the methodological relationship between the Stranger's two inquiries, since the methods of division and example are introduced in the Sophist, and more fully explored in the Statesman. Perhaps these comments will ease the way for further attention to the oddly neglected task of interpreting the two dialogues together. On this note it must be said that I have taken one liberty and refused another. I take the liberty of identifying the Eleatic Stranger's arguments with Plato's, in the spirit of identifying what the arguments are on their own terms rather than seeking clues that they are to be disregarded or minimised. I refuse the liberty of speculating here on the relationship between Socrates and the Eleatic Stranger, or Socrates and Plato. Such speculation would require at the very least that fuller interpretation of the Sophist and the Statesman as a pair suggested above. The discussion tries not to assume knowledge of the dialogue, but inevitably those able to follow along with a text either in English or Greek will gain more from the proceedings (and find them more interesting).20 The introduction to each Part, and the conclusions to Parts i and m, are designed to be so far as possible free-standing, summarising the main lines of interpretation and linking them to wider issues in philosophy and the history of political thought. Those who turn to them first, or solely, will find the principal results of the book on the trust that the sections in between have established the textual evidence. To conclude this introduction I sketch the progress of the argument through the three parts. The fundamental contention of Part I, dealing with method, is that the Sophist adumbrates and the Statesman develops

20

the Stranger says explicitly that sophist, statesman and philosopher are three (So. 217b). But see the persuasive arguments for finding the philosopher rather in the practice of philosophy in the dialogues in Frede (1996) 146, 149-51, and McCabe (forthcoming). Rowe (1995) is an invaluable critical edition, with introduction, translation and commentary. Translations by Waterfield in Annas (1995) and Ostwald/Skemp (1992) are also widely available.

METHOD AND POLITICS IN PLATO'S STATESMAN

a combined method consisting of two elements: division (diaeresis) and example (paradeigma). Whatever may be true of division in other dialogues, we fail to understand its role in the Sophist and the Statesman if we fail to recognise its intimate links, in both dialogues, with the use of an example of a special kind. The characteristic features of such examples include their relative insignificance compared to matters of political import, their structured definitions, and their relevance to the subject of the inquiry in hand. Division works adequately to define the main objects of inquiry only when it elucidates the structure of definition either of the example or of the item exemplified.21 Moreover, I shall show that the Eleatic Stranger's handling of examples involves attention to their implicit logic of similarity and to their role in inquiry, developing a theoretical construction of example which compares with work in contemporary philosophy of science and contrasts with the use of example in the ancient practice of rhetoric. The link between method and politics, in the centre of the dialogue and so in Part n of the present book, is provided by the outlandish muthos ('story', in my translation, rather than the usual 'myth'). The story has tended to monopolise a literature of its own, 22 often with some reference to the politics preceding it in the dialogue, but with none to the politics which follow or to methods other than 'myth' itself. I interpret the story as the fulcrum of the dialogue, which in hindsight makes sense of the preceding method and politics, and in foresight introduces the methodological and political themes still to come. In the aftermath of the story, method and politics are themselves unified. Reflecting on his own story after telling it, the Eleatic Stranger suggests that it was flawed by a political prejudice (a traditional belief in kings as shepherds, 21

22

Contrast D o r t e r (1994) 227 and passim, w h o seeks a 'method of hypothesis' (like that of the Republic) t o complement division in the Statesman, b u t is reduced t o gesturing a t the general 'overcoming of incompleteness' in lieu of textual evidence for such a method. M o r e papers were given o n it t h a n o n a n y other topic at the 1992 Third International Symposium Platonicum which was dedicated t o the dialogue and held in Bristol.

INTRODUCTION

ruling a tame and unthinking population) which turned into a methodological prejudice (the telling of an overly long story which cannot be properly used as an example) (St. ijjbi-6). The puncturing of prejudices, the purportedly common-sense assumptions which often distort both intellectual inquiry and political choices, is signalled in the headings, in all three parts of the book, about the identification and curing of 'delusions'. According to the Stranger's self-criticism of his story, the method necessary in its stead is an adequate, and appropriate, example. The example he now chooses is the art of weaving, and this example eventually guides not only the definition of statecraft as an intellectual competence, but also an analysis of its characteristic activity. As argued in Part m, statecraft emerges in a special relation to the other arts, able to judge and coordinate their opportunities for action, which results inter alia in the subordination of rhetoric. The political expert is also to carry out the task of weaving together two conflicting factions in the city. Each of these factions is conceived as characteristically disposed to err on one side or the other of the mean, in making evaluative judgments. I shall show that it is essential to recognise the dynamic temporal background assumed in this analysis in order to make sense of both the problem and its proposed resolution; further, that such a conception of evaluative conflict speaks to an important issue in the prior, and subsequent, history of political thought. The ideal of statecraft is, however, only one half of the political theory developed in the Statesman. A wise ruler is, as the story somewhat fancifully suggests, not always available to guide human affairs. Indeed, according to the story, in the present cosmic epoch the god has retired from active guidance, leaving humans to imitate the cosmos in forced self-rule. If the story's cosmology reassuringly insists that the god will someday return to manage human affairs, the political parallel drawn is less comforting. Arrival of a genuine statesman is a theoretical possibility, and must be kept open as a practical one. But in his absence, without the guarantee that the true statesman has ever come or ever will, humans must contrive to rule themselves. And, making use of the idea of imitation 10

METHOD AND POLITICS IN PLATO'S STATESMAN

in the story, the dialogue develops a paradoxical account of just how such imperfect self-rule can, by strict adherence to law, achieve some feature of the absent political ideal while remaining open to its eventual realisation. The Statesman provides very little of the meditation on institutions, and none of the meditation on human weaknesses and their possibly calamitous effects, that we have come to expect of a political theory (and which the Laws does amply provide). In this respect the Statesman is austere. The dialogue invites us to consider only the absence of natural authority (in the story), the plethora of rivals for political authority, and the concomitant need to define and establish the rule of the true political expert. But whereas a sceptical thinker like Hobbes, for example, would pursue the establishment of such authority as a matter of artifice, the Statesman pursues the objective 'art' in it: the political competence which can establish a state most successfully. Construing political knowledge dynamically, accepting a certain inevitability of conflict, and also considering options for politics in the absence of knowledge, the Statesman tests the limits of an objectivist approach to political value and is limited in turn by the possibilities of such an approach.

ii

PART I

METHOD

Introduction

Socrates has asked the Eleatic Stranger whether people in his country consider sophist, statesman and philosopher one, two, or - there being three names - 'divide' (diairoumenoi) them into three 'classes' (gene)1 and ascribe a class to each name (So. 217a). The Stranger answers, 'three', but says that it is not a small or easy thing to 'define' each 'clearly' (So. 217b): he undertakes first to search for and 'make plain by argument' what the sophist is. The implication is that the inquiry set by Socrates will require the establishment of definitions of sophist, statesman, and philosopher. This task is undertaken and achieved for sophist and statesman in the eponymous dialogues: definition is what they set out to give and claim to have achieved. Both inquiries contrast the definition sought with the mere assertion of a name, though the having of the name in common (So. 217c) is the starting point for the argument. Both involve separating the expertise in question from a host of rival arts, or forms of expertise, claiming the name for themselves. (Some of these are assigned roles as subordinate or collaborative kinds of expertise, while others are unmasked as impostors). And both define a paradigmatic example in order to originate, or complete, their search. Definition is achieved by dividing kinds of knowledge in order to connect them in an analytical account (logos) giving common meaning to the name. The argument of Part 1 is that the Sophist introduces the interaction of division and example; the Statesman shows that 1

See the discussion of genos and eidos below (pp. 17-18). 13

METHOD

their interaction is required successfully to define the statesman, and analyses the crucial importance of example in enabling division to succeed by picking out which similarities between arts are relevant and which are to be disregarded. The Stranger sometimes employs division without example, though never example without division. Part of the burden of the Statesman is to show why, for important matters, example and division must go hand in hand, though this is not an inevitable feature of any inquiry. Linking division with example is rather an achievement, to be understood and recognised as such, and so here analysed both in its parts (division and example separately) and whole (their interaction). In identifying a method of 'example and division' in these two dialogues' quests for definition, I mean to challenge the widespread assumption2 that the method they use is the 'collection and division' which (so the assumption goes) is identical with that prescribed (by Socrates) in the Phaedrus (265d-266b), in the Philebus' 'gift of the gods' (i6b-i8e), and (by the Stranger) in the 'philosopher's science' of the Sophist (253c-d; cf. 25ia-259e) and the instruction on dealing with likenesses and unlikenesses in the Statesman (285a-b). These passages, which are severally difficult and collectively diverse, 1 label the 'prescriptive passages' in contrast with the 'actual divisions' made in the course of defining sophist and statesman. The 'actual divisions' are strictly confined to forms of expertise {technai or epistemai), the persons who exercise them or the objects on which they do so. As we shall see, examples are explicitly introduced in connection with these actual divisions; no explicit mention is ever made of anything called 'collection' (and interpreters disagree as to what, in the actual divisions, does illustrate it). None of the prescriptive passages from the Stranger's dialogues or Socrates' say anything about example. I seek therefore to clarify the actual workings of 2

So Bluck (1975); Hackforth (1972a) 134-6 and (1972b) 142-3; Stenzel (1940) introduction (by Allan) xliii and ch.9; and Nehamas (1984). Healthy scepticism however is expressed by Gosling (1975) 82, 87, 202-3. Wedin (1987) attempts to find a middle ground, arguing that the Statesman corrects some aspects of the Phaedrus' method of division. 14

INTRODUCTION

division, and its interaction with example, without the prejudice involved in importing prescriptive assumptions about what division must be. To adopt this strategy of attending to the 'actual divisions' given by the Stranger is not to deny that there may well be affinities with the prescriptive passages, or that those passages do establish some notion of division as a logical method applicable to more than just the technai. One of the best and most recent defences of the assumption of a single method lying behind both prescriptions and actual divisions may illustrate both the affinities and the risks. M.M. McCabe has recently offered a stimulating account of 'collection and division' as signifying a new Platonic answer to the problem of what makes an individual one. 3 Unlike Aristotle, who would answer that what makes an individual one is 'being one of a kind', she claims that Plato wrestles his way to the answer that what makes an individual one is its relation to other individuals, its place in a context. When she speaks of 'collection and division', however, she appeals almost exclusively to what I called above the 'prescriptive passages', particularly of the Sophist and Philebus. Her only reference to the 'actual collections and divisions Plato gives' is as 'comical analyses of absurd skills (weaving or angling)', 4 and though this remark seems tongue-in-cheek, the 'actual divisions' are never accorded further analysis (indeed the Statesman is not discussed in much detail at all). The very fact that her account can be so persuasive for the 'prescriptive' passages, while paying virtually no attention to the 'actual divisions' which are of technai and using examples, suggests that distinguishing between these discussions is both possible and advisable. Discussion of this general question about division affords the opportunity to comment on three more standard issues in the existing literature on division. These are the distinction between meros and eidos; the distinction between eidos and genos; and the issue of whether division of eide is dividing

3

McCabe (1994). 15

*Ibid., 222.

METHOD

'Forms' (eide) in the sense in which such 'Forms' are construed in the Phaedo or Republic. Consider the last and most controversial question first. In Platonic scholarship, whether a dialogue alludes to 'Forms' has become a touchstone for the debate as to whether Plato's dialogues are universally consistent, or if they are not, whether he changed his mind ('developed' his thought) in identifiable directions which afford or concur with a chronological ordering of the dialogues as composed.5 To this structural issue corresponds a highly charged emotional and intellectual one: was there a core to Plato's teaching, and was that core the so-called 'doctrine of Forms'? G. E. L. Owen enlisted the Statesman in his well-known argument that Plato did change his mind about Forms, and that the Timaeus (in which Forms appear) must therefore be dated to the 'middle period', after which a 'late' Plato critical of Forms and concerned with the analytical philosophy of language produced the Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, and Laws.6 His polemic, though unconvincing in some details, helped to establish a robust (though not uncontroversial) tradition of reading the 'late' dialogues without reference to Forms and in the spirit of philosophical analysis. This book is within the spirit of that tradition in finding no arguments of the kinds appealing to 'Forms' in the Phaedo or Republic in the Eleatic Stranger's dialogues, and so in not assuming that such 'Forms' are what he means when he uses the ubiquitous Greek word eidos.1 However, this need not indicate a dramatic rupture on all fronts between 'late' Plato and all other Plato. That the 5 6

7

For a brief discussion, see Lane (forthcoming b). Owen (1965) (given a general rebuttal by Cherniss (1965)) claimed that part of the Statesman's 'myth' about the divine shepherd contradicted accounts of political shepherding in the Critias, the Timaeus' incomplete sister-dialogue; this use of the Statesman was decisively refuted by Gill (1979). A more successful assault by Owen (1973) on evidence for late-period Forms in Statesman 285d-286b (without reference to the dating of the Timaeus) is considered below, pp. 70-75. This is further supported by the fact that in the Eleatic Stranger's hands, eidos is used to categorise the technai rather than the virtues or standards for comparison suggested by middle-period arguments involving Forms. 16

INTRODUCTION

Statesman approaches politics differently from the Republic may mean that they are simply exploring different aspects of common questions. One finds in each dialogue glimmers of themes which appear and reappear throughout others, being reworked, explored, and treated from different perspectives in the individual world of each dialogue. As on McCabe's account of individuation, the dialogues constitute contexts for one another but each must be understood, within those contexts and the broader contexts of intellectual and political history, as distinct. If eidos in the Sophist and Statesman is not used in contexts which suggest Phaedo- or Republic-style explanatory Forms, how is it to be translated? The question is especially acute with regard to the interplay between eidos and genos common to both dialogues, terms which are tempting to identify with the 'species' and 'genus' of Aristotelian biological science.8 This temptation must be resisted.9 Though the root sense of 'genos' is extensional ('race', 'stock', 'kind'), it can also be used intensionally ('sort', 'type'); conversely, though the root sense of 'eidos' is intensional ('shape', 'outward appearance'), it can also be used extensionally ('domain', 'class'). 10 And indeed in the actual divisions of our dialogues the terms are used interchangeably in many contexts. Such flexibility within each term and between them thwarts attempts to establish a strict skeletal logic of division as an 8

9

10

E.g. Taylor (1961) 9: the serious business of both dialogues is the value 'of precise and careful subdivision of genera into their constituent species'. Perhaps it is truer to say he is tempted by Mendelian, not Aristotelian, influence: Pellegrin (1986) 69 (cf. 50-112) argues that in Aristotelian biology 'the pair genosjeidos . . . constitutes a diaeretical tool functioning at any level of generality at all'. They do not connote only the proximate genus and infimae species, but are used flexibly relative to each stage in the inquiry. Cornford (1935) 268-72 rejected the Aristotelian interpretation of Platonic division but still uses 'genus' and 'species' language for division's analysis of 'Forms'. Aristotle himself notoriously attacked division as a method of proof (An.Pr. 1.31, though Rose (1968) argues that it influenced his development of the syllogism), but reformulated an acceptable version (An.Po. 11.5 9^28-31) and used this in his biological works as a method of denning natural kinds. I owe this schematisation to De Rijk (1986) 32-3. It is meant to illustrate the force and point of these two contrasting approaches to division, though a given word may be pressed into the service of either approach on suitable ontological assumptions. 17

METHOD

exercise in extensional set theory or intensional analysis.11 I argue below that division needs to be understood as an exercise in the clarification of true beliefs which can establish knowledge. 12 It is inquiry conceived as the restructuring and clarifying of understanding. 13 That, as has been observed,14 its 'logic' raises new questions at each step (the interlocutors having to decide in which branch of the division their quarry is lurking), goes to show that the logic of proof is not what division provides. It relies not only on the prior grasp of resemblances, but also on a grasp of what are 'real' distinctions between kinds or individuals as opposed to specious ones. This latter point is thematised by the Stranger as the distinction between eidos and meros (262a-263b): dividers must take care not to hack off mere bits. 15 The advice rests on the fundamental ontological realism which is never relinquished by Plato, and reminds us of the beginning of the Sophist where the Stranger is instructed by Socrates (and instructs Theaetetus) that they must test which names really correspond to kinds or individuals. The Stranger's use of division has been all too often, and all too quickly, assimilated to mentions of 'division' elsewhere in Plato. Yet the bearing of his use of example on the images, analogies, similarities, comparisons of all kinds so prevalent 1

* This, to my mind, vitiates the subtle debate on the deep structure of division between Cohen and Moravcsik in Moravcsik (1973a). More useful in laying out the surface logic of the divisions is Cavini (1995). 12 Sayre (1969) 187-91 notes that Aristotelian genus-species analysis does not apply to Platonic dialectic. Gulley (1962) 114 claims that division is 'a method of classification, not of definition in terms of genus and specific differences', though definition in other terms is announced in both Sophist and Statesman as the goal. 13 I deliberately assert both sides of a contrast made in McCabe (1994) 258 n.79, that division is 'not a method of inquiry, but a system of understanding, a way of structuring our explanations'. That 'inquiry' and 'system of understanding' are not incompatible is argued below, pp. 68-70. 14 E.g. Gulley (1962) 112 on 'the additional power' required at every stage 'of recognising and selecting "real" resemblances and differences' [for him, between Forms]. The role of example, it will be argued here, is precisely to facilitate such recognition and selection in the working of division. 15 It is impossible not to acknowledge the resonance here of Phdr. 265c, which prescribes 'dividing things by kinds (kat'eide) where the joints are, and not trying to break off any part (meros) in the way of a bad carver'. This procedural advice applies equally well in prescription and practice. 18

INTRODUCTION

throughout the dialogues has gone relatively unexplored. Plato's most famous protagonist, Socrates, is famous for comparing familiar arts - horsemanship, medicine, shoemaking with the disputed knowledge of virtue he presses interlocutors to define. In the architecture of many dialogues, as in the give and take of Socratic argument, comparisons are often fundamental. Essential to the Republic is the comparison between the structure of the city and the structure of the soul; central to the Theaetetus is the comparison between the structure of belief and first a wax block then an aviary; the Gorgias makes unflattering analogies between cookery and rhetoric, and so on. Comparisons are indeed so prevalent in the dialogues in which Socrates is the central figure that they seem largely to have escaped philosophical scrutiny. Certainly Socrates himself (as portrayed by Plato) does not typically stop to inquire into the validity of comparison as a form of argument. His mode of argument is to fire off analogies and examples so as to press conclusions on the basis of an apparently obvious similarity. Occasionally Socrates himself or another figure does briefly worry about the notion of resemblance, which after all (as we shall see) is at the heart of any comparison. Resemblance is called into question in the Protagoras' doubts about similarity (33idi-e4), in the Parmenides' regress of likeness (I32di-i33a7; cf. 147-8), in the Philebus' debate over whether all pleasures, and all forms of knowledge, must be like one another (12c-14a), in the Sophist's warning about the slipperiness of resemblance (23ia4-bi). In the Statesman example (paradeigma) itself is used to secure relations of resemblance. The process of establishing genuine resemblance by means of example is laborious and slow. It contrasts, I shall argue, with the rhetors' habit of appealing to paradeigmata whose practice in this regard appears very close to the rapid-fire reliance on resemblances characteristic of Plato's Socrates. 16 In this respect the Statesman works out carefully 16

The classic study of 'paradigme' in Plato, Goldschmidt (1947), casually subsumes a variety of Greek terms under that French one, and treats the Sophist's 19

METHOD

what is characteristically glossed over or exploited in the Socratic dialogues.17 One apparent obstacle to the present argument is that the Statesman, which makes much of examples both in analysis and in use, begins its inquiry without one. Claiming to follow the same method used in the successful inquiry about the sophist, the Stranger plunges into a series of divisions at the outset of the Statesman. But in doing so he does not - as he had done in the Sophist - choose an example for practice first. These early example-less sallies in the Statesman end largely in failure, and it is in order to rescue the inquiry that example is introduced in the middle of the dialogue, heralded as important and explained at length. So the delay of example in the Statesman serves to highlight its importance. In contrast, the Sophist starts off with an example straight away, but does so almost casually, even slyly, without ever reflecting on what examples are or why they are important and reliable.18 Contrasting tactics - in the Sophist, the quiet pervasiveness of the example; in the Statesman, its belated but ballyhooed introduction - both serve to emphasise the significance of example in inquiry. The discussion falls into four further parts, two on use and two on analysis. The first considers briefly the use of example and division in the Sophist, in order to set the stage for the second, their uses in the Statesman. The third offers an analysis of the Statesman's own analysis of example, and the fourth part concludes by analysing the workings of division and example in relation to philosophical issues of paradigms and rhetoric. Though separate analyses of example and divi-

17

18

and Statesman's use of example as no different in principle from other Platonic comparisons. If this could be ammunition for those wanting the Stranger to 'correct' or advance beyond Socrates, it could also be read as providing support for (through analysis of) his characteristic practice. Cf. Benardete (1984) Vol. in. 103: 'it is characteristic of the Sophist that the connection between its action and its argument is at the most allusive. It never becomes a thematic part of the dialogue. It seems to be just a coincidence ... that the angler, chosen as an example to illustrate the Stranger's way, turns out to be the first model for the understanding of the sophist. In the Statesman, on the other hand, the Stranger almost obsessively harps on their [sic] own doing . . . ' 20

THE SOPHIST S USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

sion are made, and they do sometimes appear separately in the dialogues, the fundamental thesis of Part i remains that example and division in Sophist and Statesman are, when used most successfully and for the most difficult tasks, harnessed together in intimate tandem. The Sophist's use of example and division In light of the general task set him by Socrates and discussed above, the Stranger embarks on a question-and-answer inquiry about sophistry with young Theaetetus. He begins by remarking to the boy: ES:

. . . as yet you and I have in common, about [the sophist], only the name (onoma); but as to the thing (ergon) to which we give the name, we may each have a conception of it in our own minds. Yet we ought always in every instance to come to agreement about the thing (pragma) itself by definition/argument (logos), rather than to agree about the name alone without definition (So. 218CI-5). 19

Three elements are in play in this statement: the name, the thing, and the definition or true conception of the thing (logos). Having agreed to investigate the sophist the interlocutors both know this name, but they have no guarantee that they are each privately defining it in the same way, nor do they have any guarantee that their individual definitions are sound. The goal of the inquiry is to attain agreement between the two interlocutors about the definition of the thing, to replace the literally nominal agreement from which they begin. Notice however that names are not wholly disparaged. This point will be explored further below. Having defined the goal of common agreement by argument about the 'thing', sophistry, the next question is how to proceed. The Stranger immediately suggests that they begin by choosing an example. He asks, 'shall we take some lesser thing and try to use it as an example (paradeigma) for the 19

Campbell (1973) 13 n.2 succinctly observes: 'ovoiaoc = the name, is distinguished on the one hand from epyov or irpayija, the thing, and on the other from Aoyos, the definition or true conception of the thing . . . The union, TO irpayna OCUTO 5ia Xoycov, is opposed to the mere name, TO ovopa novov x w pis ^oyou.' 21

METHOD

greater?' (So. 2i8d8-9). He justifies the suggestion by observing that a 'minor' 20 and 'trivial' example will be easier to work with than the greatest subjects (So. 2i8di, d8). Example so far implies mere practice on something trivial before the real show begins. But the constraints which the Stranger quickly places on a suitable example suggest that something more is at stake. Any example chosen must be (i) 'familiar', allowing the inquiry to get off the ground; (ii) 'minor', reinforcing the opening idea that nothing too serious is at stake; and (iii) 'having no less a definition21 (logon) than any of the greater things' (So. 2i8e2-3). Though 'minor' plays down the importance of the example, the requirement that it be definable just as the 'greater things' exemplified are, begins to indicate the nature of its significance. The indication is strengthened when the Stranger suggests an example - the art of angling and its practitioner. Having checked that the angler indeed meets the three constraints (So. 2i8e4~5), the Stranger announces his twin aims in using this example: I hope he offers us a method (methodon)22 and a definition (logon) not unsuitable to our purpose. (So. 219a 1-2)

Notice the careful articulation of this hope. The definition of the angler is linked in expectation to the purpose of the inquiry (showing that to have read the opening words about example as implying an isolated practice-run was to have misread). And the hopes placed on the example of angling include not only a relevant definition but also a useful 'method'. The example is not inert terrain for a quick and easy trial of an 20

21 22

I translate smikron as 'minor' rather than the usual 'small': what is meant is not that angling and sophistry differ in size, whatever that would mean, but in importance and difficulty for purposes of definition. Smikron is glossed by phaulon at d8 (here, 'trivial'). The latter term is somewhat provocative; compare the Hippias Major, where Hippias is affronted by Socrates' 'trivial' examples of pots (288CI1-3) and ladles ( 2 9 ^ 3 - 4 ) . Logos as 'definition' is supported by the context of ngsn. Vlastos (1994) 1 n.5 notes that Plato coined methodos in the Phaedo to flag the distinctive 'method' of the elenchus (Phd. 79e3, 97b6). Its appearance here flags the introduction of an equally distinctive method (of division, introduced in conjunction with example). 22

THE SOPHIST S USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

independent method. If the Stranger's hopes are fulfilled, the angler-example will provide23 the method for the main inquiry, and the definition of the angler will also somehow prove relevant to the definition of the sophist which is the main task in hand. Let us see how the search for angling works. The Stranger begins by ascertaining with Theaetetus that the angler as such possesses a characteristic expertise - the assumption is that it is this expertise which defines him and even lends him its name. In the Sophist, the word techne is used to denote the expertise of the angler, as well as the many kinds of expertise evaluated in the course of the divisions. Possession of such an expertise defines its practitioners, particularly in Plato. 24 Techne in Greek describes a cognitive grasp giving the systematic and reliable ability to act on some part of the world. Its connotations are strongly positive,25 the technai (plural) considered so crucial to human cultural achievement that they are often imagined in myth and drama 26 as gifts from the gods. The term is used consistently in the Sophist to describe the kinds of expertise encountered in the divisions, and intermittently in the Statesman for the same purpose. Even though the two terms seem to be used interchangeably in the Statesman,21 the fact that the more wholly intellectualist episteme is missing from the Sophist may cast a faintly pejorative shadow back on the status of sophistry. 23

24

25

26 27

D a v i d Sedley has objected that the example m a y simply introduce here a m e t h o d which has been independently elaborated elsewhere (perhaps in the 'prescriptive' discussions of division by Socrates). But the embedding of division in example here is n o t arbitrary; it proves essential to the progress of the inquiry in a way which n o prescriptive discussion of division suggests. The context of example is constitutive of w h a t division is for this inquiry, a n d in the context of the Stranger's conversations originates the mention of division. R o w e (1995) 2 - 3 observes that Plato makes characteristic use of adjectives (also m a d e into substantives) ending in -IKOS for the particular kind of specialism (e.g. TTOAITIKOS), a n d substantives ending in -IKT) (e.g. &pi0|jr|TiKT)) for the activity. T h e association of techne with universality, teachability, precision, and concern with explanation is surveyed in N u s s b a u m (1986) 9 5 - 7 . A n d in the story told in the Statesman itself: see Part 11. R o w e (1995) 178, note to 258d5, observes that in the Statesman 'the two terms will be used interchangeably throughout'; he cites Gill (1995) 294 n.15. Neither remarks the discrepancy on this point between the two dialogues.

23

METHOD

Because both sophistry and statecraft are treated as forms of expertise, the examples chosen to discuss each one are themselves forms of expertise, and they are defined in terms of their similarity to and difference from other such forms, progressing in each case toward the isolation of a single expertise. These divisions of forms of expertise are described indiscriminately in terms of the forms of knowledge themselves and the persons who possess them. 28 Assured that the angler does have an expertise, the Stranger asserts that there are two kinds (eide) of all forms of expertise (2i9a8). Each kind must be named, and this is done by enumerating various arts belonging to each kind, until a sufficient sense of identity emerges for the kind to be properly named. First are listed a number of kinds of expertise 'all of which might properly (dikaiotata) be called by one name [productive-art 29 ]' (2i9bi-6); there follows on the other side of the division another list of forms of expertise, concluding 'all of this part of expertise might properly (diaprepseieri) be called acquisitive-art' (219C6-7). In both cases use of a normative term signals that these names are not just convenient or familiar, but correct. Theaetetus is then asked to judge in which of these two named kinds angling belongs. His choice of acquisitive-art (2i9d3) establishes it as the candidate for the next division-cut in which the same procedure will be repeated. This first completed step of division models all those which, though compressed, will follow. A single kind of expertise (in the first case, expertise as such) is split into two or more 30 28

29

30

T h e original topics are the personages (So. 2i7a3) and in the Sophist in particular the person is mentioned m u c h m o r e often t h a n the expertise (e.g. So. 2 i 8 b 7 , C], Q4), but the divisions are clearly conceived as divisions of the technai which certain persons m a y possess (e.g. So. 2i9a8). N o translation of the Sophist has been done on Rowe's principle of rendering techne as 'expertise', although its shadier connotations m a y sometimes be m o r e appropriate there (in the absence of episteme) t h a n in the Statesman. I have modified the L o e b translation of the Sophist (Fowler (i 921)) to suggest 'expertise' in some contexts, in a n attempt to preserve b o t h the commonality and the difference in this usage between the two dialogues. N o w h e r e is division required to be dichotomous, though it is so practised in the Sophist and in the first half of the Statesman (the 'shepherd-divisions', below); any

24

THE SOPHIST'S

USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

kinds. Sometimes these are named immediately; more often a few of each kind are enumerated until an appropriate name can be decided upon. Then one of these kinds is identified as including the target, and made the subject of the next division. Though we tend to speak of the 'division of angling', the division is rather of all the kinds of expertise which include angling until the latter is sufficiently isolated to be clear. The names of those divided along the way themselves are linked into a definition of the target, as will be seen below. One qualitative feature of division which the Stranger highlights, if discreetly, is the giving of names.31 At many points the normative dimension of names is reiterated, for example: ' . . . is not that genos worthy (axion) of being called by another name?'. (So.

' . . . since there is . . . one art involved in all of these operations, let us honour it (axiosomeri) it with one name'. (So. 226C5-6) ' . . . we must examine further and see whether [education] is all already indivisible, or still admits of division worthy (axian) of having a name'. (So.

The last quotation reveals most clearly a fundamental link between division, names,32 and value. A division is most characteristically accomplished when the separation is accompanied by the awarding of just those names which are deserved and appropriate. Conversely, some things which turn up in the divisions do not deserve names. The Stranger remarks in one case that 'all that must be considered one eidos,

31

32

such restriction is even disavowed later at St. 287C2-5, though it is conceivable that the failure of the early divisions is linked to their rigid bifurcations. Cherniss ((1962) 46-7) insisted on the inapplicability of Aristotle's criticism of dichotomous division to these two dialogues. A number of other passages indicate the giving of names as a crucial step in a division, although not drawing an explicit connection with worth: 'by what name shall we say this ought to be called?' (So. 22ia4); 'some such name as violent... what other name . . . ' (So. 225a9~bi); 'let us try to tell the name by which we must call each of these' (So. 225d4~5); 'now what name is to be given to that part of instruction which gets rid of this [stupidity]?' (So. 229CH-12, with C8-9). AeT in some of these examples plays a normative role as well. Moravcsik (1973c) recognised the prevalent attention to names in the workings of division; cf. Loriaux (1955) 158 who cites fifty-four passages in the Sophist and Statesman using terms such as prosagoreuein, eponomazein and their cognates. 25

METHOD

but it received no name from our predecessors, nor is it now worthy (axion) of receiving one from us' (225C2-4). Just how this line is drawn - as to which names are worthy and appropriate, which unworthy and to be neglected - will be discussed below. The process of division requires that once sufficient names have been awarded to the two or more new branches, the interlocutors must then agree as to which kind the target belongs. That chosen kind is then itself divided and the process repeated until the target is finally isolated. A definition of the target is then woven 33 out of all the names of the arts which have turned up in the relevant branches of the division (268C5-6), names which have been clarified by the process of argument. The result in the case of angling is recapitulated by the Stranger as follows: Now, then, you and I are not only agreed about the name of angling, but we have acquired a sufficient (hikanos) definition (logon) of the thing itself. For of expertise as a whole, half was acquisitive, and of the acquisitive, half was coercive, and of the coercive, half was hunting, and of hunting, half was of living things, and of living things, half was water hunting, and, taken as a whole, of water hunting the lower part was fishing, and of fishing, half was striking, and of striking, half was barb-hunting, and of this the part where a blow is struck by pulling from below upwards at an angle has a name in the very likeness of the act and is called angling, which was the object of our present search. (22ia7~b3)

Notice the double-edged emphasis on naming in this summary. On the one hand, the Stranger is consistent with his opening remarks in unfavourably contrasting (mere) agreement about a name with (real) agreement about a definition (logos) of something. On the other hand, the final identification of the art of angling involves naming it - even though the name, descriptive of the world as it is, would not have sufficed without the full definition. The definition establishes the identity of the expertise in question by relating it to the 33

'Woven' here is my own term, but it echoes the Stranger's call to 'weave' the logos of the final definition of sophistry later in the dialogue (So. 268C5-6). See below, pp. 38-9, for further remarks on this term which is, in the light of the Statesman's use of weaving, pregnant with meaning. 26

THE SOPHIST S USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

context of other forms of expertise; both similarities and differences are acknowledged in the course of the definition. Angling having been chosen as the example for sophistry, no recursive choice of an example for the example seems necessary. The division just summarised works - without an example - to define angling successfully. The early divisions of the Statesman also proceed without an explicit example, but less successfully, and example has to be introduced to save the inquiry. Perhaps one effect of the angler being 'minor' and 'trivial' is that its division - itself an example - can dispense with example in reaching an adequate definition. In any case the combined method of example-division is a condition for success only in the case of the 'greater things' which are the main targets of inquiry in both Sophist and Statesman. Example and division can certainly be employed separately, and division is used alone when the target-art is itself an example for something more important. But only the combined method proves successful in the case of the 'greater things'. Let us now effect the comparison between angling and sophistry as is done in the dialogue. Having completed his definition of the example, the Stranger begins again by asking whether the sophist, like the angler, possesses an art. He answers himself that the sophist does indeed have 'some art' (22id). This reply allows division to proceed according to the method introduced by the example, and we will consider the way this works in a moment. First the oddity in the reply must be explored. In the Gorgias, sophistry is decidedly not a genuine art, being only a counterfeit of statecraft (G. 465C2-3), and this attitude is wholly characteristic of Plato's many discussions of sophistry. Yet the entire architecture of the Sophist's divisions depends on treating sophistry as an art, which is the literal if not performative impact of the avowal 'some kind of art'. It may be that the instability and lightness of the Sophist's divisions reflect, indeed are designed to highlight, the hovering of sophistry on the frontier between art and not-art. That division produces six slippery and overlapping definitions of sophistry (though concluding with a seventh which claims to capture the 'being' of the sophist 'most 27

METHOD

truly'34), on this reading implies more aspersion on sophistry than on division.35 Despite these possible shadows, Young Socrates is willing to agree that the sophist does indeed possess 'some kind of art', perhaps lulled by the very word sophistes which is linked to the word for 'wise' and, as Rowe36 points out, before Plato could mean simply 'expert'. The Stranger now exclaims: ES: THT: ES:

Good gracious! Have we failed to notice that the man is akin (suggene)31 to the other man? Who is akin to whom? The angler to the sophist.

THT:

HOW SO?

ES:

They both seem clearly to me to be some sort of hunter. (22id8-e3)

Kinship between the angler and the sophist takes us very far indeed from any early (mis-)reading of the example as a trivial practice-run unrelated to the real task in hand. The example cannot be a mere arbitrary illustration if it is indeed akin to the target of sophistry. And this says something important about the way 'expertise' is here being understood. To say that the two men are both hunters of some sort does not mean that the sophist puts on Wellington boots and seizes a fly-rod in order to hunt like the angler. Rather the kinship inheres in certain abstract patterns of orientation and confrontation which may be acted out with very diverse, as it were, props, costumes and scenarios. A hunter offishand a hunter of souls are both hunters not merely metaphorically. As kin, both are hunters under the skin. The example and its 'kinship' hooks the inquiry about sophistry onto the third division-cut made in the course of 34

35

36 37

The final definition at 268c8-d4 is described by the Stranger as what they must say to be, literally 'the being of the sophist, most truly, as it seems' (TOV OVTCOS j n . . . TaAr|06crraTa, cos eoiKsv, epeT). Further aspersion may be implied in the choice of angling as the example for sophistry; as Mary Hannah Jones once remarked to me, angling is outlawed as bad for moral education in the Laws (823d-824a). Contrast the contemporary cultural status of weaving (the example for statecraft), discussed below, pp. 164-5. Rowe (1995) 2 - 3 . The composition of ovyyevsia - 'together' + yevos - already hints at the fact that six of the definitions of sophistry will derive from kinds identified in the definition of angling. 28

THE SOPHIST S USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

defining angling. Recall from the recapitulation quoted above: T o r of expertise as a whole, half was acquisitive, and of the acquisitive, half was coercive, and of the coercive, half was hunting . . . ' Both anglers and sophists belong here as kinds of hunters, and both are, according to the fourth division-cut, hunters of living things. To this point the two kinds of expertise (qua their experts) share a common logos (222a2-3). But the sophist is now sought in the previously neglected branch of the fifth division-cut. If the angler hunts living things in water, the sophist hunts those on land (222a9-b3). From this point the divisions diverge, the one path leading to a definition of angling, the other to a definition of sophistry. Indeed, six of the seven divisions by which sophistry is eventually seven times defined begin, like this first one, from some nodal art shared with the division defining the kindred art of angling. None of the six divisions 'kin' to angling challenges the original distinction between productive and acquisitive arts, and indeed all of them remain like angling within the 'acquisitive' kinds of art only. The following table displays the starting points of the six kindred divisions in relation to the definitional division of angling:38 Beginning subkind From Land222a2ff. hunting Exchange 223c6ff.

Div. ist

Kind(s) shared with angling Acq.-Coerc.-Hunt.-[not Water but-]

2nd 3rd 4th 5th 7 th

Acq.-[not Coerc.but-] 39 [as second - adds settled retailers] [as third - adds retailers of own wares] Acq.-Coerc.-[not Hunting but-] Fighting Acq.-Coerc.-Fighting-ControversyArgumentation-Disputation 40

38

39

40

22461-4

T h e analysis here is restricted to the procedural features of the analysis of angling. F o r one reading of its political significance, see Benardete (1984) Vol. 11.77-99. The Stranger misremembers his own example here: he actually contrasts exchange with hunting, forgetting that in the case of angling, exchange h a d been contrasted with coercion (of which hunting was one part; 2 ^ 4 - 7 with e2). N o t h i n g hangs o n this alteration, however, a n d in light of the five other careful back-references to angling, it seems prudent to judge it merely a n imprecision. Cf. 5th division, 225C9. T h e subject m a t t e r taught by teachers of disputation is said to be 'images', b u t the Stranger imagines that the sophist might deny this

29

METHOD

Some comment on the mysterious sixth division is in order. The sixth division, which is the only one defining a 'noble' and admirable sophist is also the only one without any roots in the dubious art of angling. It begins from another 'track' (ichnos, 226b2). As an exception, this one would seem to prove the 'rule' discussed above, that multiple definitions of sophistry derive from its ontological instability. Only this 'noble sophist' 41 escapes kinship with the angler and his multiplicitous relations, and thereby is also kept aloof from too close an affinity with the six other depictions of sophistry. Yet this isolated division, rejecting the example of angling, nevertheless forges its own use of examples marked by the same word as in the overall inquiries of Sophist and Statesman (paradeigmata, 226ci). The Stranger mentions expressions connected with household arts, citing 'sift', 'strain', 'winnow', 'separate', 'card', 'comb', and 'beat the web' (226b2-io). All these, one might observe, are the kind of 'menial' and 'minor' activities which a paradeigma was required to be (see above). 42 The exchange goes like this: THT: ES: THT:

ES:

Why do you use these as examples (paradeigmata) and ask about them all, and what do you wish to show in regard to them? All those that I have mentioned imply a notion of division (diairetika). Yes. Then since there is, according to my argument, one art involved in all of these others, let us give it one name . . . the art of separation (diakritikeri). (226c 1-8)

Notice that it is not the Stranger, but Theaetetus, who calls the assembled activities paradeigmata. Clearly, the assembled list does not bear the internal, articulable structure of the

41

42

definition of himself by denying that images are possible. Thus this seventh division occasions the great investigation into Being and Not-Being, which enables it to be resumed and completed successfully at the very end of the dialogue. Sayre (1969) 151-4 takes the 'noble sophist' to be wholly admirable and identifies him with Socrates; contrast Cornford (1935) 182 for whom the sixth sophist's evocation of Socrates highlights the negative features they share. They are also vocabulary used for weaving, a choice which seems to allude to the Statesman's central example of weaving and so to reinforce this sixth division's links to example. 30

THE SOPHIST S USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

paradeigma of angling, as worked out and worked into the analysis of sophistry. These are garden-variety examples, instances cited to make an immediate point, in a mini-method perhaps more like Socratic analogy than the carefully divisible example which the Stranger has been articulating. Yet Theaetetus seems to have picked up the connection between example and division in the conversation so far, if not yet appreciating the full import of the analytical use of example, and he underscores the link by introducing it into just the section of the dialogue from which it would otherwise be missing. And the Stranger responds to his observation by making a provocative connection between division and example in the content, as well as the method, of this sixth division. The examples make manifest the core activity of separation, a common thread tying household sifting to the Stranger's own method of division in aid of definitional inquiry. The moral that division's root act is separation, as well as the playfully doubled link between division and example, will both be emphasized in the Statesman. In the course of the seven divisions of sophistry as in the exemplary division of angling, names are invoked many times - sometimes positively as when the proper name for an art is sought, other times negatively when the Stranger urges Theaetetus not to be overly distracted by names, or advises that a certain art is unworthy of being named. The clue to reconciling these seemingly opposite attitudes toward names is a remark made in the course of the fifth division. When Theaetetus requests a name for all the arts which purify the body, the Stranger - knowing that their quarry lies on the other side of the division, in the arts which purify the soul - replies: ... it will not matter at all to our method what name soundsfinest;it cares only to unite under one name all purifications of everything else and to keep them separate from the purification of the soul. (So. 227CI-5)

The name for the purifications of the body is instrumental, designed to achieve a single task: to group these purifications together and to keep them separate from the purifications of the soul. So this name need not be precise or elegant, only 31

METHOD

serviceable; though a misleadingly glamorous43 name would not do, there may be a number of more modest names which would. The criterion for choosing a given name is simply its adequacy to the task at hand, and this is defined teleologically in terms of the inquiry's overall goal. Sometimes, the direction of the inquiry requires careful and discriminate naming; sometimes, any serviceable name or even none at all will do. The seemingly opposed attitudes to names are explicable as two sides of the teleological project of inquiry.44 There is a further refinement to this Janus-faced account of names. Sometimes names are taken as available in the language; but at other moments there is a dearth of names, which have then to be invented. But if division can so spur new names, this implies that an insufficiency of names may be due to an earlier inattention to division. The Stranger makes this very point in the last part of the dialogue, in his return to the seventh division defining sophistry: Where, then, can the fitting (prepon) name for each of the two [kinds of imitator] be found? Clearly it is difficult, because there was, it seems, among our ancestors a long established and careless indolence in respect to the division of genon according to their eide*5 so that nobody even tried to make such divisions; therefore there is not a great abundance of names. However, even though the innovation in language be a trifle bold, let us, for the sake of making a distinction, call the imitation which is based on opinion, opinion-imitation, and that which is founded on knowledge, a sort of scientific-imitation. (26yd4-e2)

43

44

45

The rejection of what sounds 'finest' suggests that the method of division, like the story's diagnosis of example, is intended to puncture delusions of grandeur which are liable to interfere with accurate political understanding. See Part II below. Despite her focus on prescription, again, McCabe (1994) 258 perceives this aspect of division's procedure: T h e trouble with words ['word' also translates onoma] . . . is that they allow us to see divisions where none really exist - names mislead us into thinking we have properly described the nature of things, where we have not done so . . . The good thing about words, on the other hand, is that they allow us to see how the nature of things is structured . . . ' She also (forthcoming) emphasises the Statesman's concern with teleology generally, a point congenial to and supported by my argument here. Although genos/eidos here can be roughly equated with genus/species, I leave them untranslated in order to preserve the flexibility with which they are used to signal relative classifications throughout the dialogue; see above, pp. 17-18. 32

THE STATESMAN

S USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

The Stranger diagnoses the lack of names as due to lack of division. It seems that division, by laying out the arts clearly and adequately, acts as a spur for the invention or application of just those names which are dialectically required. Without divisions, names may happen to be sparsely or profusely provided, but there would be no reason to expect their provision to correspond to the nature of things. So if names are useful for division, they are useful only in certain contexts regulated by the goal of the inquiry; and they may also in these contexts be generated by division. It follows that names are valuable but their value cannot be taken on its face. They are, as it were, not evidence but tools. The name 'sophist' shared by the Stranger and Theaetetus at the outset of the inquiry was a launch-pad, but the goal of the inquiry is to use such shared names to lever the discussion to a definition of the thing in question. Thus, just as the Stranger had originally hoped, both the method and the definition provided by the example of angling prove useful for the definition of sophistry. Definition is exemplified by defining (which is done by dividing) the example. And though division is used without an example in the case of the example itself, for the more difficult and more significant inquiry into sophistry example proves to be an indispensable partner of division. Yet this close and persistent connection between example and division is never remarked upon in the Sophist after the Stranger's first quick expression of hope. The dialogue makes little fuss about its use of division, getting under way rapidly and with little reflection. It is left to the Statesman to celebrate and highlight example and the divisions which articulate it. The Statesman's use of example and division46 Kinship and method The Sophist, as we have seen, begins with an injunction to reach agreement by argument (logos) about the thing underlying a 46

Line numbers in this section and the remainder of Part I refer to the Statesman unless otherwise marked. 33

METHOD

shared name, and goes on to explore the kinship (suggeneia) between two arts which though different in name turn out to have a certain common definition (logos). The Statesman begins, even before any inquiry is launched, with some banter on these same themes. A boy bearing the name of 'Socrates' has replaced Theaetetus, his companion in mathematics and gymnastics, as the Stranger's interlocutor. The passage is paraphrased and extended by Alexander Nehamas as follows: Socrates says that while he and the younger Socrates have their name in common, it is much more important to see whether they are akin (suggeneia) to one another through logov. through conversation, we get to know others better; through definition, we get to know what is akin to what and so, strictly speaking, what each thing is. 47

The 'kinship' of angler and sophist has been revealed through argument/definition; now the 'kinship' of Socrates and the youth who shares his name is to be tested through argument/ conversation. In the former case two things with different names turned out to share a substantive similarity. In the latter case, two people with the same name may or may not turn out to share any substantive character traits in common; as it happens, Young Socrates proves himself at various points cagier, brasher, and less astute 48 than Theaetetus, and his mathematical abilities do not seem to be matched by any ethical inclinations which would liken him to his namesake. At stake, as we have seen already in the Sophisfs emphasis on names, is the fundamental question of whether the likeness or difference indicated by shared or different names is real. Young Socrates' first task is to agree that the statesman, like the sophist, must be defined as one of those possessing a form of expert knowledge 49 (258b3-4). This is structurally 47 48

49

Nehamas (1984) 31, summarising St. 257di-258a3. Cagier: he gives only cautious approval to the need for a new division, and tells the Stranger that the search is really his (the elder's) alone (258C2, C9-10). Brasher: he makes the unscientifically reckless division between men and beasts, for which he is chastised (262a3~4). Less astute: although described as a promising mathematician like his friend Theaetetus (Tht. i47C7-i48b4), he has so little understanding of politics as to have to inquire as to the most basic moral of the story (271C4-7; cf. Part 11, p. 107). Episteme is used here, whereas techne was the word used at the corresponding point in the Sophist; see n.7 above. 34

THE STATESMAN'S

USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

identical to the question which was twice used in the Sophist to begin a division of technai, and it plays the same role here: 'in that case we must divide the kinds of knowledge (epistemas) as we did when we were considering [the sophist]?' (258b6-7). Besides the substitution of episteme for techne discussed above, this adoption of the Sophist's method involves one crucial adaptation. As we have seen, the search for the sophist began with the choice of an example, which then provided the method of division and a definition relevant to the main inquiry. Here at the outset of the Statesman, no example is chosen. With the method of the Sophist fresh in mind, no example appears to be needed to set the divisions going. But this appearance will prove deceptive. In this silent alteration a crucial aspect of the method in the Sophist goes missing and, for the moment, unremarked. The Stranger's instruction to divide 'as we did' in the Sophist, however, has an unexpected consequence. Though they engage in division in both cases, they begin by dividing differently. In the Sophist the first cut divided productive-arts from acquisitive arts. In the Statesman the first cut divides practical arts from theoretical arts. No argument is given in either dialogue for any extensional identity between these two basic divisions. Indeed, a later division of theoretical-art yields a group of arts which issue their own commands, and only this sub-division of theoretical art is said to give commands for the sake of production, that is, producing things ( 2 6 i a n b2). So basic, and unremarked, a difference in the two opening divisions of expertise must lead us to inquire into just how the divisions map onto reality. The idea that the divisions map reality was introduced by Skemp thus: The notion of a 'world' of Forms, i.e. of a Reality which is a kind of area occupied by Forms and susceptible of a dialectical Ordnance Survey, is fundamental [to the dialogue]. Skemp (1942) 74 n.3

Skemp's reading of course bears on something much more significant than merely the idea of a map: the notion that the Statesman's divisions divide or otherwise involve Platonic 35

METHOD

Forms. This question has been commented on above (pp. 1618). But the image of a map also requires consideration. Ordnance Surveys are normally thought of as unique and definitive, the complete account of a topographical area. So to think of them, however, is already to assume that one knows and shares the purpose for which they are made. They appear unique and definitive insofar as there is tacit agreement on the features which a comprehensive map should have (marking elevation, declination, and so on). But an oil surveyor might well have inquiries in mind which an Ordnance Survey map would not meet. The point is that maps are relative to the purposes of inquiry, and no map is even in principle definitive for every inquiry: a map suitable to the oil surveyor would not serve a motorist in haste. Skemp's appeal to mapping captures one important feature of the Statesman: the way that names have there to be tempered and even invented to correspond to the relevant features of a reality not otherwise defined, but everywhere assumed. But it is equally important to observe that the Sophist and the Statesman, from the outset, present radically different maps, which like all maps are shaped by the purposes they are made to serve. If division maps reality, it does so precisely in being neither exhaustive nor fixed in the distinctions it makes, names it gives, and definitions it constructs. And so long as a sufficient definition of the target is achieved, the divisions made along the way may be as sketchy and provisional as the interlocutors like. The teleological aim of the inquiry governs the degree of completeness it is compelled to attain as well as the very content of the definitions reached. By 'teleological' is meant the literal fact that each inquiry aims at a telos: definition of sophist and statesman, and thereby (in part) resolution of Socrates' initial query of the Stranger. Each such telos puts a 'teleological' constraint on the unfolding development of the discussion. Certain words characteristically reflect this constraint in the text of the Statesman in particular. The most notable are saphes for clarity and teleos for completeness; the latter, of course, implies completion precisely as the realisation of the telos. 36

THE STATESMAN'S

USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

Repeatedly the Stranger checks himself or the boy, or urges them both on, by observing that their clarifying task is not yet complete. 50 What must be completed is not a map of the entire set of the arts in their interrelation, but rather the definition of the target (and even that itself must be complete only in relation to answering Socrates' original demand as to whether sophist, statesman, and philosopher are one, two or three). The goal is a portrait of a single art, sufficiently clear and detailed for these purposes, 51 not a panorama of them all. It follows that such clarity about the other arts which the divisions may achieve is either necessary for the inquiry or an unintended bonus. Consequently, no special effort is made to ensure that these other arts are completely characterised, or adequately distinguished from one another. And this teleological framework engenders the double-sided practice of naming which has been noted above. This feature of inquiry is most broadly formulated early in the Statesman: ES:

So in what direction will one discover the path that leads to the statesman? For we must discover it, and after having separated it from the rest we must impress one character (idean) on it; and having stamped a single different form (eidos) on the other turnings we must make our minds think of all kinds of knowledge as being two forms (eide). (258C3-8)

This proposal echoes one made in the Sophist for the division of purifications: put the one of interest (the target) by itself, and all others in another class. The teleological character of the inquiry is evident here. Since the aim is to define statecraft, all other knowledge must be understood as in some way other-than-statecraft.52 There follows a certain 50

51

52

ou . . . TravTairaai . . . TeAecos, 267CI1; not yet 6Aov or crocks, 275a5; TEAEOV, 28oe6; n o t yet craves or TeAsov, 2 8 i d 2 . Contra Sayre (1969) 216 w h o insists that '[a] definition of the sort which the Sophist exhibits is adequate if it formulates b o t h necessary and sufficient conditions for being the kind of thing defined'. The divisions offer a notion of 'sufficiency' relative to the purposes of the inquiry instead. C o m p a r e Ackrill (1970) 384: '[Plato] is not here seeking to bring to light the structure of a whole genus, b u t to achieve a definition of a particular species. F o r

37

METHOD

53

provisionally in the discussion and divisions of all those other forms of knowledge. If we were defining carpentry we would presumably have to establish a kind of 'knowledgeother-than-carpentry' in which statecraft would now be included along with all other forms of knowledge; a changed telos would change the very classifications employed. It is important to observe that such lopsided dichotomies are not presented by the Stranger as mere way-stations, a first step in what will be a fuller and more complete exposition. Rather, the formation of these two complementary but so different kinds is demanded as an onerous intellectual discipline. To define something requires 'bringing one's mind' to consider it as something distinctive and set apart from all other things of its erstwhile kind. To recognise an eidos is a constructive intellectual achievement, one from which the purpose of the inquiry - that is to say, the purpose of the inquirers - is ineliminable. If the results achieved by division are provisional and relative to the aim of the inquiry, in what sense can they be said to be definitions? Both dialogues 54 claim to reach definitions by linking, or 'weaving' together the names of the forms of expertise identified in the path of the division leading to the target. Yet it may be objected that if the division paths are provisional and multiple, surely they cannot constitute a proper (presumptively unique) definition.55 The point is well

53

54

55

this purpose the important thing is at each stage to hit on the relevant sub-genus of the superior genus; the irrelevant sub-genus can be thrown away - and it doesn't matter if [tjhere are some other (irrelevant) sub-genera we have not mentioned.' But Ackrill takes this specially to justify dichotomous division, which it need not do. T o use this word t o express this thought is t o gloss a remark by Campbell (1973) xi: ' . . . Plato employs division by exclusions precisely as a provisional expedient [emphasis original]. His object is n o t the classification of m a n y objects b u t the definition of one.' So. 2 2 i b - c defines the angler ('not only the n a m e . . . b u t the definition (logon)') in this way; So. 2 6 8 c - d does the same for the sophist, claiming to 'weave' (sumplexantes) the n a m e by so doing. St. 2 6 y a - c does the same for the shepherddivisions of the statesman, though this is soon criticised as misleading a n d incomplete (see below, p p . 4 3 - 6 a n d Part 11) a n d the final definition of the statesman is n o t given by such reverse summation. Cherniss (1962) 47 rightly notes the provisionality: the stages of division are imp o r t a n t 'rather as a safeguard t o insure the right direction of the search (Politicus

38

THE STATESMAN

S USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

taken only in so far as it highlights the fact that definition conceived as a unique verbal formula is not the dialogues' aim. The call for 'definition' is better understood as signalling the need for, as Annas puts it, 'expert knowledge of what one is talking about'. 56 And this is entirely consistent with a focused and limited notion of what one is, indeed, talking about: a notion focused and limited by the goal of the inquiry and so provisional in relation to a comprehensive understanding of the general field. Definitions are, in these dialogues, presented as provisional insofar as they are relative to a given aim of the inquiry; they are demands thrown up by the course and direction of the argument. As remarked above, the Statesman embarks on this inquiry without choosing any example to govern it. We should not be surprised that the subsequent attempt to practise division in the absence of an example is not really successful. Division of theoretical-art continues until the Stranger invites a conclusion: 'let's go back to the beginning, and gather together (suneirdmen) from there to the end our account (logon) of the name of the expertise of the statesman' (267a4~6). The definition reached is, roughly, the statesman as giver of his own orders to the human herd (267a7-c4). The mere 'gathering together' of this first definition may 57 warn that the definition has failed to attain the requisite unity, indicated elsewhere by the language of weaving (sumplekein). Whether or not the semantics suggest failure, failure is confirmed when the Stranger rejects their definition as flawed, not in all ways 'sufficient' (hikanos) or 'complete' (teleos) (267c8-di). This is the signal for introduction of the story of the divine helmsman. But as that story is the topic of Part n, the task here is to examine the failure of this first definition more closely.

56 57

262B) t h a n as representative of the necessary ingredients of the idea, for "longer" and " s h o r t e r " roads m a y lead to the same conclusion {Politicus 265A, 266E)'. But he concludes, wrongly in m y view, that division is therefore unable to attain definitions a n d is rather a mere h a n d m a i d e n of recollection (pp. 4 6 - 7 ) . A n n a s (1995) xi. T h e possibility is in the contrast of suneirein with sumplekein at So. 268C5-6; but see the cautionary remarks on the former verb in Aristotle, N.E. H 4 7 a 2 i - 2 2 , in Burnyeat (1980) 89 n.6.

39

METHOD

Shepherding No formal example (paradeigma) is adopted at the outset of the Statesman, as was done in the Sophist. Nevertheless the Statesman's first and ultimately unsatisfying foray into division is guided by the tacit introduction of the language of shepherding. 58 The role of this language is difficult to describe precisely. Certainly the language of shepherding as used for statecraft goes far beyond a simple analogy. The statesman is discussed as shepherder of the human herd, distinguished from other herders only by the identity of his flock (people, not oxen, cows or pigs). The discussion proceeds as if statecraft were straightforwardly a kind of shepherding and the various kinds of shepherding did not differ in the nature of their activity. However, this more-than-analogy still fails to become an explicit 'example'. The shepherd is never announced as an 'example', and more importantly, there is no division of the arts involved in shepherding as there was for the explicit 'example' of angling in the Sophist. Shepherding is presented as a pursuit without internal differentiation, being divided not into kinds of expertise but only into the kinds of herds it tends. And so in contrast with the Sophist, where clear-cut and explicit adoption of an 'example' enabled the divisions to proceed successfully, in the Statesman a tacit adoption of something like an example but never clearly recognised, announced or defined leads ultimately to failure and frustration. Shepherding language first appears in the course of the fifth division-cut. To recapitulate the steps of the division to that point: theoretical art is divided into calculating arts, which only judge but do not use their judgments, versus commanding arts which issue orders to others based on their judgments. Commanding arts are then divided into those which pass on others' commands, like heralds or more fancifully retail mer58

The literal term is 'herding', but 'shepherding' is more colloquial in English so long as it is understood without special reference to sheep (remembering that shepherd's pie is often made with beef). 40

THE STATESMAN'S

USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

chants, versus those which issue their own commands. A name has to be fashioned for the latter class, since this genos 'happens pretty much to be without a name of its own', and the name chosen is 'self-directing' (26oe3-6). Only this side of the division is named since it is only in this class that the 'class of kings' is to be placed (26oe5~6). Once again, the purpose of the inquiry determines a doubleedged practice with regard to names. The 'self-directing' arts are given a name even though it has to be invented. But of the other half of the division the Stranger says, '[can we not continue] taking no notice of all the rest, leaving someone else to propose another name for them? For we set up our investigation in order to find the person who rules, not his opposite.' (26oe6-26iai) Since the ruler is not to be found among the heraldric-retailing-commanding arts, that awkward conjoined description is enough and no name need be coined for them. These self-directing arts are the ones said to be productive, to command for the sake of producing things, and they are divided into those which produce lifeless things versus those which produce living things. This division pits architect (previously a guiding model, now split off from the search for statecraft) against herder - at which point the notion of shepherding enters at last. Observe the vocabulary in which it is couched. Numerous words are put into play, with several variations of 'rearing' (trophein) but accompanied by one appearance of'caring for' (epimeleian, 26id5). 59 Young Socrates is indifferent to this plethora of possible names for the shepherd's activity: he wants simply to use 'whichever of these names crops up as we talk' 60 (26ie4). The Stranger praises him for 'not paying serious attention to names', predicting a rich future in wisdom because of it (26165-7). But his praise will soon be proved ironic. For the

59

60

These words will reappear a n d be m o r e carefully distinguished in the exaggerated portrait of K r o n o s as the shepherd of h u m a n s , in the story. Here I translate with Waterfield, in line with the ironic reading which is m a d e appropriate in retrospect (see below). 41

METHOD

boy immediately makes a hasty division between nurture of humans and nurture of beasts, an error which the Stranger diagnoses as in part a confusion about names: And to me you appeared then to think that in taking away a part you had left behind the rest as in its turn a single kind (genos), consisting of all of them, because you had the same name, 'beasts', to apply to them all. 61

Young Socrates has drawn precisely the wrong inferences from the Stranger's double-edged practice with names. 62 On the one hand, he professes indifference to names like 'herdrearing' which really do matter, names which (at least as the division proceeds) will feature in the eventual definition of the statesman. On the other hand, he is so bedazzled by his own dexterity in finding the common name 'beasts' for living creatures other than humans, that he wrongly concludes that a common name in common parlance must correspond to a real and single kind. In short, the boy makes light of names when they matter and makes them matter when they don't. He ignores the need to invent a name as a tool, and misreads another name as solid evidence. In taking his cue, perhaps, from occasions when Theaetetus and the Stranger both enjoin an appropriate neglect for names (e.g. So. 22od4, 227c 1-5), he misses entirely the way that the argument's context in the overall inquiry determines the appropriate double-edged treatment of names. In other words, the boy's error is in taking the mere existence of a name as licensing a division, forgetting that division must be employed precisely to scrutinise and revise names. A further run of divisions follows, taking the interlocutors from tame animals through terrestrial to walking ones, and then down two paths to identify humans as the kind of herd tended by the shepherd-statesman. The longer path involves

61

62

Genos as 'kind' here brings out the error better than Rowe's neutral 'class'. A n d 'beasts' brings out the fact that h u m a n s have been excluded better t h a n Rowe's 'animals'. R o w e ' s note (1995) on the passage picks u p half of this point: ' W h a t this is supposed to illustrate is perhaps primarily the danger of relying on names . . . '

42

THE STATESMAN

S USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

horns, interbreeding abilities, and a pedantic joke about the geometrical relation between the two-footedness of humans and the four-footedness of pigs; here the Stranger reinforces the equal attention which division gives to what is undignified and minor (smikroteron), a lesson which careful readers of the Sophist's introduction of the method would already have learned. The shorter path has two steps: distinguish quadrupeds from bipeds, then feathered from featherless bipeds the latter are (all and only) humans. These two different paths 63 - one starting with footedness, the other arriving there - reinforce the provisional and teleological character of the maps which division constructs. When both paths have isolated humans as the herd of the statesman-shepherd, the Stranger as seen above 'gathers together' the definition of the name of the statesman's art. He retraces the steps of the divisions leading to statecraft from the very first division into theoretical art, via the 'longer path,' and concludes somewhat awkwardly: the segment from this, a part relating to a two-footed flock, concerned with rearing of human beings, still left on its own - this very part is now what we were looking for, the same thing we call both kingly and statesmanlike. (267CI-3)

But this account, while stated 'in a certain way,' is - the Stranger fears - not complete. His main concern is that, whereas shepherds of other animals have no rivals for the multifaceted exercise of their art, the statesman-shepherd will find himself besieged by rivals arguing that they, not he, are responsible for some aspect of the art of caring for humans (267e4~268di). This criticism and its significance will be developed further in the story and the corresponding Part II here. Here, however, we may consider the question of what has gone wrong. Why did the shepherd-divisions (as I will refer to the whole set of divisions down to 267C3) fail? 63

Dorter (1994) is much concerned with the fact of two paths, and the nature of the difference between them. His desire to find a substantive point here contrasts with my emphasis on the floundering of these early divisions before the example of weaving is introduced. 43

METHOD

Their failings are interrelated and twofold: in method and in politics. Consider first the failings in method. We have already noted that this entire series of divisions, heavy with plodding humour as they are, divide only (the arts of caring for) different kinds of animals, without reference to any internal structure or differentiation of the activity of herding. The divisions fail, then, to distinguish factors internal to the art of rule. They also fail to distinguish between humans and other animals in any qualitative terms whatsoever. Only evident biological facts such as habitat, hornedness, footedness and so on are used to distinguish among different kinds of animals, and these differentiae are applied as directly to humans as to pigs and cows. Detached from the logos of an example, from the definition and kinship which shape inquiry, these dichotomies furnish no resources with which to make any meaningful comparison. The method of division-saws-example, applied to an important telos of inquiry, creates an evaluative vacuum with political consequences. To include a division of land- and wateranimals in the definition of statecraft, discussing humans as if one had first to make sure what kind of creatures they are, is to discount any internal knowledge of human goals. Instead of raising questions about human judgment, values and desires, we are subjected to a pedantic discussion which objectifies humans as just another kind of herd. The story will reject this estranging objectification, offering instead a narrative which - while still putting humans into a cosmic framework reveals the mode of self-government which is distinctive to them. In light of this coming rejection it is plausible to read the point of the alienating animal-divisions as, precisely, to make the reader uncomfortable with so 'inhuman' a discussion of politics. The very estranging64 quality of the divisions 64

Aristotle, Pol. I 3 i i b i 5 , uses allotriotes to refer to 'estrangement', a reference which - though in my view inapplicable to division generally - neatly illustrates the link between its example-less and so estranging practice and an estranging politics here (I owe this reference to Rowe (1995) 181, note to 26ia3-6). Cf. also Gill (1995) Appendix on the dialogue's method of 'defamiliarisation and theorised reconstitution'. 44

THE STATESMAN

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insinuates that humans are not in fact a herd like any other, and their governance not a matter of ordinary shepherding.65 One final political implication is suggested by the shepherddivisions, this time with reference to the language of shepherding itself. The model of the king as shepherd was ingrained in Greek culture by the Iliad. Its deep resonance may account for the Statesman's success in sneaking in shepherding without having to class or employ it as an explicit 'example'. Indeed most of Plato's political discussions take up the model of shepherding at some point, though the polemical force of the model varies with each context. Republic I dissects an inherent tension (Rep. 345a-347a): do shepherds fatten their sheep merely in order to eat them (as Thrasymachus insists), or is Socrates right to believe in a genuine art of shepherding guided solely by the best interests of the herd? The Statesman's general account of ruling sustains Socrates' view that true rulers will have the true interests of the ruled in mind. But this view of ruling cannot be satisfactorily modelled in terms of shepherding. That widely accepted model of rule will be shown to lack both the internal differentiation as an art, and the special (and internal) applicability to humans, that an adequate example for politics requires. 66 Division without paradeigma, as displayed in the shepherddivisions, ends in stalemate. The definition thereby reached, of the statesman as herder of the human herd, is unsatisfying (267C5-268d4), yet the method so far offers no resources for its correction. This failure is a key juncture in the dialogue. From this point onward, new methods and new political examples will be introduced, with a rising level of self-awareness about what a satisfactory definition of statecraft would require. 65

66

Contrast the discussion in B u m y e a t (1992) 183 of the deliberate alienation achieved in the Republic by such devices as the guard-dog imagery and the stockbreeding terminology. It must be noted that the Critias a n d the Laws each appropriate the model of shepherding in ways beyond the scope of the discussion here. See Gill (1979), rebutting Owen's claim (in Owen (1965)) that the Statesman offers 'second thoughts o n politics' correcting the Republic, Timaeus and Critias. Gill argues inter alia that K r o n o s is a m o r e psychologically subtle shepherd in the Critias t h a n in

the Statesman. 45

METHOD

The story which is introduced, as Part n will show, serves as a kind of halfway-house between the shepherd model and the genuine paradeigma of weaving which will eventually guide the inquiry to an adequate definition of statecraft. Awareness of the story as an inadequate paradeigma finally puts the topic of paradeigma onto the explicit agenda of the dialogue (in contrast to the seemingly casual ubiquity of paradeigma in the Sophist from the start). Having seen how shepherding fails to function, being neither a technically nor politically appropriate example, it is best to proceed by examining how weaving - the example which proves both genuine and appropriate - succeeds in functioning. The deliberate choice of weaving as a paradeigma is preceded by a lengthy and systematic account, by the Stranger, of the nature, value and importance of paradeigmata. Consideration of this systematic account of paradeigma is postponed to the next section, so that we may first describe the way that, once introduced, an adequate paradeigma is actually used in the Statesman. Weaving ES:

. . . what quite minor (smikrotatori) example is there which we can set beside statecraft, and which, having the same activity (pragmateian) as statecraft, will help us sufficiently to discover what we seek?67 (279a7~ bi)

This question recalls almost precisely the Stranger's selfinterrogation at the beginning of the Sophist as to what 67

My translation, to highlight the references to the themes of being 'minor', 'example', and 'sufficient'. Contra Jowett and Skemp, Rowe employs 'model' to translate irapaSeiyiJia; Rosen concurs, arguing that 'model' embodies a normative sense of standard or rule in contexts where 'example' may be simply any one of a kind (Rosen (1995) 80-3). Certainly the two central TrapaSsiyiiaTa of angling and weaving are normative (cf. Rowe (1995) 201 n.to 2^jjdi-2). Yet the Sophist introduces the term in an everyday illustrative sense, and the Statesman's irapaSeiyiaa of irapdSEiyna shows children learning letters for which no word could be more normative than any other. To distinguish too sharply between these semantic notions is to obscure the fact that Greek combines them in a single term (LSJ s. v.). The main point is, as Rosen (1995) 83 goes on to say, 'we require not merely an example of a paradigm but a paradigmatic example'; I prefer the deceptively ordinary connotations of 'example' to suggest this. 46

THE STATESMAN

S USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

example to choose for sophistry. The two dialogues place parallel constraints on the choice of the example. These are summarised in the following table. Each dialogue enjoins that the example chosen must be: Sophist (2i8e2~3) (a) minor (smikron) (b) familiar (eugnoston) (c) have logos (d) share kinship (be suggene) with telos of inquiry (22id9)

Statesman (279a7~bi) (a) minor (smikrotaton) (b) ready-to-hand (prokheiron)68 (c) [take part (mews) of it] 69 (d) share activity (pragmateian) with telos of inquiry (279*7-8)

Kinship and shared activity are, I take it, parallel ways of establishing a meaningful affinity between example- and targetart. Yet there is a subtle difference between them manifest in the workings of the two inquiries. Recall that in the Sophist, all but one division of sophistry began from a 'nodal' art identified in the division of angling. Individual arts common to the logoi of example-art and target-art underpinned the comparisons. The Statesman uses no such single common art between weaving and statecraft as a launch pad. Instead, a second-order distinction made in the division of weaving (28idio) - between contributory arts (sunaitia) and cooperative arts (aitiai) - will be taken over and applied to the division of statecraft in order to relaunch it successfully. Weaving and statecraft do not, we will find, have the same contributory arts; each has a proper set of its own which parallel one another. 68

69

The two constraints of (b) m a k e the same general point: we must have some kind of cognitive grasp of the topic in order to begin the process of clarification through inquiry which will result in knowledge. In the later technical analysis of example, this initial cognitive grasp will be referred to as 'true belief ( 2 7 ^ 9 , 278b3); see p. 64 below. The specific suggestion is that they take only 'part' (mews) of weaving, i.e. woolweaving (279b 1-5); this injunction could be read as recommending a kind of weaving rather t h a n a part of its logos. But the next sentence enjoins the same procedure of division 'just as [when] we divided each subject before by cutting off parts from parts (mere merony (iq<)bi-%). This repetition of meros in the clear context of division leading to definition is the warrant for parallel (c). (Despite the Stranger's stylised a n d unfavourable contrast of meros with eidos ( 2 6 3 b 7 - i o ; and with genos, 263a2-4), the actual divisions frequently use meros in doing their work: St. 279b8, 283a3, 283a5.)

47

METHOD

This careful separation between the arts involved in running the city and those involved in working cloth means that there is no recognisable craft or art which is common to the two. Yet a common activity binds the different sets of arts which each encompasses and directs. The activity-structure of 'weaving' - an activity which combines opposed elements while keeping them discrete - is manifest in the art of the loom-using artisan and in that of the statesman. This common activity of weaving and statecraft will be a central theme in the discussion of politics in Part III. Here, our concern is with the functional role of weaving in the dialogue: as example for the final and successful definition of statecraft. Defining the example to exemplify definition The use of the example of weaving is complicated by the fact that it is introduced halfway through the dialogue, a late-comer to a search already well under way. Definition of the example, rather than setting the scene for the main definition as in the Sophist, must in the Statesman catch up with the development of the main definition so far. The reader may wonder why, given the dissatisfaction expressed with the shepherd-definition, the definition of weaving need take the discussion so far into account at all. There are two reasons. First, the shepherd-definition was not abandoned altogether. It was, rather, declared incomplete and insufficient. The point at which the definition of statecraft was declared unsatisfactory, a point which the story did not manage to correct, 70 was the appearance of rival arts which 'dispute' (amphisbetounton) the honorific title 'statecraft' with the true statesman (268C2-3). The shepherd-definition's failure to separate the statesman from these rivals was the basis for indicting it as incomplete (268c5-d4). If the art of weaving is to give an example of how to escape this quandary, this exemplary art must first be shown in the same predicament. Weaving must have rivals if its example in showing how to dispatch them is to serve the main inquiry. 70

This will be shown in detail in Part n.

48

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But before rivals to a defined art can crop up, the definition itself must first be established. And indeed the first rapid-fire definition of weaving is designed precisely to reach a comparable level to that already attained by the interrupted definition of statecraft.71 This is done as the Stranger says, by using the same method of dividing part from part already used in defining statecraft. Working in the language of the products of the arts, the division proceeds briskly from the separation of agents and preventatives, to the art of clothesmaking, 'distinct in nothing but name' from the art of weaving - just as kingship and statecraft are declared distinct in name but not in art (28oa4~6 for both points). These first divisions of weaving also parallel what was lacking in the shepherd-divisions of statecraft. Weaving is here defined by refining its product; statecraft as shepherding was defined by refining its herd. In neither case is much said about the internal structure of the activity, and this silence so far fails to address - hence, leaves opening for self-assertion by the rival arts which will soon appear to challenge weaving. The Stranger hints as much in an immediate challenge to the definition of weaving he himself has just produced by a bravura performance of division. He remarks: [SJomeone might perhaps suppose that weaving had been adequately described when put like this, being unable to grasp that it had not yet been divided off from those co-operative arts (sunergori) that border it, while it had been parcelled off from many kindred arts (suggenon)12 (28oa8-b3)

Young Socrates doesn't pick up on the mention of as yet undistinguished 'co-operative' - in the literal sense of 'coworker' - arts at all; he still fails to see the problem of rivalry which will be posed by these very arts to the kingly art of weaving. He does ask, in response to the Stranger's comment, 71 72

I owe this point, which I have elaborated, to Miller (1980) 60. Here R o w e ' s translation is o n the whole the best available in English; Skemp takes the mention of the suggenon as invidious, while Waterfield for some reason reverses the syntax. I render 'kindred arts' for R o w e ' s 'related ones', again to highlight the verbal link to the 'kinship' (suggene) of angler and sophist (So. 2 2 i d 8 - 9 ; p. 28 above). As angler and sophist were kin in the act of hunting, so carpentry, a r m o u r - m a k i n g a n d so on are kin to weaving in the act of defending.

49

METHOD

'which kindred arts?' (28ob4), indicating that he didn't understand that arts were in play in the brisk division of 'all the things we make and acquire' (279C7). This prompts the Stranger's review of the weaving-divisions (280ci-e4), which can be understood as a naming of arts corresponding to the divisions of products effected the first time round. Only on this second round, a review, are we given the names for felting, shoemaking, skinning, carpentry, joinery, armour-making and magic. Presumably then these are the 'kindred arts'. The present interpretation must face a challenge. The remarks above began from 280CI, whereas the review of the division for the scolded Young Socrates' sake began actually five lines earlier at 28ob6. And this opening part of the review may seem to suggest that the separation of the kindred arts was really a mistake. For the Stranger begins: If you grasp the kinship 73 (oikeioteta) in this case, we cut off one 'related' expertise from it just now, separating off the putting together of blankets by means of the distinction between pulling round and putting under. (28ob6-9)

This sounds very much as if the 'kinship' between woven blankets and woven clothes was wrongly severed by the early division of what is put around (e.g. a cloak around a body) from what is put under (e.g. a blanket put under a body on a bed). The problem with this reading is that no such imputation of error attaches to the review of carpentry and so on with which the Stranger continues (and which was discussed above). How then should the present passage be understood? Recall again that the boy's initial question was 'which kindred arts?' If the identification of carpentry and so on soon to follow addresses the question of 'arts', perhaps the present passage is meant to address the question of 'kindred'. That is, the boy not only failed to notice that any arts were even mentioned in the division of weaving, but he also failed to understand what it meant for an art to be 'kin' to another. So the Stranger gives him here a first lesson in kinship by stressing the kinship in fabric between blankets and clothes; 73

Happily, Rowe renders this 'kinship', a translation which rightly begins to tie in this new word to the play on kinship and resemblance begun in the Sophist. 50

THE STATESMAN'S

USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

his second lesson in kinship will stress the kinship in activity between various defending arts including clothes-making or weaving. On this interpretation, then, we need not impute any error to the identification of kindred arts in the divisions. The 'insufficiency' then remarked at 280b 1 is indeed an insufficiency, an absence, an omission, rather than a commission the omission of the rival and co-working arts. The first of these rivals to make an appearance is the art of carding. The Stranger introduces it as an art which acts in the opposite way from weaving even though appearing in the latter's definitional division. He explains these 'opposite' actions in terms of a fundamental contrast. Weaving involves 'intertwining' (sumploke), whereas the opposite art involves 'undoing' (dialutike) closely packed and matted materials (28ia3-6). In naming this the art of the carder, and in identifying several other rival arts thereafter, the Stranger invokes the question of the propriety of naming and calling by names which we saw so prevalent in the earlier shepherd-divisions. He asks rhetorically 'dare we call (kalein) carding weaving, or weaving carding', to which Young Socrates gives the resounding and expected 'not at all' (28ia8-io); he claims that 'weaving' would be a false and bizarre 'name' for the art which produces the warp and woof (28iai2-bi); he suggests that the arts of fulling and darning should not be 'called' weaving despite their roles in caring for clothes (28ib3-6). None of these arts is entitled to the prized name of 'weaving'. Yet their claims have been dismissed without proof or nicety. No definitional argument, that is, no division of weaving has yet meted out justice to these various rivals, demarcating their several spheres of competence and distinguishing them clearly from that of weaving. Recall the close link between names and division established above. So far, the Stranger has only asserted the relevance or otherwise of certain names. Until division validates claims to names, the perilous situation of rivalry between the arts for the title of weaving will continue: ES:

Yet all of these will dispute (amphisbetesousin) the role of caring for (therapeias) and the production of clothes with the capacity of the

METHOD

weaving art, conceding the largest part (megiston ... meros) to it, but assigning a large (megala) part of it to themselves too. 74 (28ib7-io)

Because of this failure, it is implied, the definition of weaving remains inadequate, unclear, and incomplete (28ic7~d3). At last an impasse facing weaving has been identified which parallels the impasse facing statecraft. Both arts have been inadequately defined insofar as a host of rivals still challenge their right to their own names. Both must rid themselves of the rivals who claim an unassessed75 part of the art in question for themselves. Until those rivals are dispatched, no title however grandiose and honorific will be clear (saphes) or complete (teleon) enough a definition (for weaving, 28ic7-d3). If weaving can be separated (literally, divided) from these thronging rivals, such an achievement would indeed constitute an example for how to do the same for statecraft. And so, having reached the same impasse as what it models, weaving can now begin to show the way forward. Before we go on to consider the divisions which adequately distinguish these rival arts from weaving, an observation on the role of 'care' (therapeia) in the remarks about the rivals is pertinent. Note that fulling and darning are admitted to play a role in 'tending' (epimeleian) and 'in some way caring for' {Una therapeian) clothes - but the Stranger insists that these claims, this way of caring for clothes, doesn't earn them the title of 'weaving'. Physical pressing and mending isn't the kind of care which weaving gives. Nevertheless, weaving is accorded a kind of 'care' {therapeias) for clothes at 28ib7, and it may by implication engage in a kind of 'tending' as well. The point is that these two words are exact verbal echoes of the developing definition of the statesman-shepherd in the first 74 75

M y translation, following R o w e and Skemp in part. N o t e the confusion of standards of measurement in the claims ascribed to weaving's rivals. T h e rival arts grant the superlative claims of weaving to be megiston, yet in the same breath set u p a claim of some size against it {megala), without any indication of h o w to measure that claim. This confusion neatly suggests the need for the lecture on measurement soon to follow.

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USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

two stages of the inquiry, that is, the shepherd-divisions and the story. Epimeleian echoes the shepherd-divisions which were the first stage in the inquiry. Just as other arts here contest the weaver's claim to care for clothes, so earlier other arts contested the statesman's claim to tend (epimelountai, 268a2) the human herd. And therapeian encapsulates the developments in the second stage, the story; one lesson drawn from the story is that therapeuein or a term equally broad must replace the narrower terms, like agelas, as designation for the human shepherd, who unlike other herdsmen does not physically feed his charges (275d8-e3). By the parallel, we see that the weaver is able to carry out the revised function of 'tending' clothes in a general sense parallel to that of the human shepherd who should 'tend' (not feed) the human herd. The weaver doesn't mend the clothes, the statesman doesn't feed the herd, yet both carry out the functions of caring for the herd when these functions are understood in a broad enough sense. Implied by these verbal parallels is the claim that the example of weaving is able to do at least all that the language of shepherding could. Just as the weaver can be a tender, so ultimately will the statesman be - the final definition of statecraft finds it 'ruling . . . tending (epimeloumenen) . . . and weaving' together everything in the state (30562-4). 76 These verbal references to the division and the story imply that no gains of the search so far will be lost in giving up the language of herding, in favour of the example of weaving. From this point the example of weaving begins to break new ground by locating, hence subduing, the rival arts in a series of divisions. Like the very first divisions made in search of sophistry and statecraft, the first division here divides all activities into two kinds of art. In the beginning of the Sophist, these were productive and acquisitive arts; in the beginning of 76

Weiss (1995) argues that the shepherd remains present as a guiding image throughout the dialogue, but does not in my view sufficiently emphasise the chastening of the shepherd's political and methodological pretensions which occurs in the dialogue.

53

METHOD

the Statesman, they were theoretical and practical; here they are 'contributory' (sunaitiori) and 'cooperative' (aitian) causes of products (28idn). And again names and 'calling' play a crucial role in the development of these divisions. The 'contributory' arts make the tools for making an object, but do not make the object itself. In the case of weaving the arts which make the spindle, shuttle and suchlike should be 'called' contributory arts ( 2 8 i e i - n ) . Once named, these are left aside in favour of the 'cooperative' causes among which weaving itself must surely be numbered. Next a certain group of these 'cooperative' arts is set aside by being given the common 'name' of 'fulling': this art includes washing, darning, and 'caring' for clothes (therapeutiken again) (282ai~4). One Stephanus page earlier, fulling and darning were coordinate rivals for some kind of 'caring' for clothes (28^3-5). Now, the division has reorganised and validated names, making 'fulling' the overall name for an art comprising darning among others and also giving a strictly material sense to 'caring'. Division does, indeed, clarify and complete (cf.28id2 as quoted above). Though fulling is a 'cooperative' art, it is divided and set aside from those cooperative arts which have to do with the 'actual manufacture' of clothing. These arts, including among unspecified others the rivalrous carding, and spinning, 'are said by all to be a single art, wool-working {talasiourgikey (282a6~9). The Stranger here introduces a new (in this dialogue) name in order to embrace carding and spinning together with weaving at this stage in the division. (Note again how the logic of the division determines which names and how many are needed at each stage). This newly named art, 'wool-working', is divided in a scarcely (but subtly) precedented way. Its (two) parts are said to be natural parts of two forms of expertise at the same time - that is, each half of wool-working is also half of another pair of forms of expertise. This other, 'large' pair of expertises is announced as 'combination and separation' (sugkritike ... kai diakritike), which 'we found with regard to everything' (282bi~7). 54

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Where did 'we' 77 find this? The sixth division in the Sophist had identified an 'expertise of separation' (diakritiken) characterised by a notion of division (diairetika) and involved in a varied number of everyday household arts (So. 226ci-8). This was the most general identification of any form of expertise made by the Stranger so far, and it is not implausible that this passage is part of the Stranger's back-reference here; the Sophist's failure to identify combination as a general kind of expertise may hint that this statesmanlike ability is one which sophists conspicuously lack. 78 A more immediate candidate for the back-reference is in the Statesman itself, where the Stranger has already distinguished between weaving as a sort of 'intertwining' (sumploke), and carding as a kind of expertise which 'breaks apart' (dialutike) things that are combined (28ia3~6). He did not then pick out the general kinds corresponding to weaving and carding very clearly, and the present passage is perhaps most plausibly read as performing this generalisation. Once this distinction has been made, it becomes evident (also on the basis of the earlier distinction) that weaving will be found in the combining rather than the separating part. The separating part is therefore quickly dispensed with: shown to include carding and half of the art of using the shuttle, (282b9-c4), and then 'let go' in order to constitute the twopart division of wool-working into a separating part and a combining part. That is, separating need only be sufficiently grasped so as to be distinguished from combining. The purposes of the present inquiry preclude any further discussion of separation. Finally, the combining part of wool-working is divided into two parts: 'twisting' (streptikon) and 'interweaving' (sumplektikon) (282d4~5). 'Twisting' refers to the combining of the 77

78

T h e choice between the two interpretations given in the text rests in part on whether 'we' refers broadly to the Stranger and those present for the discussion, or specifically to himself and Y o u n g Socrates. C o m p a r e the conspicuous absence of episteme from the Sophist, discussed above (p. 3 n.7).

55

METHOD

threads actually to constitute the physical warp and woof, while 'interweaving' - to be identified with the long-sought 'weaving' - refers to the plaiting together of warp and woof. Recall that in the prototypical, proleptic division between combination and separation, sumploke was identified with weaving as against dialutike for carding (28ia3~6). Now the earlier, free-form notion of combination has been simultaneously broadened and tightened by the process of division. On the one hand, combination is broadened to include the twisting of warp and woof as well as their plaiting together; on the other hand, sumplekein is confirmed in its earlier title as the art of combination which counts by being finally and incontestably identified with the sought-after art of weaving. Once again division clarifies and sufficiently completes the allotment of names to arts and the relations among them. Bringing the example to bear Once defined by division, how does the example of weaving actually contribute to the definition by division of statecraft? Statecraft is, ultimately, both defined and described in its characteristic manner of activity. Weaving plays a crucial part early in the final push for a definition of statecraft. And weaving is also drawn on in the discussion of the activity and process of kingly weaving which follows on from the final definition of statecraft and concludes the dialogue. The very prolixity of the successful definition of weaving leads the Stranger to digress on the way prolixity should be assessed: this digression is the important passage on measurement, blame and praise to be discussed in Part n (pp. 125-36). Only after this is the example (paradeigma) 'borne' towards the statesman in order to resume the main inquiry (287a7~b2). To do so, the Stranger summarises the progress made in the search so far: [T]he king has been separated from the many kinds of expertise that share his field - or rather from all of them concerned with herds; there remain, we are saying, those in the city itself that are contributory (sunaition) causes

THE STATESMAN

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and those that are cooperative 79 (aitiori) causes, which we must first divide from each other. (28yb4-8)

Note the Stranger's unambiguous declaration that all those 'sharing the field' of the statesman-king - the Greek word sunnomoi brilliantly echoes the pastoral, making these experts as it were co-ruminants - have already been separated off. This happened in a passage we must now examine, anticipating Part n's discussion of the story: the passage in which conclusions drawn from the story lead to revisions of the shepherd-divisions. These revisions have everything to do with the double-edged question of the adequacy and appropriateness of names. Three main revisions are proposed. In the first case the problem is that the statesman turns out to have eluded and fled from the very 'name' assigned to him (275d4~6). The statesman had been described at the end of the shepherddivisions as engaging in 'herd-feeding' (agelaiotrophiken, 275d2). But this 'name' (275ei) implies actual feeding of the herd, which all other herdsmen do for their herds but the statesman doesn't actually do for his - he doesn't literally feed people. So this name has to be changed. Once this point has been made, however, the underside of names kicks in. In accordance with the general principle of sufficiency-but-nomore for names, so long as the theoretical point is taken any one of several new names for the kingly art would do: 'caring for' (therapeuein), 'attending to herds' (agelaiokomiken), or 'tending' (epimeletiken) (27563-8). Significantly, the first and third of these - neither of which mentions 'herds' at all - will reappear as descriptive of what weaving does for clothes. That is, the revision of the name of the herding art so as to embrace what the statesman actually does, makes the notion of 'caring' for a herd sufficiently general as to purge it of any special reference to herds at all. The language of 'caring for' is emptied of its pastoral references 79

I add 'cooperative' to Rowe's plain 'causes' in order to make the contrast between two kinds of causes uniform.

57

METHOD

and made available to weaving as to statecraft. Two further divisions set aside the divine shepherd from the human shepherd, and the tyrant - who coerces - from the king whose care is voluntarily accepted (275d5~ei3). With that, Young Socrates takes the explication of the statesman to be 'completed' (teleos, 277ai). The Stranger's unhappiness with this conclusion introduces the need for example. Forms of expertise having to do with the city are then the principal competitors still to be eliminated, and their division begins from the principal division which weaving served to introduce. Recall that the first and principal division of weaving made, from the point when the parallel between weaving and statecraft and their respective definitions had been established, was the division between contributory-arts and cooperative-arts: sunaitia and aitiai. This division between kinds of causes relevant to a given target-art is the chief structural contribution which the example makes to the main inquiry. In the case of weaving, the distinction mattered because it separated all the preparatory work of producing thread of two kinds, instruments and tools, and cleaning from the sole activity constituting weaving per se - the intertwining combination of warp and woof. Herding was unable to make such a distinction because herders of other animals do indeed feed, entertain, groom and so on, their charges. These multiple tasks signal that herding has no unique conceptual core. It is a mishmash of activities which, when transposed to the human realm where expert feeders, entertainers and so on exist, retains no characteristic task by which a statesman can be distinguished. Yet the distinction is crucial if political rule is to be distinguished from the manifold powers of producing what people need, or want, or use. The example of weaving shows up the distinction very clearly, since the weaver so evidently depends on the prior preparation of warp and woof by someone else. By having chosen this example the Stranger acknowledges that the statesman, too, depends on a great deal of prior and ongoing preparation, nurture, and maintenance of the people and material within the city. The example also shows, however, 58

THE STATESMAN'S

USE OF EXAMPLE AND DIVISION

that none of these activities exhaust or replace, or should be confused with, the political art whose characteristic function is yet to be defined. In the case of statecraft, the elaboration of the sunaitia is complex because of the great number and variety of items in the city which the statesman oversees but which are neither directly produced by his art nor directly relevant to it. Seven groups of products each produced by a different kind of art are elaborated by divisions, now no longer dichotomous 80 , but of the 'nearest number', carved 'limb by limb' like the dismembering of a sacrificial animal (287C3-5). The seven groups are summarised, in a slightly different order, as raw materials (the 'first-born' class), tools, vessels, vehicles, defences, playthings, and nourishments (289a9-b2); none of these are the product or province of statecraft. Worth noting is the fact that the 'defences' are said to include most of the things elaborated in the definitional division of weaving, and to be produced by builders or weavers (288b4-8). 81 Thus weaving not only plays its role as an example by providing a structural parallel for statecraft in a certain key division, but also takes its place as an ordinary art among fellow producers in the city. This nicely confirms the ordinariness of the weaving in question. Just as weaving was finally located and isolated among the aitiai - the cooperative but rival arts - including such rivals as carding and spinning, so statecraft is to be found among its own aitiai. The practitioners of these cooperative but competitive arts, are said by the Stranger to be 'slaves and all those people who are subordinate to others' (289C4). In what sense are slaves and servants direct producers of something like statecraft, such that they would be rivals of 80

81

Here the fact that division need not be dichotomous is clearly manifest, in a context closer to the essence of statecraft t h a n the earlier, problematic and dichotom o u s shepherd-divisions (see above, p p . 4 0 - 4 6 ) . Despite the non-dichotomous framework, names are still crucial to this series of divisions (e.g. 288C4, 289a 1-2; at 289a3 the characteristic underside of disregard for names shows). T h o u g h the mention of 'defences' is a point of contact between the divisions of weaving a n d of statecraft, it serves to distinguish rather t h a n to align them. Contrast the genuinely shared nodal points in the divisions of angling and sophistry, on which see p . 29 above.

59

METHOD

the statesman? They are all those people who act primarily with and for others in the city rather than producing material objects. The list eventually includes (as Ostwald gives it) actual purchased slaves, wage-labourers, merchants, clerks, soothsayers, priests, sophists/politicians, judges, generals and rhetors. By calling all of this varied group 'subordinates', slaves and servants, the Stranger's immediate rhetorical effect is to deflate and subvert their importance. 82 A serious undertone may however be detected based on comparison with other Platonic, though non-Eleatic-Stranger, dialogues: the philosopher-kings of the Republic are pressed into unwilling service, and the Laws (762c) suggests that no man should be a master of others in the city until he has also been a slave to them. 83 Discussion of these varied contenders for the statesman's title, though provoking digressions and thoughtexperiments along the way, makes no further mention of weaving before concluding in the complete definition of statecraft as controlling all the other arts in the city with regard to their timing, and weaving them, the laws, and everything to do with the state together. Yet as remarked above, this completed definition is followed by appeal to the example of weaving in 'scrutinising' the actual process of statecraft. These developments will be treated at greater length in Part in. All told, weaving makes two major contributions to the definition of statecraft. It provides the distinction between sunaitia and aitiai needed to see off a major group of rivals to the statesman; and it provides the process and activity - as predicted, the common pragmateia - in terms of which statecraft is finally understood. If one recalls the Sophist's hope 82

83

Hansen (1983) points out that the Greek equivalent of 'political leaders' was typically rhetores kai strategoi, 'orators and generals' (cited in Rowe (1995) 1). The Stranger confronts and subordinates the recognised Athenian political leaders to his imagined ideal political expert. He does not directly confront the claims of the demos to political prominence, crucial in the actual functioning of Athenian democracy (cf. Ober (1989); Allen (1996), except in insisting that the many could never possess political expertise (292c)). I owe this point to Ostwald (1992) 57 n.17. 60

THE ANALYSIS OF EXAMPLE

that the example of angling would provide a method and a definition for the target of sophistry, it is evident that both method and definition relevant to the art of statecraft have been provided by the example of weaving. The analysis of example We have considered the way that the paradeigma of weaving is used in the Statesman: it is itself divided (and defined) in order to facilitate the further and final division (and so definition) of statecraft. To ensure that the crucial role of paradeigma is not missed, the Stranger embarks on a lengthy analysis of what it is, how it works, and why it matters. His analysis (277d-279a) is the longest and most detailed discussion of example as such, or any of its sisters - analogy, image, comparison - in Plato. Dissatisfaction with the shepherddefinition, even as modified by the story, provokes the analysis. 84 To the boy's request to show in what ways the definition of statecraft was inadequate, the Stranger responds magisterially: It is difficult . . . without using examples (paradeigmasi) to show any of the greater things sufficiently well (hikanos). Every one of us is like a man who sees things in a dream and thinks that he knows them perfectly and then wakes up, as it were, to find that he knows nothing. (277di-4)

The inclusion of statecraft among the 'greater things' which must be shown by example, picks up the contrast between investigation of the great (megas) by using a small (smikros) example, at the very beginning of the Sophist (So. 2i8c7-d2; cf. St. 279a8). Use of example in the present inquiry will be a special case - an example - of its required use for the definition of all the greater things. The reiteration of example is written into the text on three levels, as may be seen in the following table.

84

The only previous hint of the topic is the (problematic and proleptic) reference to the story as one of the 'great examples' (megala paradeigmata, 277154), on which see Part 11. 61

METHOD

Example Exemplified (A) children learning to read example in general (B) weaving statecraft (C) statecraft greater things The analytical focus is on Level A, the 'example of example' intended to clarify 'the nature of example in general' (iqi&q10, 27865-6). But the purpose of studying Level A is twofold: to prepare the way for the use of Level B in the search for statecraft (27867-10), and also, much later, to suggest that this search is itself intended as exemplary on Level C (285d5ff.), a level which treats statecraft as a great but not the greatest of matters. The language of spelling, generated on Level A, pervades the successive levels, as G. E. L. Owen 85 elegantly observed. In the present section we focus on Level A, the analysis of the nature of example in general, as drawn from the case of children learning to read. The reader must bear in mind, however, that Level A is itself introduced because of the stalemate in the discussion of statecraft, so that the analysis - although intended as general - is not innocent of reference to that predicament. The children find themselves in the following situation, as described by the Stranger: . . . they distinguish particular letters sufficiently well {hikanos) in the shortest and simplest syllables, and can tell you truthfully in these what each letter is . . . But if they see the same letters combined into other syllables, they fall back into doubt, and judge and speak falsely about them. (IJJQ62 7 8a3)

Notice that the seeming sufficiency of their grasp of letters in the shorter syllables is indicted as insufficient by their failure with the others. Just before introducing the topic of example, the Stranger had described their definition of statecraft as a 'seemingly sufficient' (hikanos) portrait 86 of the statesman 85 86

Owen (1973). Although the outline has been sketched, the Stranger says, it still lacks the pigments and properly mixed colours needed to make the portrait clear (277c 1-3). The portrait-comparison collides with a contrast subsequently made between definitions in words a n d visual images (277C3-6; cf. 285dff.), in which images are distinctly subordinated to the word. So the portrait-comparison seems to link the 62

THE ANALYSIS OF EXAMPLE

(277c 1), a semblance he then immediately exposed. The children are thus situated in the same precarious position, with regard to their learning, as the interlocutors have reached with regard to their own inquiry. As an example of what it is to proceed with examples, the case of the children will illuminate and structure key aspects of the interlocutors' position. 87 Example is the remedy prescribed to stabilise this precarious position and allow intellectual progress to be made. But qua remedy, example cannot involve merely the perfunctory adducing of a shorter syllable; the children already have these shorter syllables before them, minor, ready to hand and familiar, yet remain confused. The remedy of example consists rather in a dynamic method of comparison which is first described at length as it would be applied to the children, and then summarised in analytical terms. Let us consider the description and the summary in turn. In the description of the faltering children, their grasp of the letters in the shorter syllables is twice referred to in words deriving from 'belief (278a9, b3). And in the explicit introduction to the topic of example we were told that example is intimately and universally connected to the instability in 'the human experience of knowledge' (277d7). The implication, and it is a radical one, is that example constitutes a path from true 88 belief to knowledge: ordinary human beliefs are (as quoted above) like the dreams of the dreamer who wakes to find himself ignorant of what, dreaming, he thought he knew. This comprehensive framing of example as an explanation of the movement from dream- to waking- (i.e. genuine) knowledge holds despite the fact that the analytical summary of example will describe its yield as the formation of a 'single true doxd

87

88

inadequate logos of statecraft with the visual images inferior to logoi anyway. Perhaps the point of this collision is that the logos of statecraft is still only approximation, child's play, compared to a really difficult logos for the greatest things (cf. Level C, above). There will also and inevitably be features which the two cases do not share; see below, p p . 6 7 - 8 . Precisely because true belief is the starting point for knowledge, its status is entirely different from that of false belief which can never lead to any kind of understanding however minor or irrelevant the matter ( 2 7 8 d 8 - e i ) .

63

METHOD

(27806) or judgment/belief. Despite the use of doxa here 89 , the framing issue of knowledge decisively casts example in the role of successful path from true belief to knowledge. The passage from true belief to knowledge is a pervasive Platonic concern. What makes the claims here for example so startling 90 is the fact that, in the Phaedo, Meno, and Republic, even true beliefs are deceptive in that the attainment of genuine knowledge will cast them in a profoundly transformative light. Dominic Scott has argued persuasively that in these three dialogues, the passage from true belief to knowledge is not a gradual one, 'the refinement and distillation of one's earlier intuitions', but rather a radical path, 'revisionary and disorientating'. 91 Of special interest here is his thesis that in these dialogues, beliefs and perceptions have to be discarded in order to recollect; true knowledge is gained not by clarifying beliefs but by radically rejecting them altogether.92 Admittedly, whether recollection is a gradual or radical process depends in Scott's view on a more fundamental feature: the question of who recollects and what recollection enables them to do. On the 'gradual' interpretation, which Scott argues is a misreading of the Phaedo, Meno, and Republic, recollection is held to be done by everyone in the process of forming ordinary concepts necessary for thought and language. On the 'radical' interpretation, only the few will ever recollect as their recollection is requisite (only) for the attainment of philosophical understanding. Scott acknowledges the possibility of a 'third way' between these two approaches. 93 Such a 'third way' would allow that 89

90

91 92 93

One way to interpret this use of doxa is in terms of the parallel treatment of names, which are acceptable if and only if they are stripped of their prima facie ( c o m m o n sense) validity and tested in the course of philosophical inquiry. It is interesting that doxa is mentioned in the same breath as episteme and nous in the Seventh Letter (342c-d). Some - e.g. Gulley (1962) 111-12 - have seen the c o m m o n ground between recollection and example, but proceeded to identify these (often in the service of finding F o r m s in the Statesman). Such easy identification obscures the startling contrast in the two m e t h o d s ' treatment of true belief, discussed below. Scott (1995) 6, and passim. Ibid. 2 1 . Ibid.

64

THE ANALYSIS OF EXAMPLE

true beliefs are in some way retained as the starting point of recollection, but the process of recollecting involves revising them in an unusually arduous, thorough and perhaps disorienting way. This third approach to the transition from true beliefs to knowledge would combine the estranging experience of the 'radical' path with the basis in true belief of the 'gradual' path. Scott himself raises this possibility only to dismiss it as an inaccurate interpretation of the texts which concern him, noting that in these texts true beliefs are to be discarded rather than retained. But the idea that a method of moving from true belief to knowledge could combine the retention of beliefs with the experience of revisionary estrangement, characterises lucidly the method of example as analysed and as interacting with division in the Statesman.9* Example is presented as the path from true beliefs to knowledge, a path which clarifies and extends those beliefs rather than rejecting them; example also interacts with division, which effects revisions of common sense and expectations in the service of gaining a genuine understanding of the character or activity being investigated. Together the two constitute a method which retains true beliefs but achieves knowledge by drastically revising them. If this interpretation of example and division is right (a detailed reading of the analysis of example will be offered shortly), it nevertheless does not entail any particular view of the relation between the PhaedojMenojRepublic method of recollection and the SophistjStatesman method of division and example. The latter's relative vindication of true belief may be exploratory or provisional, or relative to the questions being explored (the nature of the virtues, the good and the soul in Scott's trio, the nature of the technai and their practitioners in 94

It might be added that example in the Statesman seems to involve everyone it is framed as a problem of the human instability in the experience of knowledge - yet its results, as we have them in the dialogue, are not the possession of general concepts but the clarification by inquiry of a philosophical problem (the relation and relative value of sophist, statesman, and philosopher). Example in the Statesman again combines two features which Scott's gradualism and radicalism kept strictly segregated: universal applicability and restriction to philosophical understanding.

65

METHOD

the pair). The comparison is not meant to (and cannot in any case) force a conclusion about the relationship between different dialogues. It is intended only to highlight the fact that the Statesman explicitly presents the method of example - so often overlooked or minimised95 by interpreters - as addressing a fundamental and pervasive Platonic concern: the transition from true belief to knowledge. It represents one way in which Plato attacked the problem of specifying how that tantalising and problematic transition might occur. Return now to Level A, the 'example of example' offered by the case of the children, to see just how example can effect this transition or transformation. What is required is a process of active comparison. The teacher must 'lead [the children] up', 'set [them] down' by the longer syllables, and, by 'laying [the shorter and longer syllables] side by side' and 'showing' them, they will 'become examples' 96 (278a8-ci). The plethora of verbs testifies to the arduousness of a method which must extract meaning from an otherwise inert comparison. Nothing is done to the syllables in being made into (becoming) examples other than their subjection to this comparative scrutiny. It is the act of comparison, not any intrinsic features of the letters or syllables, which converts them into examples. And this underlines the constructive quality which paradeigma shares with division. Both confront a reality which linguistic practice and intellectual understanding have failed to clarify for the purposes in hand. Both must engage in active measures of comparison and separation in order to make reality tractable by and comprehensible to the aims of an investigation. Together and only together, for important topics, do these methods contribute to definitions relevant to and adequate for particular inquiries.

95

96

E.g. R o b i n s o n (1962) 215 writes dismissively of the Statesman's account of example: 'These indistinct and partial statements seem to be the nearest Plato comes to giving justifications for his use of analogy.' M y translation. Campbell (1973) 82 n . u notes what Fowler (1921) 7 8 - 9 n . i

puts more boldly as a play on words: 'Trapa-TiOeiJiEva Seix^fi, SEIXQEVTCC SE, TrapaSsiyiJiaTa. Placed beside, they are shown, and being shown, they become paradigms, i.e. objects of comparison, i.e. examples'.

66

THE ANALYSIS OF EXAMPLE

The aim of using example with the children is that they will attain a state of understanding in which: 'each of all the individual letters is called both different, on the basis that it is different from the others, and the same, on the basis that it is always the same as and identical to itself, in all syllables' (278b5-ci). Nehamas has noted that this is very close to the aims of understanding described at different points in the Sophist and Theaetetus.91 Even more interesting is to recall McCabe's claim, examined above, that division establishes the 'mesh of identity' of relative difference and self-sameness which can do the work of individuation.98 She does not cite this passage which claims the establishment of just such relations of difference and sameness as the work of example. For McCabe, division does just what the Statesman here claims example does: the work of individuation. For Bluck" and Cherniss, 100 division does just what the Statesman here portrays example as doing: the work of recollection. This remarkable overlap in the claims made by those interested in division, and the claims made by those few interested in example, supports the present argument that division and example work in concert. Combined, they work to establish and clarify genuine differences and identities as relevant to the pursuit of the overall inquiry. The active movement of example, the flow of comparison, is achieved in the Statesman by means of the methodical clarification of names in division. Two features of the Level A example are omitted when it comes to giving an analytical summary of the work of example 97 98 99

100

N e h a m a s (1984) 24, citing So. 253(11-3 and Tht. 207c!. M c C a b e (1994) 4 and passim. Bluck (1975) 39: 'The whole procedure of collection and division appears to be . . . a systematic attempt to actualize pre-existing latent knowledge', this in the context of a n argument for the appearance of F o r m s in the Sophist and late dialogues in general. Cherniss (1944) 4 6 - 7 , with n.36, argues that the Platonic divisions are an 'aid to the reminiscence of the idea [sc. the F o r m ] ' , heuristic rather t h a n constitutive of a definition. In adducing a link between division and recollection in the Statesman (in the very passages we are considering) he completely ignores its announcement ofparadeigma (47 n.36): 'in the Politicus (277B-278E) the formal outcome of the diaeresis considered unsatisfactory because of its lack of content (277c) raises the whole problem of knowledge (277D7) which is briefly but unmistakably [sic] referred to the doctrine of reminiscence (277D2-4, 278C-D)'.

67

METHOD

in general. The children are in an institution in which they have the benefit of a teacher with the authority to teach them to spell; and they also have a stock of examples available to them rather than just one, since in learning to identify letters no one word is more normative than another. Neither the teacher nor the stock of examples is highlighted in the analytical summary of the method which follows. It is worth pausing over the mention of the teacher since Richard Robinson has taken that to discredit any claims of example to be a useful method of epistemic gain. For Robinson, the Statesman describes example as used in pedagogy as the teaching of what is already known, not the acquisition of knowledge itself.101 It follows that in using example, a teacher is merely transmitting knowledge which he has discovered by a (necessarily) different route, since the choice of an example presupposes knowledge that it is applicable and so knowledge of the target of the inquiry itself. Such an objection misconceives the role of example as presented in the text. On the one hand, we have seen that in using example one may, indeed must, make use of pre-existing true beliefs. On the other hand, it is not guaranteed that an example will succeed on the first go, as the Statesman's trial and eventual correction of shepherding as an appropriate example for statecraft shows. The fundamental point is that a sharp separation between teaching and gaining knowledge presupposed by the objection is misplaced when it comes to Platonic dialogues. 102 Plato's style of depicting philosophical inquiry, which typically consists of a conversation led by one interlocutor who questions another, resists any such absolute break between teaching and learning. Common to both recollection and example is the idea that learning is learning for oneself, so 101 102

Robinson (1962) 213; cf., more neutrally, Crombie (1963) 382. Annas (1995) xi applies this sharp distinction to the Statesman, describing its method as 'not the process of search but the process of exposition.' It is more familiar in relation to Aristotle: Barnes (1975) 77 and passim defends Aristotle's epistemology in precisely the same terms, as pedagogy rather than discovery; Burnyeat (1981) n 6-18 rebuts, arguing that teaching and gaining episteme, construed as understanding, need not be mutually exclusive.

68

THE ANALYSIS OF EXAMPLE

that what is already 'known' by one person is still to be constituted as knowledge for another. And even this formulation separates too sharply the teacher from the learner. Inquiry in Platonic dialogues is a shared task: the epistemic advance made by one interlocutor is an epistemic advance for the interlocutors' enterprise of embarking on mutual understanding.103 Example can thus offer a genuine epistemic advance even though handled by someone who has some inkling, or more than an inkling, of how it is relevant to the overall purpose of the inquiry. It tells further against Robinson's objection that although the Stranger's example of example (Level A) involves a teacher (and he himself, on Levels B and C, may be teaching Young Socrates), his own analysis of its inner workings makes no mention of a teacher. I follow Campbell, who has captured the sense of this difficult summarising passage beautifully: . . . the origin of example is when that which is the same in another separate thing, and which is rightly conceived, is brought into comparison, and so effects one true judgment (mian alethe doxan) about each of the two things which are thus regarded in one view. 104 (278C3-6)

Example and exemplified share - or more precisely, they are put into that relation to one another because and insofar as they share - a common element. The Sophist had figured the commonality between angler and sophist as kinship, the Statesman will soon describe that between weaver and statesman as a shared activity. Example reveals what is common, a matter of self-same identity, and what is different and so achieves a clarification of each entity being compared. The example of Level A - the children's experience - has served to illustrate the nature of example in general. But before moving to Level B (by choosing weaving as an example for statecraft, described above) the Stranger briefly discusses the children's experience not now as an 'example of example' 103

104

Consider e.g. St. 258c8-d2, where the Stranger insists that the task of finding the p a t h to the statesman is a m a t t e r for b o t h himself a n d Y o u n g Socrates, against the latter's demurral. Translation following Campbell (1973); I have substituted 'judgment' for his 'opinion', given the active process of comparison involved.

69

METHOD

in general, but as a specific example for the human soul (278c8ff.). His turning to 'our own soul' shifts the scene from, in Owen's felicitous phrase, the spelling lesson for children, to a spelling lesson for all human learners. The soul experiences the same partial confusion with regard to the stoicheia (elements or letters) 105 of things, as did the children with regard to the letters of words. Like the children, the adult soul is stable and settled about certain letters in some 'combinations', judging correctly about them in those contexts; but with regard to the same letters in the long and difficult syllables/ combinations of life, it is unstable and wanders around in ignorance. 106 Notice the contrast once again between ignorance and 'correct judgment', and between stability and instability, both of which hark back very suggestively to the Meno. The soul of each person, suffering 'the human experience {pathos) of knowledge' (277d6-7) is in dire need of the stabilising remedy of example. Having completed his analysis of example and vindication of its importance, the Stranger is ready to apply this understanding to Level B, choosing weaving to exemplify statecraft. He will however return once more to the topic of example in general, in a passage (285C4~286b2) which is best considered here as a completion of the analysis. That this passage - a discussion of models or images for greater things - is a reprise of the topic of example was famously argued by G. E. L. Owen, and I follow the general direction of his argument but seek to extend and improve it at one point. Owen observes that the passage has a context beginning at 277d, where, just before the topic of example was introduced in the image of dreaming and waking, it was subsumed in a prior contrast. 107 That prior contrast was between discursive forms of explana105

106

107

As in the discussion of Socrates' d r e a m in Tht. 20ieiff., the dual meaning of this word facilitates the passage from an example of spelling or reading, to a theory about the elements of all things. I superimpose the two grammatical contrasts: the first ( 2 7 8 d i - 3 ) , being stable {sunistatai) a n d moving about (pheretai); the second (278d3~6), judging correctly about certain syllables but falling into ignorance about the long and difficult ones. M y paraphrase follows Campbell (1973) 83 n.7. Owen (1973) 3 5 1 - 4 .

70

THE ANALYSIS OF EXAMPLE

tion, and display of a picture or model (277C3-6). The possibility of displaying a picture was then dropped in the analysis of (discursive) example; only in the belated reprise is the pictorial alternative recalled and addressed. The passage in question is a remark made by the Stranger after observing that no reasonable person would have wanted to track down the definition of weaving for its own sake (but only as an example, as in Level B). He then remarks: . . . I think it has escaped most men, that, while some things are [endowed] with resemblances which are sensible, and therefore easily known, which there is no difficulty in shewing [sic], when one wishes to point out any of them to any one who asks about it, with no trouble, but easily, without argument, - there are also things, and those the greatest, and of priceless worth, which have no image wrought so as to strike human perceptions, by pointing to which he who would content the mind of an inquirer, shall fully satisfy him by imprinting this on some one of his senses. Wherefore one ought to practise to be able to give and receive a rational account of everything, for things bodiless, which are the fairest and the greatest things, for the sake of which all that is now said is spoken, are made clearly manifest by reason alone. 108 For practice, however, it is easier in every case to work on the lesser rather than the greater things. (285do,-286b2)

Owen's signal achievement, in his article, was to insist that the contrast fundamental to this passage is the contrast between the depictable and the undepictable: between those things which can be made sufficiently clear (identified, and enough learnt about them) by pointing to a picture of them, and those things which require a logos (definition, argument, verbal explanation) to be given instead. 109 He further insisted that in light of the context stretching back to embrace the pedagogical account of example, this contrast should also be read as making a pedagogical point. In the classroom, it is easy to put up pictures of some things (such as penguins), but impossible to put up pictures of others (such as statecraft) 108

109

T o this point I quote from Campbell's translation (1973) ad loc. I choose his translation in order to show that the success of an Owenite argument does not depend on adopting Owen's own (purpose-built) translation. Campbell's more traditional contrast between the perceptible and the bodiless need not be read in terms of middle-period F o r m s , but can be understood as the very contrast between the depictable a n d the undepictable which Owen identifies. Owen (1973) 353; cf. 356 for the next point in the text. 71

METHOD

such that sufficient understanding of them would be thereby achieved. (The crucially ambiguous status of weaving will be considered below.) Despite the pedagogical context, however, Owen considers the present distinction - which makes depictability intrinsic to certain things - as corrective to the earlier distinction - which made depiction conditional on human abilities. The earlier contrast, between people who need pictures and people who can follow logoi, implied a free and universal possibility of using pictures, depending only on the abilities of the interlocutors. Now, however, the Stranger suggests that some things are simply and essentially undepictable, so that they could not be explained to those who need pictures. The use of pictures thus emerges as a recommended pedagogical practice, for certain slower pupils, but also a proscribed methodological one, for certain topics which are undepictable but arguable. Thus far Owen's exegesis is just what we need. But his explanation of the role of picturing in this passage never explains why the possibility of picturing is recalled at all. Given that, as Owen concludes, Plato has 'something [to say] of lasting interest about picturing', 110 we may still wonder: why should it be mentioned just here, in the Statesman, as the topic directly following example and measurement? It is this remaining question which I now address, and I do so also by returning to the context, this time to the discussion of measurement. Measurement is introduced by the Stranger as a preemptive defence of the example against an imagined charge of excessive length (283b7~ci). I shall show that, although less fuss is made about it, the discussion of picturing is constructed as a parallel defence against another imagined charge: that a picture (presumably, of a weaver at work) would have served at least as well as the logos given of weaving. Consider the passage on picturing (Owen's T') in more detail. The Stranger begins by making a seemingly exhaustive contrast: between those things which have sensible resem110

Ibid. 361. 72

THE ANALYSIS OF EXAMPLE

blances (= are easily pictured), and those which have no such sensible images (= cannot be pictured) (285d()-286a4; cf. the translation above). But that stark contrast is, crucially, modified in presentation. The contrast is drawn with reference not to the things just in themselves, but with special reference to what would satisfy an inquirer about them - a feature which recalls to the reader the fact that the main purpose of the dialogue is indeed such an inquiry. The inquirer appears on both sides of the contrast. Some things have sensible resemblances which can be easily shown to an inquirer without argument 111 (28562-4); others are said, not to lack sensible images per se, but rather to have none which, pointed out, would 'fully satisfy the inquirer'112 (286a2~4). The adequacy of a picture as manifestation of a thing is not absolute, but relative to the interests of the inquirer. The conclusion drawn from this contrast is that, because the greatest things can be made manifest by reason (logoi) alone, one ought to practise (meletan) to be able to give and receive a rational account (logon) of everything (286a4~7). And it is added finally that such practice is easier with the lesser things than with the greater (286a7-b2). We have seen the beginning of the Sophist announce that the example was a 'minor' thing on which to 'practise' (promeletan, So. 2i8d5) for the sake of the greater thing (So. 2i8d4-e5). If we remember that the overall worry governing the introduction of measurement was the length of the example (paradeigma) of weaving, it should be clear that it is the use of this example which is somehow being defended in the present passage as well. We are now in a position to see just how this defence is constructed. Putting together the two concluding remarks, the passage recommends practice in giving logoi of the lesser things in order to be able to give them of the greater things (which can only be made clear by logoi). A logos of weaving one of the lesser things both by implication and by earlier 111 112

TIS (3ouAr|0fi . . . X°°P^ ^oyou pocSicos evSei^ocaOai. 6 (3ouA6|ievos . . . IK 73

METHOD

declaration (279a8) - has been given, and the present passage began with a remark about the purpose of having given this definition (285d8~9). In this light, the contrast between depictables and undepictables with reference to inquiry must be construed to bear on the question: why did the inquirers bother with a logos of weaving when a picture would have been easier to give (cf. 28563)? This is the only question which makes sense of the flow of the passage. The purpose of defining weaving is mentioned; the depictable and undepictable things are distinguished with reference to inquiry; the importance of practising giving logoi of all things, so as to be able to give them of the undepictables, is derived as a conclusion; and the fact that it is easier to practise with lesser things is appended. The development of the argument makes sense once we realise that weaving is on the cusp of the contrast. For the Greeks 113 as for us, weaving is manifestly depictable. But the interests of the inquiry interests of practising giving logoi for the sake of the greater things which weaving was introduced to exemplify - dictate that the giving of a logos instead of a picture of weaving was justified. I have argued that the passage itself offers motivation for the contrast between depictables and undepictables, a motivation which is cast in terms of the interests of inquiry, and which Owen's deflationary account omitted. The result is a double-barrelled defence of the logos of weaving which was given in the dialogue. If measurement defended the logos of weaving against excessive length, the present passage on picturing defends it against threatened superfluity, i.e., against the charge that a picture would have done as well. And the next speech by the Stranger after the present passage can be seen to support this reconstruction. Recalling the reason for all that has just been said, he appeals to the 'disgust' 114 113 114

The frequent depiction of weaving in vase-paintings is described (and illustrated) in Keuls (1983). My reasons for choosing so strong a translation of duskhereia will be given in Part in, in relation to that word's use in part of the dialogue's political analysis. 74

CONCLUSIONS

(duskhereia) they felt with the length of the definition of weaving, as with the story's account of the reversal of rotation, and the discussion of not-being in the inquiry into the sophist (286b7-io). But he goes on to mention also a second fear. They feared that these discussions had been 'superfluous' (perierga) as well as 'lengthy' (286ci). Such mention of two separate fears, in light of the above argument, supports the reconstruction of a double-barrelled defence of the definition of weaving: first, by measurement, against being too long; then by the present passage against being replaceable by a picture. The purposes of inquiry are the only legitimate criteria for each charge (cf. 286d4~287a7), and in both cases they are construed to support weaving. Conclusions Revising common sense: the delusions of the given Pre-eminent among the realities which inquiry must explore and define are similarities between arts, objects, men of different characters and skills. And it is in the handling of similarity that the interplay between division and example is perhaps closest. If names are the tools of division, the movement from similarity to dissimilarity can be perceived to be its underlying logic, although cast usually in figurative terms (e.g. kinship (oikeioteron, 259cio-di); what belongs together versus what is torn asunder (26oa9~bi)). The divisions work to separate out names of things which appear similar, 115 demonstrating their distinct individuality and so, ultimately, revealing the target-art as sufficiently separate, distinct, and definite. But how to choose just which apparently similar things or names to investigate? Similarities are ubiquitous; there is some respect in which everything is similar to everything else. What is more, it is usually on 115

Cf. Rosen (1995) 157: 'We can separate out the dissimilarities within our own lives by dividing and collecting in accordance with looks or forms', though this acknowledgement sits oddly with his general disparagement of division (e.g. p. 2, p. 140). 75

METHOD

the basis of prejudice and preconceived ideas - what I call here 'delusions of the given' - that similarities are distinguished. Young Socrates acted on just such preconceived ideas in quickly dividing humans from beasts (262a 1-2); the Stranger, correcting the boy's error, invokes the politically charged distinction between Greeks and barbarians as an equally erroneous division (262cio-d6). Especially when there is reason to confound similar things or persons - as in the case of rivals to the statesman, whose own pride and ambition makes them claim an unspecified amount of the credit due to him - the delusional familiarity 116 of conventional similarityperceptions must be corrected by the application of philosophical method. Enter example. The role of the example is to fix certain similarities as salient, once again constructing these according to the goal of the inquiry, which can then be explored, separated and refined by division. In this interplay between example and division we find a feasible method meeting anxieties about similarity in other Platonic works; we find also an understanding of the slipperiness of similarity and the role of paradigms which is shared in key respects by modern philosophers of science. Let us examine these two points in turn. Platonic perplexities about similarity Thrasymachus, 117 Charmides, 118 and Protagoras 119 each at some point challenges Socrates' undefended appeals to similarities (usually among the arts). Pressed by Socrates to agree to draw conclusions from certain analogies, these inter116

117 118 119

In correcting such common sense perceptions of similarity, division and example may well apply an estranging, revisionary solvent to ordinary opinions (though they will not destroy these altogether). Scott (1995) 52) finds 'a full-blown pessimism about common sense' in the conception of recollection he studied in Phaedo, Meno, and Republic. The Statesman attacks common sense but its very forthrightness in revision and clarification makes 'pessimism' inapplicable to its method. Part in comments on pessimism in its politics (pp. 161-3). Rep. 1 337C2. Chrm. 16563-5, i66b7~9. Prt. 33idi-e4.

76

CONCLUSIONS

locutors themselves recognise that, as we have seen Richard Robinson charge, Socrates nowhere justifies or validates his reliance on similarity. Most of these charges against Socrates are ad hoc, made by people lashing out in a moment of frustration or embarrassment. Of them all, only Protagoras succeeds, in the eponymous dialogue, in giving a reasoned and comprehensive argument for his own resistance. His argument deserves attention. The context for Protagoras' challenge to Socratic use of similarity, is this question put to him by Socrates: 'whether virtue is one whole, of which justice and self-control and piety [and courage] are parts; or whether all these are only the names of one and the same thing' (Prt. ifigcj-di). Protagoras plumps for the first alternative, thereupon having to face the question of the relation between the parts of virtue and the putative whole. 120 Two contrasting images for this relation are offered by Socrates: the parts of virtue might be like the parts of a face; or like the parts of [a bar of] 1 2 1 gold (329d59). The parts of a face resemble one another in being of the same face, but differ each from the others in function, appearance, physiology, and so on. The parts of gold differ from one another 'only in being larger or smaller' (329d8~9). Two more moves in the argument follow. Protagoras accepts the image of the parts of a face, implying that the virtues (strictly speaking, the parts of virtue) are indeed qualitatively different from one another; Socrates argues against him that justice and piety are, in some sense, 122 the same (in a way which that image would exclude). It is in frustration with the vague120

Here I am indebted to Vlastos (1973) 224, where it is shown that the following alternatives are ways of spelling out the whole-part relation. I follow the helpful interpolation of these words in the translation offered by Vlastos (1973) 230. 122 p r e c j s e iy what Socrates intends here as 'the same' - a relation which he describes in a number of ways - has excited considerable controversy. See Gallop (1961); Taylor (1976); Vlastos (1956) and (1973). Of these, the last captures the flavour of Socrates' arguments best, by describing them as strikingly 'fumbling' (p. 230). The controversy does not however bear on the present argument, which is that Socrates defends his analysis by appeal not to a well-defined notion of similarity, but rather to substantive theses about the relations of the virtues and their instantiations.

121

77

METHOD 123

ness of Socrates' last argument that Protagoras mounts his general challenge: I admit that justice bears a resemblance (proseoiken) to piety, for there is always some point of view in which everything is like (proseoiken) every other thing; white is in a certain way like black, and hard soft, and those things believed the most extreme opposites have some qualities in common. Even the parts of the face which, as we were saying before, are distinct and have different functions are still in a certain way similar (proseoiken), and one of them is like another of them. And you may prove, if you please, on the same principle that all things are like (homoia) one another. And yet things which are alike in some particular ought not justly to be called alike, nor things which are alike in some small particular, unlike. 124 (331 di-e4)

Protagoras is arguing that some similarity (resemblance), however small, will obtain between everything and everything else; therefore, he implies, Socrates' appeal to similarity without further grounding - cannot conclude in any substantive claim. Notice the generality of the Protagorean formulation, which deliberately embraces even things thought to be most opposite. If even such opposites can be, in some respect, rightly called similar, then the mere recognition of similarity has no informative or evaluative implications. The appeal to similarity is not, Protagoras complains, philosophically substantive. The argument is bold, and striking. At least two recent commentators on the dialogue have been sufficiently impressed by Protagoras' argument as to award him a near 125 or total 126 victory against Socrates. Whether one awards the overall victory to Protagoras on these grounds, 127 or, with 123

124 125

126 127

Socrates wishes Protagoras to agree that 'justice is either the same as piety, or very nearly the same, and above a l l . . . justice is like piety and piety is like justice' (33ib4-7). Tr. Jowett (revised Ostwald), in Vlastos (1956); I have added 'believed' to translate dokei at 33id5. Taylor (1976) 120, comments on 3 3 i d i - e 4 : 'Protagoras comes very near to identifying the central flaw in Socrates' argument, the shift in the force of "like" which it requires . . . ' Gallop (1961) 92 asserts that this claim, Protagoras' main objection, 'goes to the heart of the matter'. I cannot agree with Taylor and Gallop that the Protagorean challenge vanquishes Socrates' overall argument. The challenge does not deny that two things

78

CONCLUSIONS

Vlastos, finds Socrates' specific response successful in establishing a meaningful similarity among the parts of virtue, one must none the less recognise that Protagoras' comprehensive challenge is nowhere 128 refuted. The problem which he highlights - the ubiquity of similarities, from which it follows that any selective appeal to their significance must be justified - is a problem which Socrates nowhere, in the Protagoras or anywhere else, proposes to resolve in any detail. The closest which Socrates comes to addressing the issue of similarity directly is in the opening discussion of the Philebus. Socrates' first move against the view 129 that pleasure is a good is to give examples of pleasures which are opposed to one another, such as the pleasure of the fool in his vain hopes and the pleasure of the wise man in his wisdom. Protarchus protests that 'though they spring from opposite sources, they are not in themselves opposed to each other; for how can pleasure help being of all things most like (homoiotaton) pleasure, that is, like itself?' (Phil. I2d7~e2) Here, ironically, it is Socrates who must defend the view that likeness in one respect does not equate to likeness in all respects. Socrates responds by offering, again, two 'examples' (an important methodological use of the term in argument). Colour is like colour, but white is not only different from black but its very opposite; the same holds for shapes. Protarchus repeats his assertion that all colours or shapes must be alike and Socrates responds in vexation that if the 'examples' (paradeigmata) do not affect the two of them at all, they will 'behave and talk just like the worthless and inexperienced reasoners' (i3c6-di). He finally gets Protarchus to desist by

128

129

can be shown to be significantly similar; it states only that similarity per se cannot guarantee its own significance. Such a challenge can in principle be met by arguing for the relevance of the particular similarity in question; which is, on Vlastos' reading, precisely what Socrates does in returning to the case of justice a n d piety. The interest which Taylor and Gallop rightly take in Protagoras' claim is n o t grounds for ignoring h o w it actually functions in, or rather is marginalised by, the dialogue. Stokes (1986) 2 6 4 - 5 recognises that Socrates and Protagoras are left 'floundering without clear criteria for similarity', but suggests, to me unpersuasively, that the parts of a face analogy itself supplies such criteria. T h e view is ascribed to Philebus b u t assigned to Protarchus to defend.

79

METHOD

applying the same argument to his own candidate for the best life, forms of knowledge, concluding that the argument will show that these are 'many' and some of them 'unlike' each other, and that if some of them should be shown to be 'opposites' this must not be denied on pain of losing the logos altogether. In this passage Socrates insists, in effect, that there must be a way to discriminate, by means of argument, between relevant and irrelevant similarities. But he offers no tools to do this and appeals to Protarchus' faith in argument and (appeased) sense of fair play rather than to a philosophical account of similarity in order to move the discussion forward. If the Philebus indicates without analysing the problems with similarity, it might be thought that Plato, in a dialogue led by Parmenides with Socrates as a participant, does offer a satisfactory analysis. The first part of the Parmenides certainly highlights the symmetricality of likeness (similarity), on which Parmenides relies to defeat a youthful Socrates' 130 proposal that particulars participate in Forms as copies are related to their original. Pressed to give a satisfactory account of participation, Socrates proposes as 'the most likely view' that 'these ideas [i.e. Forms] exist in nature as patterns (paradeigmata), and the other things resemble (eoikenai) them and are similar to them' (i32di~4). I follow Proclus, 131 among others, in believing this proposal to be a genuine advance in the understanding of participation; it is in fact the view which will dominate the Timaeus. Parmenides' refutation of the proposal must therefore be viewed with some suspicion,132 as he manages to convince the youthful Socrates to reject a view 130

131 132

This is of course the philosopher Socrates portrayed as a youth, not to be confused with the boy 'Young Socrates' who is mentioned in the Theaetetus and the Sophist, and is the interlocutor of the Statesman, and who would grow up to be a distinguished mathematician. Proclus, in Farm., in Dillon and Morrow (1987) 906.37-907.22. Compare Parm. 147b-148c, in the second half of the first deduction, where Parmenides argues that 'the one' and 'the others' are like one another insofar as all are other, and then infers from the opposition between likeness and unlikeness that insofar as the one and the others are the same as one another, they must be unlike. The inference rests on treating 'like' and 'unlike' as absolute terms rather than as relative to a context. 80

CONCLUSIONS

which Timaeus will invoke in his teleological account of the cosmos. The refutation depends precisely on the treatment of likeness. If the copy must be like the original, then the original must be like what is like it (i.e. the copy), and so both must partake of the Form of Likeness; but, insofar as the Form of Likeness will be like something else, this generates a regress (I32d7~i33a4). This is again a difficult argument to interpret, 133 in part because it so closely resembles the celebrated 'Third Man' argument which was launched against a notion of participation at I32aff. It is at the very least ironic that the original-copy proposal, designed precisely to establish a relation between Forms and particulars which would be asymmetrical and so free from the threat of regress, should be made to fall victim to an attack based on the symmetrical notion of likeness. Malcolm Schofield has proposed that the second part of the Parmenides itself provides materials, by recurrent mention of likeness in the deductions, for meeting Parmenides' attack. 134 The solution which he finds implicit in the deductions is essentially that likeness be regarded as a symmetrical but second-order relation, hence not a predicate which (like other first-order predicates) would involve participation in a Form. The suggestion is ingenious in dispensing with the Form of Likeness (on which Socrates had first of all, in the Parmenides, naively relied), and in addressing the role of likeness in participation. It cannot however help us with the Protagorean problem posed above. Protagoras had challenged the significance of similarity on the grounds of its ubiquity. If Parmenides highlights the symmetry of similarity, this is entirely consonant with its ubiquity, and only underlines the difficulty of picking out only certain similarities as significant. Nothing in the Parmenides, or in any other Platonic dialogue, explicitly resolves the challenge which Protagoras has posed. Socrates never acknowledges or directly meets the Prota133 134

See, a m o n g recent discussions, Lee (1973) and Prior (1983) 7 2 - 3 . Schofield (1996). 81

METHOD

gorean challenge. The Eleatic Stranger who conducts the main conversations of the Sophist and the Statesman does, for his part, acknowledge that similarities can be slippery135 - he remarks in the Sophist that one must always be on guard against slippery resemblances, like the resemblance between wolf and dog (So. 23ia6-8). 1 3 6 Yet we have seen that the logic of his work with division requires him constantly to traffic in similarities. It therefore behooves us to explore the tacit approach to similarity on which, in using division, the Stranger must rely. Each inquiry - about sophistry and about statecraft - is guided by a telos; the inquiry seeks to define its target by means of a division of the arts, discriminating ever more finely among dissimilar arts until the target is revealed alone. But given the problem of ubiquitous similarity, how can division succeed in making only those discriminations which are relevant to the ultimate revelation of the target? This is in important respects the problem addressed by Kuhn's notion of a paradigm, which could be said to 'share a name' with the Sophist and Statesman notion of paradeigma. In exploring Kuhn's theory 137 we must be careful to establish that the two notions share something real in common, and not just a name. What they genuinely share, I shall argue, is concern with how the ubiquitousness of similarity is to be made salient in theoretical understanding. 138 This common epistemological concern with example and similarity survives despite the very 135 136

137 138

The 'sea of unlikeness' described in the story (St. 273d6), which the god will have to reorder, is also apposite here. Cf. So. 256aio-b4, which gives clear cautionary instructions on dealing with likeness and unlikeness. Runciman (1965) 180 argues that this passage reads like Plato's 'discovery' of the fallacies which had afflicted the use of likeness and unlikeness in Parm. 146-7. The second edition of the famous work is Kuhn (1970); the author reflects on his theory in a later collection of his own essays, Kuhn (1977). Rosen (1995) 84-8 also discusses a modern theory which shares a name, in a loose sense, with the Stranger's paradeigma. His choice is mathematical 'model theory' and he adduces similarities and differences rooted in his own reading of the dialogue. But 'model theory' gives interpretations of scientific theories which have already been constructed; it offers a semantics, not an epistemology. The dialogues' central emphasis on inquiry better supports comparison with a modern theory (Kuhn's) which also centres on discovery and inquiry. 82

CONCLUSIONS

different ontological orientations (Plato solidly realist, Kuhn flirting with relativism) and the broader differences in method (Plato writing dialogues about individual inquiries, Kuhn studying the sociology of entire communities of scientists) which clearly divide them. Modern perplexities about similarity The similar names of par&digmlparadeigrna would not in themselves establish any meaningful comparison between the Stranger's view of methodical inquiry and that of Kuhn. However, an outstanding book-length interpretation of his thought by Paul Hoyningen-Huene 139 has clearly illuminated the connections between similarity and paradigms which concern us here. In his foreword to Hoyningen-Huene's book, Kuhn states that the pattern of similarity/difference relations constitutes the taxonomic structure shared by members of a scientific community, and that this shared structure 'does not require that individuals give the same answer to the question: similar with respect to what?' With this comment, Kuhn acknowledges his debt to Wittgenstein, from whom he inherited the conviction that at least the most fundamental similarities140 cannot be defined in terms of, or derived from, any characteristics or criteria of the two items being found similar. Similarities are learned as basic constituents of the world; they cannot be analysed into or derived from any other feature of the world. Following and extending Wittgenstein's approach, as we shall see, Kuhn is concerned to explain how similarities are in fact learned and shared universally by members of a scientific community, to explain which he first introduced the notion of a 'paradigm'. But before considering his and Plato's solutions, it is important to develop the problem in the nature of similarity to which both seem to be responding. Because Wittgensteinian approaches formulate the problem simultaneously with the 139

140

Hoyningen-Huene (1993). I a m indebted to Peter Lipton for bringing this b o o k to m y attention a n d discussing its implications with me. Hoyningen-Huene (1993) 7 3 - 4 isolates these as 'immediate similarities'.

83

METHOD

solution, it is helpful instead to consider a philosophical approach which, while, like Kuhn, influenced by Wittgenstein, keeps the two distinct. Such an approach is offered in a brief article by Nelson Goodman. 141 Although Goodman's nominalism colours his examples and his solution, the statement of the difficulty itself is useful beyond the nominalist context. Goodman argues that similarity is in principle ubiquitous and so insignificant; because some (in fact, an indefinite number of) similarities can be ascribed to any two things, at least in the respect of not being a third thing, no appeal to similarity can by itself support any philosophical argument. It is only when certain axes of similarity have been established that certain similarities can be picked out as salient, and others overlooked or dismissed (and Goodman, as a pragmatist, goes on to argue that these axes are picked out by our interests and activities). What is universal in Goodman's astringent observations is the problem of the ubiquity of similarity, the concomitant need to pick out certain similarities as salient, and the consequence that without a guarantee of salience, a philosophical point based simply on evidence of similarity will be unwarranted. This set of logical difficulties with similarity has been noted in many different philosophical contexts, such as discussions of the justification of induction. Most important for present purposes, the third problem in particular the weakness of similarity as a philosophical claim - is the one stated by Protagoras in his objection to Socrates, and alluded to by the Stranger in his caution about wolves and dogs. An analysis of the problem of similarity in modern terms can help to illuminate the problems grappled with by these Platonic characters. Recall the conception of the world in terms of similarity and difference relations, to which Hoyningen-Huene draws our attention in expounding Kuhn's thought. Similarity relations are important in a number of domains: they constitute our ability to identify objects, natural kinds, and the applica141

Goodman (1970). 84

CONCLUSIONS

tions of problem-solutions. And these shared similarityrelations are at the heart of the consensus which marks both linguistic and (in normal times) scientific communities. Perceiving this consensus with his Wittgensteinian scepticism about the adequacy or primacy of criteria, Kuhn was forced to ask himself how such similarity-relations could be learnt, how one could be initiated into the progress of a scientific community in particular. His answer - now famous - was the paradigm. Despite initial ambiguity and eventual clarification of the notion of the paradigm as Kuhn's work has evolved,142 it is possible to focus on what has been its core meaning all along: the paradigm as the concrete problem-solution which is exemplary, and so normative, for future research. And the value of the paradigm consists not least in its ability to fix and to teach similarity-relations; in the words of HoyningenHuene, 'the key role of paradigms in Kuhn's theory resides in their ability to fix the network of similarity and dissimilarity relations.' 143 The paradigm manifests - we may fairly say, 'exemplifies' - a core of similarity-relations which are thereby graspable, learnable, and extendable. Expanding on Kuhn's words quoted above from his Foreword, paradigms are the nodes in the taxonomy of similarities and differences constituting a scientific ontology. 144 Similarity, example, and division Consider now an account of the way similarities are made salient in the divisions conducted by the Eleatic Stranger. The basic coin of division is similarity145 (and its complement 142

143 144

145

M a r g a r e t M a s t e r m a n identified twenty-two different uses of the word 'paradigm' in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; see K u h n (1977) 294 n.3. Hoyningen-Huene (1993) 163. D r a w i n g on phenomenological thought, not as implicit in K u h n but as a very helpful clarification of it, Hoyningen-Huene (1993) 112 suggests that these are best thought of as 'quasi-ontologies' precisely because they pertain to the phenomenal world of one scientific community, a m o n g a plurality of such worlds and communities. Cherniss (1962) 60, n.50, confirms the centrality of similarity to division in its Academic varieties: ' T h a t the determination of TCCUTOV and exepov as a means of division and its connection with the principle of OMIOIOTTIS were adopted by

85

METHOD

difference): the divisions traffic repeatedly in the distinction of differences and then the assimilation of the target as relevantly similar to one or the other of the branches established. Yet given the ubiquity and slipperiness of similarity, which line to follow is difficult to ascertain in a vacuum. Example fills that vacuum of likeness. When angling or weaving is in play, the paradeigma establishes a dominant axis of similarity - the similarity between angling and sophistry, between weaving and statecraft - which division can then refine by successive separation of those similarities made salient by the dominant comparison. The relative failure of the shepherd-divisions of the Statesman illustrate the point in reverse. Lacking a genuine paradeigma, guided only by a conventional prejudice about king as shepherd, the shepherd-divisions make all kinds of unimportant and uninformative distinctions (such as the lengthy mathematical separation of pigs from humans, 266a5-c6 146 ). But they are shown to be powerless to effect the distinctions which would really matter, such as dividing the divine from the human statesman, or the statesman from the tyrant, both of which are only achieved with the help of the quasiparadigmatic story (on which see Part n). The tacit comparison with the shepherd, the language of which imbues these divisions, proves insufficient to exert the needed sway over the similarities. Only the explicit examples of angling and weaving secure the salience of similarity well enough for division to carve out its finer and finer distinctions in ways relevant to the inquiry's goal. The example {paradeigma) mediates between the telos of the inquiry and the method of division, by selecting just those (dis-) similarities which will eventuate in the isolation of the

146

Speusippus from Plato (and used ... by Aristotle also) is undeniable.' Cherniss makes this point in the course of arguing that whereas Plato could define one object without having to establish its complete similarities and differences from all other objects, Speusippus - rejecting the independent Forms - had to make the determination of similarity (homoiotes) not only central to but also exhaustive in division. See Ostwald's note on this passage, which gives good grounds for reading the mathematical pun as a separation of pigs from humans. Ostwald (1992) 18 n.4.

86

CONCLUSIONS

target. In this account, the Platonic paradeigma and the Kuhnian paradigm play analogous roles in relation to similarity and to another method. Both examples are exemplars; the paradeigma governs our further inquiry into statecraft, the paradigm governs further inquiry into a range of problems presented to a sub-discipline. And both exemplars function in part by focusing, and so selecting, certain similarity relations as relevant to the inquiry. Needless to say, there are numerous disanalogies between the paradeigma and the paradigm, of which I shall assess the three most important. First is the fact that the paradeigma ultimately yields a definition, which articulates the similarity involved, whereas Kuhn asserts that similarity relations cannot be defined or picked out by any third statement or entity. But the gap is not so wide as it may first appear. On the one hand, although the similarity between for example weaving and statecraft is articulable as a shared activity of combining, the example pervades the reader's understanding of statecraft far beyond that simple articulable element. A reader of the Statesman will very often come to feel that he or she could not conceive of statecraft apart from the guiding example. And on the other hand, Kuhn's insistence on the indefinability of similarity is not entirely persuasive; it may be argued that Kuhn cannot show that similarities cannot in principle be defined or articulated, and that preservation of this aspect of the Wittgensteinian legacy is at odds with the dynamics of the theory Kuhn develops. 147 The difference in definability, while a real difference, is one to be acknowledged but not unduly feared. Second, the Kuhnian paradigm is meant to explain the progress of scientific research; as such it is open-ended, a problem-solution which may be applied to an indefinite number of other identical or related problems. In contrast, the implication of the Platonic texts is very much a one-to-one correlation between target of inquiry and chosen example. While the method of paradeigma is applicable to many 147

Hoyningen-Huene (1993) 119-21. 87

METHOD

inquiries, any given paradeigma may not be (although the spelling example where any word would do, the remarks about the universal arts of separation and combination, and the use of weaving as an example for naming in the Cratylus as well as for statecraft in the Statesman, suggest that this restriction need not perhaps be drawn quite so narrowly). But this difference of scope, while certainly highlighting a major difference in the enterprise of ancient and modern inquiry, does not prevent us from classifying both as ontological inquiries at a very basic level; and it is as such that the question of similarity arises, in relation to an inquiry-driven taxonomy, for both. Finally, if we step back to consider the context and purposes of the Platonic and Kuhnian texts, a more significant difference does emerge. While Kuhn has walked an uneasy tightrope between realism and relativism, the phenomenological interpretation of his theory highlights the plurality and changeability of worlds which succeed one another in scientific revolutions, 148 and in more limited circumstances within the practice of normal science.149 The role of paradigms as arbiters (and foci) of similarity-relations, enables them also to play a role as arbiters of world-views and, by being supplanted, as foci of the revolutionary process. No such additional role is countenanced in Plato. Plato being ever the realist, it is important to see that in the Sophist and the Statesman in particular, his realism has nothing to do with the phenomenalism on which Kuhn relies. The paradeigma focuses and helps to constitute our (strictly, the inquirers') understanding of the nature of things, but such understanding is either true or false to the nature of things; 148

149

T h e fundamental contrast between 'normal' (i.e. paradigm-governed) science, a n d scientific revolutions, which is crucial to K u h n ' s overall project, has n o real counterpart in the Platonic texts or project (although I have argued that the Stranger's contrast between provisional and absolute methods does involve a qualitative, as well as quantitative, distinction). R e a d as a realist, K u h n is saying that this plurality evolves according to constraints exerted by the world-in-itself; read as a relativist, that the plurality changes according to some other criteria. The plurality of worlds is consistent with b o t h readings.

CONCLUSIONS

there is no plurality or progress of world-views. This is, undeniably, a significant difference indeed between the role of a paradeigma and that of a paradigm. Yet it is striking that two inquiries with, in this respect, such different contexts and purposes, should deal with the logic of similarity and example in parallel ways. Whether in establishing a world-view or an understanding of the world, an exemplary paradigm {paradeigma) is a linchpin of the enterprise of inquiry. It is instructive that while founded on radically different ontological assumptions, these two conceptions of inquiry both afford example a crucial role, and both treat the categories of inquiry as relative to the purpose of the search. Rhetoric and method Kuhn's philosophy of science rests on a fairly clear cultural consensus, at least in practice, about just what 'science' is and which kinds of activities (with characteristic equipment and equations) constitute it. Plato could rely on no such consensus: the question of whether there was such a thing as 'scientific' inquiry, what its constituent concepts and activities would be, and its status vis-a-vis other forms of cultural construction (epic, rhetoric) was very much contested (and his own work played a major role in this contestation). The use of example is part of the Stranger's inquiry into definitions of technai and epistemai, and to that extent part of what we might call - bolstered by the comparison with Kuhn - 'scientific' inquiry. Yet at the same time, this inquiry is one carried out entirely by means of semi-public conversation (remember that the two interlocutors are not alone, but are attended at least by Socrates, Theodorus, and Theaetetus) and such conversation must be intellectually persuasive to its auditors. And the notion of paradeigma itself plays a crucial role in the rhetorical theories of Plato's contemporaries, forebears and followers. It is important to examine just how paradeigma is being appropriated and reworked in the Sophist and Statesman, for this is part of a critique of rhetoric as well as a construction of science - or perhaps, a construc89

METHOD

tion of science by means of a critique of rhetoric. 150 We begin by looking at other uses of paradeigma elsewhere in Plato, then move on to consider the rhetoricians and theorists of rhetoric. Socratic deftness with example We have already noted Protagoras' outburst against Socrates, urging the ubiquity of similarities (and therefore their inconclusiveness). His point in making that claim is to object to Socrates' attempt to compare the parts of virtue to the parts of a bar of gold, rather than the parts of a face. This choice of one comparison over another appears to Protagoras indefensible at least on grounds of 'likeness' and 'sameness' alone. Such choices of one example over another are part of the Socratic stock-in-trade. Most of Socrates' examples are never challenged by his interlocutors, and are indeed very often crucial to the development of the discussion: medicine, gymnastics and navigation as examples for statecraft or justice, cookery for rhetoric, and so on. Socrates relies on such comparisons in order to shape his interlocutors' views and secure their consent. But as Protagoras' challenge implies, the comparisons themselves would seem to need more theoretical articulation than they normally receive in the rapid-fire pace of Socratic dialectic. Occasionally, when an interlocutor of Socrates is unhappy with the conclusions his reluctant consent has yielded, he may put his finger on a particular example which went astray in its import. This is what Thrasymachus does, famously, with regard to the shepherds caring for their sheep (he suggests that they care for them only in order to eat them; Rep. 343b). And then it is not clear that Socrates has a convincing rebuttal in defence of his method. Precisely because his examples are 150

Rhetoric is a rival, in the Statesman, in two realms. In the realm of method, the rhetorical notions of paradeigma (shown here) and kairos (shown in Parts n and in) are appropriated and revised as concepts suitable to the Stranger's form of inquiry. And in the realm of politics, these same rhetorical notions (kairos in particular) are shown to be most comprehensively studied by the statesman's expertise, not the rhetor's. 90

CONCLUSIONS

so casual, the assumption of patent self-evidence well nigh exhausts their evidential force. I argue below that just this quality of casual self-evidence makes the Socratic use of examples kin to that of the rhetors and rhetorical theorists. Before that, however, we must attend once again to a shared name and investigate whether it corresponds to anything shared in reality. This is the term 'paradeigma' as it appears in Platonic dialogues other than the Sophist and Statesman. The reason for concern is that the Socratic use of example, so common as discussed above, is not labelled with the term 'paradeigma'. That term appears in a variety of other Platonic contexts which bear investigation. The task is most complicated by one such context: this describes the Forms instantiated in particulars as paradeigmata, of which particulars are copies or imitations. This context is suggested by the youthful Socrates in the Parmenides, and is arguably central to the metaphysics of the Timaeus. Whereas the Fovm-zs-paradeigma is complemented by (inferior) copies, the paradeigma linked to division in the Sophist and Statesman (ironically itself said to be inferior) is complemented by a specific art which is itself articulable in terms of a common structure (but which is in no way treated as inferior). If in the Timaeus paradeigma expresses a metaphysical fact, marking a relation of imitation which is created by the Demiurge, this is quite different from the constructive methodological use of paradeigma in order to establish a definition. The Stranger is not however unique in Plato in using & paradeigma methodologically, although even these uses scarcely intimate the sophisticated and elaborate conception defended in the Statesman. In the very passage of the Protagoras to which we have already adverted, Socrates uses 'paradeigma' to name the example (the parts of a face) which he himself will go on to reject. Though the example is minimal and scarcely developed, the offering of an example, even if it is the wrong example, is itself methodologically exemplary. 151 And in the 151

Compare Euth. 6e, in which Socrates states that a definition of holiness will serve as a paradeigma (here, standard) for judging the holy and the unholy. 91

METHOD

Meno, Socrates recommends to Meno a method of definition by giving paradeigmata of the application of that method to defining colour and shape (M. 77bi, 79aio). 152 The same interactive use of paradeigma, Socrates offering an example not to convince the interlocutor(s) but to show him (them) a way of going on, is manifested in the Euthydemus, where Socrates offers his proleptic questioning of Cleinias as a paradeigma for the method of questioning he wants Euthydemus and Dionysodorus to undertake (Euthd. 282d5). The Cratylus (387e-388c) exemplifies naming by weaving, and draws out its example by developing unobvious features in establishing the implications of the comparison. 153 If the Cratylus begins to develop the internal content of the paradeigma, the Meno and Euthydemus develop its explicitly methodological role. These uses of paradeigma suggest some of the aspects of the technical notion which the Stranger will introduce; they show that the Stranger's version is not a complete departure from, but rather an expansion and deepening of, the ordinary possibilities and connotations of example at least in the Platonic corpus. Of these other possibilities, there is a final set which is also illuminating to consider. This set includes the ethical uses of paradeigma, when a virtuous life is presented as a paradeigma to follow (or an evil one, to avoid). In the Apology, Socrates talks of the gods treating him as an example {paradeigma) for all men in the words of the Delphic oracle (23b 1); in the Laches and Gorgias, paradeigma describes some men serving as an example for others in matters of ethical behaviour (L. i87a7; G. 525b3,c3,c7,d2). The interesting feature of such uses is brought out most clearly in the Republic, to wit, the paradeigma must be in152

153

C o m p a r e Phil. 1308, where Socrates complains that Protarchus has not been affected by the paradeigmata he has just produced to counter Protarchus' claim that all pleasures are alike. T h e Cratylus passage makes provocative use of terms important in the Statesman: Socrates describes names as tools for separating things and compares them to the weaver's shuttle (Crat. 3 8 8 a i o - c 7 ) . However, the value of the comparison depends on m a k i n g sense of Socrates' complex strategy in dealing with Cratylus a n d Hermogenes in the course of the dialogue. F o r one view, see Baxter

(1992).

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CONCLUSIONS

ternalised as a standard of conduct. 154 Socrates speaks several times of these ethical paradeigmata, sometimes speaking of ordinary people internalising others as models (e.g. Rep. in 4O9c-d), 155 sometimes of the philosophers who will have internalised as their paradeigma the Form of the Good (Rep. vi 484c-d, VII 54oa9). 156 Such internalisation imbues the ethical individual with the qualities of the exemplary life, colouring their perception and habituating their judgment so that they will desire and do only the good. And the character of this utter interpenetration between exemplar and follower is the point of contact between the Socratic ethical notion of paradeigma, and the technical notion of the Stranger. In neither notion can example and exemplified be conceived, except in light of one another. Despite these plentiful uses of paradeigma in Plato, the Stranger's development of the notion stands out in two ways. First, nowhere in Plato other than in the Stranger's two conversations do we find so extensive and self-aware a use of example in the shaping of an inquiry. Second, the Stranger's deliberateness in developing examples contrasts markedly with the Socrates of the elenchus who is casual to the point of laxity in his play with examples. We turn now to a discussion, perhaps startling, of some features which this example-happy Socrates shares with the much-maligned rhetoricians. Rhetorical deftness with example Use of paradeigma by the orators is little discussed, perhaps because their own use of examples was as unsystematic and 154 155

156

This point was impressed on me by M a r y H a n n a h Jones. Cf. also Rep. 557ei a n d 56ie6, on patterns of lives in the degenerate democracy; 6 i 7 d 5 a n d 6 i 8 a i , on patterns of lives in the m y t h of Er. T h e other major category of uses of paradeigma in the Republic does not fit into any of the three groups just described. These are the uses of paradeigma to describe the F o r m s , as models according to which the philosopher-kings and -queens will m o u l d (in verbs of handicraft) their just city (e.g. Rep. 472d, 484C8, 5ooe). These are not metaphysical uses in the Timaeus sense because they describe h u m a n , n o t divine, actions; there is however a clear parallel insofar as the Demiurge also moulds the world as a craftsman, looking to the F o r m s as paradeigmata. These uses, and others, in the Republic are not, however, relevant to the m a i n argument here.

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METHOD

casual as that of Socrates. It remained for Aristotle to systematise a notion of paradeigma in his Rhetoric, in contrast with demonstrative argument. But before examining Aristotle's definition of the notion, it is worth observing a more general feature of the orators' practice which dovetails with our analysis of example and, indeed, with Aristotle's. This is their reliance on invoking the pre-existing ideological beliefs of their audience, a reliance which means precisely that they invoked rather than challenged those beliefs in order to win their points. Even when subtly reshaping ideological beliefs, or invoking some in preference to others, the successful orator had to make it appear that he was in conformity to what his audience already believed. Josiah Ober has emphasised this point in his major study of the way that the orators negotiated democratic ideology in fourth-century Athens: As Aristotle clearly recognized, an orator who wishes to persuade a mass audience must accommodate himself to the ethos - the ideology - of his audience. He must therefore in general speak well of what the audience thinks is good and ill of what the audience thinks is evil. He will present his own behavior and character as conforming to the values of his audience, his opponents as failing to conform. 157

It is against the backdrop of this general imperative, that the orator must present himself as making common cause with the assumptions and beliefs of the audience, that we can appreciate Aristotle's investigation of a notion of example specific to rhetoric. Aristotle's central notion of paradeigma was developed in his Rhetoric and intended to contrast with demonstrative argument. Paradeigma for Aristotle is the inductive element of rhetoric, compared to epagoge as the inductive element of demonstration. But whereas epagoge involves moving from several cases to a general definition, paradeigma is denied any generalising power. Aristotle stipulates that rhetorically used, paradeigma moves from 'part to part,' never 'from part to whole or whole to part.' 158 By epagoge, one could conclude Ober (1989) 43.

158

94

Rhet. 1.2,

CONCLUSIONS

from cases of appeasement that aggressors should always be resisted; by paradeigma, one could use the abandonment of the Melians to counsel the saving of the Czechs in 1939, or the Bosnian Muslims in 1992. 159 It is important to see that such a conclusion, by rhetorical paradeigma, involves a tacit generalisation, in which the salient similarity is recognised and made useful, just as in the Stranger's analysis of paradeigma, the putting together of the two cases enabled articulation of their shared element. Also, it is conceivable that a rhetorical example, such as the Melians for the Muslims, could be developed in such a way as to imbue an entire discourse and decision with its characteristic terms, and this extended use may well be what Aristotle's terse analysis is intended to suggest. Yet it remains the case that the two uses of example are discussed and deployed very differently. In Aristotle's conception, paradeigma, like any inductive argument, attempts to exploit the audience's prior sense of similarity. Even if the paradeigma helps to make a decision or insight possible, it is difficult to conceive of this process in terms of a revised or challenged structure of similarity. Because the constraints of any rhetorical situation demand rapid persuasion, the audience cannot be likely to resist or be suspicious of any rhetorical move. Although they might not have thought about the Melians before arriving in the Assembly that day, the rhetor's invocation of that case must be one to which the audience will quickly respond and be able to assimilate. So while it is true that, as my earlier discussion of the logic of similarity would suggest, even this rhetorical construction of example hinges on a sense of similarity, the similarities involved tend to be invoked but not substantially revised. This feature was made explicit not by Aristotle but by his rhetorical heir Cicero, who states clearly that the assembled examples 159

I am indebted to Myles Burnyeat for these examples, and for helping to develop their significance for Aristotle's rhetoric and for political life more generally.

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METHOD

must 'resemble' (similitudinem) the doubtful proposition which one seeks to establish. 160 For Cicero, the success of example rests on the easy invocation of similarity, just as was the case in the early Socratic analogies. And Cicero was well aware of the potential for playing on analogy to establish dubious conclusions. He tells the story of a sharp-witted practice of Socratic analogical argument by Pericles' consort Aspasia, who led Xenophon and his wife to a swift admission that they desired their neighbour's spouse since they desired the best in food, clothing, indeed in everything. 161 Cicero drew the moral that inductive argument can easily use analogy to establish a doubtful claim. If Cicero self-consciously illuminates the nature of Socratic analogy in analysing rhetorical example, Aristotle's discussion of rhetorical example must be admitted to be more circumscribed. Unlike the Ciceronian case, Aristotelian example is debarred from making a general conclusion (although it presupposes one). Nevertheless, both share the same basic structure. By using an example, they seek to make what is potentially unfamiliar - the desired conclusion - immediately and unquestionably familiar. 162 Only those examples are suitable which will be easily and quickly grasped by the audience as relevant. And the perception of relevance which mediates the familiar and the unfamiliar relies upon a skilful invocation of similarities. Only because Xenophon and his wife see the similarity between desiring the best food, the best clothing, and the best spouse does the conclusion - which would have otherwise been shocking to them - slip by them so easily. It would have been self-defeating for Aspasia, aiming to per-

160

161 162

Cicero writes, 'Induction is a form of argument which leads the person with w h o m one is arguing to give assent to certain undisputed facts; through this assent it wins his approval of a doubtful proposition because this resembles (similitudinem) the facts to which he has assented', De Inv. 1.51. In the Topics, he classifies induction (which he identifies with Socratic epagoge) under the heading of arguments from similarity (similitudo, Top. x . 4 1 - 2 ) . Cicero attributes the story to Aeschines Socraticus (De Inv. 1.51-2). Although I focus here on example, A n d r e w Fitzmaurice has taught m e that this feature of rhetorical example exemplifies a feature of classical rhetoric m o r e generally, which seeks always to m a k e the unfamiliar, familiar.

96

CONCLUSIONS

suade quickly, to try to revise their sense of similarity. As a good rhetorician, she applied herself rather to exploit it. As a method of inquiry, one which sets itself to challenge, scrutinise, and reorganise perceptions of similarities, the Stranger's method of example must therefore be distinguished in this important respect from the example of the rhetoricians (and, for the most part, Socrates). Where they seek persuasive immediacy, the Stranger seeks a gradual and difficult development of an unprepossessing comparison. Where they seek to exploit similarity, the Stranger seeks to revise and rectify assumptions about it. And while the rhetoricians may indeed be able to conceive example as helping to produce some new insight or decision, the relatively minimal development of example in Aristotle, especially, contrasts with the Stranger's understanding of the clarity and adequacy which his method will achieve as a conversion, from dream to waking, from true belief to genuine knowledge. The Statesman's analysis of example, the Sophist's and Statesman's practices of it, link a revision of the rhetorical tool of example to a 'philosophical' method of division, the two serving together to drastically revise ordinary assumptions about similarities and differences in the process of guiding inquiry to a specified end.

97

PART II

THE STORY1 AS A FULCRUM OF THE DIALOGUE

Introduction: story-telling and self-criticism In Part i, we saw that the early divisions concluded with a logos of statecraft given by a systematic division of theoretical expertise: the statesman was defined as the herdsman of the human herd (267a8-c4). Young Socrates was contented with that definition. But the Stranger faulted its completeness and adequacy (267c8-di). Whereas other herdsmen, for example the cowherd, practised all the arts their herds required - feeding, medicine, matchmaking, midwifery, music - the human statesman is challenged by a competitor in each of these domains. Though the interlocutors had awarded him the title, his claim to it is not secure so long as the challenges of rivals go unanswered (267ei-268cio). That is as much as the text gives as the occasion for introducing the story. To avoid the disgrace of such an incomplete argument, the Stranger announces, 'we must travel some other route, starting from another point', adding when queried, 'we must bring in a large part of a great story' (268d5~e2). Yet the resumption of division is envisioned even as the story suspends it. The Stranger continues, 'we must then - as in what went before - take away part from part in each case and so arrive at the furthest point of the object of our search' (268d8-e2). The special reason for appealing to a narrative just at this point in the divisions is perplexingly unclear. Such perplexity is only heightened upon reading through 1

I have chosen to translate muthos in the Statesman as 'story' rather than the virtually uniform conventional choice of 'myth'. On the development of muthos from an original sense of 'speech' undifferentiated from logos, to the Platonic sense of 'story', see Annas (1982) 120-1; Friedlander (1958) 172; and Pembroke (1981) 302. See also below, pp. 113-14.

99

THE STORY AS A FULCRUM OF THE DIALOGUE

the story thus introduced. At its close, Young Socrates is again contented, declaring that it's likely that with the modifications suggested by the story their manifestation {apodeixis) of the statesman should be concluded (277a!-2). But the Stranger refuses to agree. Instead he compares their work to that of sculptors who 'sometimes hurry when it is not appropriate {para kairon) to do so and actually lose time by making additions and increasing the size of the various parts of their work beyond what is necessary {ton deontos)' (277a6-bi). Their story is like such an ill-timed, badly finished sculpture, an 'astonishing mass of material' which was not even properly finished (277b4~7). The Stranger's graphic criticism of his own handiwork must make the reader ask, why did he bother? What is the point of the enormous and elaborate story which has just interrupted the dialogue, if only to slow it down? Yet instead of trying to answer this question, most readers have taken the Stranger's self-criticism more literally than it can be meant given that the story is indeed present in the text. Whatever their view of the story itself, the vast majority of scholars have discussed it as if it were virtually severed from the rest of the dialogue. Even those who find some redeeming interest (usually cosmological or aetiological) in this 'strange bulk' are disinclined to see it playing any major role in the structure of the dialogue or the development of its inquiry. Yet the Stranger's self-criticism is pointed, and in its careful formulation gives point to the story's role within the overall inquiry. For all his condemnation of the story's bulk he never retracts his opening remark that its introduction was 'necessary'. The criticism shows the story to have been necessary, but not sufficient or entirely appropriate, for its role in the investigation of statecraft. And in so doing, the self-criticism of the story makes it a fulcrum of the dialogue.2 Just as in 2

The procedure followed here owes much to the 'two-tiered reading' advocated by Sedley (i 991) for the 'myth' of the Phaedo. Such a reading is concerned to understand the surface details and organisation of a Platonic muthos, but works also to uncover a deeper significance of the muthos in relation to other themes important in the dialogue. The aim is to free oneself from a limited range of allegorical 100

TELLING THE STORY

Part I the purpose of the overall inquiry was seen to shape the divisions and paradeigma of weaving, so here we shall find that the purpose and direction of the overall inquiry shapes the nature and role of the story. And this is indicated precisely in the criticism levelled at the story by its own teller. It serves not only to show the errors in what has gone before (the shepherddivisions), but also to introduce two points of method which together make possible the completion of the inquiry. In criticising the story as an excessively grand, childish and inconclusive paradeigma, the Stranger at once introduces the theme of paradeigma (what is a proper one?), the theme of measurement (what is excessive?), and the assorted motivations of himself and Young Socrates for wanting to tell or hear such a childish narrative about divine rulers in the first place. These concerns, which frame the story as well as the present discussion, are the indispensable context for making sense of the bizarre and fanciful episodes which the story recounts. The story with its critical aftermath turns out to link questions of method and politics more closely than any other part of the dialogue. Telling the story Zeus versus Kronos: autonomy versus authority The Stranger begins3 his story with an account of the cosmos' movement: This universe the god himself sometimes accompanies, guiding it on its way and helping it move in a circle, while at other times he lets it go, when its

3

responses, in order to read the story itself as a treatment of relevant themes. If Sedley finds in the Phaedo's 'myth' a working out of the teleological world-view longed for by Socrates earlier in the dialogue, I seek to reveal the topics of example, measurement, and political theory in the story of the Statesman. The story is prefaced by the recalling of three unrelated legendary tales: the reversal of the sun and stars during the quarrel between Atreus and Thyestes; the notion of a golden age ruled by Kronos; and the legend of autochthony, or humans born from the earth rather than from women. The story proper claims to recount the previously untold pathos ( 2 6 ^ 5 , cf ci), or 'state of affairs', which explains them all, and indeed each legend will be seen to find a place within the complex story, although not the place which the legendary accounts would themselves assign (see pp. 113-14 below). IOI

THE STORY AS A FULCRUM OF THE DIALOGUE

circuits have completed the measure of the time allotted to it, and of its own accord it revolves backwards, in the opposite direction, being a living creature and having had intelligence assigned to it by the one who fitted it together in the beginning. This backward movement is inborn in it from necessity . . .

On the face of this passage is the fundamental contrast which governs the meaning of the story: the contrast between two cosmic epochs, one ruled by 'the god' who guides the universe's rotation, the other when he 'lets it go' and it rotates backward of its own accord. The 'necessity' in this backward rotation is explained by an inference combining teleology, cosmology, and mechanics which may be laid out as follows (schematising 269d5~27oa8): (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v) (vi) (vii)

the most perfect motion is circular and changeless and belongs only to the most divine things the universe is not divine, having body therefore, its motion cannot be entirely changeless but, the universe is also intelligent (as quoted above) therefore, it will change its motion as little as possible the 'smallest possible variation of its movement' is to reverse direction while still rotating therefore, the universe, when the god 'lets go', will reverse the direction of its rotation

To this deduction the Stranger soon adds the support of a theodicy. He proscribes accounts of the universe which appeal to a godless cosmos, a god responsible for movement in opposed directions, or two gods battling each for a different direction. Only the above deduction, which has room both for a divine agent and for a partially independent rational-animal cosmos, is an allowable supposition.4 In some periods the universe follows divine authority, in others it is left to get on as best it can, and the alternation between these conditions exhausts all time (274d7). The present age, which the story will eventually describe as the 'age of Zeus', belongs to the 4

The neo-Platonic reading of the opposed epochs as aspects of the same world rather than temporally successive is attractive at this point in the story, when the argument is still schematic and abstract. It is argued below that the human implications, however, are best captured by adhering to the surface presentation of the two epochs as alternating periods in time. 102

TELLING THE STORY

category of the cosmos being left to conduct its own rotation, and contrasts with the 'age of Kronos' which is the previous epoch in which the god guides the cosmos' rotation in its original direction. Before examining the wealth of detail contrasting the two epochs, some objections must be considered to the way the fundamental cosmological structure of the story has just been presented. The reader may already be wondering how a contrast between the cosmos being 'ruled by the god' and 'left to itself can map onto a contrast between Kronos and Zeus, since the latter is a god himself (as are the other divinities who will be mentioned as benefactors of humans in the age of Zeus). To this concern may be added problems with the intricate detail of the transitions from one epoch to another. Each transition is said to be attended by great catastrophes and upheavals. Yet how can this be true of the inauguration of the cosmos' period of self-rule, which is said to start off well and only slowly degenerate as memory fails of the god's reign (272e-273e)?5 And perhaps most fundamentally, if the 'present' era is rotating contrary to the god-directed cosmos, does this not condemn all hopes for human existence at all? Two recent commentators 6 on the story have answered 'yes' to this final question, and this is the linchpin7 of their new interpretation of the story as depicting a three-stage cycle rather than the traditional dual one. On a three-stage account, 5

6

7

This problem can be rather easily resolved by appeal to the classic mechanical model of the story set out by P.-M. Schuhl (i960). Picturing the universe as a spinning top, as Schuhl does, allows one to understand the tremors attending each transition while allowing the top to settle quickly into a smooth and circular motion. One may wish to label these transitional tremors a 'third stage', but it is hard to feel that this adds much to the moral of the story. (Schuhl's mechanical reading must however be overlaid with the zoological imagery of the cosmos as a 'living creature' (269di) with 'reason' (269di) and 'body' (26961).) Brisson (1995) (cf. (1974)) defends a three-stage interpretation proper: the age of Kronos when the cosmos is steered by the god and the minor divinities govern the living creatures; the cosmos left to itself entirely; and the age of Zeus, when the god again steers the universe but without any minor divinities. Rowe (1995) treats the interstitial stage of reverse rotation rather as brief catastrophic phenomena of transition. I am indebted to McCabe (forthcoming) for making clear that this teleological issue is fundamentally driving the three-stage arguments of Brisson and Rowe. 103

THE STORY AS A FULCRUM OF THE DIALOGUE

two stages of the cosmos rotating in the same direction (under Kronos and then under Zeus) are separated by a stage of reversed rotation without any divine assistance. This sandwiched stage of reverse rotation may also be invoked to explain the penultimate question raised above: the catastrophe of reverse rotation punctuates each change in direction. What grounds are there for adopting such a three-stage account, and what difference would it make? The central problem of teleology - how can the cosmos now have any merit if it is rotating against the direction of the god - can be defused by careful attention to the schematised argument above. The significance of reverse rotation in the original deduction made nothing of the reversal being against the will of the god and so contrary to any possible teleological order. Instead, as the schematisation showed, reversal signifies the least possible change consistent with the universe's corporeal intelligence. If the universe had stopped rotating altogether or started moving rectilinearly when left to itself, the fears for the teleological rectitude of a god-abandoned age would be more compelling. As it is, the continued circular rotation under its own self-determination is actually quite impressive, and the moral of the story for humans centres on its autonomy rather than on its eventual decline (a relict of Greek cosmological pessimism). The problem of overlapping and excessive divinities, or how 'the god' versus cosmic autonomy maps onto Kronos versus Zeus, is trickier to resolve. The answer seems to be that the former pair is used when the story's cosmological scaffolding is in view (as above), while the latter pair is brought in only when the implications for human beings and other living creatures are discussed.8 Kronos represents the authority which guides living creatures in the period when 'the god' guides the heavens; Zeus represents the autonomy which, Kronos, cited in the preface as one of the three legends, is not mentioned in the story proper until Young Socrates asks how he fits into the tale of cosmic reversal (271C3-4). Zeus is mentioned even more adventitiously: the Stranger remarks almost absentmindedly on an unattributed "logos' (Rowe: 'they say') that the present time is the time of Zeus (272b2~3). 104

TELLING THE STORY

albeit with divine presence, the Olympians accord to humans at a time when the cosmos too must be self-reliant. It is as if even believers in the Olympian gods must be prepared to accept that the universe, and themselves, are for practical purposes independent of them and must be self-determining. To see this, let us fill in the human and animal consequences of the cosmic saga. The Stranger begins with the purely physical consequences for living creatures of the rotation which was 'the opposite of the one that now obtains' (27od4~5) (in line with the argument above, the rotation guided by the god). Creatures then aged backwards, being born old and getting younger until they disappeared altogether (270c); and this race of reverseagers were born from the earth out of the dead who had been buried in the previous cycle (27ia-b). 9 Presented as a physical consequence of the catastrophes, the notion of the earthborn (the third of the legends for which the Stranger had promised the story would account) invokes a common and cherished belief of the classical Greeks. Many different cities expressed a belief that their earliest forebears were earthborn as part of their civic patriotism, binding them to the land from which they had sprung. 10 Nowhere was this more pronounced than in Attica. 11 Isocrates articulated the special Athenian pride in autochthony in eloquent terms: We hold our land not by right of having expelled others, nor by coming upon it as uninhabited, nor yet by having gathered into it a mixture of 9

10 11

This argued (if fanciful) link between the reverse-aging and the earthborn belies the belief of Brisson and Rowe that these two features must be distinct, a belief which is again part of the justification for the three-stage interpretation. See Brisson (1995) 351 and Rowe (1995) 194, n. to 272d8-e3. Rowe's further argument for a discrepancy between those born from the earth from the dead of the previous epoch, and those born from the earth from allotted sowings of souls as seeds (272d8-e2), rests on assuming that the rebirth from the dead uses the same bodies and ignores the logical possibility that the allotted sowings may be used in the process of living, dying, and being reborn from the earth. Guthrie (1957) n.15 to p. 24, gives sources for attributing an autochthony belief to the Carians and Arcadians as well as the Athenians. See Loraux (1986) as well as Rosenstock (1994) and Saxonhouse (1986). Revealingly, Loraux's use of Plato is confined to the Critias, Republic, Menexenus, and Laws\ as confirmed by its absence from her Index, she does not consider the Statesman's treatment of autochthony at all. 105

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many races. No, our birth is so fine and pure that we have from all time continued in the very land from which we sprang. We are autochthones, and can address our city by the same names as our nearest kin. Alone of the Greeks, we can call her not only native land but mother and nurse.12

Plato satirises this same belief in the Menexenus.13 In the Statesman, the belief in the earthborn is severed from the patriotic tradition. Far from being the forebears of the proud Athenians, the earthborn are associated with the reign of Kronos which, as argued above, is explicitly severed from the actual world. Moreover, the Stranger situates the common belief in men being born from the earth as requiring a complete cosmic reversal; the cosmic reversal is supposed to have a knock-on effect which makes all creatures, including humans, live backwards. The contested claim to autochthony among the various Greek cities is, in the Statesman's story, denied to any particular claimant (including ipso facto that of Athens), and instead universalised to all humans in the age of Kronos. Moreover, and more significantly, the reverse life-cycle makes it impossible for autochthony to legitimate civic pride. No city can claim its founders in these earthborn humans, 14 lodged firmly in an era without politics and deprived of the sexual intercourse by which the polis is perpetuated. 15 12 13

14

15

Isocrates, Paneg. 24, cf. Panath. 124; quoted by Guthrie (1957) 21. Menex. 237b2ff. Saxonhouse (1986) 258 argues for a reappropriation of autochthony in the Menexenus, claiming that Aspasia's version of the Funeral Oration is distinctively 'female' in its depiction of the earth as mother to her autochthonous children. But the reference to the earth as mother is also made by Isocrates, quoted above; moreover, as Loraux argues, the femaleness of the belief is rendered problematic by its use to legitimate male citizens only. The Stranger is ambiguous on the question of earthborn women. His remark that there was under Kronos 'no personal possession of wives and children' is usually taken to exclude women altogether, but may also be read to imply earthborn women who were not possessed as wives; the possibility is noted by Saxonhouse (1986) 258, although still finding a negative implication. In view of the fact emphasised by Loraux (1986) 14 and passim, that Athenian culture crucially believed in male autochthones only, the effect of the Stranger's leaving 'the woman question' open is further support for its subversive intention. (Vidal-Naquet (1986) 137 confuses the issue by claiming that the earthborn are all men, but that this contradicts the practice of spoils - ignoring the belief structures brought out by Loraux.) Note that even 'our earliest ancestors' came into being only at the beginning of the present rotation (27ia7~b2). The humans in the age of Kronos are not counted as our ancestors; it follows that no legitimation of the polls can derive from them. 106

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The transition from autochthony in the age of Kronos, to sexual reproduction in the age of Zeus, is as noted above literally catastrophic. The Stranger specifically observes, of the transition from the previous age of Zeus to the last age of Kronos, that 'only a small remnant of the human race survives' (27oci2-di). So observing, he invokes contemporary Greek beliefs in catastrophes - parallel to the Noah's Ark and many other Near Eastern tales - as an additional, if unenumerated, legendary source included in his story. Plato's interest in catastrophes as a recurrent purge of human history, wiping out the arts and sciences, is displayed in other dialogues, most famously in the Timaeus and the Critias. But as Aristotle remarked,16 the catastrophe theory of human origins - that existing humans descend from the survivors of some near-fatal calamity - is normally contrasted with the theory of humans being earthborn. It is unusual for the Statesman to combine the two, by positing a catastrophe brought on by the cosmos as the origin of a periodic reversion to birth from the earth alternating with reversion to birth from women. These physical features of life in the god-steered universe are then joined by moral, economic, and political implications when the Stranger confirms (to Young Socrates' question) that this was also the age of Kronos. It is not that Kronos himself is so important in the story; the human species is 'shepherded'17 by a 'god' (27165-6) while the other animal species are ruled by dedicated daimones, and the universe is again said only to be steered by 'the god' (27^4). Rather, the effect of mentioning Kronos is to import the profound 16

17

Pol. 12692L4, which raises both alternatives but does not choose between them. The only place Aristotle explicitly endorses the catastrophe theory is in the De Philosophia (specifically in two fragments, Aristotelis, Fragmenta Selecta (1979) 75, 767), although Ross' note to Met. XII.8, iO74bio, suggests that this and three other passages mentioning the recurrent cycles of human invention also imply periodic catastrophes. The pastoral vocabulary lavished on the age of Kronos (vojjifis, 27id6; EVEJJIEV, 27165; VOUEUOUCTI, 27167; VEIJOVTOS, 2 7 i e 8 ; EVEIJIOVTO, 272a6; VEJJIOVTOS,

27^5)

suggests the inadequacies of the shepherd-divisions to the age of Zeus. It need not however pick up shepherding models of politics in other dialogues, as Owen argued it did; see n.66 in Part 1 on the debate between Owen and Gill). 107

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cultural associations of a golden age, an Age of Kronos, into this section of the story. Perfect leisure, the absence of war and political constitutions (also of wives and children, since birth is from the earth), the abundance and comfort of food, shelter, and weather: this idyll is overlaid on the bizarre reversal of aging and universal autochthony. The carefree existence of humans and animals in this epoch, ruled by divinities under Kronos' benevolent eye, mirrors the carefree existence of the cosmos which could depend on the god to sustain it in its perfect circular motion. Contrasted with this carefree dependence of both cosmos and creatures in the 'age of Kronos' is the painstaking independence required of both in the 'age of Zeus'. Again, physical implications are mentioned first. The reversal of the cosmic rotation brings with it a reversal of the aging and growing processes, so that creatures stop getting younger and smaller and start to get older and bigger. This 'imitating and following' (273en-274ai) of the cosmic reversal extends to a reversal in the form of generation: . . . it was no longer possible for a living creature to grow within the earth under the agency of others' putting it together, but just as the world-order had been instructed to be master of its own motion, so too in the same way its parts were instructed themselves to perform the functions of conception, birth and rearing so far as possible by themselves, under the agency of a similar impulse. (274a2-bi)

This structural demand for autonomy is the key motif of the age of Zeus. By determining their own reproduction creatures must imitate the cosmos, now forced to determine its own motion. The demand for self-reliance extends from birth and rearing to the properly political domain. Without the god to guide them, humans must use forms of expertise (the technai) in order to look after themselves, just as the cosmos looks after itself. In the transition from Kronos to Zeus, the catastrophes shake up the ordered harmony of Kronos' garden, leaving humans unsettled and forced to be self-reliant. If the denizens of the age of Zeus are said to be 'autonomous', however, this does not mean that they are entirely cut loose from any 108

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moorings in the structure of the cosmos. On the contrary, their autonomy is to be patterned in the specific form of 'imitation' of the cosmos. This theme of imitation prefigures themes to be important in the latter part of the dialogue and in Part m of this work. As set out in the passage on birth and rearing, the notion of imitation seems straightforward enough: just as the universe has become responsible for its own course (autokratora, 2743,5) so must its elements under the same necessity conceive and bear and nourish themselves. The parallel seems direct: autonomous cosmos, autonomous animals. Yet it is vital to see that the imitation required in the story, imitation of the cosmos' autonomy under Zeus by humans who must therefore be themselves autonomous, is perforce of a distinct kind. To imitate something which is itself autonomous could be understood on two levels. If I imitate your autonomous skipping, I may skip myself; or I may imitate your autonomous decision-making about your gait and choose for myself a different gait. The former may be termed 'first-order' imitation, the latter 'second-order', and the text makes clear that it is the latter, and more complex notion, which is intended. Focusing on human beings we see that the new dispensation means that humans, insofar as they 'follow and imitate' the cosmos, are also necessarily independent of it. 18 Stanley Rosen has described this well as a condition of 'partial detachment': 19 humans are attached to the universe by the relation of imitation, yet detached from it by what imitation in this peculiar case dictates. Thus, to imitate self-rule means to rule oneself, not to be ruled by that which one imitates. And such secondorder imitation can allow for substantial divergence in the actions of imitator and imitated (such that appearances may

18

19

Contra Friedlander (1958) 205: 'It is evident how differently from the Protagoras, and how much more strikingly than in the Critias, the human, political way of life is [in the Statesman's story] co-ordinated with the cosmos. What was merely suggested in the repetition of the political Utopia at the beginning of the Timaeus, is now formulated in the Statesman with incomparable power: the grounding of the human state in the cosmos.' Rosen (1979) 85. 109

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deceive about their relationship). This is the case for the humans in the autonomous cosmos of the story. The progress of the human attempts at imitation further detaches them from the cosmos. For while the cosmos is slowly descending into chaos, corrupted by its bodily element (273bff.), humans climb out of their helplessness with the help of divine gifts: fire from Prometheus, the arts (technai) from Hephaestus and (it seems) Athena, seeds and plants from other gods. That some of what they need, like fire, tools, and seeds, come as gifts from the Olympian gods, does not undermine this moral. In the same breath that the Stranger mentions the Olympians' gifts, he reiterates that these were vital 'since care from the gods . . . ceased to be available to human beings' (274d3~4). Assorted Olympians are portrayed as benefactors, but their munificence serves to provide tools for human self-reliance. They are given no role in the business of 'caring for' humans or actively providing for them. The moral remains clear: in an age of cosmic self-provision and selfdetermination, humans must imitate the cosmos by providing for and determining the course of their own survival. The city is not mentioned here; as in the 'myth' of the Protagoras (322-3), establishment of the technai precedes the foundation of cities. However, mention of the technai reminds the reader that the overall goal of the inquiry is, after all, to define the politike techne; the presence of the rivals implies that the quarry itself cannot be far off. The humans will be able to progress by using the technai, diverging from the decline of the cosmos as they ascend 20 the urban trajectory. Imitation of a declining self-determination does not necessarily require decline on the part of the imitators. This Janus-face of imitation will recur in the Statesman's analysis of politics, to be discussed in Part in. 20

Though in an aside on the age of Kronos, the Stranger has commented that the supreme test of whether its inhabitants are happy is whether they used their leisure to philosophise (272bi-d2). Presumably the same is true of the age of Zeus; the progress of the technai and of urbanisation does not necessarily mean that philosophy will flourish.

110

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In Part m, we will also find that the story's relation of 'imitation' is echoed in the description of the desirable link between the true statesman, while absent, and imperfect actual cities (3ooei). There too the nature of imitation will prove second-order, not first-order imitation. And the political developments to be discussed there involve, furthermore, the image of a ruler returning to the helm, taking up the direction into his own hands once again, as a possibility held out for the political affairs of actual cities. The likelihood of that possibility, that a statesman with genuine political knowledge will appear to rule, must be interpreted with care. In the case of the cosmos, it involves a physical process, which is certain but extremely remote, and which humans cannot implement for themselves. In the case of the cities, it is not at all certain, although the implication from the story does support it; it is a logical but unlikely possibility, which must be protected and recognised as a potential future even while it may never take place. A fierce insistence on the possibility of the advent of a true statesman is combined with an equally fierce insistence on recognition of his current absence. The peculiar contours of this approach, unique to the Statesman, are heralded here in the peculiar and invented cosmic imagery of the story. The imperative of invention To use the Kronos story for such a complex purpose is inventive. Not that the age of Kronos itself is Plato's invention; on the contrary, it dates back at least to Hesiod, from whom derived the connected tale of a 'golden age', and there are good reasons for believing it a traditional story which Hesiod himself exploited. By the fourth century stories of Kronos had permeated a wide range of literature and philosophy, expressing a time of simplicity and sufficiency of food, when war and strife were absent. 21 A straightforward invocation of the age of Kronos would easily have served the Stranger, at much 21

Guthrie (1957) 71.

Ill

THE STORY AS A FULCRUM OF THE DIALOGUE

abbreviated length, to contrast an age of careless and tranquil ease with a present age of dissension, politics, and need. But such a story could be exploited for widely divergent morals, as indeed was the case in contemporary Greek culture; the description of life under Kronos induced or was exploited to bolster subversive22 tendencies in some, nostalgic 23 ones in others. The Stranger, while determined to proscribe nostalgia, forges a new kind of subversive message. By embedding an idiosyncratic version of the Kronos tale in an elaborate framework of cyclical cosmic history, he presents the age of Kronos as an impossible choice for actual (existing) polities, while still leaving open the remote possibility that it might once again recur. 24 The best studies of the story, including and deriving from the structuralist study by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, 25 focus on the double edge with which the idea of a Golden Age or an age of Kronos was suffused in Greek culture. On the one hand, the age of Kronos was a time of tranquil vegetarianism, a Utopia of pastoral simplicity; at the same time, the assimilation of humans to the animals also evoked the bestial aspect of the human, and the age of Kronos was expressed in Bacchic revelry and Cynic subversion as well as in the nostalgia on which I have focused. The 'shadow' over the Golden Age, as Plato describes it in the Statesman, has been observed well in these studies; they help us to understand, for example, why it is that the Stranger leaves the value of human life under Kronos as an open question, depending on whether the 22

23

24

25

By this term I m e a n the varied interpretations of the K r o n o s tales which support changes in the existing political order. Consider the jokes m a d e in Aristophanes a b o u t characters seeking to restore an age of K r o n o s , in Clouds (398, 1070) and Plutus (581), as well as the Cynical and Bacchic connections to K r o n o s discussed by Vidal-Naquet (1986) 290. Aristotle remarks that the peasants praised Peisistratus' regime by comparing it with ho epi Kronou bios, Ath.Pol. 16.7; cf. Cratinus' praise of the food in the time of K r o n o s , Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, vi, 2 6 7 c In the fourth century the Peripatetic Dicaearchus found support for his vegetarian politics by appealing to the golden age of K r o n o s : see Guthrie (1957) 74; Vidal-Naquet (1986) 2 8 5 - 7 . O n this point m y interpretation has m u c h in c o m m o n with Miller (1980) 50, w h o also emphasises the gulf between us a n d the age of K r o n o s established by the cosmic reversals. But Miller fails to observe the political significance of keeping the possibility of return open, which will be explored in Part in. Vidal-Naquet (1986), and, following him, Brisson (1970).

112

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humans exploited their communication with the beasts for sensual satiety or for philosophy (272b3~di). Such structuralist approaches, however, deprive the discussion of the age of Kronos, in the Statesman, of its contextual point. Vidal-Naquet makes no mention of the contrast between the age of Kronos and the age of Zeus, between the life of heteronomy and the life of autonomy, which we have seen already is crucial to the story's formulation and point. Nor does he offer any reflection on the fact that the story, while invoking previous Kronos legends, weaves these together with other material in an entirely unprecedented way. If the Stranger has indeed so carefully constructed this artful narrative, it follows that he cannot simply be repeating a legendary 'myth'. The point bears elaboration. So familiar is the motif of Kronos and the golden age that the temptation to find the Stranger's use of it a simple invocation of other stories has proved hard for scholars to resist. Transliteration of muthos as 'myth' reinforces this sense that the Stranger is doing nothing more than recounting older and already legendary material. But transliteration is not always the best translation, and it is useful to translate 'story' precisely in order to divest the tale of the shrouded and traditional mystery of myth. And if the composition of the story is considered more closely, its highly inventive and un-traditional structure can be seen precisely to belie any mythical authority. Recall that two other legends - Atreus and the sun, and the idea of the earthborn - as well as the legend of Kronos' reign, are presented as the initial elements of the story. Out of these the Stranger weaves his singular muthos (268d9). It is important to see that these legends are not appealed to as sources of authoritative tradition. The ancestral qualities of legend are absent; the story is no familiar tale recounted again and again to each generation, but rather the Stranger's own construction out of the three legends. The Stranger weaves these three into a single story purporting to be the backdrop event from which each legend emerged. In the course of connecting the legends he revises, expands, and embroiders them as seen in the previous section. 113

THE STORY AS A FULCRUM OF THE DIALOGUE

These alterations are licensed by his claim to be revealing the event of which each of them is a partial distortion (269b5~c2). But as distortions, they enjoy no independent claim to allegiance or to embody the voice of tradition; their traditional authority is stripped from them as they are incorporated into this new saga. Authority is granted instead to the autonomous storyteller, who is self-reliant just as his fellow denizens of the age of Zeus must be. The Stranger dramatises his own call to self-reliance by inventing his own story. In this, his use of the Kronos legend (and of the other two) is very different from most other appeals to it, which drew precisely on the allure of the traditional imagery. We have seen how the age of Kronos is, in the Statesman, firmly removed from us as a possible but not actual world. Such estrangement of content can now be linked to an estrangement of process, as the very elements of tradition are reworked practically to the point of unrecognisability in the light of their putative source. Both content and procedure are well-designed to alienate the contemporary reader from his or her political traditions and imaginative yearnings. And this estrangement, modelled and described in the story, is proleptic of the later argument of the dialogue about the ideal statesman and the relation of actual cities to this ideal. A central message of that discussion, as will be argued in Part in, is that cities lacking political experts should not, should one appear, bar him from power on the grounds that the authority of law must be preserved. A certain inner estrangement from law is advised even though strict adherence to law is the best policy so long as no political expert exists. The story is well-designed to prepare us for this recommended estrangement, and if rhetorical skill is involved in constructing this pointed pastiche, it presupposes rejection of the rhetoric of traditional myth and legendary authority. The necessity of narrative So far we have observed the cosmic gulf between the humans living under Zeus and Kronos' nurslings, a gulf which on the 114

TELLING THE STORY

human side requires self-reliant autonomy imitating the autonomy of the cosmos. If Kronos is then the rival whom the story succeeds in isolating from the statesman, it would seem that the 'new path' has fulfilled at least part of its purpose. In examining just how and why a story was necessary to do this, however, we will see also that there remain rivals whom the story, told as it is, is powerless to despatch. Why is it precisely a story which is needed and introduced here, when the divisions have run aground? To this question, posed at the outset of this Part, a two-fold answer may be returned. First, the resort to story-telling when analytical resources are apparently exhausted is a standard Platonic manoeuvre. In such cases (as in the Gorgias, the Republic, the Phaedrus) the stories told are often genuine 'myths', employed as supernatural models or justifications to bolster a conviction which the analytical argument has sought to establish.26 This observation would explain the resort to a story, some kind of story, in the Statesman. The second point, however, is one which is distinctive to the Statesman and its story. The nature of the divide which the story recounts - the temporal and cosmic gulf between our own world and the possible world of Kronos - is one which no division could establish on its own. Division has no mechanism for dealing with history. Its distinctions are drawn between arts or species treated as logical wholes, and tenselessly. But the distinction between human life now, and human life in the age of Kronos, is a distinction not of kinds but of epochs. It is true that, as shown above, the earthborn are described fancifully, and are not treated as ancestors in political terms. But they are precisely not treated as a different species. The life described under Kronos is specifically a life 'of humans' (27164). So the force of the contrast is not to confront us with a happy race of Martians, but with a carefree spontaneous existence which could be - but is not - ours. To this extent the revision of the Kronos story does respect the claims of the traditional tale - this is a life for humans - but for different 26

Cf. Annas (1982) 119-22; Sedley (1991) 360.

THE STORY AS A FULCRUM OF THE DIALOGUE

motives. If some of the traditional stories of Kronos used that fact as a basis for nostalgia, the Statesman appropriates it for a fierce denial that nostalgia could have any point when cosmic history has decided our life otherwise. This distinction between possible and actual is one which division, bound to the tenselessness of logical exhaustiveness, could not easily establish. Resort to narrative makes sense as an alternative path in the attempt to establish such a distinction. None the less, not any or every narrative would draw this same distinction. Consider, for example, the way that the age of Kronos is discussed in the Laws (Book iv). 27 A 'small story' (muthos smikros) is offered by the Athenian Stranger in support of his contention that the state should be named after the god who is the ruler of rational men (L.7i3a9~b4). The god in question is Kronos, who is described as being aware of the potential hubris and injustice of any human ruler, and so choosing to keep the reins of government in his own hands (more precisely, in the hands of his daimones, one of whom is appointed to rule over humans). As in the Statesman, humans live a life of their own will (automates, 713C3-4; cf. St. 27165), with leisure and abundant food. But the point of the Laws' story is subtly opposed to that of the Statesman. The Athenian Stranger tells his story in order to bind existing states tightly to the rule of Kronos. He blurs the difference between life under Kronos and political life, referring to 'cities' even under Kronos (713d!), whereas the Eleatic Stranger distinguishes sharply between the apolitical life under Kronos and the life in cities we are forced to lead under Zeus. Most significantly, the Athenian Stranger prescribes imitation as a direct and substantive bond between existing states and the rule of Kronos ('we must imitate (mimeisthai) life under Kronos', 7i3e6-7i4a2). This direct and unproblematic imitation is very different from the second-order notion of imitation in the Statesman's story, as discussed above. 27

To the significant differences between the Statesman's and the Laws' appropriations of Kronos, must be added the further (and also different) use of Kronos in the Critias; see Part I, n.66, as well as the briefer remarks of Vidal-Naquet (1986) 296. 116

CRITICISING THE STORY

The Laws' story of Kronos attempts to establish continuity between a previous age and the present age. But as we have seen, in the Statesman, the point is precisely the rejection of continuity in favour of a cosmic gulf. It would seem that the dramatic terms of each dialogue's digression are carefully chosen. The Statesman's resort to story, unlike that of several other Platonic dialogues, is not merely to find diversion or reinforcement for analytical argument, nor is it, unlike the story of the Laws, to establish a continuous historical framework. The gulf recounted in the Statesman, a gulf between the possible and the actual, is one which requires a narrative which is constructed specifically around this distinction. Criticising the story The insufficiency of narrative: remaining rivals Recall that the failure of division to identify and separate off all rivals to the statesman was what originally prompted the need for the story. But the content of the story as analysed here - the temporal gap and the attack on tradition, with the related fate of self-reliance in the age of Zeus - does not seem directly to address the question of rival arts. While the divine king could be construed as a rival, he was not one of those whose thronging challenge occasioned the story. Those rivals, who seemed to include doctors, farmers, musicians and midwives, are all clearly inhabitants of the age of Zeus just as the statesman is. The story's contributions and failures on this front eventually bring us back to confront the criticism of the story with which Part n began. The Stranger draws his own lessons from the story, before reflecting on its excesses and inadequacy in the terms with which this chapter began (277aff). These avowed lessons are much more narrowly circumscribed than the interpretation which has been offered here, being limited to the avowed purpose of the story in correcting the preceding divisions.28 28

Frutiger (1930) 187 takes the correction of the divisions to be the sole purpose of the story, although his notice of the correction is itself valuably made. 117

THE STORY AS A FULCRUM OF THE DIALOGUE

Two mistakes in the previous divisions are said to have been identified by the story, but in fact each of these comprises two separate points so that four points are made altogether (although the organisation of the entire passage from 274c i is somewhat obscure). (i)

(ii) (iii)

(iv)

The herdsman described in the previous divisions was in fact the divine ruler of the age of Kronos, not the mortal statesman who was sought; (in other words, the temporal gulf was inadvertently crossed; 274eio-275ai). The manner of the statesman's rule was not sufficiently specified (275a2-4). However insufficiently specified, the statesman's distinct manner of rule was actually omitted by the very divisions which purported to isolate it (275d4-6). 29 The use of 'herding' implied bodily nurture which all herdsmen of other animals, but not the human herdsman, carry out. A wider term for guardianship without feeding responsibilities, such as 'tending herds' (therapeutikeri) or 'care for herds' {epimeletiken) should have been used in order even to include the statesman in the definition (275e3-8). 30 'Concern for herds' should itself have been divided into 'enforced tendance' and 'tendance voluntarily accepted', the first exercised by the tyrant, the latter alone the proper province of the statesman (276d5~ei4).

The Stranger envisages the results of these lessons as additions to the divisions (e.g. 276d5, d8~9): the change in names being assumed, we should have divided the divine ruler from the human ruler, and among human rulers, the tyrant from the statesman. His casting of points (i) and (iv) in terms of divisions makes sense of his prognosis, even before telling the story, that after it they would return to dividing part from part as before. Although the story was a new beginning and

29

30

T h e point from Part i, that naming is a double-edged concern, is reiterated here. According to the Stranger, the statesman 'eluded us without our knowing it while we were intent u p o n the process of n a m i n g ' (275d4-6). A s shown in Part I, these t w o verbs become the point of contact between statecraft and weaving in the later development of the paradeigma of weaving ( p p . 52-3). This link is a minor instance of the importance of the story for what follows (and not only what precedes) it in the dialogue.

118

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a new path, part of its yield has been a new crop of divisions to add to the previous ones. The division has been not only interrupted, but also enriched by the story (which, as will be discussed below, is counted as a kind of paradeigma). Notice, however, that no division, nor any progress, is suggested to take account of (ii). The statesman's manner of rule has not been clarified by the story. Nor, although one could say that a new rival (the divine Kronos himself) has been identified and subdued, is any sign given that the story has helped to address the rival human experts whose challenge set the scene for its telling. In fact, the story's description of the Olympian gods' gifts of the arts (274C7~di), as well as fire and seeds, seems to ensure plural technai and so techne-r\\d\vy within the age of Zeus. The Protagorean overtones of this description of human beginnings in self-care and self-rule implicitly raise the question of the political art, whether it is included in the bestowal of the arts, and how it is related to those other arts which the Stranger has called its rivals. By describing the divine gift of the arts, the story reinforces the claim that the statesman has human rivals, but offers no guidance in distinguishing him from them. This task, which the story fails to address, is left to be resolved by some other method of proceeding, which will turn out to be the introduction of the paradigmatic paradeigma for statecraft, weaving. Delusions of grandeur: Kronos as a 'great example' That the story is fabricated, man- rather than tradition-made, has been shown above to be an important feature of its construction. This feature gains further relevance if we compare the construction of the story with the canonical account of the construction of a paradeigma, as given later in the dialogue and discussed in Part I. We saw there that a paradeigma in the sense central to the Statesman must be constructed: its origin is in judging two 'sundered' (diespasmeno, 278C5) elements to be the same, and bringing them together in a single true 119

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judgment (27803-6). But no such careful juxtaposition is made in the construction of the story. 31 Statecraft is left to one side, while the fantastic story develops a momentum and a complexity of its own, unrelated to any articulation which its putative target might possess. Despite lacking the construction on which the analysis of paradeigma has insisted, the story is nonetheless apparently included as a 'paradeigma' (2771^4). This apparent inclusion is made in the context of the Stranger's criticism of his own story (the passage with which this chapter began); the Stranger remarks that 'believing that only great examples (megala paradeigmata, 277b4) were suitable for a king ... we took up an extraordinary swelling of story' (277b3~5, my tr.). This remark is crucially ambiguous. He does not state outright that the story is a paradeigma, much less a great one; the story was told on the basis of the belief that such a paradeigma would be suitable, but that belief does not guarantee that the intention was realised. Whether, and in what sense the story counts as a paradeigma, is left for the reader to judge. And in view of the pivotal role of the story in the dialogue, that reader will bring to bear retrospective awareness of what is made of paradeigma as the dialogue develops, as well as the prospective momentum which carries the text from the shepherd-divisions to the story. Before passing judgment on this question, it is important to be clear about the larger picture. The account of the importance of paradeigma in the Statesman, given in Part I, was presented in holistic terms; it drew on evidence from throughout the dialogue without considering the order of presentation. Part 1 was also concerned to emphasise the link between the Sophist and the Statesman, and so to stress that the reader of the Sophist would already be familiar with the interplay of paradeigma and division when approaching 31

It is true that the three legends are described in a related word as 'sundered' (diesparmena, 269137), the scattered survivors of a group of legends all deriving from the same original experience (pathos) (26c)b5-ci); but the linking of the three legends within the story has nothing in common with the laying side by side of the two items being compared by an example. 120

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the Statesman. As we focus now on the story as a fulcrum of the Statesman, however, it will be quickly noticed that no mention of paradeigma has been made up to the close of the story in the dialogue. The problematic reference to the story just quoted is the first reference to paradeigma in the text. This observation illuminates the analysis of paradeigma made in Part I. For the Statesman in fact begins with a series of divisions, leading to the definition of the statesman as herder of the human herd, which are carried out without benefit of paradeigma. It is true that the method of division was itself introduced, in the Sophist, only in the context of a paradeigma, and the ready use of division in the Statesman is clearly linked to its employment in the earlier conversation of the Sophist?2 And the shepherd-divisions are governed by an implicit model, of the king as shepherd, which was common currency in the Homeric epics and in classical Greek thought deriving thence. But the early divisions of the Statesman nevertheless occur without an explicitly installed paradeigma as framework. Is this lack responsible for the inadequacy of the first definition? The answer must be made by inference. The first attempt to rectify this definition - the great story - is said to have been intended as a sort of paradeigma', the second and ultimately successful attempt is precisely the technical account of paradeigma and the adoption of the paradeigma of weaving to which it leads. Paradeigma is the perceived and then the prescribed remedy for the inadequacies of the initial definition produced by division and prejudice - the conventional model of the king as shepherd - alone. The idea that paradeigma is a legacy of the story has both a (minimal) negative and a (stronger) positive reading. Negatively, the inadequacies of the story lead immediately to the account of paradeigma in redress, although no internal link may connect the two procedures. Positively, however, we must consider the knotty issue of whether and in what sense the story is itself an instance of paradeigma. Consider again 32

To begin the search for the statesman, the Stranger asks, 'Well, then, must we distinguish the forms of knowledge as we did when looking for his predecessor [sc. the sophist]?' (2581)6-7). 121

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the Stranger's remark, criticising the story, that they had taken it up 'believing that only great examples were suitable for a king' (277b3~4). As we saw in Part i, crucial to the Sophist's specification and choice of a paradeigma was the requirement that it be 'small' (smikron) or 'minor', So. 2i8e2; cf. pp. 22-3 above). That the paradeigma be small enables it to be used as practice for the greater things, while reassuring the practitioner as to its tractability (the Stranger assuming an equation between what is small, what is minor, and what is manageable). Moreover, the inappropriateness of a great example is confirmed two Stephanus pages later in the Statesman itself, when a 'most small example' (smikrotaton paradeigma) is sought, and found in the art of weaving (279a7~bi). With this clue, the reader has good reason to regard Kronos as having been proven inappropriately grand; that the story, told in order to provide such a great example, should have proved distractingly excessive, comes as no surprise. Great examples are thus framed as inappropriate on methodological grounds. But the fault with the story's greatness is not only its procedural unwieldiness, but also its political implications. The key is the connection presumed to be appropriate between a king (a great subject) and a great example. No such connection was made in the Sophist, and indeed no one familiar with Plato's thought would presume that a sophist, or any example of sophistry, should be anything grand. But the Statesman must contend with tenacious expectations about what statecraft, and its near-synonym in parts of the dialogue, kingship, deserve. One implication of the story's inappropriate greatness is to divide the commitment to the authority of rule, which shapes the dialogue throughout, from any yearning for superhuman authority. The story shows that greatness in the conventional sense - here displaying trappings of divinity and cosmology may obscure rather than advance political understanding. Politics is hindered rather than helped by conventional assumptions about its grandeur. In this way the criticism of greatness is related to the criticism of tradition, which was shown earlier to be a general theme of the story. Insofar as 122

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the expectation that a king should have a grand example is a traditional expectation, its demolition strikes a blow against tradition in the political realm. Returning to the methodological domain, we can conclude that because the story is mega (the opposite of smikron, let alone smikrotaton) its status as a technical paradeigma is vitiated. One might say that it tries, but fails, to be a paradeigma, but also that its failure is carefully designed to highlight - by contrast - the criteria for a paradeigma to succeed. The apparent reference to the story as a paradeigma which we have been considering {iqqb^) both should and should not be taken in the technical sense. To count the story as a paradeigma would be more than casual, but less than complete. It is precisely in its failure that it orients us toward the ideal. 33 Having reached this understanding of the relation between the story and a (technical) paradeigma, the comparison between their modes of construction may be re-examined. Recall that the story nowhere, until completed, is compared to statecraft; its elaboration proceeds in isolation from that which it is meant to illustrate. This structural weakness further explains why the story ultimately fails to be a proper paradeigma. For the shared elements, the common structure, of the example and what it exemplifies provide the framework within which division can take place. The interplay between paradeigma and division, which was shown in Part I to be essential to the successful attainment of definitions in the Sophist and Statesman, cannot function without a common articulated structure shared by the paradeigma and that of which it is the example. The story, as suggested by its mode of construction, has no such internal or articulable structure. The Stranger does extract two divisions from the excessive narrative mass: between divine and human ruler, and between voluntary acceptance 33

I choose this wording to bring out a further parallel between this role of the story and the political implications of the dialogue. As Part m will argue (and as has been mentioned briefly above), the relation between the actual and the ideal is a key theme of the politics of the Statesman. A similar formal pattern - between the (actual) story and the (ideal) paradeigma to follow - is embodied here. 123

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and enforced acceptance of rule (276cn-e5). But there is no more structure with which to continue; in particular, no structure available to achieve the task which prompted the storytelling, the differentiation of the statesman from his rivals. It is in the failure to provide such a structure for division, as well as in the outlandish and inappropriate greatness when smallness is required, that the story is most significantly contrasted with a technical and effective paradeigma. To conclude the discussion of paradeigma, it is important to observe one final context in which the story's status as such a paradeigma is problematic. G. S. Kirk has observed of Greek myths generally that 'Greek myths from the time of Homer had assumed a function that already had elements of both the particular and the general: they were now treated as paradigms or exempla, familiar and typical instances of certain kinds of situation and ways of reacting to them.' 34 To say that myth was exemplary 35 for the Greeks is to say that it provided moral exemplars to guide action, in much the same sense that the Republic appeals to moral exemplars which must be internalised as standards of conduct (see above, Part i pp. 92-3). Part of the polemical purpose of the Republic, as Annas 36 among others has recognised, is to ban many of the familiar mythical exemplars, instead proposing its own new exemplars (the Forms) as the best guides for action. Insofar as the Statesman rejects the familiar versions of myth, including the nostalgic or Cynical versions of the Kronos story, and replaces them with its own invented and moralistic cosmic tale, its purpose can be seen as parallel to the censorship and replacement of Republic 11 and in. But the Statesman also makes a more radical move of its own. The 34 35

36

Kirk (1974) 289. The Republic connects not only myth and paradeigma as would follow from Kirk's argument, but also myth and imitation, discussing myths as themselves imitations of moral qualities (cf. Laws m, 7ood-7oia, Arist. Pol. vm, I34oa29-bio). The Statesman separates these three ideas, assigning each a distinct function: myth (story) as a failed paradeigma; paradeigma as a technical method; imitation as a second-order imitation of independent practice. Annas (1982) 121-2. 124

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notion of paradeigma is employed in a methodological, not an ethical sense. And the role of distinguishing good men from bad, the role played by traditional myth as well as by the ethical paradeigmata of the Republic, is in the Statesman assigned instead to the technical province of measurement. 'Is it not just this matter of attaining the due measure which marks off good men from bad?5 the Stranger will ask (283636). To understand this transfer of moral education from the traditional notion of paradeigma to the art of measurement, it is necessary to turn now to a discussion of that art, as introduced by the story and analysed by the dialogue. Delusions of grandeur: measured by the mean The passage criticising the story (277a-c) serves as a fulcrum for the introduction not only of paradeigma but also of measurement. Each of the points of criticism assesses the story against an explicit or implicit standard. Recall the simile of the hasty sculptors, who 'hurry when it is not appropriate {para kairon) to do so and actually lose time by making additions and increasing the size of the various parts of their work beyond what is necessary (tou deontosj (277a6-bi). Their actions are measured against the kairos, the right opportunity for action, and found wanting. The additions are measured against the deon, the necessary, and found excessive both in number and in scale. These two standards have not yet been explained in the dialogue, but their appearance here heralds the full analysis of them to be given in the discussion of measurement (283b287b). While the simile uses standards which are explicit, if as yet unexplained, the direct criticism of the story adds standards which are implicit and to that extent unclear. The Stranger's criticism of what 'we' (not himself only, but the complicit Young Socrates) did in telling the story has been quoted in part above. To quote it fully now: I suppose in order to give a grand as well as a quick demonstration of the mistake in the route we previously took, we thought it was appropriate (prepein) to the king to give 'great examples' [my tr.] and took upon 125

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ourselves an astonishing mass of material in the shape of the story, so forcing ourselves to use a greater part of it than necessary (meizoni ton deontos); thus we have made our exposition longer (makroteran), and have in every way failed to apply a finish to our story, and our account, just like a portrait, seems adequate (hikanos) in terms of its superficial outline, but not yet to have received its proper clarity (enargeia), as it were with paints and the mixing together of colours. (277b 1-C3)

The standard of the deon recurs from the simile of the sculptors. But notice also the plethora of assessments for which no standard is explicitly given: a grand style; great examples; suitable examples; a demonstration which is too long. Grandeur, greatness, unsuitability, and excessive length are a varied list, but because they are all considered flaws, all four implicitly invoke a standard of measurement by which they have been judged and found wanting. The searching criticism of the story, then, raises for the reader the question of how to measure: how to judge the grandeur, greatness, suitability and length of the story which has just been presented. The discussion of measurement does not enter the dialogue ex nihilo as free-floating methodological advice; rather, it is best read as a response to, and redeeming of, these implicit invocations. Although the judgments have not worried Young Socrates (as he asserts with reference to the suggested pointlessness of the discussion of weaving), the Stranger chooses to inoculate him against doubts by presenting the grounds for all such judgments about measure (283b7-ci). These grounds consist essentially of a single contrast, the contrast between relative measurement and measurement in terms of a mean, or standard (283d7~9). What may be referred to as 'relative measurement' can only measure two findings against one another (x is hotter or colder than y); 'mean-measurement' measures a finding against a standard of what is appropriate for an activity (x is too hot to be applied to the skin). The point of the contrast is to validate mean-measurement, as indispensable for the existence and productivity of the arts (284a8-b2). Because the exposition in the text circles back again and again to the same contrast, I shall not present the argument 126

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expositorily but instead try to systematise and summarise it. Relative-measurement includes 'all those kinds of expertise that measure the number, lengths, depths, breadths and speeds of things in relation to the opposite' (28463-5). Although this formulation does not exclude the possibility that number and its cohorts be measurable also according to the mean, the emphasis is certainly on their assessment in relative terms. Commentators impressed with the Stranger's basic contrast have found it easy to denigrate the description of relative measurement; one representative judgment is that relative measurement is 'brutal et mecanique'. 37 But this is to grant the Stranger's point too soon, and so to miss the point of his polemic. For we must recognise, as a contemporary reader would have done, that among the listed arts of relativemeasurement were many which were among the most celebrated achievements of Greek culture. 'Number' (arithmos) was closely associated with counting; as Martha Nussbaum and Julia Annas have observed, its paradigmatic role was as answer to the question, 'how many?' 38 The role of the technai in being able to answer these questions in relevant domains was a source of great cultural pride. The Stranger's scrutiny of the measurement of number sets limits on that pride. The measurement of number is distanced from its close customary links with order and understanding, portrayed instead as a purely comparative task. The other relative measures listed - length, breadth, depth and velocity - had also been subjected to definite standards which the Stranger here minimises. The stade, the various receptacles which measured capacity, the units of linear measure applied to area and volume, all these were determinate and standardised units. 39 These measures were susceptible to mathematical determination, even if such determination was occasional or premature at times. 40 To dismiss the measurement of length and so on as merely relative must, in light of these intellectual 37 38 39 40

Dies (1935) xi. Nussbaum (1979) 89-93, cf. (1986) 106-9; Annas (1976) 6-11. See Richardson (1975) for a survey of these measures. Lloyd (1988). 127

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and cultural standards, serve the purpose of a considerable polemic. The polemic intended is brought out well by Campbell's gloss on the two kinds of measurement as the 'More' and the Too-much'. 4 1 What relative measure lacks, in the Stranger's view, is a normative dimension. Application of 'more' and 'less' involves comparing two things without evaluating them as good or bad. The comparison may be arbitrary, but even if not arbitrary it is purely descriptive. Thus no matter how advanced or determinate measures of number, etc. might become, they are silent as to any purpose; we might say that they are instrumental, not substantive measures. The mild disparagement of these paragon achievements of measure is intended to make room for the possibility of normative judgment. Judgment is normative insofar as it invokes a standard. For purposes of the basic contrast, the relevant standard is labelled the 'due measure' (to metrion, 284a2). According to the Stranger, if due measure were abolished, the arts (technai) would perish along with it - and among them, the objects of the present discussion, statecraft and weaving. The existence of statecraft is actually said to be threatened in two ways. First, the abolition of due measure would make it impossible for the arts (including statecraft) to produce the fine and the good in their products (284a5-bi). Second, without admitting the existence of due measure it will prove impossible to define or establish the existence of statecraft (284c 1-3). The first is a threat to productive technical activity; the second, to the progress of the inquiry for a definition. While making the latter point the Stranger compares the case with the search for the sophist: Is it the case then that just as with the sophist we compelled what is not into being as well as what is, when our argument escaped us down this route, so now it is that we must compel the more and the less, in their turn, to become measurable not only in relation to each other but also in relation to the coming-into-being of what is in due measure? For if this has not been agreed, it is certainly not possible for either the statesman or anyone else 41

Campbell (1973) vi. 128

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who possesses knowledge of subjects relating to things done to have come into being in an undisputed way. (28^7-^3)

The claim is that the admission of not-being, and the admission of due measure, are made on the same basis: because they are necessary to complete an argument (specifically, to reach a definition which 'brings into being' a definiendum). The attempt to vindicate the existence of not-being, in the Sophist, is made in order to fend off an imagined challenge from the sophist: that if the sophist's art is defined as an art of deception, it must produce false opinion, but false opinion would involve attributing being to not-being (So. 24OC3-24ib3) which the interlocutors had previously agreed to be impossible, and indeed self-contradictory (So. i^qbq-i^diii). Notbeing must be, in some way, if sophistry is to be possible (and indeed, the dialogue assumes, it is actual). Similarly, in the Statesman, due measure must exist if statecraft and the other arts are to be possible (as indeed they are actual; the story has already described the origin of the technai in the age of Zeus). Notice that in both cases the argument moves from actuality to the conditions of possibility. Neither dialogue ever doubts the existence of its eponymous subject, only whether a definition will be reached or the inquiry embarrassed. An inquiry may run aground not because its object is a chimera, but because of obstacles which block progress. Both the existence of not-being and the existence of due measure are challenges of this kind. Before examining the details of due measure, it is well to observe that the overall discussion of measurement is said to be 'finely and sufficiently done (kalos, hikanos)\ but is contrasted with a demonstration which would be 'perfectly accurate' (auto takribes, 284di~3). A form of meta-measurement is applied to the very discussion of measurement, contrasting not the relative versus the mean, but the sufficient versus the accurate. It may be recalled that the criticism of the story concluded by contrasting a sufficiently outlined sketch with a picture of clear and well-mixed colours. Sufficiency in the Statesman is the hallmark of an argument which is useful, but 129

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still provisional in some way. The Stranger remarks that his analysis of measurement will be necessary for the perfectly accurate demonstration but does not itself merit that title, implying that the present contrast will need to be revised or supplemented in some way in order to attain perfect accuracy, in keeping with the provisional tenor of the inquiry discussed in Part i. The contrast of this division of measurement with perfect accuracy is particularly interesting because it displays some nuances in a bond often assumed to hold between akribeia, measurement, and techne. Martha Nussbaum has remarked, for example, that 'the notion of akribeia is extremely important in fifth-century debates over techne ... [and] the acquisition of akribeia is frequently linked with the notion of having a measure or a standard'.42 Yet the Stranger, as we have seen, complicates these links. He still associates measure and techne, though limiting this association to mean-measurement only; but he drives a wedge between these two and the achievement of akribeia. His reservations about akribeia do have precedent, but a precedent with a different purpose. It was characteristic for Hippocratic doctors, as G. E. R. Lloyd has observed,43 to reject the standard of akribeia in medicine. The author of On Ancient Medicine not only rejects akribeia** but also asserts that medicine instead can have knowledge of the kairoi (defined as 'the turning points of diseases which present the doctor with opportunities for intervention'). 45 In the Hippocratic text as in the Platonic one, the disavowal of akribeia accompanies assertion of a technical practice which observes the kairoi. The Statesman does not wholly dismiss akribeia. The standard of accuracy is denied to the technai (despite their elevation), and reserved instead as an 42 43 44

45

Nussbaum (1986) 96, emphasis original. Lloyd (1987) 129-30. Pace Nussbaum (1986) 96, whose use of the same evidence in support of her own thesis is misleading; she reads the Hippocratics as apologising for the lack of akribeia in their art, whereas as Lloyd rightly assumes, they are substituting a different standard altogether. On Diseases 1 = De Morbis (ed. Littre), cited in Lloyd (1987) 129-130. 130

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honorific of complete philosophical exposition. Such a formulation of akribeia expresses the fact that while the technai are indeed important in the Platonic universe, they will never be as important as philosophy. 46 Returning now to the sufficient, it is time to consider the detail of the sufficient account of due measure. Although due measure is used to mark the basic contrast, an expanded list of standards for mean-measurement is given in tandem with the expanded list of relative standards previously remarked. Mean-measurement includes: all those [arts] that measure in relation to what is in due measure (to metrion), what is fitting (to prepon), the right moment (ton kairori), what is as it ought to be (to deon) - everything that removes itself from the extremes to the middle. (28465-8)

The mean is literally described as the abode of these standards, their location. Each of the four listed standards is a specification of mean-measurement. By analogy with the specification of relative measure in different dimensions (length, breadth, and so on), these can be seen to be specifications of the mean in different dimensions: time, necessity, suitability, and so forth. To measure according to any of the standards listed is to make the idea of the mean operational in a given domain. Each of these standards, moreover, bears its own deep associations in Greek culture. We have already met the kairos in the simile of the sculptors, and in fact it is the kairos, and to a lesser extent the deon, which recurs in the Statesman outside the measurement passage. Most significantly, the final summary definition of statecraft defines its characteristic knowledge thus: 'it knows when it is the right time {egkairias) to begin and set in motion the most important things in cities and when it is the wrong time (akairias)' (3O5d2-4). Part m will develop this crucial role of the kairos in the dialogue's analysis of politics. In preparation for this 46

The story itself, once again, made this very point. Asking whether humans in the age of Kronos (who lacked all technai) were happy, the Stranger avers that all depends on whether they made use of their opportunities to practise philosophy (272c 1, with 27203^2). 131

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discussion, Part n now closes with a consideration of its centrally temporal significance. On the temporality of the kairos The fact that the kairos was an important term for the fifthand fourth- century sophists, and that the Statesman mounts a campaign to make it characteristic of the eponymous political expert instead, will be discussed in Part in. Before considering the inheritance and appropriation of the kairos in the Statesman, however, the question of its temporal significance must be confronted. Numerous scholars have compiled accounts of the evolving use of the kairos in Greek literature, and in recent years, several have made the point that kairos should not always be given a temporal interpretation. While the broad outlines of the term's evolution are beyond dispute, it may well be time for the pendulum to reverse its swing on the issue of the temporality of the kairos. I shall argue that even where, as sometimes happens, the explicit reference is not temporal, temporality provides a necessary context in almost all cases for the notion of the kairos to make sense. There are three principal stages in the term's evolution, and it is the second stage which is the major ground for contention. First is the archaic use of the term to signify a vulnerable point of the body. Homer uses not kairos but its adjectival form (kairion) (II. vni 83-4, 326); his image of the archer's vulnerability is echoed in Aeschylus (Supp. 445), Sophocles (El. 31), and later in Plato (Laws in 687a5). In Homer and Hesiod temporality is spoken of in terms of hora (season), in Homer also by the contrast between chronos and hemeros. Between the archaic era and the late fourth century lies the second stage, in which kairos signifies something like the right norm or measure, whether by adaptation to given circumstances or by a decisive inflexion of action. I shall consider this stage at greater length below. On all accounts, this stage eventually subsides into a third and purely temporal use of kairos by the late fourth century. The debate is over when this happens, in other words, when in our fifth- and fourth132

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century authors we can be secure in giving kairos din exclusively or even emphatically temporal reading. An excellent survey on this subject is given by William Race with particular reference to drama. 47 Race endorses the general sequence just outlined, from Homer through a normative use (with other terms) to an exclusively temporal use. He is also one of those wishing to downplay the temporal aspect of kairos in its normative phase, remarking that as a normative term it had little or no temporal connotation, but rather a basic sense of propriety. This claim, however, is shortly undermined by his remark in the course of the survey, that ' . . . the primary difficulty is in deciding in each case to what extent the normative and/or temporal sense is present'. 48 This telling caveat suggests that the normative and temporal senses are more closely intertwined than the revisionists, like Race himself, wish to allow. And the point is borne out in the six normative senses of kairos, with examples, which he considers. His findings are that in classical drama kairos may signify (i) the proper amount; (ii) what is apposite or correct or worthwhile in speech; (iii) what is needful, advantageous, or successful; (iv) what is fitting, proper, right; (v) the appropriate or fitting time or circumstances; (vi) an opportunity or chance. Race wishes to confine the temporal sense of kairos to (v) above. Yet all of these contexts involve speech or action, both of which are conceivable only in, and over, time. So for example Orestes tells Electra to avoid excessive explanation, rather 'to tell what is appropriate to the present moment, for your story would preclude the proper amount of time'. 49 Now Race himself groups this example under the putatively nontemporal category (ii) of the kairos in speech. But the example itself reveals the temporal context of speaking, and so of any use of the kairos to measure speech, even when it has also a reference to correctness. In other words, correctness (like brevity) can only be judged with reference to the occasion, and that occasion can only take place in time. This is as true when the ornamental or 47

Race (1981) I97ff..

48

49

Ibid. 199. 133

Soph. El I288ff.; Race (1981) 203.

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prestigious aspects of the kairos are stressed over its temporal ones, as when the temporal aspects are themselves the focus of attention. So, to take another of Race's examples from (ii), Aeschylus' frequent contrast between speaking ta kairia and keeping silent depends on the sense of occasion, that is, an occasion in time. Or, to take an example from another writer, G. M. A. Grube notes the link between the kairos and the occasion in the criticism of Dionysius of Halicarnassus: 'the meaning of kairos and kairios in criticism comes very close to that of prepon, that is, appropriateness to the occasion'. 50 In every case temporality will form at least a backdrop, a context, for the performance of action and speech. The same point applies to a self-avowed revisionist endeavour, by John R. Wilson, to stress kairos as 'due measure' over kairos as temporal; in a discussion of Pindar (Pyth. 10) Wilson is forced to admit that 'no doubt the primary reference of the kairos is to the opportunity gained by not procrastinating'. 51 And in an otherwise excellent discussion of the kairos in Aristotle, Pierre Rodrigo and Alonso Tordesillas attempt the same self-undermining distinction once again. 52 They identify three main categories of Aristotle's use of the kairos: (i) those in line with his official definition of the kairos as 'the good in the category of time'; 53 (ii) the use in the physical writings for time, which in fact puts more weight on 'nun' than on 'kairos'; (iii) a heterogeneity of other uses, including mathematical, rhetorical, and theological contexts. Category (i) is said by the two authors to unite Aristotle in common cause with the sophists against Plato's unitary Good. The definition of the kairos in terms of time is thus, on their own account, the most significant and distinctive sense in which Aristotle employs the kairos. Yet in the same breath, they put forward the revisionist warning that a temporal 50 51 52

53

G r u b e (1961) 52 n.73. Wilson (1980) 185. R o d r i g o a n d Tordesillas (1993). I a m grateful to Alonso Tordesillas for having involved m e in the ongoing research on the kairos at the Universite de Provence (Aix-Marseille 1), now centralised in the Centre d'Etudes sur La Pensee antique 'kairos kai logos'. N.E. L4.iO96a26, quoted in R o d r i g o and Tordesillas, 'Politique', 399.

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overdetermination of the kairos begs the question of interpretation. Given that use of the kairos is effectively otiose in (ii) and unfocused in (iii), the temporal sense of (i) is on their own account the primary use of kairos in Aristotle. Once again the evidence presented undermines the force of the revisionist claim. There are doubtless contexts in which we do better to stress the sense of propriety or some other quality of the appropriate, in translating the kairos, than the temporal. The revisionist move is a laudable effort to remind us of precisely this, that the temporal is not always uppermost in the gauging of a situation. Advising a friend about what to wear, we might well speak of the party's elegance rather than its date. But the sense of 'occasion' is not ambiguous between context and time; rather, the time is the context. To minimise the temporality of the kairos is to lose sight of this basic dimension of speech and action. Furthermore, this analysis is in keeping with the Stranger's own discussion of normative measure in the Statesman. His appeal to the conditions of speech and action generally, analysed above, suggests that he shares this sense of their inescapably temporal context. And the definition of statecraft quoted above (3O5d2~4) marks out the province of statecraft as command of the moments for action by the other arts. Rhetoric, one of the three final arts to be distinguished from statecraft in the dialogue (304b i-e2), is closely connected with knowledge of a kairos in the political culture of Plato's day. But the Stranger argues that there is, in effect, a meta-kairos which determines when rhetoric should itself be used, and knowledge of which belongs only to statecraft. Statecraft determines whether rhetoric, force, or no action should be unleashed against a group of people at any given time (3O4d4~e2). By reminding Young Socrates of the possibility of force a possibility external to the tight political culture of rhetorical persuasion - the Stranger sets up the expectation that rhetoric will only sometimes be given the stage. He wrests the kairos from the proud claims of the orators, making it instead the exclusive property of the political art. 135

THE STORY AS A FULCRUM OF THE DIALOGUE

Such an analysis challenges the sophists on two points. If he is to admit the importance of the kairos in an inquiry obsessed with knowledge, the Stranger must upgrade the kairos to match a characteristically strong Platonic sense of what knowledge is. But at the same time, this knowledge cannot be allowed to rhetoric alone. Insofar as rhetoric would claim to be a comprehensive art (e.g. Gorg. 452e), statecraft must unmask its lack of knowledge and itself step in to exercise knowledge of the kairos. In Part m, we shall consider the implications of this political appropriation of the rhetorical kairos, within an art of measurement and within rule of the city.

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Introduction

The fundamental political perspective explored in the Statesman is the authority of political expertise (considered a form of knowledge) in a dynamic temporal context. This theme accounts for its obsessions as well as for its limitations: its treatment of conflict, law, persuasion and possibility are all relative to, and radically shaped by, the fundamental and exclusive commitment to the authority of political expertise. (The construction of the dialogue as a whole reflects its own methodological commitment to the teleological, and so provisional, pursuit of inquiry.) The statesman is a cypher. His only relevant characteristic is the possession of the right sort of knowledge, and no interest is taken in his acquisition of, emotion about, or motivation in utilising this knowledge to rule. Such sustained argument about the nature of the political expert's authority as related to the nature of his knowledge, is unique to the Statesman. That there is such a thing as political expertise (a politike techne) is explored and asserted in other dialogues.1 That knowledge should have political authority - that because philosophical knowledge of the Good is required to order the soul and the city, philosophical knowledge should be ipso facto politically authoritative - is the burden of the Republic. That political knowledge {techne) should be used in forming the laws2 - and that the authority of the laws, its nature and mode of exercise, is therefore the authority which matters - is the burden of the Laws. The 1

2

See O'Brien (1967) 58ff. on the politike techne as a notion infifth-centuryGreece, and Sprague (1976) on the pattern of concern running through the Platonic dialogues with this notion, related also to the notion of a master art in general (e.g. temperance at Chrm. i66e5-i72a9, I74bio-I75a8). L.m 7O9b-d. 137

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Statesman's focus of interest is distinct from those of these other dialogues. Further remarks on the nature of authority, time, and law in the Statesman must await the relevant discussions below. But it is appropriate to offer here a further clarification of the notion of 'possibility' and its relation to the promotion of an ideal in the dialogue. Andre Laks has developed a masterful account of the notion of 'possibility' in the Republic and the Laws.2' He observes that 'possible', in the Republic, does not mean, as for Kant, that 'nothing distinguishes a real object from its possible concept except its actual existence',4 a view on which the Republic's 'possibility' would require its programme being precisely implemented. Rather, a model is available to be actualised 'so far as possible' given the inherent limitations of the material and the circumstances. Laks links this structure to the general structure of what he calls 'Platonic paradeigmatism', by which he means above all the Timaeus' account of the way a copy can be modelled on an original.5 The Laws, on his account, show what it would mean to realise the Republic for a city of humans who, more fully than those described in the Republic, are seen as having to be persuaded by and find pleasure in the dispositions of the laws. Realisation of the original 'possible' model will inevitably, as it were by definition, involve substantial revision of its commitments. In the Statesman, of course, 'paradeigmatism' means something very different: not the model-copy relation of the Timaeus,6 in which a copy will necessarily be an imperfect version of the original, but the sharing of a common structure or element which unites two quite disparate entities. The phrase 'so far as possible' which Laks identifies as the key to possibility in the Republic is, in the Statesman, attached instead to the account of 'imitation' in the story and in the discussion of the second-best constitutions. It is appropriate that discussion of the second-best regimes should employ this 3 6

4

Laks (1990) esp. 213-18. Tim. 29b-c and passim. 138

Ibid. 214.

5

Ibid. 215.

SUBORDINATION OF THE ARTS TO THE MASTERY OF THE KAIROS

notion of possibility since it, like the question of possibility in the Republic and Timaeus, deals with how to reproduce an ideal in inauspicious material conditions. In developing its notion of 'imitation', then, the Statesman deploys the same sense of possibility as that attached to paradeigmatism in the Republic. However, this notion of the possibilities (and their intrinsic limitations) of imitation does not exhaust the Statesman's sense of possibility. The Stranger makes reference also to the possible advent of the ideal, not as modified in application to material conditions, but in unabated theoretical splendour: the statesman possessing genuine expertise. The appearance of such a true statesman with perfect political knowledge would be free from any compromise with the limiting or inhibiting materials of reality. The true statesman does not arise naturally, like a queenbee in a hive (3Oiei); but it is incumbent on actual cities to recognise that he could arise, and to recognise that if he should, he should be granted the unconditional authority due to his knowledge. This recognition does not come in degrees of hope which would shade it into either optimism or pessimism. It creates a dual requirement of cities lacking political expertise. They must, on the one hand, acknowledge the possible perfect existence, or the perfect possibility, of the true statesman, while on the other hand undertaking to imitate the ideal constitution in the Laksian sense of 'so far as possible' which signifies as inevitably imperfect. The significance of these remarks will become clearer once we examine the definition of the statesman's knowledge as knowledge of the kairos, the suitable opportunity for action. Rivalry revisited: subordination of the arts to the mastery of the kairos Part i surveyed the way that the example of weaving, once adopted, facilitated adequate completion of the definition of statecraft. It did so primarily by offering a distinction between forms of expertise which are 'contributory' and those which are 139

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'cooperative' co-workers, the latter being closer kin of statecraft (289c-d). Recall that all these experts were said to be 'rivals' of the statesman, claiming as did the rivals of weaving that their work amounted to the real task of politics and so their own knowledge exhausted statecraft. Further rivals to statecraft were unmasked in the next divisions of these closer and direct rivals, which distinguished seven categories of 'slaves or servants' from the statesman: wage-labourers, merchants, clerks, soothsayers, priests, sophists/politicians, and the closest kin to the statesman of all, the group of judges, generals, and rhetors. We will comment further on the two final steps, in the course of which the sophists/politicians and the magistrates, generals, and rhetors are distinguished from the statesman. But our immediate concern is with the final definition in which statecraft is distinguished from its rivals, and this requires a brief reiteration of the very first two divisions in which the fundamental features of statecraft were set out. The very first division separated the 'theoretical' kinds of knowledge from the 'practical' ones, and located statecraft in the former group (25864-5). At this stage the alternatives are stark. Forms of 'theoretical knowledge', exemplified by arithmetic (258d4-5), 7 produce nothing; forms of 'practical knowledge', exemplified by carpentry (258d8-e2) are bound up with practical actions and complete the bringing of material objects into being. At this stage statecraft, embodied in the person of the 'king', is classed as 'more closely related' (259cio-di) to the theoretical kind of knowledge, a definition which threatens to deprive it of any intrinsic capacity or authority to rule. This deprivation is reinforced by the Stranger's remark that a person possessing it 'whether he happens to be a ruler or a private citizen' will be properly addressed as an 'expert in kingship' (25^3-5). 7

Annas (1995) xiii makes the intriguing suggestion that by relegating arithmetic (she wrongly calls it 'mathematics') to the 'impractical' theoretical arts, 'quietly, the whole basis for the Guardians' long years of abstract studies [in the Republic] has been pulled out'. Despite her overly general interpretation of arithmetic, Annas may be right that this reference highlights a problem with the utility of theoretical knowledge which the Republic did not frontally address. 140

SUBORDINATION OF THE ARTS TO THE MASTERY OF THE KAIROS

The second division, however, divides theoretical knowledge in such a way as to allow statecraft a relation to practical action. One part of theoretical knowledge includes those arts which 'make judgments' (kritikein). The example of this is logistike, the 'art of calculation', which recognises differences among numbers and evaluates them (25965-6), and appears close if not identical to the art of arithmetic which served as an example for theoretical knowledge as a whole. On the other side of the division are the 'directive' (epitaktikon, 26ob3) kinds of knowledge and their knowers, like the master builder. He provides knowledge, not manual labour, but he 'rules over' (archon, 25969) workers and 'assigns' (prostattein, 26oa6) each his work until their task is complete. This second division of statecraft, establishing it as one of the arts which 'rules' and 'directs' other arts, is crucial to the success of its final definition. It indicates that whatever the content of the statesman's knowledge, his mode of exercising it is second-order: he does not produce things by hand himself, but directs others who are producers. His art is indirectly involved in production, though he himself produces nothing. Yet a sceptic might still ask, what kind of knowledge could possibly be relevant to such second-order production? If the statesman doesn't know carpentry, it's difficult to see what kind of orders he could usefully give to carpenters. The problem is reminiscent of that raised in Socrates' examination of Polemarchus in Republic 1 (332d~333d). Polemarchus has claimed, following Simonides, that justice is doing good to friends and harm to enemies. In a quicksilver set of arguments, Socrates gets Polemarchus to agree that, given that other arts are the ones able to do good or harm in specific contexts, justice is at best the art of guarding their goods or tools; justice is useless when it comes to the matter of production or use. 8 In the present case of statecraft, the problem is to define what kind of knowledge the statesman may have 8

Socrates goes on to a further reductio of the Simonides claim, arguing that because he who guards is best at stealing, the just man appears to be a kind of robber (R. 333 e ~334 a )-1 a m grateful to David Sedley for recalling this passage to my attention when commenting on my doctoral dissertation. 141

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that is 'useful' to the other arts in their endeavours of production. These early divisions provide indispensable context for the final successful definition of the statesman. Consider now, moving to the end of the dialogue, the first part 9 of the final definition of statecraft, which describes the grounds on which the judges, generals and rhetors have been subordinated to the statesman: ES:

If then one looks at all the kinds of expert knowledge that have been discussed, it must be observed that none of them has been declared to be statesmanship. For what is really kingship must not itself perform practical tasks (prattein) but control [literally, 'rule over': archein] those with the capacity to perform them, because it knows when it is the right time (egkairias) to begin and set in motion the most important things in cities and when it is the wrong time (akairias); and the others must do what has been prescribed for them. (3O5cio-d4)

The second-order control which statecraft exercises over the other arts has now been given content: it is exercised in virtue of a particular kind of knowledge. That knowledge is knowledge of timing. The master builder of the second division is joined as a master of theoretical praxis by (and indeed subordinated to) the statesman who is a master timer, a master of timing. Statecraft is concerned with 'these very things' (3O4b6) that any given form of expertise, like rhetoric, is concerned with - its subject matter is not esoteric - but it is 'different' (3O4b8) from any other form in that it alone can determine when the other forms of expertise should start working or down tools. The Stranger does not prove that statecraft is useful to each ordinary art considered in itself, but rather establishes - as Socrates and Polemarchus failed to do (perhaps ironically) for justice - that it is useful to the city as a whole. There is, in the city, a time for persuading and a time for using force (3O4d3~ 5), a time for making war and a time for friendly withdrawal 9

Unlike the definitions of angler, sophist (the seventh) and weaver, there is no clearly marked definition of statecraft summarising all the divisions which led to it. Instead, there is this passage, followed closely by an almost epexegetic restatement of the definition in broader terms at 30562-6, to be discussed below (pp. 171-82). 142

SUBORDINATION OF THE ARTS TO THE MASTERY OF THE KAIROS

(3O4e9-n). 10 These questions raise fundamental political choices, which expertise in strategy or speechmaking are no qualification to make. By asking the question of whether rhetoric or war should be deployed, alternatives incapable of consideration within the terms of reference of their practitioners are made apparent. Persuade - or coerce; fight - or negotiate: in each case there is a decision-function which stands outside the mastery of either activity. Debating cannot decide whether it is best to stop debating; fighting cannot decide to stop and give way to dialogue. 11 These decisions are here construed as matters of timing and are considered the peculiar province of the political art. Observe the way that this second-order control of timing is defined. The statesman knows when it is egkairias (with the kairos) and akairias (against the kairos) for each of the arts to undertake important tasks of production in the city. In short, his knowledge consists in knowing what the kairos demands. We met this term earlier in the dialogue and earlier in this book, in the methodological vindication of mean-measurement in contrast to measurement purely in relative or quantitative terms (Part n). The kairos was one of a host of terms enumerated as belonging to the mean, to the measurement of what is appropriate in a given context, which relates specifically to 'coming-into-being' or production (284d6-285a2). Now we find this term, the one most often imbued with temporal 10

The subordination of judging, the last of the three 'precious and kindred' (3036910) rivals to statecraft, does not follow the same pattern as the other two. The judge is made subordinate to the statesman by taking over from him those things established as lawful in relation to contracts (30504-7). He is deprived of the very capacity for initiation (arche); his role is not to initiate but to respond to violations of contracts, which may explain why the statesman is not described as directly controlling the timing of judicial decisions. 1 * The modern reader may object that Nelson Mandela indeed decided both when the ANC should fight and when it should negotiate; one individual can make both judgments and meta-judgments. Plato, however, tends to identify individuals exclusively with the (one) form of expertise which defines their knowledge and social role. This questionable assumption is part of his hostility to democracy, in which various individuals consider themselves capable of all sorts of things - compare the Republic on 'doing one's own' job as justification for a meritocratic caste society. It is however analytically distinct from the interesting argument it is involved in here: that knowing when to exercise a given skill or art is not in principle part of the content of that skill. 143

POLITICS

associations of all the mean-measurement terms listed earlier, made unequivocally central to the definition of the statesman. The example of whether to make war or retreat confirms that the issue at stake is temporal: when should the generals be unleashed to fight, and when should they be reined in? It is knowledge of the kairos which gives content to the statesman's control over the general and other rivals for power and action in the city. The kairos pertains to the productive actions of the other arts, and the statesman does indeed control their production - just as the second division already intimated. Mastery of the kairos relevant to the important matters for the city belongs, according to the Stranger, to the statesman and not {inter alia) to the rhetor. It should be observed that this claim was polemical in a fourth-century Athenian culture in which kairos was a term closely associated with rhetoric. The kairos was an important term in the self-definition of the fifth- and fourth-century sophistic movement, signifying the idea of the right moment for a speech, and the right apportionment of that speech itself.12 Gorgias is said to have been centrally concerned with the idea of the kairos in composing his speeches,13 and though we have little evidence of this in his extant writings, even this fact has been taken to show how well he took its non-prescribable nature to heart. 14 And for Gorgias' students Alcidamas and Isocrates, kairos retains a close connection with the opportunity for a deft oral intervention. 15 Plato himself sometimes uses 'kairos' in ways consonant with this rhetorical concern to match words to occasion; Timaeus, before embarking on his cosmology, and Clinias in the Laws assess the kairos for the suitability of their respective 12 13 14 15

A good survey of kairos in the Sophists as well as Plato is Guillamaud (1988). Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Rhet. 10.3 (DK B13). This interpretation of the paucity of extant comments on the topic is advanced by Classen (1976) 228. On Alcidamas and Isocrates see Vallozza (1985). T. Cole (1991) 173 n . n , suggests further that Isocrates' insistence on fitting style to subject and part to whole may derive from a search for principles of writing which could rival or at least match the oral performer's ability to discern the kairos. 144

SUBORDINATION OF THE ARTS TO THE MASTERY OF THE KAIROS

speeches.16 The ambition of the Statesman in its mobilisation of kairos is bolder. In making the statesman responsible for determining and mandating the kairos of rhetorical performance, the Stranger wrests a plume from the rhetor's cap. He reveals their command of the kairos as strictly limited to the horizon of their own art, and insists on a more encompassing kairos which constrains rhetoric itself from without. If the Statesman thus subordinates rhetoric to political expertise, it also, in adopting the kairos as definitive of such expertise, re-evaluates the relation of knowing and time. Aristotle's definition of the kairos as the good in time captures its Janus-faced character also for the Statesman. The kairos is objective: it is knowledge of the good, which explains its place in the account of teleological measurement according to the mean (Part n). As knowledge of the good, definitive of the political ideal, it expresses a deep commonality with the aspirations expressed in other Platonic dialogues, notably for instance the Republic. But it is also ever-changing, inalienably context-relative and tangled in temporality, and in this respect the use of the kairos in the Statesman is very different from its use in the Republic.11 What originates the degeneration of the ideal city in Republic vin is the philosopher-guardians' misjudgment of the kairos. It is when the philosophers fail to discern the kairos and order sexual consummations against the kairos (para kairon)18 (546d2) that the resulting ill-tempered offspring begin the city's decline into an ordinary aristocracy. The mathematical overtones of this passage clearly allude to the 16

17 18

Tim. 38b3-4; L.m 7O2b7-8. See also Phdr. 228e3-229a2, where the eponymous youth enthuses about the kairos-matching nature of the pastoral setting he has chosen for his walk with Socrates. On this passage and its implications in a dialogue much concerned with rhetoric, see Ferrari (1987) 5-9. A brief but illuminating discussion of the depreciation of time in the Republic contrasted with the Statesman is given by Gunnell (1968) 6 and I59ff. I read this seasonally, pace Adam (1963) vol. 11, 208, who rejects a seasonal interpretation in favour of a reading referring to the wrong couples, too many marriages, etc. For support he refers to Book v 459eff., where the discussion of marriages focuses on their numbers without mention of timing. But this is just to conflate the issue of the number of citizens (Book v) with the issue of how the population can be maintained (by seasonal marriages, Book vni). 145

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Pythagorean 19 conception of the kairos as a number and have been reflected in translations of the passage as having to do with a 'marriage number'. 20 But though the kairos is mathematically expressible, it is important to see that calculation of the kairos is not part of the philosopher-rulers' mathematical studies which are purely theoretical. It belongs rather to the domain of application, applying mathematics to the seasonal demands of determining the right moment for sexual intercourse. And it is this demand for applying knowledge in time which proves the Achilles' heel 21 of the mathematically adept philosopher-rulers. By contrast the knowledge of the temporal kairos is the celebrated defining feature of statecraft in the Statesman, and there is no suggestion of any inherent eventual failure in this crucial aspect of political competence. In defining the authority of political expertise, the Statesman makes its capacity to deal with the demands of time definitive both of the content of the expertise and, by extension, of its second-order authority over productive action. It is this situating of objective knowledge in a framework of temporal flux which explains, in part, why the 'possibility' of realising the ideal rule of such knowledge need not resort to a notion of applying the ideal to recalcitrant material. Knowledge of the kairos subsumes within itself all the odd corners and resistant aspects of temporally changing reality, so that in being realised the ideal need not accommodate itself further to these constraints. We shall have further occasion to comment on the implications of this dynamic context, and content, of political expertise. Rivalry renewed: the challenge and subordination of law

The Statesman treats laws, like names, in a Janus-faced way. On the one hand, the authority of political expertise over law 19 20 21

A r i s t Met. 985b22~986ai. Jowett (1888) is representative. It must be acknowledged that the philosopher-rulers do manage to get it right for a long time before their grasp of the kairos fails them. The Republic's notion of knowledge is more robust than may appear from this brief discussion. Yet it remains true that the fall, when it comes, hinges precisely on the kairos. 146

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is uncompromisingly argued by the Stranger against an initially resistant Young Socrates. On the other hand, once this vindication of statecraft's supreme authority is complete, law is resurrected in two different ways: the true statesman himself is said to rule with laws, and the second-best states cope with their lack of a political expert by sticking unwaveringly to their laws unless and until one should appear. The following discussion considers each of these stages of the Stranger's engagement with law. Through each twist and turn of the argument what is at stake is the question of ultimate political authority: can law be granted authority? On what grounds? What is its authority based on, and how does it compare with the authority of political expertise? Law (in general) and laws (in particular) are the central themes of the eponymous, and enormous, unfinished Platonic dialogue in which the Cretan Clinias, the Spartan Megillus, and an Athenian Stranger discuss, inter alia and from Book IV onward, the best laws which could be given to the newly proposed Cretan colony of Magnesia. Andre Laks, whose ongoing study of the Laws has supplied a subtle and penetrating account of this difficult dialogue, argues that the Laws has a concern with the form of law which is not shared by the Republic or Statesman.22 This is a concern with the law's irreducible reliance on force (prescription with the threat of sanctions) and with reducing this reliance so far as possible by using instead the persuasive capacities of legal 'preludes'. He is right to observe that the Statesman does not explore this question of the combination of, and balance between, force and persuasion in the form of law. 23 However, I shall argue that the Statesman does explore both the sources of law and its applicability in the course of the complex argument about its validity sketched above. 22 23

L a k s (1995) a n d (forthcoming). His phrase is that the Statesman does not concern itself with the 'epitactic' aspects of law, but only with its 'substitutive' role for the c o m m a n d s of the statesman ( L a k s , forthcoming). This formulation is u n h a p p y insofar as the statesman's c o m m a n d s , as argued above, are precisely 'epitactic' and law as substitute would share this quality; but his overall point, stated in the text, is well taken.

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Two conceptions of law: as mortmain24' and as memorandum The Stranger launches his initial attack on law when considering how to divide the 'sophists' who are concerned with the affairs of cities, a various, weak and versatile group (29ib-c), from the statesman whose expertise they lay special claim to rival. He argues that the criteria by which people normally divide constitutions - whether one, few or many rule; the rule of wealth or poverty; rule by force or by consent; and rule with written laws or without them - do not in fact determine their correctness (29id-292a; cf. 293a6-b4). Correctness depends only on the possession of expertise, which is to be expected only among one or a few but not many (292c293a). This point about expertise recalls the opening decision to class the statesman as the possessor of an episteme and so seems bound to attain Young Socrates' consent. On the basis of the boy's concurring, the Stranger launches into a long account of what such expert rulers may do - execute, exile, colonise - while stating that other constitutions imitate these actions for better or worse. (We shall return to the issue of imitation.) Now, however, Young Socrates does express unease: 25 'The rest of it, Stranger, seems to have been said in due measure (metrios); but that ideal rule may exist even without laws was a statement harder for a hearer to accept' (29366-7). His objection launches the Stranger on an argument for the irrelevance of laws 26 to the definition of ideal statecraft. 24

25

26

The appeal is to the figurative sense of control from the grave, used in legal contexts to refer to the individual testator's power to bind in perpetuity. The OED comments: 'The figurative use is often based on the notion that the 'dead hand' means the posthumous control exercised by the testator over the uses to which the property is to be applied.' I am extending the figurative sense to apply to the collective decisions and dispensations of the past embodied in laws and customs. The Stranger glosses the boy's discomfort as 'squeamishness' (duskheraineis, 294a2); the word will be significant in the discussion of pp. 161-3 below. I choose this phrase advisedly in light of the arguments to come. Note that Young Socrates may have exaggerated the threat: the Stranger had argued that laws were no criteria for correct rule, the boy objects to his advocating rule 'without laws'. 148

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The Stranger's response begins with a significant admission: 'Now in a certain sense it is clear that the art of the legislator belongs to that of the king; but the best thing is not that the laws should prevail, but rather the kingly man who possesses wisdom' (294a6-8). 27 Lawmaking will indeed comprise part of statecraft in the final scenario, as noted above. But the present bone of contention is who should wield the supreme authority, and on this point the Stranger is adamant: not the laws, but the possessor of knowledge. It is worth asking why the rivalry between law and knowledge for authority should be here pressed so hard. A comparison with the Republic may help to underscore the remarkable pressure being put on this point. The maxim that political authority should be based on knowledge is held by the Republic as well as by the Statesman. And both dialogues ultimately describe their philosophical rulers as ruling with the aid of laws: in the Republic, the fundamental provisions about women, children, and marriage are enshrined in laws (R. 423d8-e2 with 42561-4), even though details are left out or left alone. Yet this role of law appears in the Republic to be perfectly acceptable and unproblematic. No discussion ensues about the relation between rule by knowledge and rule by law, much less an assertion of a fundamental contrast between them. Why then is so much attention paid to the insistence that law be subordinated to political expertise in the Statesman! The Stranger's immediate explanation of his last quoted remark will also provide our answer. It is worth quoting at length: law could never accurately embrace what is best and most just for all at the same time, and so prescribe what is best; for the dissimilarities (anomoiotetes) between human beings and their actions, and the fact that practically nothing in human affairs ever remains stable, prevent any kind of expertise whatsoever from making any simple decision in any sphere that covers all cases and will last for all time. (294aio-b6)

27

Phronesis: but the implication is that this is the same political expertise which has been being defined throughout the dialogue. See Introduction above, n.12. 149

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Conceptual similarities, we have seen in Part I, can be handled, revised and organised by the interplay of division and example. Here, the emphasis is on temporally bound dissimilarities28 in human actions, which cannot be handled by any decision made for 'all cases' and 'all time'. It is these dissimilarities in actions over time - dissimilarities which the kairos claims to discern correctly - which resist comprehensive and unchanging dispensations. And I suggest that it is the positing of a dynamic temporal framework in the Statesman, described in the above passage and captured in the notion of the kairos, which exacerbates anxiety about law in the Statesman so much beyond anything shown in the Republic. In the Republic, the fixed hierarchy in psyche and city made the changes in political knowledge engendered by time relatively minor. Should the hierarchy collapse, the possibility of genuinely authoritative political action would anyway be vitiated (as in Books vm and ix). But in the dynamic world of the Statesman, fixed laws pose a mortal threat to appropriate action responsive to a constantly changing kairos. It is the shift to a temporal and dynamic context which makes law suddenly stand out as a dangerous rival to political expertise, a rival to be unmasked and firmly subordinated. It is true that the Stranger has said that any form of expertise seeking to make a comprehensive and eternal decision about dissimilar actions will fail. But he goes on to describe law as characteristically insisting on the unalterability of its prescriptions, even in the face of superior knowledge: But we see law bending itself more or less towards this very thing, like some harsh 29 and ignorant person, who allows no one to do anything contrary to what he orders, nor to ask any questions, not even if after all something new turns out for someone which is better, contrary to the prescription which he himself has laid down. (294b8-c4)

The diagnosis of what is wrong with law pinpoints its general feature of not allowing the laws to change even on the basis of better knowledge. The Stranger is arguing against a styl28

29

Cf. the 'boundless sea of unlikeness' (TOV TTIS avonoio-rriTos dirapov OVTOC TTOVTOV) threatened by the cosmos' degeneration in the story (273d6). I translate authade to bring out the similarity with Gorgias, discussed below. 150

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ised version of law as entirely static. Is he arguing, implicitly, against Athens? If Young Socrates is speaking for popular Athenian opinion in defending law, as has been claimed, it must be said that the charge that laws are unalterable is a peculiar one to make in the classical Athenian context. Christopher Gill interprets Young Socrates' discomfort as speaking for a deep Athenian commitment to constitutionalism: a restraining framework for politics which offers designated procedures prior to change of laws. 30 This is problematic as a diagnosis of how the Athenians understood the role of law; 31 moreover, it involves no claim that the laws must remain unalterable for all time. The commitment to the 'ancestral constitution', the distinction between the unwritten customs or (after 402) the redacted laws and the Assembly decrees, never amounted to a commitment that the laws never be changed. 32 Indeed, a contrast very like the Stranger's, drawn by Gorgias, implicitly acknowledges the possibility of improving on the laws in practice while presumably staying short of acting directly against them. Nicole Loraux translates Gorgias' Funeral Oration: 'praising the dead for the many instances in which they preferred correct thought and speech {akribeias logon orthoteta) to detailed points of law ... by . . . observance of the kairos\33 The preceding lines of Gorgias' oration contrast the 'gentleness of equity' 34 with the 'harshness' 30 31

32

33

34

Gill (1995) 2 9 2 - 3 0 5 , a clear and valuable article. Gill's idea (shared by Campbell (1986)) that the Athenians conceived their constitution as a restraining framework has been challenged by studies emphasising the negotiated a n d contested invocation of Athenian laws and the absence of any binding precedent or case law. See Ober (1989) 301, Cohen (1991) and (1995), and Allen (1996), the last of w h o m argues that the Athenians used law only 'to help themselves j u d g e ' a n d treated judgment, not law, as the supreme authority. Jones (1978) 52 stresses that '[a]t n o time was it legal to alter the law by a simple decree of the assembly', b u t he observes also that n o age was without some legal way to alter the law. T h e fifth-century practice of using special legislative commissions was supplanted after 403 by a n elaborate process involving assembly and a specially empanelled court. Loraux (1986) 185 as translated by A l a n Sheridan from her French rendering of D K B6 in L o r a u x (1981). N u s s b a u m (1993) 92 a n d n.16 treats Gorgias' definition of equity here as developing an ideal opposed to strict retributive justice (dike) which would culminate in Aristotle (e.g. Pol. I 2 6 9 a 9 - i 4 ) . She fits St. 294a-295a, on the trainer, into this

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{authadous) of the law; the Stranger uses another form of the same word when he indicts the law as 'harsh and ignorant' (authade kai amathe) in contrast to the kairos (294C1). Gorgias' lines show that the Stranger's stylised interpretation of law was shared by others in Athens, but also that Athens does not fit the Stranger's depiction of a society unalterably and comprehensively bound by its laws in every particular action. Gorgias' emphasis on the kairos as a principle for oral interventions, cited above, may suggest that his Funeral Oration and the Statesman too are essentially celebrating an oral principle over the written laws, in a way continuous perhaps with some of the Phaedrus worries about writing. Though this may be true of Gorgias, 35 the seeming parallel in the Statesman - kairos is to law as oral is to written - is only superficial. The heart of the Stranger's argument is the contrast between changing and unchanging prescription, a contrast which does not map onto the distinction between oral and written (the unchanging prescriptions, like actual Athenian nomoi, could be either oral or written). The Stranger's stylisation of nomos is matched by a stylisation of knowledge which pits one view of law against another: law as the rigid and static dead hand of the past, versus law as the memorandum of the one who knows. This latter, and acceptable, source of law is developed by comparison to the 'instructions' (epitaxeis, 294d8) which sports trainers give to benefit the majority of people, when they are unable to prescribe what is appropriate to each individual (294d-e). The legislator, too, will never be capable of doing what his expert knowledge would in principle allow him to do - 'sitting beside each individual perpetually throughout his life and accurately prescribing what is appropriate to him' (295a9-b2) and so will resort to written and unwritten laws

35

story along with passages in the Laws. Nussbaum's teleological account of the development of equity omits the crucial focus on temporality in the Statesman, and assimilates the Stranger's insistence that discretion is part of knowledge to the Aristotelian view that discretion must be allowed to supplement law. See Ostwald (1969) 51.

152

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and customs designed to hold for the majority and for the most part. Observe that this rehabilitates law as part, when correctly conceived, of the ideal practice of statecraft: that exigencies and numbers force even the legislator with expert knowledge to resort to laws. The next three steps in the argument, however, sharply limit the validity of such memoranda-laws and reinforce the authority of the expert over them. First, the Stranger posits that the trainer, or now also a doctor, might sometimes need to travel away from his charges for a long time. He would want to write down his laws as memoranda ('reminders')36 for them. Next, he suggests that if such a doctor or trainer should return and find circumstances had changed, he would and should not hesitate to alter those prescriptions, nor should his patients hesitate to drop them, on the grounds that they were ancient laws requiring obedience (295c-d). Finally, he argues that even if such a doctor or lawgiver should use force in coercing people to follow his prescriptions, the actions required of the patients are not to be called 'shameful, unjust and bad' since they result from expert knowledge (296b-d). He concludes with a bravura comparison of these cases to the steersman who 'preserves his fellow sailors not by putting things down in writing, but by offering his expertise (technes) as law (nomorif (2g6Q4-2gjai): here the techne of the navigator wholly usurps the role and even the name of the law. This extended argument offers two different reasons that an expert might use written instructions or laws: in order to deal with numerous cases, and in order to provide prescriptions during his own absence. The first justifies law as a shorthand, the second as a reminder: together they constitute a view of laws as 'memoranda'. Such laws, summary and temporary, are sharply contrasted with the static and rigid law laid down by the 'harsh and ignorant person' (294ci), or the potential

hupomnemata (29504).

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misconception of memoranda themselves as so static and rigid by the returned doctor and his patient (295d). The Stranger will shortly offer an extended and graphic thought-experiment in which the view of the laws as static and rigid is even more fully expressed. He does so having begun to turn his attention to the question of the second-best regimes which imitate the true statesman, but in undertaking to explain this idea of imitation to Young Socrates, he reverts once more and most venomously to the havoc which rigid laws would wreak. The Stranger asks Young Socrates to imagine that 'we' all believed ourselves abused by pilots and doctors, subject to their arbitrary wielding of power, harmful treatments, and corruption. With such motivating beliefs, we might decide no longer to allow these experts to rule us unfettered (archein autokratori, 298ci), but instead to let an assembly of the demos make laws to govern them. This assembly would take advice from lay people and experts in other fields, but would then establish the majority decision as 'written rules' and some other 'ancestral customs' to govern all sailing and caring for patients 'for all future time' (298c-e). Moreover, the demos would ban all investigation into the subjects of the law-governed technai: all investigators without exception would be called 'star-gazer' or 'sophist' 37 and denied the title of expert (299b). Again, it must be stressed that the Athenian demos never regarded its laws in a way remotely like this: its collective political agency meant that laws and decisions were frequently overturned and there was no law specifically against investigation. The crux of the fantasy (or horror story) is that the possibility of innovation for the better is rejected a priori: the laws are fixed 'for all future time' and so it is by definition impossible that any man should gain the title of expert 37

Miller (1980) 98 notes that these appellations and other details recall the treatment of Socrates in the Apology: a trial which, of course, in the dramatic siting of the Statesman has yet to take place. The reference is substantively flawed, for Athens had no such laws against investigation, nor was Socrates charged with breaking such a law; one implication might be that the city's law against inventing new gods amounted to such a ban. 154

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however knowledgeable he should become, if his knowledge would contravene the law. This is a conception of legal authority as rooted immobile in a fixed past. Whatever the original value of the laws (persuasion, consensus, experience, tradition; these will be discussed shortly), they are granted an absolute authority disproportionate to any individual merit they may have: the authority of a static pronouncement setting its face against the very possibility of innovation, against the unknown offerings of the future. It is such rejection of the possibility that some future change, brought by knowledge, could be better, which the Stranger's arguments are designed to highlight as incompatible with the presumption of political expertise. And this is why the expert can indeed, on the other hand, be a lawgiver. So long as laws are conceived as memoranda rather than as rigid, they serve the useful function of aggregation and approximation while at the same time protecting the possibility of correction by expertise when needed. Laws have a place within the ideal so long as they are properly understood. 38 If names must be understood as tools rather than as evidence, laws too must be understood as tools rather than as the dead and inalterable hand - the mortmain - of the past. A third view: law as makeshift in the second-best regimes The thought-experiment confirms Young Socrates' view of the importance of expertise and its implications, which he had already claimed to accept with the invocation of the navigator making his expertise his law. But the Stranger had introduced it, not as part of the original attack on law, but in the context of discussion of the 'second-best' (29763, e4) constitutions that no one in the city should ever do anything contrary to the 38

This vindication of law within the ideal regime is not at all the 'realistic' compromise which Annas finds Plato making: ' . . . Plato displays a new interest in the kind of compromise that the rule of the ideal expert must make, in the real world, with laws and institutions' (1995). This confounds the role of law for the expert with the very different role of law for the 'second-best' regimes discussed in the next section. 155

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laws on pain of death (297dio-e5). After Young Socrates has registered his horror at the thought-experiment's ban on expertise, the Stranger immediately and in pursuit of the secondbest draws a different moral. He says that bad as laws ruling the arts would be, 'an evil still greater' would transpire if written laws were flouted by a non-expert for the sake of profit or favour (3Ooa3-9). This is a crucial turning point in bringing the argument on to a new role for law: not this time as the memorandum of the ideal expert, but as the second-best course of the second-best regimes in the absence of such an expert. Slavish obedience to written rules is worse (he had argued) than submission to expertise; now (in the passage just paraphrased) he argues that slavish obedience to written rules is better than their being changed on a basis of venal ignorance lacking in expertise. How can obedience to written rules have any value if they do not amount only to the memoranda of the statesman? Two views of the Stranger's claim have been advanced. The orthodox view is that the Stranger now distinguishes new sources of law, of limited but partial value, which had been left unevaluated in the thought-experiment.39 In Rowe's translation, which he takes to support his new heterodoxy, these sources can still be discerned: these laws 'have been established on the basis of much experiment (peira), with some advisers or other having given advice on each subject in an attractive way, and having persuaded the majority to pass them' (300b 1-6).40 The orthodox view is that, though experiment, persuasion, and majority consensus are seriously defective sources of legal value, they do somehow succeed in 39

40

The orthodox view is a good gloss on Demosthenes' contrast between oligarchical government under which 'everybody is entitled to undo the past, and to prescribe future transactions according to his own pleasure', with 'free' (i.e. democratic) laws which 'prescribe what shall be done in the future, such laws having been enacted by convincing people that they will be beneficial to those who live under them' ('Against Timarchus,' xxiv.76, Loeb tr.). Note the emphasis on the laws being the result of persuasion and controlling the future. Ostwald/Skemp (1992) translate in line with their orthodox view: 'The laws which have been laid down represent the fruit of long experience - one must admit that. Each of them incorporates the clever advice of some counselor who has persuaded the public assembly to enact it.' 156

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establishing laws which are valuable enough to be worth preserving from all change. In particular, some of the laws thus established have allowed their cities to endure despite the fact that written laws would destroy any other form of expertise (3O2a2-b2). For some reason, written laws are not as toxic to the polis as they were imagined in the thought-experiment to be to the technai, and they even have a limited value of their own. The heterodox view defended by Rowe is that these features are 'in the light of the whole of the preceding context - absolutely no recommendation of [these laws] at all'. 41 The value of the written laws is not to be ascribed to any value which they may have in themselves, but only to something like the value of stability.42 This view derives support from the fact that changes to the laws other than those of the ideal statesman are ascribed to corrupt personal motives (3ooa5~6). It takes no strong belief in the value of laws to defend them against corrupt tinkerers. And this view also fits well with the formal emphasis in the account of imitation which the Stranger is about to offer, to account for the way that the second-best regimes should relate to the ideal. The 'second-best' constitutions are described as 'imitating' the true constitution 'so far as possible' (eis dunamin)*3 - by never doing anything contrary to their laws and customs (3Ooen-3Oia3). The notion of possibility here rejoins one common to the Republic and the Timaeus, as analysed by Laks and cited above (pp. 138-9): in a context of applying the ideal to a limited and faulty material and human world, the 'possibility' of realising the ideal will inevitably involve substantial alterations in it. The context at this point in the Statesman is precisely a context of application, in which the 41 42

43

Rowe (1995) note ad be. Compare KRS 457 (= D K 58D3), in which Iamblichus describes the Pythagoreans as approving 'of a city's remaining in its ancestral customs and laws, even if they were a little worse than those of other cities; for to skip easily out of the existing laws and to be at home with innovation is not at all advantageous or salutary.' But the Pythagoreans seem to reject all innovation whereas the Stranger, I shall argue, wishes to reserve the possibility of innovation by the ideal statesman. Cf. kata dunamin (3ood6), eis dunamin (3Oia2); compare Rep. 473bi, b9. 157

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limitation of the material human world is the apparent, but not necessarily eternal, absence of true political expertise. Despite its common cause here with the sense of the possibilities of application in the Republic and the Timaeus, the Statesman has no truck with their model-copy view of imitation. A model-copy view of imitation expects the superficial appearance of the copies to be quite similar to that of the model, even if they diverge in other ways (a classic example is a copy of a coin which is inferior in metal and shape to the original model, but bears the same picture). The Statesman's account of imitation in the story, however, focused on the way that the humans must imitate the cosmos by being, as it is, autonomous and responsible themselves (Part n). This account of imitation focuses on a structural feature which model and copy will instantiate in common even though the resulting appearance of each may be quite diverse. Now, in the discussion of the second-best regimes, we find that they are to imitate the ideal in just such formal and second-order terms. The ideal was that the political expert be able to change his laws and prescriptions whenever necessary, either to correct individual cases or to update his prescriptions after an absence. The 'second-best' is that regimes lacking an expert stick to their laws without any exception. How can these two paths be even plausibly related? The best answer is that the second-best cities, like the best city, will not change their laws when the expertise required for doing so is not present. 44 The statesman having not appeared in the second-best cities is comparable to the statesman who goes away and leaves written instructions behind (3ooc-d) for the best city. In neither case will the laws be changed until the expert (re-)appears. This links the second-best constitutions to 44

I owe the clarity of this insight to Rowe (forthcoming), though I disagree with him that the second-best city is incapable of recognising that it lacks the necessary expertise: see below. Rowe (1995) ad be. successfully defends the concomitant translation of 299C4-6 as referring to the ideal ruler's laws, which 'imitate' his truth, not to the laws of the second-best regimes which have no access to, and so share no content with, the ideal ruler's laws. Students of the Statesman are in his debt. 158

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the ideal solely in relation to the second-order feature of not changing laws without expert advice. Superficially they will be quite different. Each will have its own laws derived, in the case of the ideal, from memoranda, and in the case of the secondbest, from experience and persuasion. There is no reason to expect the content of these laws to be similar at all. Imitation of the ideal constitution 'as far as possible' yields not a plausible resemblance on the surface, but instead - given the radically different material shaped by presence or absence of knowledge - a structural commonality under the skin. The crucial point for the second-best constitutions is to establish absolute stability and stasis of their laws, not because their laws are in themselves especially valuable but because such rigid stasis is superior to the devices of the ignorant. Does this mean that the second-best regimes are simply to adopt the 'mortmain' view of law as the unchallengeable and unchanging decision of the past, which was criticised in the thought-experiment? To answer this question we must consider the six-part classification of regimes - three counting as 'second-best' in the broad sense, but now ranked among themselves; three rejecting the 'second-best' supreme authority of law. The seventh is the true constitution which consists of the authoritative rule of the political expert. The distinction between rule by one, by few, and by many, earlier rejected as irrelevant to the correctness of a constitution (to which only the presence of expertise is relevant), is now resurrected and used as the basis for the six-part scheme of 'necessary' (anagkaias, 3O2e6) constitutions. (These distinctions constitute a species of division and pay the kind of double-edged attention to names which we have seen characteristic of division in Part i.) One person who rules according to laws is called king (as is the true statesman: the same name applies to two different men); one person who rules neither according to laws nor to customs, but 'pretendpng] to act like the person with expert knowledge' (301C1) in claiming it is best to act against the laws, is called a tyrant. The 'rich' 45 who 45

Here substituted silently for the 'few'. 159

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imitate the true constitution are aristocrats; those who 'pay no mind to the laws' 46 (ton nomon me phrontizosin, 3Oia7) are oligarchs. Finally, the name democracy is divided in two, those who rule 'according to law' (kata nomous) and those who rule 'against law' (paranomos) (3O2C7~d9). Of the law-obedient constitutions, the easiest to live under is monarchy, then aristocracy, then democracy; of the lawflouters, democracy, then oligarchy, then tyranny. In both cases the ordering hinges on the power of the regime to do good or evil, and in both cases democracy, which distributes offices 'in small portions among many people', is the weakest (3O3a-b). This assessment of democracy as the least bad of the worst evils has won critical approbation for Plato as newly tolerant toward democracy. 47 But once again it is crucial to see that the law-obedient democracy Plato here finds tolerably bad is not even remotely close to the Athenian attitude towards law. The recommendation of a rigid adherence to law dethrones the ongoing practice of collective deliberation and judgment, in the process of punishment as much as in the Assembly, which characterised Athens. 48 Obedience to law is meant to exclude precisely the reliance on their own judgment which ordinary non-expert (in Platonic terms) Athenians indulged in every day. More generally, as the Stranger says, it excludes the 'participants in all these constitutions' as not statesmen but 'experts in faction', 'sophists' presiding over great images (3O3b9~c5).49 The democracy here recommended as the worst of the lawful regimes is not 46 47

48 49

My translation, to capture the pun. E.g. Annas (1995) xviii-xix, who finds that it recognises the 'advantages of democracy from the viewpoint of a realistic assessment of how political institutions actually function'. She adverts especially to the fact that the parcelling out of rule makes it more difficult for either virtuous or vicious to control the system to their own ends, and this is true, but it is not a 'realistic' assessment of Athenian democracy for reasons given in the text. I am glad to acknowledge my debt here to the excellent and provocative work of Allen (1996). This reference neatly achieves two things. It completes the separation of these sophists (in fact, all existing politicians) as unsuccessful rivals to the true statesman, which was the context for the whole discussion of law (p. 148 above). It also evokes the Sophist's final definition of sophists as traffickers in images (So. 266aff.). 160

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the Athenian democracy of Plato's own time, but rather one bound by a strict adherence to law which was unknown to a society in which the laws and judgments were in the hands of the people and available for constant renegotiation. This returns us, finally, to the question of whether the attitude to the laws of the three collectively second-best (though serially ranked) regimes is identical to the mortmain attitude of the thought-experiment. There is a difference, and it is significant. The imaginary assembly in the thought-experiment had rejected investigation into the subjects of the technai, and that rejection foreclosed any possibility that innovation might ever attain authority over the dispensations of the past. (The ban on investigation was also the point at which the Stranger's language most closely approached the trial of Socrates.) None of the three law-obedient constitutions (nor even the three law-changing ones) are said to ban investigation. And this means that they could still, in principle, welcome a true political expert should one arrive. The Stranger, indeed, says confidently that they would do so: 'if there were to come to be someone of the kind we are describing, he would be prized and would govern a constitution that alone would be correct in the strict sense' (3Oid4-6). They would welcome him even though their imperfect regimes are based in part on their being 'squeamish' 50 (duskherananton) about the possibility of such a monarch who would rule justly rather than cruelly and exploitatively (3Oic6-d4). [DJuskherananton is a form of the word used earlier by the Stranger (duskhereias, 286b7) to project Young Socrates' reaction to the long talk about weaving and the story, a squeamishness which prompted the discussion of measurement (see above, p. 75); another form of it is used when Young Socrates first expresses discomfort with the rejection of law (duskheraineis, 294a!); and it is used in the final pages of the dialogue to describe the avoidance of marriages between those of opposite temperaments (duskhereia, 310C7; see below, pp. 180-82). In a discussion of the Philebus, Malcolm Scho50

My translation; the justification is given in the text. 161

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field has analysed the root notion of the term as finding something hard to stomach, 51 and this is the key to unlocking the meaning of this confusing passage. The passage suggests, on the one hand, that just this squeamishness with the notion that any contender might be a true statesman who would act justly and not harm has brought about the six imperfect regimes. (The compressed reference (houto, 301C6) may imply that if the imperfect regimes could overcome their squeamishness they might not have to suffer their flawed constitutions any longer.) On the other hand, the passage goes on to say that 'if there were to come to be' a true statesman, 'he would be prized/welcomed (agapasthai) and would govern a constitution that would alone be correct in the strict sense, steering it through in happiness' (3Oid4-6). How can the Stranger assert that the imperfect regimes would welcome the true statesman, the idea of whom they can't even stomach? The juxtaposition of these ideas is difficult to unravel. One way to understand the flow of the passage is to see it as demonstrating the confusion in the citizens' fears about the true statesman, the very confusion which, if it were sorted out, would indeed allow them to 'welcome' him. Two fears are run together in the squeamishness of those who have generated and live under imperfect constitutions. On the one hand, they are afraid that the true statesman might hurt them by the harshness of his prescriptions; and the dialogue admits, indeed insists, that this may be so. 52 On the other hand, they are afraid of corruption: that the person changing the laws will not act on the basis of knowledge, but on the basis of favours, self-interest or caprice. 53 The result of confounding these two fears is that the people fear being hurt - mutilated, killed, 51 52

53

Schofield (1971). Cf. 293a9-c3; compare the Gorgias (52ie6~522a4), where children fear the doctor will cut and burn and starve and choke them: the point is not that this won't be done to them, but that it m a y be done under the description not of evil acts but of prescriptions based on the doctor's knowledge of medicine; and again the Statesman's insistence that the expert using force should not be said to have done evil things (296c-d). 3Oid3; cf. the doctors taking bribes at 298b2. 162

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maltreated - and do not recognise that those same acts might fall under the description of appropriate in light of knowledge of the kairos. The best interpretation, I submit, of this admittedly difficult passage is that these imperfect regimes need to overcome their squeamishness so that they would be sure to give the true statesman the welcome he deserves. Though suppressing the demands of the changing temporal context in their adherence to law, they must acknowledge 54 the possibility that one such change would transform their relation to legal authority: that change would be the appearance of the true statesman. Unlike the thought-experiment assembly, they should not use their rigid legal stasis to preclude the possibility55 of a genuine statesman; and to acknowledge this possibility is precisely, and only, to be willing to recognise his advent should it occur. Political knowledge as weaving The characterisation of the statesman's knowledge as commanding the other forms of expertise to start and stop, in accordance with the kairos, is correct but incomplete. This defines the statesman's knowledge as knowledge of timing, and also defines his mode of rule over the other arts which had rivalled his authority. But there is more to the city than the arts and their practitioners. There are the citizens in general, and in its relation to them political knowledge is revealed in full kinship to the example of weaving. Once seemingly only a methodological example, weaving now reveals itself as the structure of the statesman's activity in relation to the citizens. The lawgiver and commanding expert is also a political weaver. 54

55

R o w e (forthcoming) seems to claim that n o actual city could acknowledge such a thing, but also that such acknowledgement is presumably the first lesson of the dialogue. 'Possibility' here is, of course, not the Republic I Timaeus notion of application and so derogation from the real which was used in the discussion of the constitution of the second-best regimes, but the notion of the advent of the ideal (if schematically and bloodlessly defined) statesman himself.

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This is the burden of the second part of the definition of statecraft mentioned above, complementing the first part to do with knowledge of the kairos which has just been analysed. It runs as follows: the [form of expertise] that controls {archousan) all of these [other forms of expertise], and the laws, and cares for (epimeloumenen) every aspect of things in the city, and weaves (sunuphainousari) everything together in the most correct way - this . . . we would, it seems, most appropriately call statesmanship. (30562-6)

Note the complementarity of'rule', 'care for' (rehabilitated by the story's criticism of the shepherd-divisions), and 'weave'; suitably reconstructed, all these ideas have a place in the conception of the statesman. Nonetheless only the paradeigma of weaving is used to guide the further and final discussion of statecraft (30568-10). Weaving as political example: gender and simple unity in the Lysistrata Weaving was in Greek a pervasive metaphor for language {Iliad 3.212, 7.324) as well as for political activity; more than a metaphor, practices of weaving and bearing woven fabrics were central to a variety of rituals including marriage ceremonies, religious festivals, and commemorations of the achievement of peace. 56 Its use in these contexts of civic and domestic unity, both in word and in deed, provides the social and symbolic backdrop 57 for textual appeals to weaving as a metaphor for politics. It has long been noticed 58 that the Statesman's extended analysis of political weaving was preceded by some forty-odd years by an extended analysis of political weaving in Aristophanes' Lysistrata, a play which Plato can reasonably be expected to have known. 56

57

58

Scheid and Svenbro (1996) offer elegant explorations of these areas, if sometimes excessively reliant o n verbal connections. They open with an interesting contrast between the ship of state as an 'external' model for political and social cohesion and weaving as an 'internal' model (5-6). Pace Scheid and Svenbro (1996) 32, w h o conclude that with this background in m i n d the 'philosophical bent of the m e t a p h o r in Plato' proves 'rather limited'. E.g. by Louis (1945) 164; cited in Henderson (1987) note to 567-86.

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Both texts are concerned with the notion of weaving as the product of human craft, producing a woven fabric, which implies a central role for the techne of the weaver. And both manifest a clever extended interpenetration of technical terms for weaving 59 with pointed political language, virtuosic to an extent which sets them apart from briefer and more offhand references to weaving in other political literature. Nevertheless, a closer examination of the way that the example of weaving is developed in each text - examining in particular the themes of gender and unity - will show that in each case the example is developed so to yield very different political implications. In Aristophanes' play, written during and addressing a crisis for Athens in the Peloponnesian War, the heroine Lysistrata instructs a woeful male envoy to her triumphant female regime that men should conduct affairs of state and establish civic and pan-Hellenic unity on the model of women managing their weaving. Lysistrata appeals to weaving in order to explain to an incredulous magistrate just how to govern a peaceful and unified city - as distinct from the divided, warring city which actually watched the play first performed in 411 BC. Under Lysistrata's leadership, the older women of Athens have seized the Acropolis and impounded public funds in the treasury from being released to support the bruising and perilous war against Sparta. The elderly male envoy, one of ten magistrates actually appointed in 411 with extraordinary powers to salvage something from the disastrous defeat of Athens' expedition against Sicily, has huffed and puffed onto the scene to confront Lysistrata and her followers. When he mocks the claims of veiled women to conduct public affairs, they dress him up in a veil, and hand him a basket (535), telling him to stand by and card some wool while the women manage the war (538). When Lysistrata starts describing her plans, the magistrate - haughty despite his costume - asks just how the women propose to sort out the 'many tangled affairs' {tetaragmena pragmata polla, 59

On which see Bliimner (1969) 120-57. 165

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565) which the war has produced. Lysistrata seizes on his image of tangles to develop weaving as the cure: LYSISTRATA:

First of all, just like washing out a raw fleece, you should wash the sheep-dung out of the body politic in a bath, then put it on a bed, beat out the villains with a stick and pick off the burrs; and as for those people who combine and mat themselves together to gain office, you should card them out and pluck [cut] off the heads. Then card in the wool into the work-basket of union and concord, mixing in everyone; and [including] the immigrants, and any foreigner who's friendly to you, and anyone who's in debt to the treasury, they should be mixed in as well. And yes, there are also all the states which are colonies of this land: you should recognise how you now have them lying around like little flocks of wool, each one by itself; so then you should take the human flock from all of them, bring them together here and join them into one, and then make a great ball of wool, and from that weave a warm cloak for the people to wear. 60 (574-87)

Throughout the passage and the play, the domestic agility of women is celebrated and mockingly compared with the public incompetence of men. 61 Weaving is clearly and ideologically associated with women, contrasted in the minds of both the men and the women with the male art of waging war. The humour of the passage as well as its polemical point depends heavily on this clear gender identification of weaving with women - precisely because Lysistrata is in fact proposing this model of civic weaving as an appropriate model for the men 62 ('if you had any sense, you would handle all your affairs in the way we handle wool' (571-3, emphasis Sommerstein's)). Despite the brave words of 538 claiming war to be women's business, Lysistrata invokes the traditional ideological assignment of weaving to women in order to give the men - however taunted - an example of how to conduct their affairs better. The play as a whole, as has been observed,63 is balanced 60 61

62 63

Translation here and below from Sommerstein (1990). I owe this helpful formulation to a private communication from Roger Brock; cf. M o u l t o n (1981) 58 on 'the symmetry of the political and domestic fields' as the mainspring of the play. Cf. Rogers (1911) ad be. Foley (1982) 7.

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between the women's self-assertion and the ultimate restoration, with the women's connivance, of male authority. The weaving passage, while elaborating and celebrating women's characteristic know-how, foreshadows this male reinstatement by linking the value of male authority to their adoption of this female paradigm. Still, it is weaving's gendered associations stretching back to Penelope and Clytemnestra - on which the force and wit of the passage depend. Consider now the question of the gender of the weaver in the Statesman. No reference is made to the weaver in the example being feminine, and the political statesman-weaver is always referred to as masculine. Though key to the comic success of weaving in the Lysistrata, the strong femininity of weaving, emphasised in structuralist studies, 64 seems to cast no shadow in the Statesman. How can this be explained? There are at least three possible explanations. First is the possibility that despite heavy ideological associations of weaving with women and domestic work, there were indeed male weavers, probably producing for the retail market. In this case a male weaver in the Statesman would pose no real difficulty for the dialogue's readers. There is some evidence for this proposal, although surprisingly scant, and the most categorical claim for the existence of male weavers in Athens rests heavily on the 'testimony' of the Statesman itself.65 The second explanation would be that the association of weaving as female is indeed welcome in the dialogue, though never explicitly mentioned or drawn out. 66 The thought 64 65

66

See Jenkins (1985) among others. Scheid and Svenbro (1996) 23, n.75 state that '[t]he existence of male Greek weavers seems to be attested by Plato', citing H.Mi. 368C4, Phd. 87b, Rep. (huphantes), and by Arist. Pol. I 2 9 i a i 3 , Aeschines 1.97: poikiltes aner, 'weaver of designs' and Hdt. 2.35 on Egypt. None of these references is conclusive: contrast Ion 540c. Thompson (1982) also rests a claim for male weavers almost exclusively on these and other Platonic references, writing ingenuously of 'Plato's valuable testimony' that the statesman gave the weaver orders (p. 220). Nevertheless, there is no good reason to believe that there were not male Athenian weavers; I am grateful for a private communication from Lin Foxhall to the same effect. This thought was suggested to me independently by Dominic Scott and Verity Harte. 167

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would run that much of the dialogue seems to revel in refuting conventional expectations of statecraft as grand and alien (see p. 65, p. 114 above on estrangement in division and in the story). The poker-faced use of a classically feminine art for statecraft might be just another way of distancing and challenging conventional political attitudes. And looking further in Plato, one could argue that modelling statecraft on a feminine expertise was also in keeping with the Republic's line that there can be philosopher-queens as well as -kings. On this view, choosing such a model for statecraft is a subtle way of maintaining the revisionist view of women propounded in the Republic as well as the revisionist approaches to method and politics propounded generally in the Statesman itself. This view certainly has something to recommend it; certainly the early parts of the Statesman overturn conventional pieties about rulers as shepherds in just this way. But the Stranger is not Socrates, and the dialogue as a whole is so innocent of references to women or the feminine that the silence may simply be too overwhelming to be read as subtle support. It might be, simply, silence. A third view would capture this quality of absence by positing that weaving is intentionally neutered in the dialogue so as to be shorn of any hint of femininity. Within this approach, two strategies for such neutering may be discerned. One way in which any feminising of weaving is eliminated from Plato's Statesman is by the early denial of any difference between the expertise needed to rule an oikos (household) and a polis (city or political community) (259b7~c4). On the face of it, this denial of the boundary between oikos and polis a denial which Aristotle would reject outright in Politics 1 might seem to have the opposite effect, clearing room for expertise from the female domestic sphere to act in the polis. Yet the maintenance of a frontier between oikos and polis is indispensable if any comparison between them, whether satiric or serious, is to make sense at all. Lysistrata's analogy between household and city is both funny and pointed precisely in its play on the usual deep (if complementary) contrast between the two. The Stranger's poker-face collapses the 168

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difference. By refusing to countenance any sense of transgression in an ideologically domestic art such as weaving entering the public sphere, he also helps to eliminate any female identifications for weaving in the dialogue. The second strategy is found in the divisions of weaving examined above (279c-28oe; pp. 49-56 above). The forms of expertise identified in the course of that analysis - carpentry, building, joinery, and so on - are mainly 'male', unleavened by any especially 'female' ones. Weaving is even included in the class of 'defences' together with the quintessentially male 67 art of armour-making. By grouping weaving alongside so many, and exclusively, non-female arts, the salience of the usual gender disparity is drastically reduced. In reorganising our cognitive map of expertise, the divisions reorder our understanding of their salient features, in this case making the conceptual role of weaving much more important than any female associations it might possess outside this text. Such features of the text appear to function strategically to neutralise the feminised associations of weaving, making its gender a genuine absence rather than a presence to the extent possible. If the Lysistrata contrasts with the Statesman in its explicit appeal to the femaleness of weaving, it contrasts also in the way the example is made to yield a political result. This latter point requires us to re-examine the Lysistrata passage. Lysistrata constructs her example artfully, combining language of the actual physical craft of weaving with language specific to the politics of the day. Yet the final stage of the process, the stage of 'weaving' proper - the interweaving of warp and woof on the loom - gets scarcely a sentence, essentially stated as the outcome of the People's Cloak. All the emphasis of the passage technically and politically falls on the preparatory stages - what we may call collectively the cleansing, culling, carding and collecting. And these preparatory stages are the ones crucial for the achievement of unity. 67

Compare Aristophanes' Birds (831), where weaving as the paragon of female domesticity is contrasted with armour-wearing as the paragon of male civic duty. No such contrast is implied in the Stranger's dry grouping of defences, nor is gender ever a demarcating factor in the subsequent divisions. 169

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Culling means getting rid of anything interfering with the smoothness of the wool, anything which will tangle or catch the yarn, and Lysistrata identifies precisely two different interferences to be purged. First, to be 'beaten out' and 'picked off' are the Villains and burrs', an epexegetic phrase which has been argued to link Athenian democratic demagogues68 to the technical term for burrs in the civic fleece. Second, to be 'carded out', their 'heads' (literally, kephalas) cut off - a neatly violent blend of material and political language - are the oligarchic clubs 69 bent on controlling civic offices. The demagogues do harm by irritating, the oligarchs by combining into cabals which mar the unity of the city. The two groups threaten civic unity in different ways, and the weaving imagery is used to imply that they must simply be eliminated. Lysistrata treats both factions as evil, sources of friction to be plucked out, in order that unity may be achieved. The oligarchs have to be 'carded out', but this phase of carding is really a matter of 'culling' in my sense. The true moment of carding, recalling Lysistrata's earlier instruction to the magistrate to stand quietly in his veil carding, is in Lysistrata's hands a 'carding in' - carding in to the basket all the separate bundles of spun wool. The political reference here is to the various groups separated from one another and alienated from the city: debtors, metics, foreigners, and the cities which had been in revolt against Athenian imperial rule. The 'carding in' process collects (sunagein, sunathroizein) all of these groups, purged of any troublemakers and oppositions, into 'one' {hen). This unity is formed into a ball and without further ado a cloak is woven (finally, a word for the weaving process itself, uphenai). The defining feature of this unity, which may be dubbed a 'simple unity', is that it rests entirely on the success of the 68

69

Hugill (1936) 4 0 - 1 convincingly identifies the term mochtheros with demagogues and extreme democrats elsewhere in Aristophanes: Lys. 1160, mochtheria connotes the democratic war party; Ach. 517-19, for 'sycophants'; K. 1304, for Hyperbolus, the notorious demagogue; cf. Thuc. 8.73. Again, Hugill (1936) 4 1 - 2 convincingly links this phrase to the oligarchical clubs associated with Peisander earlier in the Lysistrata itself (490; cf. Peace. 394) and in Thucydides (8.4). 170

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preparatory stages which create a single unified ball of yarn. Correspondingly, the entire burden of the example is on the arts leading up to loom-weaving, which in itself, in its contribution to the unity or conception of the city, is a metaphorical nullity. No attention is paid, no exploitation is made of the structure of weaving as a combinatorial art of opposites; all the emphasis falls on the structure of culling and assimilating. It is interesting however that despite her almost exclusive focus on these preparatory stages, Lysistrata doesn't name them as different arts or distribute them to different craftworkers, though this was certainly known in ancient Greece. She idealises the single woman's household handicraft, a single individual crafting a unified object, as the right model for the city. Weaving as political example: complex unity in the Statesman Contrasting this simple unity with the kind of unity achieved by weaving in the Statesman brings us to the heart of the programme of political weaving defined there as the statesman's task. Embarking on his characterisation of political weaving, the Stranger announces that he must advance an 'astonishing' claim: that two parts of virtue, courage and moderation, are 'in some sort of way ... extremely hostile to each other and occupy opposed positions in many things' (3o6b6-io). This is explained in relation to 'all things we call fine', which must be placed in two opposite classes: quickness and vigour, praised as 'courageous', and slowness and deepness, praised as 'orderly' when appropriate to the kairos {en kairo, 3O7bi). When either group of qualities is inappropriate for the moment (akaira, 3O7b5) it is blamed instead and called names which indicate excess: the courageous class are called "excessive and manic" when they turn out quicker than is timely (tou kairou), and appear too fast and hard', while 'things that are too deep and slow and soft [are called] "cowardly and lethargic" (307CI-2). 171

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Two points crucial to a proper understanding of the passage follow. First, it is not simply the excessive versions of the two classes which conflict.70 The Stranger states clearly that 'it's pretty much a general rule that we find these qualities, and the moderate type as a whole and the courage of the opposite qualities, do not mix with each other in the actions concerned with things of this sort, as if they were types of things that had a warring stance allotted to them' (307C2-5). The 'nature' of each class is at war with that of the other, and this is as true for them described as virtues as it is of them when described as exceeding the kairos. Second, these are not simply abstract qualities. Each opposing class characterises the souls of one group of people, who themselves 'praise some things as belonging to their own kin, and censure those of their opponents as alien (allotria)9 (3O7d2~5). Possessing one virtue rather than the other conditions a group to assess thoughts, voice, art and action according to its own partial standpoint. Such assessment is meted out not only in praise and censure of qualities, but also in judgments about political affairs. The example given is foreign affairs. The moderate faction will urge pacification even when this is 'less timely than it should be' (akairoteron onta he chre, 30767), the courageous faction war even when their desire for it is 'more vigorous than it should be' {sphodroteran tou deontos,11 3o8a6). Each policy, followed to excess by a group shrinking from the policies of its rivals, will lead to the disaster of defeat and enslavement (3O7ei-3o8d9). Use of the kairos to measure the distorting excess in each faction's evaluative judgments binds the statesman's activity as weaver to the definition of his political expertise as master of timing. The two sides of the definition of the statesman come together in the kairos. Before considering its significance 70

71

As is claimed by Bobonich (1995); his view cannot make sense of the repeated emphasis on the hostility between the two groups ( 3 o 6 b 9 - n , 3O7di-4, 3o8b2-8) nor of the later affirmation that statecraft, which uses only good materials (308C5) will intertwine these two groups as opposites. Recall that to deon was one of the alternative terms for the mean, along with kairos, used in the discussion of measurement (28467). 172

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as a measure of evaluative disagreement further, let us spell out the way that political weaving achieves a 'complex' unity between these two factions, in order to complete the comparison with the simple unity of the Lysistrata shown above. It is the conception of weaving as the combining of opposites, the warp and the woof, which is fundamental to the Statesman's use of weaving as an example for politics.72 Unlike the Lysistrata, which put all its emphasis on carding and preparing the wool, the Statesman reiterates that carding is only preparatory. Earlier in the dialogue when weaving was being defined, we learned that this process of separation exemplified by carding was the very opposite of (and a key rival to) the combinatory process of weaving (28oe6-28iaio). The Stranger is therefore careful to assign this separative process to 'teachers and educators' who are distinct from the weaver himself and who, like the carder, 'prepare the . . . things needed for its twining' (3o8d). In drawing attention to combination, rather than separation, as the activity of weaving proper, he makes a technical correction to the Lysistrata which carries with it a substantive political point. If statecraft is comparable to weaving, this is not because it culls the bad from the city - on the Statesman s conception of both politics and weaving, culling is a prepolitical task to be done by others. Rather, it is because statecraft, like weaving, can achieve a combination of opposites which does not eliminate conflict but rather uses it to the city's advantage. With this recognition of the interlacing of warp and woof on the loom as the weaver's peculiar task comes an implicit acknowledgement of a difference between example and exemplified. The 'kingly weaver' cannot stretch out courageous and moderate people on a loom as on the bed of Procrustes. People cannot be bound into place as threads can be; to bind them is to bind them, not into place, but more closely to one 72

Scheid and Svenbro (1996) 5 remark that 'the fundamental gesture of weaving is this interlacing of the warp and woof of which Plato spoke in the Statesman'. But they do not observe how little the actual gesture of interlacing features in the Lysistrata. 173

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another. And the Stranger adverts precisely to the language of 'bonds' (sundein, 309137) in describing how the kingly weaver will do his work of intertwining. Two kinds of bond are to be constructed. The first and 'divine' bond, pertaining to the supernatural daimones and arising in the human soul, consists in '[t]hat opinion (doxan) which is really true (ontos ousan alethe) about what is fine, just, and good, and the opposites of these, and is secure (meta bebaidseds)'13 (309C5-8). The second and 'human' bonds 'consist in intermarriages and sharing of children, and in those matters relating to private giving-away in marriage' (3iob23). In order to understand how these bonds achieve their effects, and what they are intended to do, we must return to the conflict between the two factions and consider their clash over the kairos more closely. '[BJecause of their affinity to either set of qualities, they [the two factions, each] praise some things as belonging to their own kin (suggeneian), and censure those of their opponents as alien' (3O7d2-4). For an outsider to judge which qualities or policies suit the kairos, as the Stranger described in introducing our judgments of quick and slow music and other matters, is a straightforward issue of objective knowledge. Ex hypothesis however, the factions are not able to approach these judgments objectively, because the 'kinship' which enmeshes them in one set of qualities also embroils them in hostility to the other. Their evaluative judgments of praise and blame ('censure' above) - central to decisions of how to act and treated in this way by the rhetors - are coloured by their tendency to warm to what is familiar, while shrinking, disparagingly, from what is alien to their own temperament. It is this which explains both groups' readiness to act against the kairos: the key link between temperament and action is evaluative judgment, expressed in descriptions. 73

Note the elevated status of true belief here. Unlike true belief in the Meno (97d89), it can be held meta bebaioseos (I translate 'secure' instead of Rowe's 'guaranteed') without thereby being converted into knowledge. Unlike true belief in the Republic (43OC2-3), it is described as ontos. Compare the doxa which emerged from the construction of example (278C6) discussed in Part 1. 174

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If one shrinks from what is alien, one is unlikely to judge as accurate any description which makes the alien praiseworthy or appropriate. Instead one may describe the unfamiliar course of action as excessive - e.g. as a courageous person, describing moderation as cowardice - thus expressing one's temperament in the choice of evaluative language itself. Distaste for what is alien skews one's judgment such that one will tend to misdescribe the alien policy or action whether or not it happens in a given instance to be appropriate; conversely, affinity for the familiar leads one to describe it positively whether or not it is really opportune. So temperament conditions judgment, and these listing judgments are expressed in language. The role of language was emphasised in the Stranger's introductory discussion of qualities, which is couched throughout in terms of what 'we' say, what 'we' call things, and so on. We say approvingly of what is vigorous 'that is quick and manly', while what is quiet and restrained we praise by the name, 'orderly' (30669-10, 3O7b2). When these same phenomena appear to us untimely - akaira - we 'speak' differently, disparaging them respectively with names such as 'wanton' and 'cowardly' (3O7b9~c2). In these introductory cases the 'we' still appears unified, the judgments common and objective. But the point is that judgment is reflected in language, so that when the two groups diverge in temperament and so in evaluative judgments, the implication is that their language also differs. And this would heighten the sense of conflict between them: who is more alien than someone who appears to use words themselves differently? Admittedly, as quotation will soon reveal, in the most drastic and politically dangerous case of conflict it is only judgments, not the linguistic descriptions following from them, which are portrayed as clashing. But the introductory material suggests that language is not a neutral tool which could be used to bring the two groups together; language follows from judgment of what is appropriate, and judgment as we have seen - follows from temperament. So if language can't help, neither can a pure cognitive infusion of proper 175

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judgment, since the temperamental clash is itself an obstacle to cognitive clarity. Only lessening one's attachment to the familiar, and one's fear of the foreign, can right the listing judgments sufficiently to allow language to be used accurately and in common. The danger so far emphasised in temperamental conflict is misjudgment of others. But the 'most hateful' disease (ta megista nosos, 3O7d7) is misjudgment of oneself. Consider the full account in which the Stranger prophesies such selfdeception, on both sides, with disastrous foreign policy results. ES:

[T]hose who are especially orderly are always ready (etoimoi) to live the quiet life, carrying on their private business on their own by themselves, both associating with everyone in their own city on this basis, and similarly with cities outside their own, being ready in any way to preserve peace of some kind; and because of this passion of theirs, which is less timely than it should be (akairoteron), when they do what they want nobody notices that they are being unwarlike and making the young men the same, and that they are perpetually at the mercy of those who attack them, with the result that within a few years they themselves, their children, and the whole city together often become slaves instead of free men before they have noticed it. YS: What you describe is a painful and terrifying thing to go through. ES: But what about those who incline more (repontes) towards courage? Isn't it the case that they are always drawing their cities into some war or other because of their desire for a life of this sort, which is more vigorous than it should be (sphodroteran tou deontos), and that they make enemies of people who are both numerous and powerful, and so either completely destroy their own fatherlands or else make them slaves and subjects of their enemies? (3O7ei-3o8a9)

The self-deception of believing one's own judgments to be accurate, and shrinking from the opposite course, leads inexorably to a disastrous attachment to those judgments even when they become clearly unsuitable to the occasion. Again it is misleading to infer from the comparatives - both policies exceed the kairos or the deon - that all the parties must do is observe the kairos to make all well and conflict disappear. As if to ward off such misinterpretation, the Stranger's next words insist that these two kinds of people in such important matters 'always' maintain 'hostility and enmity' (3o8b2-4) 176

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(the same 'hostility and enmity' he originally stated (306b 10) to obtain between the opposing 'parts of virtue' to which the opposite temperaments tend). These differing evaluative judgments are not intellectualist errors in knowledge which could be corrected by instruction. If it is true, as Socrates would say, that they do not do wrong willingly, it is also true that their problem is not purely and sheerly ignorance. Their lack of knowledge, their misapprehension of the kairos, is rooted in their suspicion of what is alien and obtuse fondness for the familiar. Missing the kairos is, for each group, a systematic effect of their conditioned and systematic imbuing of evaluative judgment with temperamental affinities. Why, however, does it matter so much that the two groups perceive the kairos correctly, since the statesman has already been defined as possessing its perfect command? This is an important question which is seldom asked. It goes to the heart of the dual presentation of the statesman in the final process of definition: the statesman as the commander of the kairos, ordering the other arts to start and stop; and the statesman as the political weaver, concerned with intertwining two opposite groups of citizens. The rival arts were shown to be constitutionally incapable of assessing the kairos for themselves to initiate action in relation to the other matters in the state. Thus the statesman had to judge the kairos for them. But in the case of the hostile citizens, the presentation of their conflict quoted above depicts them as engaging (if failing) in judging the kairos for themselves. If the kairos has to be discerned for the arts to act within the city, it has also to be discerned for the city itself to act as a whole. And this latter direction of the city is consistently presented in the Statesman as being done by the citizens themselves. We have seen the citizens' struggle to control the city's foreign policy. What must be recognised is that the statesmanweaver does not dispense with their control over the city's actions, substituting his own commanding knowledge of the kairos instead. His purpose in constructing the two bonds (which we will return to, finally, below) is 'always to entrust 177

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{epitrepein) ^ offices (tas archas)15 in cities to these in common' (3iiai-2), since '[everything in cities cannot go well, either on the private or the public level, unless both of these groups are there to give their help' (31^3-5). The point is that although the statesman goes on 'ruling' in the city (311C6), his rule is indirect: it involves 'choosing' (3iia4) the individuals or groups who themselves hold office and so 'rule' (3iia4) in the city directly.76 If the statesman's control of offices and policy were direct, getting the two groups properly seasoned and combined would be irrelevant - and yet this is the whole task of political weaving (cf. 3iia4~b5 as a whole). It is because the people will play an important role in ruling their city, despite the continued presence of the statesman and the effects of his political weaving, that it matters so much that they overcome the hostility rooted in temperament and issuing in evaluative judgments. With this in mind, we can at last consider the aims and methods involved in the statesmanweaver's construction of the two bonds. Recall that the divine bond consists in bringing-to-be a common 'opinion' about 'what is fine, just, and good, and the opposites of these' (309C5-6). The Stranger describes the effect which such shared opinion will have on each group. The courageous are 'tamed' and given a new tendency: instead of 'a desire' (epithumian, 3o8a6) for war, they become 'especially willing' (malista... an 74

75

76

F o r this sense of entrusting rule to those w h o will rule, cf. Polybius vi.9.2-3 on the cycle of declining constitutions: once the oligarchs have been killed, the people realise that they can n o longer 'entrust (epitrepein) the government with confidence to a select few'. Meier (1990) 161 observes: 'It was a great advance when the demos ... was granted arche or kratos (or archein or kratein) - that is, functions or positions that h a d formerly been seen as pertaining wholly to individuals.' Despite the dialogue's emphasis on the ultimate authority of political expertise, once this has been recognised a n d m a d e manifest in the city, the role of the people in ruling can be acknowledged also. In Lane (1994) 1 9 2 - 5 , 1 argued that the entrusting of offices to the people indicates that the statesman m a y only be fitfully present in the city, like the itinerant doctor in the discussion of the laws a n d Zeus in the cosmic story. 'Choosing' ( 3 i i a 4 ) and 'rules a n d directs' (31 ic6) do, however, indicate a continued presence of the statesm a n against m y previous claim. I thank Christopher Gill and David Sedley for urging m e to reconsider.

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etheleseieri) to 'share in what is just' {ton dikaion ... koinonein). Without this possibility of sharing in justice they will 'slide away towards becoming like some kind of beast' (3O9dio-e3). No language of the kairos appears here. But the passage suggests that the courageous group's inappropriate readiness for war is modified by partaking in common opinion about what is just, and one may infer that this common opinion about justice will modify their judgments so as to make them more able to recognise the kairos even when it requires qualities or policies 'alien' to them. 'Becoming beastlike' is both an objective judgment of what happens when the courageous lose their hold on common and true belief and so make excessive claims, and also an evocation of the way that evaluative descriptions link language to judgment and action whether objectively or subjectively. This link between judgment and language is evoked even more clearly in the description of the effects of the divine bond on the moderate. Without such common beliefs, the moderate nature will 'very appropriately acquire a disgraceful reputation, for simplemindedness {euetheias)' (30965-8). 'Reputation' translates literally as 'is said to be' (phemen): the moderate person lacking true beliefs is objectively described as 'simpleminded', and this reference to description again evokes the earlier analysis of how language is linked to the judgments which each faction makes. With a share in the common and true beliefs, the 'orderly' nature becomes genuinely virtuous, not only 'moderate' (sophron) but also 'wise (phronimon) so far as wisdom goes in the context of the city'. 77 Like the introduction of 'justice' to the courageous, the addition of 'wise' to the description of the 'moderate' shows that they will no longer list toward the kind of anal (as it were) 'orderliness' which dragged them into a ruinous policy of appeasement in the foreign policy example. Now their moderation, always a 77

It is difficult to tell whether this qualifies the reality of the wisdom ('it is only civic wisdom') or only directs it ('it is wisdom dealing with civic affairs'). Compare Rep. 430C2-3 and Phd. 82b 1-3. 179

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part of virtue, is stabilised by its share in true and common beliefs so as to combine with the virtue of wisdom. The effect of the divine bond, then, is to keep each temperament from degenerating into its extreme (note the medical air of pharmakon (3ioa3), inoculating each side as it were) and to link its partial virtue securely to other aspects of virtue. True opinion keeps the courageous sufficiently gentle so as to be just, the moderate sufficiently wise so as not to be foolish. (Justice and wisdom, the two hitherto absent cardinal virtues, here join courage and moderation). Provision of true beliefs held in common seems to alleviate the suspicion of foreignness which temperamental enmity brought with it. In recognising something common in an other, one is ex hypothesi less likely to shrink from all s/he represents and to valorise all of one's own tendencies instead. But this does not mean that the two sides will agree completely so that their differences would disappear. What they have in common is only belief, true though it is, and this does not destroy the peculiar leanings of their own judgments but rather grants them the ability to overcome suspicion so as to recognise virtue (validity) in the others' judgment as well. Consider now the human bonds, said to be easier to forge. These are bonds of intermarriage with reference to procreation, and in proposing them the Stranger intends to counter practices of marriage-selection78 which exemplify the love of familiar/fear of foreign which he had presented as characterising members of the imagined polity. Some people, he says, just pursue wealth and power in choosing marriage partners for themselves or their daughters, and this isn't even worth discussing. But of those who do concern themselves with suitors' characters, the Stranger says: [ES]:

78

[T]hey act out of no correct sort of consideration {logon) whatever, going for what is immediately easiest, and . . . welcoming those who

Several writers have remarked on an aristocratic Athenian practice of marrying into the aristocracy of other cities. Patterson (1981) 99-100 with n.72 gives references to the claim, but argues that there is grossly insufficient evidence for this practice among either the aristocracy or the many, and also that it was not the cause of Pericles' Law of Citizenship. 180

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Recall the discussion of duskheres (pp. 161-2, above) as indicating an inability to stomach something. It was used of Young Socrates and of the second-best constitutions to indicate their unwillingness to stomach rule by the true statesman. Here, it applies to the factious citizens who can't stomach those who are 'unlike' them and so shy away from them when it comes to choosing marriage partners for themselves or their daughters (3iodi). Likeness and unlikeness too, similarity and dissimilarity, are familiar from an earlier part of the dialogue. In method, misperceptions and assumptions - what I called 'common sense' - about what is similar and dissimilar had to be properly scrutinised and clarified by the combined efforts of division and example. The problem was to get clear about what was really similar and dissimilar, to which habit and prejudice were the obstacles. Now, in politics, it appears necessary for the citizens not to revise perceptions of similarity the two sides are right in finding themselves more similar to those of their own kind - but rather to revise expectations of how similarity should matter. Compare the discussion of the policies people should pursue in marrying in Laws vi (773a-d). There too, there is 'a natural tendency for everyone to make for the mate that most resembles {ton homoiotaton) himself. But this attraction to similarity should be resisted on the basis of self-knowledge and a proper understanding that the state is best off when balanced and symmetrical. The man who 'sees himself {xuneidota) as excessive (more than is deon) in haste and violence should choose a bride born of 'orderly' parents. So too it is the ability to see one's own tendencies and to recognise the need for combination rather than aversion which is required in the Statesman. The habit and prejudice of both sides, their 'gut reaction' (drawing on the notion of stomaching), is to assume that similarity is a good basis for marriage, whereas in fact the expertise of weaving knows otherwise. Opposites must be brought to mix with opposites overcoming their mutual 181

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suspicions and distaste, as the second-best regimes must be brought to overcome their suspicion of the idea of a true statesman. The proper marriage choices are eugenically based. 'Without mixture' (St. 3iod6) with moderation, the courageous soul over many generations ends up 'mad', while the moderate soul unmixed with courage ends up 'more sluggish than is timely' (nothestera ... ton kairou) and ultimately crippled. Once again departure from the kairos assesses the way that the opposed natures tend toward excess. But it is important to conclude this section by re-emphasising that the policies of common beliefs and intermarriage do not aim at abolishing the fundamental temperamental and evaluative differences which characterise those possessing opposed 'parts of virtue'. Were the political warp and woof to disappear, there would be no call for the weaving characteristic of the true statesman. Conclusions Delusions of righteousness: the political significance of evaluative conflict The Statesman's scenario, striking as it is, is not sui generis: it bears points of resemblance to forerunners, contemporaries and successors within Plato's own works, the ancient world, and the later history of political thought. Because these affinities may mislead as well as enlighten, discussion of these points of contact is essential to understanding the Statesman's significance. Perhaps the best place to begin is within Plato's own work, in Book VIII of the Republic, which dramatically describes the degeneration of regimes following the philosopher-guardians' misjudgment of the kairos in the ideal city. In each case Socrates describes first the decline of the form of regime followed by the decline of the individual: that is, the formative influences on a representative youth of the old regime which shape, out of its contradictions as it were, a mature man of the 182

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successor and coarser kind. Throughout this unhappy morality play there is an emphasis on faction and the fact of division as the principal cause of moral and political worsening. At the outset, Socrates states that intermarriage between the different kinds of souls symbolised by varyingly precious metals results in 'unlikeness and inharmonious irregularity' which in turn breed war and hatred. No distinction is drawn between healthy unlikeness and factional strife; unlikeness is equated with disunity which inevitably leads to disaster. That the Statesman allows for a potentially healthy unlikeness, between two kinds of virtuous individuals both good and fine, is already thrown into relief by comparison with Republic VIII. But the latter work contains also an even more striking passage of comparison with the Statesman's closing scenario. The mutation of an oligarchic youth into a democratic man is said to be kindled by his associating with 'fiery, clever beasts who are able to purvey manifold and subtle pleasures with every sort of variety' (559d-e). These 'Lotus-eaters' are evident kin to the lion-, centaur-, and satyr-like sophists of the Statesman (29ia8-b3). In the Republic these givers of 'boasting speeches' instruct the youth in a whole series of evaluative redescriptions. They name shame, simplicity; moderation, cowardice; measure and orderly moderation, rustic and illiberal, and banish these virtues from the 'Acropolis' of the youth's soul (the imagery is all of defence, invasion and expulsion). And having driven out these virtues by false disparagement they welcome in, as conquering heroes, four vices with names of false praise: 'calling insolence good education; anarchy, freedom; wastefulness, magnificence; and shamelessness, courage' (all, 56oc-e). In the hands of the sophists grown up in the unstable oligarchy these redescriptions are tantamount to pure manipulation. The references to 'cleverness' and 'boasting' suggest that the flatterers of the naive youth do not believe in the renamings they propagate; they insinuate disrespect for values by using language as a tool for their own ends. Redescription is here rooted not in temperament but in adventitious purposes of deceit. Nor is there another side to the story, any 183

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bashful sophists calling timidity wisdom or indecision prudence. The rhetors are the vanguard of the advancing democracy, deliberately misusing language to stir up the settled structure of the young oligarch's soul in a process of one way decline. Before drawing a direct comparison with the Statesman it is helpful to consider a case of evaluative redescription which may well - by reason of the general respect it commanded have influenced Plato's own accounts of the phenomenon. This is the case of the slide into civil strife in Corcyra during the Peloponnesian Wars as narrated by Thucydides, and it too presents an instance of wilful manipulation of language by people made vicious by the want and fear attendant on the war. One faction, the bold and reckless, are spurred by the general chaos and fear to promote their own vision to excess: ... inconsiderate boldness was counted true-hearted manliness; provident deliberation, a handsome fear; modesty, the cloak of cowardice; to be wise in every thing, to be lazy in every thing. (3.82.4; Hobbes' translation)

Recent scholarship has emphasised that this passage is not describing a change in the meaning of words as has often been assumed.79 Rather it describes a corruption of judgments80 such that different words (whose meaning must be stable for the switch to make sense) are applied to the same phenomena. As in the Republic the manipulations are described by one party only; here too it is a bold faction which dares to try to manipulate events, while we are not told what if anything the moderate, quiet people did under such provocation. Here however the effects are deeper and more corrosive, a genuine corruption of judgments rather than the casual verbal manipulations of the sophists. The sophistry of Republic VIII seems to work by destabilising judgment and hierarchy in general rather than by systematically substituting different judgments in the youth's soul. In Thucydides on the other hand it is the slide towards a systematically new set of judgments, the 79 80

See Wilson (1982) and Macleod (1979). Gomme emphasises the cognitive element of these evaluations in his notes on the passage. 184

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skewing of one faction of the populace towards their own tendency now magnified to excess, which is so damagingly expressed in linguistic redescription. Perhaps the most striking observation to emerge from these comparisons is that evaluative conflict in the Statesman is not linked either to sophistry or to degeneration but to the unlikeness of two equally good, and equally necessary, temperaments. There are certainly sophists present in the Statesman, clamorous rivals to the true statesman who are painstakingly unmasked, and it would have been easy enough to blame them for stirring things up in the city ruled by the statesman's art. Instead their art is as we have seen assigned a place of honour in the city, subordinate like the others to the statesman's knowledge of the kairos, but a 'precious' collaborator when persuasion is needed. And the rhetors' pride, the kairos, is also rehabilitated and made over to statecraft as has been shown above. This general atmosphere of rehabilitation of rhetoric - even reconciliation, though on statecraft's own terms - is preserved insofar as the rhetors are not as in the Republic blamed for the evaluative conflict which threatens the city. Indeed neither undue manipulation as in the Republic's oligarchy, nor civilised breakdown due to outside catastrophe as in Thucydides' Corcyra, is responsible for the 'hostility' between the two groups of citizens in the Statesman's closing pages. This tension is endogenous, inescapable, and linked to what is valuable. It arises, as the Stranger says clearly but with evident fear of being misunderstood, from the unlikeness and mutual suspicion of two virtues, allied to two kinds of temperament and ultimately to two groups of citizens. The threatened corruption of judgments is due to the two groups' temperamental affinity for their own kind and suspicion, even squeamishness, of everything opposite and different. These emotional affinities and dislikes must be moderated if judgment and so language are to be used unclouded. Unlikeness in itself is not to be feared, indeed it is required if the model of weaving is to make any sense (involving different woof and warp) in creating a unity of distinct elements. But 185

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this new kind of unity brings with it as its price the potential hostility of its own two elements, and it is this which is the final task for statecraft to address. Although 'measure' is mentioned as one of the terms redescribed, nowhere in Republic vm nor for that matter in Thucydides do we find an objective standard erected by which misdescriptions are to be measured. Perhaps the narrative attitude of 'seeing through' manipulative and degenerative antics which characterises both works, explains the fact that no standard is clearly described; in unmasking opportunism the status quo may be sufficient to warrant the implicit condemnation. By presenting the reader with two valuable but mutually hostile and disparaging standpoints of judgment, however, the Statesman highlights the problem of objectivity and indeed provides a solution to this problem in the concept of an objective mean. The kairos (and once, the deori) measures divergence from the mean for the conflicting judgments, and also resolves the problem of judgment as knowledge of the kairos dictates what is properly to be done. In structural terms the solution is internal to the problem: the very specification of the conflict prescribes its own remedy. Yet the Statesman does not, as I have argued, proceed from the neatness of this structure to a straightforward solution, the statesman resolving their disagreement by telling both groups what to do when. Never is such peremptory intervention even mentioned as a possible solution once the rival groups have been identified. Instead objectivity is approached obliquely. The two groups are to be brought, through common beliefs and common psychosomatic inheritance, to lessen their suspicion and self-love sufficiently so that they may allow some measure of praise to be sometimes due to what is different from themselves. Only in this indirect way, by clearing judgment of distrust and disgust, is attainment of the kairos envisaged. Although objective knowledge is involved in specifying the desired result, it must be applied to the murkier stuff of beliefs and backgrounds. Such an indirect role for the idea of the mean distinguishes 186

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the Statesman from its more famous successor in the doctrine of Aristotle. Aristotle's influence on later thought has been incalculably greater than that of the Statesman, and it is difficult therefore to resist reading the Statesman's use of the mean as a sketchy precursor of the great Aristotelian doctrine. The role of the mean is in Aristotle much more highly developed in the Ethics than in the Politics, being central to the analysis of moral qualities in the Nicomachean Ethics Book n. There Aristotle remarks that like health, moral qualities and the feelings and actions they animate are destroyed by deficiency and excess, while preserved by the mean. The mean is defined mathematically as equidistant to the two extremes but must be gauged relative to each person. In the case of moral qualities, the two extremes represent vice and the mean, the target which must be hit in any given situation in order to be virtuous (though he also acknowledges that not every action or feeling admits of a mean: the extremes themselves have no mean, nor do feelings and actions which are evil in themselves). Aristotle enthusiastically sets about listing the excess, mean, and deficiency of various virtues, for example, rashness-courage-cowardice; vanity-magnanimity-pusillanimity; shamelessness-modesty-shyness.81 In the course of this exercise the neighbourliness of vices and virtues is frequently emphasised, and it is this conceptual, quasi-spatial nearness which is the basis for four accounts given by Aristotle of linguistic redescription. He begins by observing that the neighbourliness means that dispositions and actions appear differently depending on the light of comparison, in that even the mean can appear excessive when compared with the defect (the concrete example being a brave man appearing rash compared with a coward). But he immediately builds on this observation to account for a first way in which language is actually used to redescribe: 'the people at the extremes push 81

In some cases the scheme directs attention to a disposition without a name in common usage, either through the rarity of the phenomenon or mere neglect; in these cases Aristotle bestows a name in a procedure reminiscent of the Stranger's inventing names to fill out the divisions. 187

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the intermediate man each over to the other, and the brave man is called rash by the coward, cowardly by the rash man' 8 2 (uo8b25). In this first account the emphasis is on deception and manipulation by vicious types attempting to put themselves in a better light by redescribing their fellows. Secondly, however, we find that there are some natural human inclinations toward one extreme in particular, for example licentiousness, and this tends to make us describe licentiousness as more contrary to temperance (or implicitly as 'the' opposite to temperance) without considering the existence of the other extreme, in this case 'indifference'.83 Thirdly we find that 'we all have different natural tendencies', discernible from the pleasure and pain they give us, which suggests without saying explicitly that we may describe vices and virtues differently according to these tendencies. Aristotle concludes by remarking that sometimes we redescribe simply in error, because the mean is always difficult to discern: 'we . . . sometimes praise those who fall short and call them good-tempered, but sometimes we praise those who get angry and call them manly' (iiO9bi6). Redescriptions thus occur, according to Aristotle, for a variety of reasons: deliberate manipulation, general human fallibility, individual temperament, individual error. And redescriptions are possible because of, and structured by, the neighbourliness of vice and virtue. Nevertheless he nowhere posits redescription as a fundamental ethical or political threat. It is possible and actual but not terribly significant. And there is no emphasis on evaluative conflict or redescription in the Politics, where references to the mean relate to types of constitution and education, but the chief conflicts 82 83

Translation by Barnes (1984). This second case is actually described as one of two causes for the general phenomenon of one extreme appearing more opposed to the mean than does the other; while the case quoted in the text is rooted in people's dispositions, its sister cause is the naturally 'closer affinity and resemblance to the mean' of one extreme than the other, for example the closer affinity of rashness to courage which makes cowardice appear more opposed to courage. The case in the text is cited without this context because the question in hand is what makes people redescribe things, to which the sister cause is not relevant. 188

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pit rich against poor, oligarchs against democrats for reasons of wealth and power rather than contradictory judgments. Aristotle's legacy to later political thought on the issue of evaluative conflict is consistent with what we have seen of his thought, the touchstone being the neighbourliness of vice and virtue and the possibilities for manipulation this offers. While Aristotle himself had tremendous influence on the scholastics and on some forms of Renaissance thought, the Renaissance was also greatly influenced by the Roman rhetoricians who themselves had picked up the neighbourliness idea and developed sophisticated handbooks as to how to exploit it.84 The Renaissance fascination with rhetoric was therefore shadowed by anxiety as to whether the rhetorical art of evaluative description threatened the stability, even the possibility, of the state. Perhaps the most original response to this predicament was that of Thomas Hobbes, who rejected neighbourliness and objectivity but insisted that there was a universal conflict of descriptions based on the conflict of judgments as to what individual self-preservation required. Hobbes' early translation of Thucydides, quoted above, already betrays his persistent concern with the phenomenon of redescription. His mature statement of it in Leviathan, chapter iv, ascribes the names given by men to the virtues and vices to the 'different constitutions of body, and prejudices of opinion, [which give] every thing a tincture of our different passions'.85 The examples with which he illustrates the resultant variance in judgments - 'one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth Feare; and one cruelty, what another justice; one prodigality, what another magnanimity; and one gravity, what another stupidity' - have been persuasively, and painstakingly, traced to sources in the rhetorical tradition.86 But the conflict of judgments is emphatically not diagnosed in terms familiar from the rhetoricians. Physical causes and prejudiced opin84 85 86

See Skinner (1991) and (1996) for an extensive account of this phenomenon. Hobbes (1991)31. Skinner (1991) 36-7 with notes. 189

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ions, not the manipulation or definition of the skilled rhetor, are said to lie behind evaluative conflict. Hobbes observes in De Cive that it is 'because the inclinations of men are diverse' that the state of war is necessary, 'as by reason of the diversity of the present appetites, they mete Good and Evill by diverse measures'.87 If the Statesman implies that the conflict of judgments is a general phenomenon but takes the form of two opposed temperaments, Hobbes finds a universal diversity of evaluative judgment unavoidable outside a state of settled authority. As much as both Plato and Hobbes hated rhetors, neither lays the fundamental blame for evaluative conflict at the rhetor's door (even if both could consistently blame the rhetors for stirring the conflict up). Both conceive evaluative conflict as a fundamental constraint on and challenge to political philosophy. I suggested earlier that if this approach to evaluative conflict does identify something common to Plato and Hobbes, they differ in the role of the mean in generating or resolving such conflicts. The case for the kairos in the Statesman's conflict has been made above. Hobbes, at one point in De Cive, does seem to accept the 'neighbourliness' of the virtues and vices, writing that 'for as oft as anothers good action displeaseth any man, that action hath the name given of some neighbouring vice . . . ' and conversely.88 This neighbourliness of virtue and vice had become in humanist writings a clear signal of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean. But later in the very same section Hobbes mounts an attack on the doctrine of virtue as the mean, calling it false, and offering three counterexamples.89 This attack suggests that the reliance on the Aristotelian doctrine earlier in the paragraph cannot be more than superficial, if Hobbes' anti-Aristotelian ethic is to cohere. 87 88 89

Hobbes (1983) 74. Hobbes (1983) 75. The counterexamples are, (i) that to call 'daring' a virtue depends not on its moderation, but on the motive or cause; (ii) similarly, liberality is judged not by quantity given but by the motive; (iii) finally, a free gift of one's own goods is not injustice, even if it exceeds what is owed. 190

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And indeed, references to the mean are dropped in Leviathan (where in other contexts90 the attack on the scholastics is redoubled). The diagnosis of conflicting names in terms of physiques and passions examined above, makes no reference to the neighbourliness of vice and virtue. Nor need it do so. Impressed by the phenomenon of global disagreement in judgment, and insistent on the right of each to his own judgment in the state of nature, Hobbes had no investment in relating such judgments as deviations from an objective mean. On the one hand, then, Hobbes and Plato agree in diagnosing evaluative conflict as a profound tendency rooted in the diversity of human dispositions. It is not a trick of rhetoric nor a function of corruption: it is rather the starting point, the condition to which politics must respond. On the other hand, Hobbes drops the analysis in terms of the mean on which Plato, with a special temporal reading, had relied. For Hobbes, evaluative judgments are different simply because they are different, because the humans who make them are guided by diverse passions. The judgments should be measured by the requirements of the Laws of Nature, according to what will conduce to peace. But there is nothing in the judgments internally which gives us any hope that they can be linked to this measure. Reason would lead to peace, but reason is not, most of the time, dominant in the formation of human evaluative judgments. Hobbes concluded famously that the only practicable political solution is the institution of a Sovereign whose judgment and power will determine the evaluations for all to follow.91 Plato, on the other hand, draws a tighter link between the way that people misjudge and the proper measure. I argued that in the Statesman, political conflict is a function of clashing temperaments, who refuse to admit that the moment of a mean alien to themselves may have arrived. This internal connection between judgment and objectivity, even when it is 90 91

On the attack on scholasticism in Leviathan, see Skinner (1993) 93 with n.148. See for instance Tuck (1993) 123.

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lived as a connection between misjudgment and objectivity, enables a solution to be offered which is internal to the problem, rather than external in the way that Hobbes' Sovereign comes in from outside to settle the matter. Whereas theories based on the mean could, like Plato's in the Statesman, offer an internal resolution to the conflict of judgment, Hobbes stepped outside for a Sovereign to put an end to disagreement by fiat. The absence of the mean severs the problem he identifies from the solution he prescribes. If, like the Statesman, Hobbes returns to the root of linguistic conflict in a conflict of judgments, unlike the Statesman Hobbes does not discern any internal structure to that conflict, which for him is not a war of opposite temperaments but potentially a war of all against all. Consequently his solution the absolute authority of a statesman or -men personified in the Leviathan - rests its weight almost entirely on the power of the Leviathan to enforce obedience to its unitary and possibly arbitrary establishment of judgments. For the sceptical Hobbes there is no point in looking for an objective nub of mediation, even one which, as we have seen in the Statesman, can only be established indirectly. Instead the political solution is entirely external to the structure of the conflict. This significant difference need not obscure the interesting commonality between the Statesman and the Leviathan, in that both present evaluative redescriptions rooted not in the neighbourliness of vice and virtue, but in the cognitive-cumemotional temperamental judgments of individuals. In this the Statesman is less proto-Aristotelian than has often been supposed, and we as interpreters must struggle to shake off the Aristotelian mantle which Hobbes, for his part, so decisively rejected. A contemporary feminist ethicist has recently invoked the problem of redescription as something which a dialogical conception of ethical justification would have to address: 'When we morally disagree ... we do not only disagree about the principles involved; very often we disagree because what I see as a lack of generosity on your part you construe as your legitimate right not to do something; we disagree because what you see as jealousy on my part I view 192

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as my desire to have more of your attention.'92 The problem of finding an objective moral, or in Hobbes' case political, foundation from which to assess and resolve the problem of evaluative conflict remains alive. Delusions of righteousness: the political significance of authority and time

The Statesman addresses the question of political authority from two directions. On the one hand, assuming (as the interlocutors begin by agreeing) that there exists such a thing as political 'expert knowledge', the question is how this sort of knowledge is distinguished from other sorts, and what vindicates its claim to be peculiarly {qua politically) authoritative over them. On the other hand, later in the dialogue, the question is raised (by Young Socrates' demurral) whether knowledge as such can claim the mantle of political authority over, for instance, the claims of law. If the dialogue begins by settling the intellectualist question of priority among the forms of knowledge, it goes on to raise the politically urgent question of priority among the rival claims to authority of knowledge and law. Knowledge and law are not adventitiously contrasted here, nor are they linked in the Statesman's analysis alone. Rather, as the historian of political thought John Pocock has argued, they represent some of the major modes of a society's selfunderstanding of its own continuity through time. Pocock's analysis, developed in accounts of early modern England and in a speculative account of translated sources from ancient China, investigates the multiple and dialectical ways that challengers to, and defenders of, the authority of tradition may be led to reflect on social continuity.93 He links the question of political authority to the authority of different modes of conceptualising time, and posits the specific and 92

93

Benhabib (1992) 163. Skinner (1996) 145 n.45 also quotes this passage, observing that the example a b o u t generosity is Quintilian's. Pocock (1972).

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dialectical unfolding of this link in each society as central to the history of that society's political thought. For Pocock, the ideal-typical dialectic of social time begins when conservatives are challenged to account for the value of preserving the past in the present, and so must develop a notion of the past as past or an historical awareness. The challenge comes from radicals who may themselves be defending original principles indigenous to the past to which the present should return, or else external principles which set themselves as judges of the value of history. Those who, in the latter camp, defend the political authority of reason or knowledge as a political value will have to elaborate some notion of the relation of reason to time. Is reason embodied in a process of historical evolution, for example in the evolving common law; is it the prerogative of legislators, judges, or philosophers; should it aim to abolish past dispensations altogether, or to reform them, or to rule by privileging the future over the past? Time thus presents to reason the problem of the past. But it also presents the problem of particulars. 94 How can reason grasp, not only the past, but also individual present circumstances and objects of judgment and action? Political efficacy depends on reason's being able to meld itself to the particularist demands of the times. The Statesman addresses the authority of the past only obliquely, in the course of its discussion of law which will be considered further below. But it addresses the particularism of reason head-on. Its claim for the authority of political expertise directly addresses the problem of the knowledge of particulars in time which Pocock finds to have plagued Renaissance political theory. The dialogue begins, as I have said, by assuming that there is such a thing as political knowledge, and seeks to identify this special form of knowledge by the process of division (by dis/similarities) guided by example (which picks out salient dis/similarities). Yet this process of specifying related branches of knowledge threatens to backfire when the related branches 94

See especially Pocock (1975). 194

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of knowledge, placed on the same level as the political knowledge which is differentiated from and compared to them, express a claim (personified) to the mantle of political authority. Simply to define one branch of knowledge as 'political knowledge', in other words, does not by itself answer the political question of which branch of knowledge should rule: this is a question not (only) of the content of a branch of knowledge, but also of the characteristics which rule requires. And indeed, specification of those characteristics is just what secures, ultimately, the claim of 'political knowledge' to rule over all matters in the city, rule which entails (inter alia) authority over all the other branches of knowledge. The relevant feature being the ability to judge when a given form of knowledge should be employed, 'political knowledge' is thereby distinguished in kind and not only by degree of (dis)similarity from the other forms of knowledge. Such elevation of political knowledge to a second-order or indirect status from which it can command the other forms of knowledge, is not done by appeal to a mythic origin or other form of charisma standing at the beginning of or outside time. Rather, it is done precisely by attention to the ongoing temporal dimension of praxis. Forms of knowledge-based praxis like carpentry, medicine and rhetoric cannot possibly claim authority on the basis of unbroken temporal continuity, because the plain fact is that they stop and start. Their practitioners start work and down tools, go to and fro the Assembly, wake up and retire to sleep, and so on. And this haphazard but ineliminable aspect of their activity, while it can and must be regulated according to the good of the political community within which it exists (this would not have been especially controversial in Athens), cannot - this is the crucial point - be so regulated according to any principle internal to the forms of knowledge themselves. The knowledge of how to build or paint does not and cannot, in itself, include the knowledge of when building or painting should be practised. The latter knowledge requires a double appreciation of time and the good. And this is precisely what is united in the notion of the kairos, which, being

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posited as the object of political knowledge, thereby legitimates the authority of its own practitioner. This dispatch of the rival 'arts' amounts to the claim that the political community and the knowledge which directs it can command the timing of social practices (and conversely, that these practices cannot regulate their own timing). Social time, on this view, must be conceptualised not only in terms of continuity but also and equally in terms of discontinuity, and the units involved are the experiential units of knowledgebased social action. To conceive political society in time (the adjective is crucial, since here as in Aristotle it imports a conception of a teleological good) is in part to conceive it as seamed by beginnings and endings, exercises and withdrawals, of crafts and practices, and to make essential the provision of some form of authority which can judge and command these. Indeed the very language in which the point is stated - when political expertise is finally defined as having knowledge of the 'when it is the right time to begin and set in motion the most important things in cities and when it is the wrong time' (3°5d) - links initiation (arche) of praxis to the legitimation of the claim of political knowledge to rule (archein). Here the point is at its most lapidary: to rule is (now defined and legitimated as) to govern the initiation of action in time. Thus the justification of the peculiar, that is political, authority of 'political knowledge' is achieved. But before it is quite completed in the text, the vindication of the 'true statesman' (stipulated possessor of political knowledge) must pause to confront a second challenge from a different quarter. The occasion is again a stage in the divisions of dis/similarities, this time the division of the 'true statesman' defined by knowledge from that crowd of 'satyrs' and other beast-like sophists who bear the name of 'statesman' in 'actual' (that is, contemporaneous with the dramatic date of the dialogue, and perhaps also loosely with its date of composition) cities. Whereas in the previous challenge, resolution could at least utilise the difference in names between carpentry, etc., and statecraft, in this second challenge the homonymy between true and illusory forms of statecraft is a hindrance rather than 196

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a help. Indeed, if the clarification of names is a major purpose of the divisions (as argued in Part i), the homonymy of names here poses perhaps its most serious task. While shared names generally pose a problem for method, the name shared by existing statesmen with the 'true statesman' poses also a problem for politics. In the Republic, the bad reputation of 'actual' philosophers contributes to Adeimantus' doubts, first as to whether philosophers should indeed rule and then (once he is brought to agree that they should) as to whether their rule could ever be accepted by 'actual' cities. Here, Young Socrates has to be brought to accept not only the (intellectually challenging but politically relatively innocuous) rule of statesmen over carpenters and builders, but also the politically explosive rule of a 'true statesman' in place of the regimes of existing cities. Unlike Adeimantus, the boy does not prove particularly worried about the supplanting of the 'actual politicians'. But these were only part, and arguably a contingent part, of thenexisting regimes. The essential part and the one which Young Socrates shows himself loath to supplant was the rule of the laws. In Athens - which is relevant insofar as Young Socrates, who resists the debarring of lawfulness as a criterion for knowledge-based political rule, is or will be an Athenian citizen - the laws constituted a crucial if peculiar source of social and political authority. One of their peculiarities from the modern (and also early modern, which means that Pocockian considerations must be treated with care) point of view, is that the rule of law was not conceived predominantly or exclusively in terms of the production of generalisations by the legislature and their precedent-forming application to particular cases by the executive and judiciary. Most of what the Assembly did was to pass decrees for specific actions rather than formulate new laws, an activity which was conceived as exceedingly hazardous and rare; the executive and judicial processes, while applying laws to cases, specifically did not do so in a way which accumulated (and so was not bound by the accumulation of) precedent. 197

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What was, then, the source of the authority of law and its place in the social understanding of continuity through time? The Statesman's limited validation of the second-best regimes offers only stability as the source of value in any laws decoupled from the practice of the ideal statesman. Against the Athenian attachment to tradition and special appreciation for the Solonic laws, the Stranger treats written laws and unwritten customs as all of a piece, all valuable only if they remain unbroken. The crushing of law's claims in comparison with statecraft is first diagnosed in terms of law's inability to determine 'accurately' (akribos) what is best for all, because 'the dissimilarities both of men and of actions, and what may be termed the absolute unrest of human beings, suffer no art whatever to lay down in any matter any simple rule which shall be applicable to all cases for all time' 95 (294b2-6). It is the dynamic nature of human existence which makes it impossible to promulgate unchanging rules with any accuracy.96 Observe that law, in this analysis, is presumed to be 'unchanging' and 'for all time', a characterisation which reflects the spirit if not the letter of Greek laws. 97 The argument exploits this imputed immobility in claiming law to be, therefore, inadequate to the temporal aspect of human affairs as a domain of 'absolute unrest'. In terms of the relation between method and politics, it must be observed that dissimilarities, which were seen to be in the methodological realm the necessary subject matter of the method of division, are here in the political realm presented as necessitating the reign of political expertise. If the dissecting of dis/similarities by division was subjected to one major temporal divide (that of the story, between the reigns of Zeus and of Kronos), the governing of dis/similarities by political author95 96

97

I follow Campbell (1973) 127-38 n.6. The stress on process and flux and their political significance in the late dialogues is brought out by Grene (1950) n o , 182-3. Most cities did allow laws to be changed, albeit with great difficulty, but case application, as noted above, did not itself change them. Contrast the almost imperceptible but gradual alteration of the common law as conceived by its lawyers in Pocock's reading of Sir Matthew Hale in Pocock (1972). 198

CONCLUSIONS

ity is intrinsically constituted by the changing flow of time. Law, polemically defined as inherently unchanging and so practically atemporal (though non-eternal, since it did originate with those legendary lawgivers) is presented as manifestly inadequate to deal with the ceaseless flow of dissimilarities which constitute human affairs. To be conclusive, the polemical definition of law must be combined with a stipulation about time: to wit, that the flow of time brings with it dissimilarities rather than similarities. In the Statesman the placid flow of time which, in Pocock's discussions, constitutes the sense of tradition, is entirely absent as an assumption. Instead time is conceived as a succession of particulars, each dissimilar from the next. This Heraclitean image immediately poses the problem of the very intelligibility of particulars to reason. Certainly, elsewhere in Plato, this problem is felt so acutely as to lead to the positing of a realm of eternal universals as the objects of reason. It is all the more striking, then, that the Statesman adumbrates this predicament in the service of neither eternal universals nor even scepticism of particulars, but in order to vindicate a peculiar form of knowledge of particulars in time as the proper domain of political knowledge. Not law, but knowledge of the kairos, is capable of accurately prescribing what is best for each individual (295a!; note again the coupling of the good with the particular) and so is entitled to political authority. By artfully shaping assumptions about law and time, then, the Stranger succeeds in making the ancestral, legendary claims of law look simply absurd. If the crucial facts are that law is immobile while time (and particulars) are incessantly on the move, then recommending the laws for their long tenure or legendary origin is manifestly inadequate to the real temporal task. The claims of the laws are routed not so much by direct attack as by insinuating that the conceptions of social time on which they rest - time as traditional, linking past to present in historical development, and as originating in divine action - are manifestly inadequate to the urgent political problems posed by time as ever-changing. 199

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It is the Stranger, then, who tacitly exposes the link between the traditional conceptions of time and the traditional authority of law. But this is not to say that the link was crystalline to those who relied upon it. When Young Socrates demurs from the Stranger's proffered conclusion that law-abidingness is no criterion of political knowledge or its rule, the source of his discontent is not quite clear. He is clearly unhappy with jettisoning or subordinating fidelity to law even though he does not analyse or advance any sources for law's authority. Yet the thought-experiment brings him to agree in effect that if change is paramount and particularised, the only appropriate mode of relating to it is via knowledge; any virtues of law such as tradition or experience would be totally ineffectual and even destructive. The Stranger's reconceptualisation of time brings with it, even for those schooled in the traditional (historical) authority of law, the unavoidable implication that such authority is inadequate to the tasks posed by the flow of time. That authority must be ceded instead to knowledge - to wit, the temporally adept knowledge of particulars defined as the domain of the statesman - reflects the deep connection between authority and knowledge which pervades the Platonic corpus. (Compare the fact that Machiavelli's move, at a parallel point, was to vindicate the authority not of knowledge but of the wilful if also prudential quality of virtu.) Having once exposed the inadequacy of traditional authority to deal with a temporal context ever in flux, however, the Stranger relents. Though his interlocutor has already been brought to the point of giving up his traditional attachment to law altogether, being unable to defend its authority, the Stranger now acknowledges the limited value of stability in the laws as a bulwark against corruption and adventurism. The Stranger does identify some kind of experiential process (translated by Rowe, pejoratively, as 'experiment'), persuasion, and majority agreement as factors in the establishment of the second-best regimes' laws, even if he does not mean to endorse these as valuable. Notice that persuasion here - 'who has persuaded the public assembly to enact it' - defines a 200

CONCLUSIONS

mode of establishing the source of authority rather than a mode of exercising it. It contrasts with the knowledge of the true statesman rather than with his command. Instead of being figured in the Statesman, as it importantly is in the Laws, as a mode of rule, persuasion is assigned to the rhetors and so made a tool to be controlled by statecraft as the knowledge and command of timing. As a source of authority, persuasion is here portrayed as a kind of imperfect guesswork which is better than nothing but certainly no rival to genuine knowledge. As for experience, nothing in this dialogue contradicts the Gorgias' dismissive contrast between knacks of experience (empeiria kai tribe, G.463b) and genuine knowledge. Still in the spell of the contrast between the quicksilver flow of time and the sluggish, resistant rule of law, this characterisation of experience makes it not the mother of prudence, nor even the poor but respectable relation which it would be to knowledge in the early modern period, but rather an impersonator of limited social and cognitive acceptability. Instead of conceiving of experience as the appropriate, if low-level, mode of cognising particulars in changing time (as Pocock argues was characteristic of the early modern period), the Statesman insists on the absolute contrast between real cognitive achievement (knowledge) and experience as a structural analogue bearing no relation to knowledge even when filling its shoes. In the Statesman, in other words, experience is not the mother of prudence nor even its cousin, but a temporary regent whose rightful claims must be steadfastly denied. Experience is in no way the source of genuine knowledge even though it may occupy an analogous role in guiding action while knowledge is absent. Against the claims of law and the less vocalised claims of experience and tradition, the Statesman is steadfast in vindicating the autonomy and authority of political expertise. The knowledge of the good in time, which makes it possible to determine the particularities of timing, is in this Platonic dialogue the sole basis for genuine political authority. The operation of such authority at one remove, regulating the activities 201

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of the various experts in the city, and facilitating the perception of the timely good by the citizens, demands the ability to understand what is relevantly similar and to distinguish this from what is relevantly different. The capacities for exemplifying and dividing, and for finding the mean, which are exercised in the Stranger's methods of inquiry, are the same capacities on which the political knowledge which it defines will have to rely. Method and politics in the Statesman become one.

202

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217

GENERAL INDEX

There are no entries for 'Eleatic Stranger' or 'statesman', since these are the main protagonist and topic of the work which is discussed throughout. For citations of individual works by ancient authors, see the Index Locorum. Ackrill, J. L. 37 n.52 activity, shared, see pragmateia Adam, John 145 n. 18 Adeimantus 197 Aeschines 167 n.65 Aeschines Socraticus 96 n. 161 Aeschylus 132, 134 aging, reverse (in story) 105 akribeia (accuracy) 129-31 Alcidamas 144 alien 175; see also estrangement Allan, D. J. 14 n.2 Allen, Danielle 60 n.82, 151 n. 31, 160 n.48 angling (angler) 15, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29, 38 n.54, 47, 86, 142 n.9 Annas, Julia 8 n.20, 39 n.56, 124 n.36, 127 n.38, 140 n.7 St. as transitional 4 n . n , 155 n.38, 160 n. 47 on method 68 n.102 on story 99 n.i, 115 n.26 Arcadians 105 n. 10 archein (to rule; to begin) 2, 3, 6, 45, 154, 177-8, 196; see also authority aristocracy 160 Aristophanes, see Index Locorum Aristotle 5, 15, 168 on questions of method 17 n.8, 68 n.102 on division 17 n.9, 25 n.30 on similarity and example 94-7 on kairos 145 on evaluative redescriptions 187-9 arithmetic, art of 140 n.7 armour-making, art of 49, 50, 169 arts, see techne Aspasia 96 Athenaeus 112 Athenians 105

attitudes to law 151, 160, 197 Atreus 101 n.3, 113 authority, of statecraft 2, 11, 147-50, 193 of second-order arts 140, 141, 146 in story 114, 122 autochthony 101 n.3, 105-7, I J 5 autonomy, as theme of story 105, 10810,113 imitation of see imitation axios (value, worth) 25-6 barbarians, versus Greeks 76 Barker, Ernest 4 n.9 Barnes, Jonathan 68 n.102, 188 n.82 Baxter, Timothy M. S. 92 n.153 beasts 113, 179 versus humans 42, 76 beliefs, true 18, 47 n.68, 63-6 in divine bond 174 stability of 63, 70 Benardete, Seth 1 n.2, 1 n.3, 7 n.16, 20 n.18, 29 n.38 Benhabib, Seyla 193 n.92 Bluck, R. S. 14 n.2, 67 n.99 Blumner, H. 165 n.59 Bobonich, Chris 172 n.70 bonds 174, 177 divine 178-80 human 180-2 Brisson, Luc 103 n.6, 103 n.7, 105 n.9, H2n.25 Brock, Roger 166 n.61 Burnyeat, Myles 3 n.8, 7 n.17, 39 n.57, 45 n.65, 68 n.102 Campbell, Blair 151 n.31 Campbell, Lewis 1, 21 n.19, 38 n.53, 66 n.96, 69 n.104, 128, 151 n.31, 198 n.95 218

GENERAL INDEX Carians 105 n.io carding, in St. 30, 51, 55, 173 in Lys. 169-70 Cavini, Walter 18 n . n Charmides 76 Cherniss, Harold 16 n.6, 25 n.30, 38 n.55, 67 n.ioo, 85 n.145 children, in 'example of example' 62, 6670 Cicero 95-6 Classen, Carl 144 n. 14 Cohen, David 151 n.31 Cohen, Marc 18 n . n Cole, Thomas 144 n. 15 collection, method of 14 combination, art of 54-6, 88, 173 conflict, among sophists 160 evaluative 172-6 see also judgment, evaluative Corcyra 184 Cornford, Francis 17 n.9 courage, as part of virtue 171-83 Crombie, I. M. 68 n.101

duskhereia (hard to stomach), defined 161-2 about measurement 74 n.114, 75, 161 about rule without laws 148 n.25, 161 about marriage 161, 181

daimones (minor divinities) 103 n.6, 107 definition, see logos democracy, in Athens 60 n.82 in Rep. 93 n.156 in St., as form of regime 4, 160; in 'thought-experiment' 154-5 Demosthenes 156 n.39 deon, deontos (the appropriate) 100, 125-6, 172, 176-7 diaeresis, see division Dicaearchus 112 n.23 Dies, Auguste 18 n.7, 127 n.37 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 134,

Ferrari, G. R. F. 145 n.16 Fitzmaurice, Andrew 96 n.162 Foley, Helene 166 n.63 Form, eidos as 16-18 paradeigma as 64, 67 n.ioo, 80, 91, 93 Fowler, Harold N. 24 n.29, 66 n.96 Foxhall, Lin 167 n.65 Frede, Michael 8 n.19 Friedlander, Paul 99 n.i, 109 n. 18 Frutiger, Perceval 117 n.28

disgust, see duskhereia dissimilarities, see similarities division, divisions 1-2, 8-9, 14-15, 16— 18, 20-1, 65, 75, 194 Aristotle on 24 n.30, 44 n.64 in So. 14-15, 24-33, I 2 1 in St. 14-15, 33-9, 121, as dichotomous 24 n.30, 38 n.50; as maps 35-6; of second-best regimes 159; of shepherding 24, 40-6, 121; of weaving 48-66, 169; as linked to similarity 85 n.145 see also names, paradeigma Dorter, Kenneth 1 n.i, 7 n.16, 9 n.21, 43 n.63 dreaming, versus waking 61, 70, 97

eidos (look, class) 16, 17, 18 n.15, 24, 32, 37, 38, 47 n.69; see also genos, Forms epagoge (Aristotelian induction) 94 epimelein (caring for), in shepherding 41 in ruling 53, 118 episteme (form of expert knowledge) 5 n.12, 14,23, 34IM9, 55n-78,89 estrangement, Aristotle on 44 n.64 from law 114 of recollection 65 of shepherd-divisions 44, 65 in story 114 from weaving as female art 168 Euclides 7 expertise, forms of, see episteme, techne political, see statecraft

Gallop, David 77 n.i22, 78 n.i26, 78 n.127 genos (kind) 13, 17, 32, 41, 42, 47 n.69 Gill, Christopher 16 n.6, 23 n.27, 44 n.64, 45 n -66, 107 n.17, 151 n.30, 151 n.31, 178 n.76 god, gods 10, 104, n o , 119; see also daimones golden age, see Kronos, age of Goldschmidt, Victor 19 n.i6 Gomme, A. W. 184 n.8o Goodman, Nelson 84 n.141 Gorgias, on the kairos 144 on law and kairos 150, 151-2 Gosling, J. B. 14 n.2 Grene, David 1 n.2, 198 n.96 Griswold, Charles 5 n.12, 7 n.19 Grube, G. M. A. 134 Guillamaud, Patrice 144 n.12 219

GENERAL INDEX Gulley, Norman 18 n.12, 18 n.14, 64 n.90 Gunnell, John 145 n. 17 Guthrie, W. K. C. 105 n.io, 106 n.12, i n n.21, 112 n.23 Hackforth, R. 14 Hale, Sir Matthew 198 n.97 Hansen, M. H. 60 n.82 Harte, Verity 167 n.65 Henderson, Jeffrey G. 164 n.58 Herodotus 167 n.65 Hesiod i n , 132 hikanos (sufficiency), of divisions 26, of examples 61, 62 contrasted with akribeia 129 Hippias 22 n.20 Hippocratics 130 Hobbes, Thomas 11, 184, 189-93 Homer 124, 132 Iliad of 45, 164 Hoyningen-Huene, Paul 83-5, 87 n.147 Hugill, W. I7on.68 Hutson, Lorna 5 n.14 hypothesis, method of 9 n.21 Iamblichus 157 n.42 ideal, political 11, 123, 139, 148, I55n38 images 29 n.40, 62 n.86, 70, 160 imitation, by humans of cosmos 10, 109 in the Laws 116 by second-best of best regime i n , 157-9 two kinds of 109-10, 116, 138 individuation 15, 17, 67 inquiry 9, 18, 39, 69, 89, 97 purposes of 41, 73-5 in So. 21-33 in St. 33-9 Isocrates 105-6, 144^15 Jenkins, I. D. 167 n.64 Jones, A. H. M. 151 n.32 Jones, Mary Hannah 28 n.35, 93 n.154 Jowett, Benjamin 46 n.67, 78 n.124, 146 n.20 judgment, evaluative 174, 175-77, X79 using redescriptions, in Aristotle 187— 9; in Hobbes 189-93; m Rep- ^3~ 5; in St. 186, 189-93; m Thucydides 184-5

justice, in Rep. 141 in St. 179 kairos (the opportune moment) 2, 4-6, 90 n. 150 in definition of statecraft 139, 142-5, 163, 182-99 in measurement 130, 131, of conflict 171-7, 179, 182-3, 185-6, 190; of marriages 182 in Rep. 145-6, 182 in statecraft as weaving 171-7 in story and its criticism 100, 125 temporality of 132-6 Kant, Immanuel 138 kinship, of arts in division 28-9, 50 of qualities and judgments 174 of Socrates and Young Socrates 34 king 9, 159; see also statesman kingly art, see statecraft Kirk, G. S. 124 Klein, Jacob 1 n.3, 7 n.16, 7 n.19 knowledge, political, see statecraft Kronos [and] age of 41 n.59, 101-21, 198 in the Laws n 6-17 Kuhn, Thomas S. 82-5, 87-9 Laks, Andre 138, 147, 157 Lane, Melissa 16 n.5, 178 n.76 law/laws 4, 146-63, 193, 197-201 as mortmain 148, 152-5 as memorandum 148, 152-5 as makeshift 155-63 Lee, E. N. 81 n.133 likeness, Form of 81; see also similarity Lipton, Peter 83 n.139 logos (definition, argument) 13, 14, 21-2, 33-4, 37-9, 66, 71-4, 180 Lear, Jonathan 5 n.13 Lloyd, G. E. R. 127 n.40, 130 Louis, P. 164 n.58 Loraux, Nicole 105 n . n , 106 n.13, 106 n.14, I 5 I Loriaux, R. 25 n.32 Lysistrata 165-71 Machiavelli, Niccolo 5 n.14, 2 0 0 Macleod, Colin 184 n. 79 marriages, in Laws 181-2 in Rep. 145-6 in St. 180-81 Masterman, Margaret 85 n.142

220

GENERAL INDEX McCabe, M. M. i n.3, 8 n.19, 15, 17, 18 n. 13, 32 n.44, 67 n.98, 103 n.7 measurement 52 n.75, 56, 72-5, 101 of evaluative conflict 172, 186 by kairos 132-6, 143-6 mean in Aristotle 187-9 two kinds defined 125-32 see also akribeia, hikanos Meier, Christian 178 n.75 men, 'work of 166 mews (part) 15, 18, 47 method, of division and example 1, 810, 22, 31, 33, 44, 65, 181 in criticism of story 101, 122 in relation to politics 181, 198 see also similarity Miller, Mitchell 1 n.3, 7 n. 16, 49 n.71, 112 n.24, 154 n.37 moderation, virtue of (sophrosune) 5, 171-83 Moravcsik, Julius 18 n. 11, 25 n. 32 Moulton, Carroll 166 n. 61 muthos, see story for muthos in St. myth [in other sources] 2, 9, 99 n.i, 100 n.2, 113-14, 115, 124 names, in So. divisions 13, 21, 24-7, 30, 31-3 in St., shepherd-divisions 34, 37, 38; methodological uses of 42, 75, 92 n.153; weaving-divisions 51-2, 54, 56, 57-8; in criticism of story 118 n.29; in division of regimes 159 Nehamas, Alexander 14 n.2, 34 n.47, 67 n.97 Nicholson, Peter 1 n.3 not-being 30 n.40, 75, 129 Nussbaum, Martha 23 n.26, 127, 130 n.44, 151 n.34 Ober, Josiah 60 n.82, 94 n.157, 151 n.31 O'Brien, Michael 137 n.i oikos (household), versus polis (city) 167-8 oligarchy, versus aristocracy 160 orators, see rhetors Ostwald, Martin 8 n.20, 60 n.83, 78 n.124, 86 n.146, 152 n.35, 156 n.40 Owen, G. E. L. 16 n.6, 45 n.66, 62, 70-4, 107^17

as 'small' (minor) 22, 46 in So. 21-3, 27, 30-1, 33 in St., absence of 39-40, 'example of example' 61-2, 66, 69-70; shepherd as failed 44-6; similarity and 85-6; story as failed 101, 119-24; weaving, see weaving other Platonic uses of 79, 80, 90-3 paradigm, in Kuhn 82, 83-5, 87-9 passages, 'prescriptive' 14-15 Parmenides 80-1 Patterson, Cynthia 180 n.78 Pellegrin, Pierre 17 n. 8 Pembroke, S. G. 99 n.i persuasion 201; see also rhetors philosopher/philosophers, in Rep., as rulers 3, 93, 137, 146, 14950, 168 in So., science of 14 in St., as part of trio 6-8, 13, 37, 65 n.94; philosophy, in story n o n.20, 131 n.46 phronesis (practical wisdom) 5 n.2, 149 n.27 picturing 71-5 Pindar 134 Plato 1, 4, 8, 16, 68, 135, 155 n.38, 164 Pocock, J. G. A. 193-4, l9% n.97, 2 0 1 Polemarchus 141 politics, as linked to method 2, 9, 44, 101, 122 and similarity 181, 198 Polybius 178 n.74 Popper, Sir Karl 5, 6 n. 15 possibility 138-9, 157-8, 163 practice 20, 22, 71, 73-4 praise, and blame, see judgment, evaluative pragmateia (activity, business) 46-7 prejudices 76, 121, 171-7 Prior, W. J. 81 n.i33 Proclus 80 prophecy 6 Protagoras 76-8, 90 Protarchus 79-80, 92 provisionality 36, 38-9, 42, 137; see also names, sufficiency, teleology Pythagoreans 157 n.42 Quintilian 193 n.92 Race, William 133-4 realism, ontological 18, 35, 83, 88 n.149

paradeigma (example), method of 8-10, 13-16, 19-21, 138, 194

221

GENERAL INDEX reason, practical, see phronesis recollection 64, 67 redescription, see judgment, evaluative regimes, 'second-best' 155-63 resemblance/s, see similarity rhetoric/rhetors 2, 9, 19, 20, 89-90 and example 93-7 and kairos 135-6, 142, 185, 195 as rival to statecraft 60, 201 Richardson, William Frank 127 n.39 rival arts, see techne Rijk, L. M. De 17 n.io Robinson, Richard 66 n.95, 68-9 Rodrigo, Pierre 134 n.52, 134 n. 53 Rogers, Benjamin Bickley 166 n.62 Rose, Lynn E. 17 n.9 Rosen, Stanley 1 n.3, 2 n.4, 5 n.12, 46 n.67, 75 n.115, 82 n.138, 109 n.19 Rosenstock, Bruce 105 n. 11 rotation, of cosmos 102 Rowe, Christopher 1 n.3, 3 n.7, 8 n.20, 23 n.24, 23 n.27, 24 n.29, 28 n.36, 42 n.62, 44 n.64, 46 n.67, 49 n-72> 50 n.73, 52 n.74, 60 n.82, 103 n.6, 103 n. 7, 104 n.8, 105 n.9, 156-7, 158 n.44, 163 n.54, 174 n.73, 200 rule, rulers, see archein Runciman, W. G. 82 n.136 Ryle, Gilbert 1 n.2 sameness, versus difference 67 saphes (clarity) 36, 37 n.50, 52 Saxonhouse, Arlene 105 n. 11, 106 n. 13 Sayre, Kenneth 18 n.12, 37 n.51 science, philosophy of 9, 76; see also Kuhn, Thomas Scheid, John 164 n.56, 167 n.65, 173 n.72 Schofield, Malcolm 81, 161-2 Schuhl, Pierre-Maxime 103 n. 5 Scott, Dominic 64-5, 76 n.116, 167 n.65 Sedley, David 23 n.23, 100 n.2, 115 n.26, 141 n.8, 178 n.76 'second-best', see regimes separation, art of 54-6, 88 shepherd/shepherding, in defining statecraft 9, 16 n.6, 40-6, 48, 53 as failed example for statecraft 68, 86, 121 divine versus human 16, 58, 107 n. 17 Sheridan, Alan 151 n.33 Skemp, J. B. 2 n.5, 8 n.20, 35-6, 46 n.67, 49 n.72, 52 n.74, X56 n.40

Skinner, Quentin 5 n.14, 189 n.84, 189 n.86, 191 n.90 similarities, in division and example 1819, 34, 50, 75-6, 97 in method and politics 198 in various Platonic works 76-83 in science and rhetoric 83-9, 89-90, 95-6 dissimilarities and change 149, 150, and marriage 181 Socrates, in Rep. 141, 183 in So. 6, 13, 21, 36, 37 in other dialogues 7, 14, 80 n.130 and examples 19-20, 89, 97 and similarity 76-82, 84, 97 Socrates, Young 34, 55 n.77, 69, 80 n.130, 104 n.8 mistakes in inquiry of 41-2, 58, 61, 125 attachment to law of 14, 151, 155-6, 197 Sommerstein, Alan 166 n.6o sophist/sophistry, as part of trio 6, 8, 13, 37,65 definition of, in So. 20, 21-4, 26 n.33, 28, 49; and not-being 75, 129 democratic, in Rep. 183-5 as rival to statesman 140, 142, 160, 196 see also names, images soul 31, 70 spelling 62, 70 Sophocles 132 n.49 Speusippus 86 n.145 Sprague, Rosamond Kent 7 n.19, 137 n.i squeamishness, see duskhereia statecraft definition of 2-3, 5-6, 10-11, 43, 160, 162, 201-2 and example 62, 71 and law 148-61, 193, 198-201 and measurement 129, 135-6, 142, 194-6 as political weaving 173-4 Stenzel, Julius 14 n.2 Stokes, Michael 79 n.128 stomach, inability to, see duskhereia story, in St., content of 101-11 criticism of 99-101, 117-25 dissimilarity in 150 n.28 form of 111-17 role in dialogue 39, 44, 46, 61 n.84, 75 role of gods in 10, 23 n.26

222

GENERAL INDEX translating muthos 9, 99 n. 1 Stranger from Athens ('Athenian Stranger') 115 Svenbro, Jesper 164 n.56, 167 n.65, 17311.72 Symposium Platonicum, Third International 1 n.3, 9 n.22 Taylor, A. E. 1 n.4, 2 n.6, 17 n.8, 77 n.122, 78 n.125, 78 n.127 teacher, in method of example 66, 68-9 techne/technai (forms of expertise), and episteme 5 n.12, 34 n.49 as subject of divisions 2-4, 14-16, 2 3 9, 34-5, 89 in story 108, n o , 119, 131 n.46 and measurement 128, 130-31 and law 153-7 varieties of, contributory (sunaitia) 47, 54, 56, 60, 139, cooperative (aitiai) 47~9> 54> 57> 59~6o, 140; kindred (sunerga) 49-51; political (politike techne) see statecraft; rivals to weaving 48-9, 51, 140, 165; rivals to statecraft 48-9, 99, 117, 140, 196 teleos (complete, completeness) 58, 99 telosj teleology, of inquiry 32, 36, 39, 43, 86, 137 in Phd. 101 see also provisionality temperament 174-80, 182, 183, 185 temperance, see moderation therapeuein (tending) 52-3, 118; see also epimelein Thompson, Wesley 167 n.65 'thought-experiment' 154, 155-7 Timaeus 81, 144 time/timing, in definition of statecraft 60, 135-6, 142-6, 163, 196 and politics 3, 194, 198 in story 102 see also kairos Theaetetus 7, 23, 30-1, 34, 42, 89 Theodorus 6, 7, 89

Thrasymachus 45, 76, 90 Thucydides 170 n.69, 184-5 Thyestes 101 n.3 Tordesillas, Alonso 134 n.52, 134 n.53 Tuck, Richard 191 n.91 tyrant 4, 58, 118, 159 unity, simple 170-1 complex 171-3 Vallozza, M 144 n. 15 value, see axios Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 106 n. 14, 112-13, 116 n.27 virtu 5, 200 virtue, virtues 16, 19, 188-9 in Prt. 78, 90 parts of, in St. 171-7, 179-90 Vlastos, Gregory 22 n.22, 77 n. 121, 77 n.122, 77 n.123, 78 n.124 Waterfield, Robin 8 n.20, 41 n.6o, 49 n.72 weaving, in Athenian culture 28, 164-5 of definitions 26 n.33, 38-9, 92 n.153 as example for statecraft 10, 15, 30 n.42, 62, 139; defence of 62, 72, 74-5; definition of 46-61, 142 n.9 statecraft as variety of, in Lys. 16471; in St. 163, 167-71, 171-4, 177-82 Wedin, Michael B. 14 n. 2 Weiss, Roslyn 53 n.76 Wilson, John 184 n. 79 Wilson, John R. 134 wisdom, virtue of 179-80 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 83-4 women, 'work o f 165-6 Xenophon 96 Xenophon, wife of 96 Zeus [and] age of 101-4, 107-9, 178

223

I1

3~I1,

INDEX LOCORUM

References made to works as a whole are listed opposite their names, with the exception of the Statesman, for which line number references only are given. Rhetoric

AESCHYLUS

Suppliants 445

94 n.i58 132

ARISTOPHANES

CICERO

Acharnians 517-19 Birds 831 Clouds 398 1070 Knights 1304 Lysistrata 490 535-87 1160 Peace 394 Plutus

De Inventione 1-51 Topica x.41-42

170 n.68 169 n.67

DEMOSTHENES

170 n.68

DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS

170 n.69 112 n.22

146^19 iO7n.i6

156 n. 39

10.3 ( = D K B I 3 )

144^13

HOMER

Iliad 8.83-4, 326 3.212 7.324

132 164 164

IAMBLICHUS

Vita Pythagorae 175 [KRS 457 = DK 58D3]

157 n.42

ISOCRATES

Panegyricus

Nicomachean Ethics

I34oa29-bio Posterior Analytics 91028-31 Prior Analytics 1.31

Against Timarchus xxiv.76 Rhetoric

170 n.69 164-71 170 n.68

Ath.Pol [Constitution of Athens] 16.7 H2n.23 [Fragmenta Selecta] 107 n.i6 Metaphysics

no8b25 H09bi6 H47a2i-22 De Phil. Politics

96 n.i60

112 n.22 112 n.22

ARISTOTLE

985b22-86ai iO74bio

96 n.i60

188 188 39 n.57 107 n.i6 151 n.34 44 124^35 17 n.9

24 124

105-6 105-6

PLATO

Apology 23bi Charmides 16563-5 16607-9 i66e5~72a9 I74bio-75a8 Cratylus 387e-88c 224

2, I54n.37 92

76n.n8

76 n.118 137 n.i 137 n.i 88 92

INDEX LOCORUM 388aio-c7 Critias Crito Euthydemus 282d5 288-92 Euthyphro 6e Gorgias 452e 463b 46502-3 52ie6-22a4 525b3, 03, 07, d2 Hippias Major 288di-3 29^3-4 Hippias Minor 368C4 Ion 540c Laches i87a7 Laws 687a5 7ood-7oia 7O2b7-8 7O9b-d 7i3a9-7i4a2 762c 773a-d 823d-24a Menexenus 237b2ff. Meno 77bi 79a 10 97d8-9 Parmenides I32aff. i32di-4 i32d7-33a4 146-7 I47b-48c Phaedrus 228e3-29a2 265d-66b 265c Phaedo

9211.153 16 n.6, 45 n.66, 105 n . n , 107, 109 n.18, 116 n.27 2

92 2-3

91 n.151 19, 115 136 201

27

162 n.52

79e3 82bi-3 87b 97b6 Philebus I2c-i4a I2d7-i3di 1308 i6b-i8e Protagoras 32907^9 33idi-e4 322-3 Republic

22 n.22 179 n.77 167 n.65 22 n.22 1, 16, 161-2

332d-33d 333e-34a 337C2 343b 345a-47a 369d 4O9c-d 423d8-e2 42561-4 43002-3 459eff. 472d 473bi, b9 484c-d 48408 5ooe 54oa9 546d2 557ei 559d-e 56oc-e 56ie6 6i7d5 6i8ai [Seventh Letter] 342c-d Sophist

141

92

22 n.20 22 n.20 167 167 92 2, 4, 11, 16, 45 n.66, 105 n.n, 137, 138, 147 132

124^35 145 n.16 137 n.2

116 60

181-d 28 n.35 105 n.n 106 n.13 64-6, 76 n. 116 92 92

I74n.73 7 n.16, 16, 91 81 80 81

82 n.136 80 n.132 1, 115, 152 I45n.i6 14 18 n.15 16-17, 64-6, 76 n.116, 100 n.2

19

79 92 n. 152 14

109 n.18 77-8 19, 78-9, 9i no 2, 3, 5-6, 9 n.21, 16-17, 19, 64-6, 76 n.116, 115, 124-5, 137, 138-9 140 n.7, 146 n.21, 147, 157, 163 n.55: 168, 182-6, 197 141 n.8 76 n.117 90

45 167 n.65 93 149 149 174^73, 170 n.77 I45n.i8 93n.i56 I57IM3 93 93I1-I56 93H.I56 93 145 93n.i55 183 183 93n.i55 93n.i55 93n.i55 64 n.89 1, 6-9, 16-21, 21-33, 34-7, 40, 43, 46, 48, 55 n.78 60-61, 65, 67, 69, 80 n.30, 89, 121, 123

216a 2i7a3 225

7 24 n.28

INDEX LOCORUM Sophist (cont.) 2i7a,b,c 2i8b7 218CI-5 218C7 2i8c7-d2 2i8di 218 d4~5 2i8d8-i9a2 2i8e2~3 2i8e4 ~7, e2 22ia4 22lb-C 22ld 22id2-e3 22id8-9 222a2-3 222a2ff. 223c6ff. 22461-4 225C2-4 225C9 226b2 226b2-I0 226CI 226CI-8 226C5-6 227CI-5 229C8-9, 11-12 23ia6-8 24003-4^3

266aff. 268C5-6 268c8-d4 268c-d

Statesman 13 24 n.28 21

258C2 258C3-8 258c8-d2 258C9-10

24 n.28 61 22

73 22 47, 122 24 n.28 24 29 n.39 42 2 5 n.3i 26 38 n.54 27 28 49 n.72 29 29 29 25 29 29 29 29 25^31 26 29 n.40 30 30 30 30,55 25 31,42 2 5 n.3i 25 19 82 29 129 129 14 14 67 n.97 82 n.136 160 n.49 32 26 n.33, 39 n.57 28 n.34 38 n.54

258d8-e2 25864-5 259cio-di 25965-6 25969 26oa6 26oa9-bi 26oe3-6 26oe6-6iai 26ian-b2 26ie4, 65-7 262ai-2

262cio-d6 265a 266a5-c6 266e

267CI-3 267c8-di 267c1-68c10 268a2 268c-d 268C2-3 268d5-e2 268d9

269c 1 27OCI2-dl

226

34 n.47 34 35, 121 n.32 34 n.48 37 69 n.103 34 n.48 140 140 140 140 168 75, MO 140 141 141 75 141 35 76 47 n.69 34 n.48 18 47 n.69 42 76 39 n.55 86 39 n.55 38 n.54 39 39,99 43 39,99 99 43 53 38 n.54 48 48 99 113 101, 114, 120 n.31 103 n.5 102 102 103 n.5 107

INDEX LOCORUM 27od4~5 27oe 27ia-b 27103-4 27104-7 27id6 27^4 27^5 27167, e8 272a6 272b 1-d2 272b2~3 27201 272d8-e3 272e-73e 273b

2 7 8b 3 278C3-6 27805-6 278c8ff. 278di-3 278d3-6 278d8-ei 27865-6, e7-io 279a7-bi 279a8 279bi—5 279^7~8 27907 279c-8oe 28oa4-6 28oa8-b3 280b 1 28ob4 28ob6-9 280c1-e4 28oe6 28oe6-8iaio 28ia3-6 28ia8-io 28iai2-bi 28ib3-6 28ib7-io 28ic7-d3 28ld2 28idio 28idn 28iei-n 282ai-4 282a6-9 282bi-7 282b9-c4 282d4~5 283a3, a5 283b7__ci 283d7-9 28363-6 284a2 284a5~bi 284a8-b2 284b7-c3 284CI-3 284di-3 284d6-85a2 28463-5 28467 28405-8 285a-b 285d-86b

105 105

105, 106 n.15 104 n.8 34 n.48 107 n.17 115

107 n.17, X I 6 107 n.17 107 n.17 n o n . 2 0 , 113, 131 n.46 104 n.8 131 n.46 105 n.9 103

no

82, 150 n.28 273d 1—74ai 274a2—bi 2 74 a 5 2 74^5 274C7-di 274d3~4 2 74^7 274eio-75ai 275a2-4 2 75 a 5

108 108 109

275d4~6 275d5-ei3 275d8-e3 2 75ei 2 7 5 e3-8 276011-65 276d5-ei4 277ai 277a6-bi 277bi-c3 2 77 b 3~5 277b4~7 277b-78e 277bi-6 2 77 b 4 277CI-3 27703-6 277di-4 277d3~6 277d7 277d9~io 277e6-78a3 278a8-ci 278a9

57, n 8

107 n.17 119

no 102

118 118

37 n.50 57 58 53 57

57, u 8 124 118

58, 100 100, 125 126 120 100

67 n.ioo 10

61 n.84, 62,63

I22

>

I2

3

62 61

70-71 63,70 62 62

66,67 47 n.68, 63

227

47 n.68, 63 69, 120 64, 119, 178 n.73 70

70 n.106 70 n.106 63 62

47, 1 2 2 61,74 47 n.69 47 n.69 50 169

49 49 51

50 50 50

37 n.50 173

5i,55 51 51

5i, 54 52 52 37 n.50, 54 47 54 54 54 54 54 55 55 47 n.69 72, 126 126 125 128 128 126 129 128 129 143 127 172 131 14

16 n.6, 62, 70, 71

INDEX LOCORUM

Statesman (cont.) 285d8-9 285d9-86a4 28502-4 286a2-4 286a4~7 286a7-b2 28607-10 286CI 286d4-87a7 287a7-b2 28704-8 287C2-5 288b4-8 288C4 289ai-2, 3 289a9~b2 289C4 289c-d 29ia8-b3 29ib-c 29id-92a 292e~93a 293a6—b4 293a9~C3 29366-7

74 73

2QASL2

148, 161

2Q4a6—8 294aio-b6 294a-95a 2O4b2—6 294b8—C4 294CI 294d—e 295a2 295a9~-b2 295b—d 296c-d 296e4~97a2 297dio-e5 29763, e4 298b2 298c-e 299b 299C4-6

149 149

300b1-6 3ood6 3ooei 3ooeii~3oia3 3Oia7 301CI 3Oic6-d4

3Oid4-6 3Oiei 3O2a2-b2 3O2d7~3O3e2 3O2e6 3O3a-b 303D9-C5 30404-62 30469-11 3O5cio-d4 3O5b4-7 3O5d2~4 30562-4 3O5e8-io 30606-10 3o6e9-io 307b! 3O7b2

73,74

73 73 73

75, 161

75 75 56 57

25 n.30, 59

59 59 n.8o 59 n.8o 59 59

3O7b5

140

183 148 148 148 148 162 n.52

148

199 152 153, 154 162 n.52

153 156 155

162 n.53

154 154 158 156 156

20ieiff.

2O7d 2iod Timaeus

in

157 160

29b-c 38b3-4

159

161, 162

228

160 160 135, 142

143

142 143 n.20 135, 196 53,142^9,164,177

164 171, 172 n.70

175 171

175 171

179

Theaetetus I43a-c

157 n.43

159

3o8a6 3o8b2-8 3O9a9-io 3O9b7 30905-8 3O9dio-e3 30905-8 3ioa3 3iob2-3 310C4-7 310C7 3iodi 3iod6 3iiai-c6

150 152, 153 152

160

175

3o8d

198

139 157

3O7b9~c2 307c1-2 307C2-5 3O7d2~5 3O7d7 3O7ei-3o8d9

308C5

151 n.34

161, 162

171 172 172, 174

176 172, 176 172 n.70, 176 172 n.70

173 143 n.io

174 174, 178

179 179 180

174 181 161 181 182

178 16, 19

7 34 n.48

70 n.105

67 n.97 7

16 n.6, 45 n.66, 91, 93 n.156, 107, 109 n.18, 138-9, 157, 163^55

138 145

INDEX LOCORUM POLYBIUS

The Histories vi.9.2-3

1288

178 n.74

Electra 31

THUCYDIDES

Peloponnesian War 8.4 3.82.4

SOPHOCLES

133

132

229

170

184-5