Socrates and the Sophists by Plato

Author:Plato
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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11 The Athenian aristocracy commonly used the phrase kalos kai agathos for someone with the bearing and manners of a proper gentleman. Socrates, a bit further on, will contrast Axiochus’s son (Cleinias) with his lover Ctesippus in this respect.

12 Socrates almost always uses the dual number for the two brothers, instead of the plural. The translation uses the word “pair” and singular pronouns and verbs to capture the odd overemphatic effect of this usage. In this speech, for instance, the pair of brothers is several times referred to as “it,” since a dual entity is neither a “they” nor a “he.”

13 This is referred to in Plato’s Apology (31D) and Phaedrus (242B-C) as “a sort of voice” that held him back from actions that would have been to his detriment.

14 Socrates uses the word hubristês. Hubris ranges in meaning from insolent disdain to violent cruelty. Its use here is clearly at the milder end of the range, but just as clearly clashes with the conventional phrase for gentlemanliness. Later in the dialogue, Ctesippus will display the kind of feisty rudeness another tradition might call chutzpah.

15 This is the phrase used for proper gentlemen, used above by Crito for Cleinias’s looks and by Socrates for Ctesippus’s nature.

16 The Carians were the first mercenary soldiers, and Carian slaves were cheap, in plentiful supply, and regarded as expendable. The reference to Medea just below is to a trick she played on the daughters of Pelias, getting them to cut their father up and boil him as a way of restoring him to youth.

17 A satyr skinned by Apollo after challenging him to a musical competition, his piping against Apollo’s harping, and losing.

18 Literally “such a Cronos,” the god who once ruled the universe but was overthrown by Zeus and the rest of the new gods.

19 The sentence is construed with the “not” inserted by an earlier editor, and keeping the five words cut out by Burnet.

20 One reason why Socrates speaks of these men in the dual so often may be found this speech. When each of a pair of contradictory assumptions has consequences, the tag-team style of the men allows the two of them together to have it both ways. But the argument itself does not move anywhere, since no one takes responsibility for making a choice; the topic just spins in one place, as in the dance metaphor in 276D.

21 A shape-shifting sea god described in the Odyssey (IV, 384-424) who eventually gave truthful answers to Menelaus’s questions, but only after he’d held him still until he stopped his shifting.

22 The art of dialectic is described by Socrates in the divided-line passage at the end of Bk. VI of Plato’s Republic as philosophic reasoning that can suspend and look behind its own assumptions, unlike mathematical reasoning that is always bound by hypotheses. The word dialektikê might also have been used by others for the sort of logic-chopping games played by debaters, which would account for the following qualification. This digression on

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