5 The Gorgias

All shine in that and eager pursue it­
Giving the better part of the day thereto–
In which they find themselves most excellent.
(Euripides, Antiope, fr. 20)

Dark gloom awaits the reader of the Gorgias. Somberly prophetic admonitions advise Socrates to change his way of life or face trial and capital charges. The dialogue has been seen by very fine readers of Plato as a battleground between dialectic and rhetoric, where Socrates takes on increasingly clever and dangerous opponents and overwhelms them all, proving thereby that rhetoric, for all its ability to persuade the masses, is hollow at the core and unable to confront the power of dialectic intelligently.^[1] This interpretation, though appealing, does not, I think, do justice to the dialogue.

As we stand back from the dialogue and view it as a play, what we observe is something else, though perhaps not entirely incompatible with the aforementioned interpretation. What we see is a drama that starts out brightly and gaily. Callicles, a model of wit and charm, greets Socrates in a most friendly fashion. Socrates has arrived late to a display by the world-renowned professor of rhetoric, Gorgias of Leontini. No matter, says the amicable Callicles, he would be delighted to ask his friend Gorgias for a display especially for Socrates’ benefit. Here, in the introductory framework, we see Callicles as a man very eager to share his guest with Socrates and most willing to go to great lengths to accommodate him. What a change he undergoes! By the end of the Gorgias Callicles has become an angry, sullen, belligerent man. What, we need to ask, has transformed him? Why have Socrates’ conversations with Gorgias, Polus, and most especially with Callicles transformed this charming man into one who asserts principles incom­patible with civilized life?^[2]

Again, the dialogue is said to concern itself with politics and the nature of the true politician. It appears from the dialectical arguments that the truest politician is the one who can make his fellow citizens better, that is, more virtuous. But it also is agreed that no historical politician, even the most famous and illustrious of them, has ever been able to make any of his citizens better, for, unconcerned about the virtue of citizens, the politician was interested only in power. At one point (521D-E), Socrates says that he is the only one who practices the true political art. Yet, if we look at the drama of the dialogue, what do we see? We see not the improvement of a single citizen, but just the opposite! We see Callicles actually transformed through his encounter with Socrates into a less virtuous person! Nor indeed do we see Socrates’ arguments as entirely sensible or practical for this world; nor, finally, do we see Socrates always arguing fairly.

The Gorgias, I think, falls into that class of dialogues in which extreme positions are presented so that they may be rejected by the audience.^[3] Gorgias and Polus represent the extreme of those rhetori­cians who care not for the meaning but wholly for the form of what they say. They represent the position of Gorgias in his Encomium on Helen (13), when he says that a speech delights and persuades an audience by the brilliance of its composition, not by its accuracy. Callicles represents the extreme position of one who cares only for the utility of rhetoric, for the power it can get one. He represents the man who is concerned not with abstract reflection or contemplation but with the life of action. Socrates too represents an extreme view: his care is only for the world of the soul, for goodness and virtue ab­ stracted from life, for the cloistered and isolated world of contemplationtion. He may very well win the philosophical debate, but what is that victory worth if it actually makes his fellow citizens worse and makes them despise philosophy?

In the Gorgias we see the rejection of extremes. Socrates’ argu­ments, seductive and appealing, are not suitable for the world of active living. Politicians simply could not run a state by allowing criminals to go free so that they would receive punishment in the continued corruption of their souls. The positions of Callicles and the rhetoricians are not acceptable either, for they make no attempt to improve the moral health of the citizenry. Once again we are to look to the mean for the solution to the problem posed by extremes, to a life of philosophy somehow infused with politics or a political life somehow infused with philosophy. The way of the rhetorical schools (and perhaps the target is Plato’s rival Isocrates) is to be rejected; so too the old way of Socrates. Perhaps, too, the Gorgias is an advertisement for the Academy, where such an education could take place.^[4]

I have used Callicles’ quotation from the Antiope of Euripides to introduce this chapter. This lost play included a scene in which Antiope’s sons Zethus and Amphion represent the differing values of the contemplative and practical lives. In the end of that play, the god Hermes predicted that Amphion’ s music would build the walls of Thebes. Thus, by the intervention of a god, the musical, the contem­plative life prevailed.^[5] But, of course, in the lives of us nonmythological people, the gods don’t generally intervene.

Let us consider the Gorgias to be Plato’s Antiope, a dialogue about the philosophical and contemplative lives, ultimately rejecting extreme forms of both. Attention to the value of the contemplative and practical lives was long-lasting in Greek life. It begins perhaps in Phoenix’s statement of the Homeric educational ideal, when Achilles’ tutor says he was charged with making Achilles into “a speaker of words and a doer of deeds,” in other words, into a man combining both types of life. It lived in the Antiope of Euripides and is a major issue in Aristotle’s Ethics. For rhetoricians, it seemed to suffice to be a speaker of words in the lowest sense, where words are separated from their meaning; for Socrates, it seemed to have been enough to contemplate only the meanings; for men like Callicles, a life of deeds alone seems to have been the goal. Plato, I think, enters into the tradition of debate on the issue, and in the Gorgias advocates the Apolline way—meden agan—nothing too much.

The Gorgias is a play in three acts and a prologue and epilogue. ^[6] For the most part, the characters are familiar. In addition to Socrates, we see Socrates’ old admirer Chaerephon, the companion who we learn in the Apology went to the Delphic Oracle to ask whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. It is not essential that we recall this piece of information, though recalling it enables us to place Chaerephon in the class of zealous Socratic admirers. Gorgias of Leontini is the famous Sicilian rhetorician and teacher of rhetoric whose style is noted for its verbal dexterity. Although it seems to modems contrived and artificial, it had a large influence on his contemporaries.^[7] Polus is an enthusiastic student of Gorgias, a Gorgian counterpart to Chaerephon. Socrates refers (462B) to a handbook on rhetoric that Polus wrote, so it is clear that he is more than a mere dilettante of the subject. Callicles, the most interesting of Socrates’ interlocutors, is known only from this dialogue.^[8] After lengthy arguments, the dialogue ends with a myth about the afterlife of the soul. The myth recapitulates Socrates’ posi­tion while at the same time showing some of its inherent difficulties.

The hint that Callicles and Socrates will represent polar extremes comes in the first two speeches of the dialogue. Callicles jokes that Socrates has arrived as one should to a battle—late. Socrates responds by asking whether he has arrived at the end of a feast. Feast and battle-these are the differing ways each refers to Gorgias’s display. Yet despite this joking clash of wits, a real affection is shown by Callicles towards Socrates. He will take Socrates home so that Gorgias can give him a special exhibition. When Socrates says he wants conversation with Gorgias, not an exhibition, Callicles suggests that Socrates simply make the request.

The scene shifts to Callicles’ house. Here Plato characterizes Gor­gias and his student Polus amusingly, as Gorgias, willing to answer any question about anything, claims not to have heard a new question in many years, and as Polus shows his impetuosity in interrupting so that he can answer in Gorgias’s place. In misunderstanding the kind of question that Chaerephon has asked him, Polus does a nice imitation of Gorgias’s style, a better imitation of his master than Chaerephon’s imitation of Socratic questioning. (Can Plato be showing that it is easy to imitate rhetorical eccentricity but hard or impossible to imitate Socratic argument?) The difficulty Chaerephon and Socrates have in eliciting the proper kind of answer to the question of the nature of the work that Gorgias does is meant to show how philosophically naive Gorgias’s sort of rhetoric is. It is able to bedazzle the multitudes, but it cannot answer even the simplest question in a straightforward way. Like so many of Socrates’ interlocutors, neither Gorgias nor Polus understands the difference between a description of a quality and a definition.

It is not my purpose here to offer a recapitulation of the arguments of the dialogue, for which I refer the reader to the many excellent discussions of them.^[9] Instead, I shall endeavor to show the dramatic purpose of each scene in the context of the whole play.

Gorgias explains his art as the art of persuasion and claims to be able to teach men how to persuade others. Socrates (453C) objects that all teachers persuade, but all teachers do not claim to be rhetoricians. Gorgias admits that his teaching has to do with public persuasion, persuading in courts or other assemblies. When Socrates distinguishes between the persuasion that leads to belief and that which leads to knowledge, Gorgias candidly admits that his persuasion leads to belief.

This introduces the familiar Socratic argument that knowledge is superior to belief and that experts, those who have knowledge, will give better advice than those who don’t have knowledge. Here Gorgias praises the power of his craft, for he observes that it is politicians who, even though they do not possess expert knowledge, make the impor­tant decisions in a state. His art of persuasion is not guilty if the tool of persuasion is misused.^[10]

Socrates questions Gorgias’s consistency and politely asks whether he wishes to be questioned further. Gorgias worries that perhaps the audience might wish to do something else. Chaerephon and Callicles insist that the conversation continue. Once again we see Callicles in a good light.

When the conversation resumes, Gorgias praises the rhetorician as more convincing about medicine than a doctor, and he does not object at all to Socrates’ addition that such superiority is shown only before a crowd. Finally, Socrates lays his final trap for Gorgias: having already said that rhetoric could be misused, Gorgias claims that rhetoricians can teach justice. But he is led to agree that the man who knows what justice is is just, and if just, will act justly and not misuse the art of rhetoric. Thus he is caught in an inconsistency. Of course, there have been defects in Socrates’ argument, especially in the claim that as a man who has learned music is a musician, so a man who has learned justice is a just man. It is, after all, possible even for an expert in music to play a wrong note or to play an instrument badly. Is it really so that a man who knows justice will never act unjustly? The question of whether knowing the good compels performing the good is not addressed in this dialogue. Although we in the audience may see such loopholes in Socrates’ argument, Gorgias does not. Perhaps this is part of Plato’s point, and he is noting the failure of the rhetorical schools to sharpen minds.

At this point the impetuous Polus enters the fray. He is indignant that Socrates would make so great a fuss over so small an inconsis­tency, and he accuses Socrates of bad taste. Gorgias withdraws from the argument and Polus takes his place.

If Gorgias was forced to admit an inconsistency in his position, poor Polus will be driven to renounce his altogether. Attempting to be the questioner, his questions lead Socrates to assert that rhetoric is akin to cookery and a mere semblance of the art of politics (464E). Now let us imagine ourselves at the performance of this drama. Socrates, in the presence of a world famous teacher of rhetoric and his devoted student, has compared what they believed to be the supreme art, the embodiment of political activity, to the low occupation of cook, which Socrates does not even call an art but a knack.^[11] Not content with the shock that such a statement must make, Socrates insults Polus for failing to remember that Socrates had called rhetoric “a part of flattery” (466A).

Polus asks whether rhetoricians are not the most powerful in their cities (466B), and here Socrates begins the argument that will dominate the rest of the dialogue. He claims that they have no power, in fact, that they are the least powerful in their states. Throughout the argu­ment, Polus continually interjects his incredulity at the argument. He cannot believe how Archelaus or the King of Persia, since they can kill anyone they want with impunity, are not happy. But Socrates shows that all men aim at the good, that the good for men is happiness, that happiness is goodness of the soul, and that the man who thinks he can be happy by vice, not knowing where to aim, will never achieve the happiness he wants because he does not know what it is.^[12] As if these arguments were not startling enough for Polus, Socrates argues further that punishment actually improves the soul and that the tyrant is the most unhappy and miserable of men because he is the least likely to be punished and have his soul improved thereby. Polus objects to these arguments as “preposterous” (473A) and claims (473E) that Socrates’ views are rejected by the very fact that no one will believe them. Socrates, however, says that he does not care about the views of the multitude; he will be happy to persuade only Polus. A short while later he has (479E), and Polus is ready to agree that Archelaus is the more miserable to the degree that his crimes go unpunished. In the end, when Socrates concludes that if rhetoric has any use at all, it is to persuade oneself and one’s friends and kin to accuse themselves and seek punishment (481D), all Polus can do is meekly agree. Yes, he says, though the conclusions are fantastic, they are consistent. At least, the audience says to itself, Polus will not be guilty of inconsis­tency.

But Socrates is not content even there. He pushes the argument still further: one must see to it that oneself and one’s kin are punished for wrongdoing but that one’s enemies escape all punishment. If an enemy has done the robbing, rhetoric must be used to see that he does not return the money but squanders it; and if he commits horrendous crimes worthy of death, he must live as long as possible-without punishment-so as to wallow in his wickedness.^[13]

These views do certainly seem consistent with the argument, the audience will say to itself. But can Socrates be serious? Would he really want to allow criminals to go free? Surely, we must think, if these are the views to which philosophy leads us, do we want to be led by philosophy?

It is precisely at this point that Callicles—who represents the practical man—enters the scene. We should recall that Polus had entered to defend Gorgias when he had proved inconsistent. Callicles enters when Polus has completely reversed his position. Are we to assume that Callicles’ greater forbearance has finally burst? Callicles, like the readers of the dialogue in wondering whether Socrates is serious or joking, asks Chaerephon. Chaerephon thinks Socrates to be quite serious, but echoing Socrates early on in the dialogue, urges Callicles to ask Socrates himself. “If you are serious,” says Callicles, “human life is upside down and the opposite of the way it should be.” He asks Socrates whether he is joking.

Here Socrates launches into a rather long speech in which he says that he and Callicles each have two loves: he himself loves Alcibiades and philosophy, Callicles loves the Athenian demos and a man named Demos. He adds that philosophy makes him constant in his views, whereas Callicles’ love of the Athenian demos makes him fickle in his. Now why should Plato’s character Socrates mention Alcibiades at just this point? Plato’s audience will surely be familiar with the char­ acter. Are we to see in him a man who escaped punishment, wallowed in his own wickedness, and ended badly? This history surely lingers in our minds; but also important, surely, is the reminder of Alcibiades’ relationship to Socrates. Mentioning the most notorious personage of the late Peloponnesian War must cause the same emotional reactions in Plato’s audience of a generation later that the mentioning of World War II’s notorious personages causes in us. Socrates’ naming him here cannot but remind Plato’s audience of Socrates’ failure with him, and the reminder of this failure overshadows the rest of the dialogue. Later, near the end of the dialogue, just after the argument that the true statesman makes his fellow citizens better, Socrates will again bring up Alcibiades, and again (519A) we shall recall that Socrates was unable to make even his beloved Alcibiades virtuous. Why does Plato wish to remind us of Socrates’ failure as a teacher of virtue if not to criticize Socrates?

In mentioning Callicles’ loves, Socrates cannot restrain himself from criticizing Callicles’ behavior (481D-482A). He accuses Callicles of fickleness for loving the assembly and for uttering absurdities because he loves Demos, son of Pyrilampes. The tone of criticism towards the hitherto very respectful and polite Callicles comes as rather a shock, to us and to Callicles, and Callicles’ demeanor changes dramatically. It is clear from the context of the drama that what changes Callicles is Socrates’ rudeness to him. It is witty punning rudeness, to be sure, but its effect on the young and well-meaning Callicles is wholly negative. Even Socrates’ attempt at mollifying Callicles, when he says that perhaps Callicles thinks that Socrates speaks absurdities from his love of philosophy (482A), is undone by his defense of philosophy’s constancy.

Callicles now delivers his longest speech. Its tone is quite varied as it modulates from angry to critical to conciliatory to insulting to threatening. Confused and emotional, he accuses Socrates of dema­goguery and Polus of being ashamed to say his true views. He accuses Socrates of equivocating and of shifting between arguments based on nature and convention. Callicles argues that by nature it is better for the stronger to take advantage of the weaker (483D) and only by convention is it better for people to obey laws, which are made by the weak to keep the naturally strong suppressed. He launches into an attack on philosophy, allowing a little in one’s youth, but condemning it in adults, whom it makes as ridiculous both in public and private as public men are when they argue with Socrates. Here he alludes to the Antiope of Euripides, to the debate between the contemplative and active lives. An old man engaging in philosophy, he adds angrily, deserves a beating. And he ends by warning Socrates (486A-B) that his philosophy will not save him but will wound him if he is ever dragged to court, even by a base accuser. As Socrates’ allusion to Alcibiades resonates in Plato’s audience, so do Callicles’ dramatically prophetic statements about Socrates in the law court. Even if we find ourselves cheering on Socrates, we cannot but realize the terrible truth in Callicles’ words. This truth shows of course that Callicles is no fool, and it lends a good deal of credibility to his remarks. As we read the rest of the dialogue, we won’t be able to forget who made this accurate prediction, as accurate as the prediction by Euthyphro of Socrates’ acquittal was inaccurate. Callicles’ attack on philosophy, delivered without rhetorical artifice but with intense sincerity, is, as a result, far more effective than the speeches of Gorgias and Polus.

Both Socrates and Callicles in their introductory remarks to the climactic confrontation have indicated that the other must appear ridiculous to one of the contrary way of life (482A-B and 484D-E). This momentary insight does not, however, help either to become more sympathetic to the other’s position, and the bitter taste the Gorgias leaves its readers is attributable to the inflexible stances and ultimate failure of both men.

Socrates expresses pleasure at being able to confront Callicles. He says that if he can reach any conclusions now, with a man who speaks his mind candidly and without the restraints of politeness, these conclusions will certainly be sound (487D-E). Thus Socrates prepares his philosophical phalanx.

It takes but a few seconds for Socrates to prevail over Callicles. Having lost the first skirmish, Callicles in effect gives up. He has said that law is the mechanism of the weak to keep the powerful in check, but he is now forced to admit that when the weak are united, they are powerful and therefore, according to Callicles’ own statements, the better. Here (489A) and throughout the rest of the dialogue Callicles often turns silent, and only with the greatest effort can Socrates get him to participate. When Socrates claims that it is by nature, not by convention, that to do wrong is more shameful than to suffer wrong, Callicles reaches his nadir of rudeness. “Won’t Socrates stop drivel­ ing?” he asks, and Plato’s audience sees how unpleasant things have suddenly become. The courtesy present in the exchange with Gorgias is gone now, and neither speaker spares any insult. Socrates responds sarcastically, “Oh most wise Callicles. . .” (489C), and Callicles accuses Socrates of irony (489E).

Callicles reacts to the exposure of contradictions in his position by a change of terms, but his shift in vocabulary is met by Socrates. By “stronger” he actually meant “better,” Callicles says, and by “bet­ter” “worthier,” then “more intelligent.” Finally it turns out that the intelligence he has in mind is not that of the physician or the expert, but of the man who can rule. In the discussion Socrates toys with Callicles, like a cat with a mouse: he understands in the most literal sense Callicles’ remark about the wiser having more and asks whether the wiser should have the largest shoes and the biggest coats (490 A-E). Callicles responds with appropriate indignation, accusing Soc­ rates of nonsense. In return, Socrates accuses Callicles of always changing his opinions (491B-C). The debate puts both men in a bad light. Perhaps Socrates does have the better arguments, but how will his trickiness help persuade Callicles?

They now enter upon a discussion of what it means to rule, and here in diametric opposition we see the contrast of the active and contem­plative lives. To Callicles rule means not having to repress passions or desires; to Socrates it means control over one’s passions. Socrates tries but fails to persuade Callicles that an ordered life is best and drives him into extreme positions: thus Callicles finally proclaims that “luxury and intemperance and license, when they have power, are virtue and happiness” (492C).^[14] This extreme position is as absurd in its way as Socrates’ argument about letting one’s enemies who have committed crimes go free. Adoption of either principle would render civilized life-human life-impossible.

Socrates accuses Callicles of insincerity (495A) for his identification of the good and the pleasant just in order to avoid an inconsistency, and Callicles returns the charge. As Socrates wins the next line of argument, showing that the pleasures Callicles has named are in fact accompanied by pains-the pleasure of eating by hunger, the pleasure of drinking by thirst-and that therefore the pleasant and the good are not identical, Callicles accuses Socrates of quibbling and wants to quit the debate. Urged to continue by Gorgias, however, he assents, though with great reluctance (497B-C).

Socrates now shows that both coward and brave man feel pleasure and pain in the same way so that if “good” meant only to feel pleasure, the coward would be good. When at last Callicles sees the simplicity of his earlier statement, he asserts that he had been joking, that of course some pleasures are beneficial, others not. Socrates then turns to the question of who ought to make the judgment of which are beneficial-the “real man” in the Assembly or the philosopher (500C)-and with this question the dialogue returns to its central theme, which way of life should one adopt:

And do not either take what I say as if I were merely playing, for you see the subject of our discussion-and on what subject should even a man of slight intelligence be more serious?-namely, what kind of life one should live, the life to which you invite me, that of a “real man” speaking in the Assembly and practising rhetoric and playing the politician according to your present fashion, or the life spent in philosophy, and how the one differs from the other. (Tr. W. D. Woodhead)

Many professions—cook, flautist, poet—aim at pleasure. Rhetori­cians or politicians, says Callicles, come in two kinds, those who aim at the good of the people and those who aim at their own indulgent gratification; but Callicles is unable to name any current politicians who aim at perfecting the souls of the citizens (503B). When examined even cursorily, none of the earlier rulers aimed at the goodness of the citizens either. The argument then suggests that good souls are well ordered and temperate and just; when Callicles seems on the brink of agreeing to this conclusion (505C), he claims not to know what Socra­tes is talking about. Socrates responds that Callicles will simply not allow himself to be improved.

When Callicles again attempts to withdraw from the debate, it looks as though Socrates will conduct the rest of the dialogue by himself and both ask and answer. First, comparing himself to Euripides’ Amphion, the defender of the contemplative life, he recapitulates the argument and affirms the conclusions reached with Polus (508B). If there had been any cloud of doubt whether he was serious in his arguments about punishing friends but not enemies, he disperses it. He next defends himself against Callicles’ reproaches, insisting that it is better to suffer than to do wrong.

Callicles is redrawn into the argument, on the question of whether one needs power in addition to will in order to avoid the greater evil­ doing wrong. When the answer is obvious, that it requires merely will, Callicles again withdraws into sullen silence (509E). When a bit later Callicles accuses Socrates of twisting the arguments, Socrates (511B) confirms that he’s heard that accusation from nearly everyone in the city. From nearly everyone in the city! Surely this near unanimity concerning Socrates is not a testimony to his success.

After a long Socratic speech on how goodness and nobility are more than the mere saving of lives, Callicles comes his closest to agreeing (513C): “It seems to me, I know not how, that you are right, Socrates, but I feel as the many do. I am not quite convinced by you.” Callicles’ softening position, however, does not seem to be recognized by Soc­ rates, who makes absolutely no attempt to win him over. Nay, it seems as though Socrates becomes even more hostile, as if he doesn’t want to persuade or doesn’t care about persuading Callicles. If current leaders have never had success in improving the citizens, he asks, is it not foolish to continue with the same methods? Then he sarcastically and pointedly asks Callicles (515A): “Have you ever improved any­ one?” Why such nastiness on Socrates’ part? Are we not meant to see in his rudeness the causes of his failure? Can a philosophy so savagely blunt expect to participate in the political world?

Callicles accuses Socrates of being contentious, and, I think, Socra­tes has by his contentiousness lost his last opportunity to make peace. He brings up the old Athenian statesmen—Pericles, Cimon, Themisto­cles—to show that not one of them made citizens better. In the middle of this speech he mentions Alcibiades again (519A), and we as the audience ask ourselves: did Socrates make him better? Was Socrates, for all the virtuosity of his arguments and for all his proclaimed love of Alcibiades, able to effect an improvement in him?

Socrates attacks the politicians of his day as no different from the sophists: neither improves anybody. If the sophists were successful, their students, having learned justice, would surely pay them their just fees. As it is, sophists have no claim to sympathy when they are not paid.

As the debate draws to an end, Callicles is asked for his opinion on how Socrates should serve the state; Callicles says Socrates ought to try to please the city and warns him again how he might suffer if hauled into court. Socrates admits (521D-E) that if he were dragged into court, he would probably be put to death. He is the only true politician in the city, he says, the only one who practices true statesmanship. And because he will not flatter but will say the truth, he will be unsuccessful in court. In a statement contemptuous of his society, he says that his trial will be like the trial of a doctor prosecuted by a cook before a jury of children. In his last substantive statement, Callicles asks Socrates whether he really thinks it is well for a man to be unable to defend himself in his own country.

At the end of the dialogue, then, we see that Socrates has failed to convince anyone of anything. He and Callicles are both right: Socrates will fail before a jury; he will cling to his philosophical position; and he will be condemned and executed.

Are we, the audience, to be filled with admiration for Socrates in the Gorgias? I think not: he comes across as bull-headed, tricky, abusive, and wholly indifferent to reality. Despite his claim to be the only true politician, if we accept his definition that the true politician improves the citizens, we see that Socrates is no more successful than Pericles or Themistocles. Indeed, his most prominent historical failure is Alci­ biades, who, in case we might have forgotten him, is mentioned twice, and in key contexts. And in the dialogue before us, we see him fail utterly to persuade Callicles. Indeed, Gorgias boasted that he could make a man deinos legein—clever at speaking. In a sense, hasn’t Socrates proven that he can do the same thing, if we understand by deinos not “clever” but “terrible”?^[15] Socrates, spurning every oppor­tunity for reconciliation and agreement with Callicles, has transformed the patriotic, well-meaning man into a tyrant-loving, anti-philosophical man. Surely Plato means for us to see in this dialogue a failure in the extreme Socratic way of life. Surely he wishes us to see also the ethically empty life of public speaking and politics, a life that has never done any real good to the citizenry.

The dialogue ends with Socrates’ story of the souls in the under­ world and of their judgment. The myth is remarkable in several ways, not least the way Socrates cleans up discreditable myths of the gods. Of particular interest is the account of the improvement in the gods’ judgment of the dead. In the beginning, the gods were accustomed to judge souls on the basis of their external appearance; recognizing that this method did not lead to a true assessment of the souls’ worth, the gods changed the procedure, seeing to it that the souls were stripped and judged naked. Thus external beauty or wealth would not affect the assignment of souls to their proper places. Are we perhaps to wonder how mere humans can judge people aright when even the gods had trouble? Now souls are judged exclusively by the virtue or vice manifested in life. Bad souls-and the worst are the souls of tyrants who tyrannized with impunity-go for all eternity to places of excru­ciating torture; good souls-and the best are the souls of philosophers who, like Socrates, have minded their own business-go to the Isles of the Blessed. What a way of putting it! Socrates seems to be saying, “If you care for your soul, stay out of politics!” Over and over again through the myth his remarks are aimed at Callicles (524A, 524D, 525E, 526A, 526C, 526D, and 527E)—Socrates’ fellow Athenian and the main object of Plato’s concern in the dialogue, a fact indicated by Plato’s putting the name “Callicles” as both the first and last word of the dialogue. Yet we know that the demos is Callicles’ true love and ardent interest. How is he going to receive these remarks and the dark hint that his soul will be condemned to torture? Won’t he feel that as he has threatened Socrates with trial and punishment in this life, so Socrates is threatening him with trial and torture in the next?

What is of course most important is how Plato wanted his normal and expected audience to react to his drama. I say “normal and expected” audience because this is, I think, just the kind of audience that Plato has been denied for more than two thousand years. His audience has been people who take courses in philosophy or people interested in philosophy as a discipline, or, worst of all, trained or untrained philosophers. His readers have been those who acknowledge Plato as a pillar of the established canon of philosophical writings. Nowadays we can’t read him without Whitehead’s words ringing in our ears that all of Western philosophy is footnotes to Plato. But could Plato have expected his readers to look at him in this way? Of course not! Doubtless he would have expected his readers to react as the uninitiated freshman reacts (though the young student too is not free of the baggage of the tradition) to the dialogue, where it is not a matter of unambiguous clarity that Socrates is the hero.

Well, what could Plato have intended us to see in the dialogue? If I am right (and I am, alas, profoundly aware of the difficulty addressed in the Phaedrus-that once the author is dead we cannot ask him for a sure explanation of his intentions), Plato wants us to reject both ways­—the way of Callicles and the way of Socrates. Each character represents an inappropriate way of life-the one who rejects the higher principles of justice that alone can render the citizens and their state better, and the other, whose philosophy would render life in this world impractical if not impossible; Callicles, in his repeated refusal to engage in ethical thought, Socrates by his constant scorn of the actual world and by his rudeness, which endures even to his very last statement to Callicles, when he calls his life worthless-both these types are to be rejected.

Once again, perhaps, we are to see the solution in the mean, in some sort of union of body and soul, some combination of the active life of politics with one of contemplation and philosophy.^[16] Perhaps we are to see the dialogue as propaganda for the Academy, where a curriculum offering such a happy marriage could be found.