8 The Menexenus

The Menexenus is another of the dialogues that show Plato’s wit and imagination. As in the Symposium and Phaedrus, we see Socrates giving a long speech and poking fun at rhetoricians. Menexenus, a follower of Socrates, comes from a meeting of the Council, which has delayed until the next day the selection of a speaker for those who have fallen in battle. Socrates jokes: death is wonderful; the dead man gets a splendid funeral and a wonderful speech is said over him. The speech praises the man in every possible way, his ancestors, his country, himself (234C-235C). The speech has the wonderful effect of making the hearers think that they are wonderful too. Indeed, says Socrates, he goes away feeling uplifted for three full days, and not until the fourth or fifth day does he settle down to earth.

Menexenus accuses Socrates of always making fun of rhetoricians, and certainly Plato’s audience is familiar with this view of Socrates. Menexenus laments that the speech will probably not be very good this time, for the speaker will have little time to prepare. It does not matter, replies Socrates; such speeches are easy to improvise. They are, indeed, ready-made, formulaic, and besides, it is an easy thing to praise Athenians to Athenians. To Menexenus’ s query, Socrates re­ plies that he could easily give such a speech. He’s heard one just the day before from Aspasia-to whom he attributes his and Pericles’ knowledge of rhetoric.^[1] Upon Menexenus’s ardent request, Socrates agrees to relay to him Aspasia’s speech. He’d do anything for Menex­enus, he says, even dance naked (236D).

The Menexenus begins with remarkable playfulness. Socrates will give the speech that he heard Aspasia give, and Aspasia was just making it up in idle musing about speech composition.^[2] That Aspasia was Pericles’ mistress surely causes one to wonder about Pericles’ famous funeral oration, recorded in Thucydides. That this speech is attributed to her is perhaps a suggestion that she wrote Pericles’ speech too. It is certainly an attack on the presumed need for great eloquence to give such a speech.

Socrates’ funeral oration is to be understood as a tour de force. What is remarkable—given the history of scholarship in Plato—is that there have been many who have taken it so.^[3] Aside from the very clear introduction to the speech, there are numerous hints in the speech itself that it is to be so taken. Some of the jests are as unsubtle as possible, as when Socrates claims that the government of Athens has always been an aristocracy, even when it was a democracy, because it was ruled by the “best” (238D); when Socrates claims that the Athen­ians’ losses are a testimony to their excellence, for it was their own fault, not the valor of their enemies, which caused their defeat (243 C-D); when Socrates finds Athenian civil wars praiseworthy because their mildness shows the moderation and gentleness of the people (243E); or when he says that Athens may be justly blamed for its excess of-kindness !-for it listened to the appeals of other Greek cities for defense against the Persians (244A-B). In short, the dialogue consists of a series of cliches, confusions, and outright distortions. Of course, Socrates has announced right at the outset that this is what public eulogies are supposed to do, so there ought to be no confusion in anyone’s mind about our taking the dialogue in this comical way.

That Socrates carries it off so beautifully is dramatic testimony to his claim that such speeches are easy to make. That it sounds familiar to the audience, that it has the right ring to it, is support for the argument that such speeches come ready-made.

The Menexenus ought to alert all readers to the sort of thing that Plato is capable of. If his parodying is more obvious in the Menexenus than it is in most of the other dialogues, it is because he calls attention to it so broadly. If, however, my interpretation of these dialogues is correct, he does the same sort of thing throughout the corpus, just more subtly.