Parmenides' Sail and Dionysodorus' Ox*

ROSAMOND KENT SPRAGUE

purpose of this paper is to point out that a brief passage in t Plato's 300E3-301A 7 is an to the he Euthydemus objection theory of Forms of the same general type as one of those raised in the first part of the Parmenides, and that this similarity should be taken into account when the meaning of those objections is discussed,I The Euthydemus passage runs as follows:

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300 E (And I said, Cleinias, why are you laughing at such serious and beautiful things?) Why Socrates, have you ever yet seen a beautiful thing? asked Dionysodorus. Yes indeed, Dionysodorus, I said, and many of them. 301 A And were they different from the beautiful, he asked,

91 or were they the same as the beautiful? This put me in a terrible fix, which I thought I deserved for my grumbling. All the same I answered that they were different from the beautiful itself, but at the same time there was some beauty present with each of them. Then if an ox is present with you, you are an ox ? And because I am present with you now, you are Dionysodorus? Heaven forbid, said 1.2

Comments on the passage,

This passage occurs very late in the dialogue. We have already had ample opportunity to observe that Dionysodorus and his brother are eristics and that Plato's opinion of them is low. We have also seen that one of their arguments is an argument against false speaking (283E). This is an Eleatic argument, one explicitly associated with Parmenides by Plato in the Sophist at 237 A. It will not be surprising, therefore, if the objection to the theory of Forms now raised by Dio- nysodorus proves to be of the sort we might expect from an eristic sophist of the Eleatic type. Dionysodorus opens his attack by asking Socrates if he has ever seen a beautiful thing. Socrates answers that he has, "and many of them." Dionysodorus then puts a question about these particular beautiful things: "VVere they different from the beautiful or the same as the beautiful?" This question, Socrates says, put him "in a terrible fix." Why? It must be because he sees the risk of choosing either of the alternatives offered. He has already had experience of this type of either-or question earlier in the dialogue. At 293Bff., for instance, he was offered the choice of being either completely knowing or completely not-knowing; neither alternative provided an accurate description of his true condition, that there were some things he knew and others he did not know. So here, neither alternative is adequate to describe the relation of particulars to their homonymous Form. They are neither so like it as to be identical with it nor so different from it as to be un- related to it. As I have snggested elsewhere,3 the sophist's question has been constructed in such a way as to be destructive of the distinction

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