The Ethical Implications of Plato's Portrayal of Alcibiades and Critias

Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Fall 2004 Plato's Villains: The thicE al Implications of Plato's Portrayal of Alcibiades and Critias John Baynard Woods Jr. Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Woods, J. (2004). Plato's Villains: The thicalE Implications of Plato's Portrayal of Alcibiades and Critias (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1381 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Plato’s Villains: The Ethical Implications of Plato’s Portrayal of Alcibiades and Critias A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty Of the Philosophy Department McAnulty College and Graduate School Duquesne University in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by J. Baynard Woods, Jr. November 16, 2004 2 AKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful for this opportunity to thank those who have made this dissertation possible. Ron Polansky deserves special thanks for following me through every stage of this process, with great rigor and insight. His energy and curiosity are endless. I would also like to express my deep gratitude to Therese Bonin and Warren Smith for the care they took in reading this dissertation. In addition, I would like to thank my colleagues in the graduate school for many long and detailed conversations, and particularly Antonis Coumoundouros for his enthusiasm and encouragement. Most of all, I would like to thank my wife Nicole, without whom the “good life” would be nothing more than a concept. 3 Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 5 Chapter 2: Promethean Readings and the Measurement of Paradigmatic Lives 24 Chapter 3: Progress and Decline in the Protagoras 42 Chapter 4: The Unity and Difficulty of Virtue 68 Chapter 5: Pleasure, Akrasia, and Measure 88 Chapter 6: Time and the Soul in the Alcibiades I 117 Chapter 7: History and Forgetting in the Speech of Alcibiades 166 Chapter 8: Amazed by Remembering 190 Chapter 9: Knowing What We (Don’t) Know 222 Chapter 10: The Ghost of Polemarchus and the Problem of Time in Republic I 253 Chapter 11: On Generation and Corruption in Republic VIII 267 Conclusion: Conclusion 300 Bibliography 305 4 Chapter 1 Introduction In an argument claiming that Plato’s early dialogues present the historical Socrates, Gregory Vlastos says: Xenophon’s Socrates, pious reciter of moral commonplaces, would have elicited nothing but a sneer from Critias and a yawn from Alcibiades, while Plato’s Socrates is just the man who could have gotten under their skin (Vlastos 1971, 2- 3).1 Vlastos intends to justify a claim to Socratic authenticity.2 But he also tells us something about the ways in which we read Plato. He shows that when we read a dialogue, we import external knowledge into it in order to supplement our understanding of the arguments and the characters. This external knowledge opens temporal dimensions that the dialogue form cannot include, but must necessarily imply. No dialogue lasts longer than a single day. But, in order to understand the role a particular character plays in a dialogue, we must take into account what we know about their lives from other sources. I argue that we not only do this, but that Plato intends us to, and constructs the dialogues so that they force the reader to take a diachronic view of the characters. 1 Elsewhere in the same essay Vlastos characterizes Critias as “that nasty intellectual.” (1971, 9). 2 Brickhouse and Smith offer a good description of Vlastos’ influence. “The entire field of Socratic studies has been a busy one lately, stimulated to a large degree by the attention called to it in the work and teaching of Gregory Vlastos. Although we rarely agree with Vlastos’ specific positions, our debt to him and our recognition of the great significance of his work will be obvious from our many references to his work … No doubt, our very selection of topics reflects Vlastos’s influence” ( 1994 vii-viii). For another similar account cf. Beversluis 2000. 5 This diachronic dimension helps us judge or weigh the arguments that characters put forth. Ruby Blondell calls this diachronic dimension “historical irony.” She describes it as follows: Plato can exploit his audience’s knowledge of subsequent events in a way that parallels the dramatic irony of the tragedians. Just as the playwright’s audience knew how the main events of a myth would turn out … so Plato’s readers knew the prominent events and ideas of late fifth-century and early fourth-century Greek history and read the dialogues in their light. Plato uses this technique, which I call ‘historical irony,’ in various ways (Blondell 2002, 32). I argue that the main purpose of Plato’s use of historical irony is to enable the reader to see the relationship between the lives that people lead and the accounts that they give. One can only see this relationship over the course of time. Plato doesn’t show us Alcibiades and Critias when they are coming to ruin. Rather, he presents them in their youths in order to highlight the importance of arguments and accounts on the outcome of their lives. That is to say, that by the use of historical irony, Plato is able to turn historical individuals into paradigmatic characters. In a recent book, Frances Pownall shows the ways in which fourth century historians created what she calls a “paradigmatic history” which views the past as a way to illustrate moral points (2004).3 Thus, I build on Pownall’s concept of “paradigmatic history” in my investigation of Alcibiades and Critias as “paradigmatic characters.” I agree with Pownall that Plato, like the historians who followed him, saw the figures of the past as models of different kinds of living and as potential moral examples. I show, however, that Plato’s use of historical characters is far more complex than what we see in 3 She points out that the “influence of Socrates and Isocrates in particular results in a greater emphasis upon the instruction of political virtue in the interpretation of the past by fourth century prose writers. As a result, the moral and didactic elements implicit in Herodotus and Thucydides become overt and the primary focus of the historical works of Xenophon, Ephorus, and Theopompus” (2004, 29). 6 Pownall’s account. Plato uses historical figures in order to show us something about the human experience of time itself and to enable us to evaluate synchronic arguments in a diachronic way. Paradigmatic characters show the relationships between accounts and lives. Plato does this through a complex use of intertextual relations with the historians. Intertextuality is a term coined by Julia Kristeva and associated with post-modern literary theory.4 Intertextuality refers to one text’s use of and reliance on the resonance of other texts and other genres. Andrea Nightingale uses this concept to show how Plato incorporates the echoes of other genres in order to create the genre of philosophy. Nightingale focuses on Plato’s use of tragedy, encomia and comedy. Of these comedy is the most useful for our discussion for it, like the Socraticoi logoi,5 is a genre which uses historical characters paradigmatically. Nightingale does not use the treatment of historical characters to investigate Plato’s relation to the historians.6 Indeed, very little work has been done to show Plato’s connections with the tradition of classical historiography. My dissertation shows the relation between the genres of historiography and philosophy by focusing on the figures of Alcibiades and Critias. Plato relies on the knowledge that his reader has of the historical tradition, but he also uses some of the same literary devices and sees history in the same way as many fourth century historians. 4 Cf. Barthes “Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc., pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text. Intertextuality, the condition of any text whatsoever, cannot, of course, be reduced to a problem of sources or influences; the intertext is a general field of anonymous formulae whose origin can scarcely ever be located; of unconscious or automatic quotations, given without quotation marks” (1981, 39). 5 See also Kahn 1996, 1-36. 6 The historical awareness of Plato’s early readers would be much more complex: a combination of remembered experience (in some cases) and both oral and written sources. It would more greatly resemble the knowledge that a twenty-first century reader possesses of twentieth century figures such as Richard Nixon or Winston Churchill. 7 Thus, by combining the key concepts of Nightingale, Blondell and Pownall, I am able to arrive at a philosophically rigorous and historically adequate description of Plato’s use of historical characters. Then I turn to the philosophical purpose behind Plato’s portrayal of these characters in particular. It is not as immediately obvious as it is in the case of Xenophon who explicitly defends Socrates against the charges that link him to the corruption of Alcibiades and Critias. Xenophon begins by claiming that “those two men were by nature the most honor-loving of all the Athenians. They wished that all affairs might be conducted through themselves and that they might become the most renowned of all.” (I.2.14).7 Xenophon tells us how bad Alcibiades and Critias were, but Plato shows them exclusively when they were young and promising.

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