The International Journal The International Journal of the of the Platonic Tradition 8 (2014) 72-91 Platonic Tradition brill.com/jpt Philosophical Pursuit and Flight: Homer and Thucydides in Plato’s Laches1 Steve Maiullo Hope College, Holland, Michigan, USA [email protected] Abstract This paper offers a new reading of Plato’s Laches that examines the dialogue’s philo- sophical approach not only to courage but also to two literary texts that both formed and questioned traditional Athenian views of it: Homer and Thucydides. In the middle of Plato’s Laches, the eponymous character claims that the courageous man “should be willing to stay in formation, to defend himself against the enemy, and to refuse to run away.” Socrates responds by wondering whether a man can be courageous in retreat. He cites Homer’s description of Aeneas’ horses that “know how to pursue and flee quickly this way and that” (191b), a quotation that appears twice in the Iliad: once at 5.222-3 when Aeneas refuses to retreat from the rampaging Diomedes and again at 8.106-8 when Diomedes retreats from Hector, despite their belief that to do so is cowardly. On the surface, it seems that the contexts of the Homeric line do not match Socrates’ argu- ment. This paper will argue that Socrates’ apparent ‘miscue’ is both intentional and pur- poseful because it signals a correspondence between the Homeric scenes and Thucydides’ narrative of the Battle of Mantinea that invites criticism of Homer’s place in the value systems of contemporary Athens. Plato signals a philosophical reading of Homer’s Iliad and of Thucydides’ description of the Battle of Mantinea, through which we are invited to evaluate not only the traditional model of Athenian education, 1 Versions of this paper were read in April 2009 at the Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South in Minneapolis, MN and in March 2011 at the Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of New England at Mt. Holyoke College. I have profited greatly from the comments, questions, and suggestions of both audiences. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Anna Peterson and Anthony Kaldellis whose insightful criticisms of earlier drafts have clarified my language and argument. © maiullo, ���� | doi ��.����/��������-�������� This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 3.0. Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ brill.com/jpt Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 03:00:00AM via free access Philosophical Pursuit and Flight 73 embodied by the former, but also its application in fifth-century Athens, as revealed by the latter. This paper, therefore, demonstrates that the philosophical and literary strate- gies behind Plato’s decision to ‘misuse’ Homer reveal a disjunction between wisdom and manliness in the Athenian cultural tradition that philosophy aims to resolve. Keywords Plato – Homer – Thucydides – Laches – Battle of Mantinea – courage – virtue – misquotation – poetry – history Introduction The last quarter century has witnessed a sea change in Platonic scholarship that has raised the consideration of the literary and rhetorical features of the dialogues—studies of character, setting, and genre, to name a few—to the same level as what used to be regarded the ‘strictly’ philosophical.2 New approaches have advanced our understanding of Plato’s corpus as a whole and his philosophical project in general, as well as of individual dialogues.3 One dialogue that has particularly benefited from new approaches is Plato’s Laches, which was originally viewed as one of the earliest and, in some cases, most awk- ward of Plato’s definition dialogues.4 It was counted among the early dialogues because it shares many elements in common with other so-called early defini- tion dialogues: it is concerned with the virtues—in this case, andreia (‘manly courage’)—and their possible unity; it advances a series of definitions that are tested and ultimately rejected; it ends in aporia; and it lays the groundwork for proper education of the youth, to name a few.5 It was considered clumsy, 2 For a synthesis of how Plato has been read over the last two centuries by philosophers, see A. Bowen (1988) 49-65. Whereas Plato’s readers have attempted to outline what he thought and believed by focusing on arguments, he concludes that readers cannot strip away the dramatic elements of the dialogues because they are crucial to their meaning. 3 For a representative list of these approaches, see C. Griswold (1999) 361 as well as C. Zuckert (2009) 1-47. 4 On the ‘primitive form’ of the dialogue, see W.K.C. Guthrie (1975) 124. 5 The scholarly literature on the Laches has focused primarily on virtue, with particular atten- tion to the unity of the virtues. See H. Bonitz (1871) 413-42; G. Santas (1969); M. O’Brien (1971) 303-25; D. Devereux (1992) 765-769; T. Penner (1992) 1-27; and T. Brickhouse and N. Smith (1997) 317-324. The different definitions of courage in the Laches have also been well studied. The International Journal of the Platonic TraditionDownloaded � ( from�0�� Brill.com10/03/2021) 7�-9� 03:00:00AM via free access 74 Maiullo moreover, because it takes so long for Socrates to enter, for the main problem to be outlined, and for the elenchos to begin.6 As an early and primitive dia- logue, the Laches was believed to express the historical Socrates’ beliefs about virtue.7 But other readers, focusing less on claims about its date of composition, have recognized the Laches as a dialogue of greater depth than previously thought.8 This case has been made largely through historical and literary analysis. Socrates’ main interlocutors in this dialogue were well-known Athenian politicians and generals, Laches and Nicias, and scholars have argued that Socrates interrogates both traditional and radical views about warfare and courage and their application in fifth-century Athens. The ‘histori- cal’ fatal character flaws of both Laches and Nicias—as recorded by the Greek historians themselves—are the very flaws that shape their initial views and then prevent their progress in the philosophical search for courage (on which more later).9 On this reading, in questioning Laches and Nicias, Socrates both questions traditional and sophistic notions of courage respectively and also See S. Umphrey (1976) 14-22 for the view that Laches’ definition is crucial to the Socratic understanding of courage. See C. Emlyn-Jones (1999) 123-138 for the view that the definitions represent a progression from less (those of Laches) to more (those of Nicias) sophisticated definitions of courage. For the relationship between courage and education, with emphasis on self-knowledge, see C. Griswold (1986) 177-93. 6 To put it in perspective, the dialogue begins at 178, Socrates does not enter until 181d, the main question is not formulated until 185a, and the testing of the question does not truly begin until 189e. Compare this with another early definition dialogue, the Euthyphro in which Socrates appears on the first page. For discussion, see C. Emlyn-Jones (1999) 123-30. 7 Because the text has been viewed as early, some historicists suggest that the understanding of virtue found in the Laches can be attributed to the historical Socrates. See, e.g., C. Gould (1987) 265-66 and D. Devereux (1992) 767. Scholars of this school generally follow the work of G. Vlastos (1991) 45-80, who argued that the Socrates of the early dialogues was the historical Socrates. 8 An account of the traditional ordering of the dialogues by stylometric analysis and the diffi- culty of ordering the early dialogues specifically can be found in L. Brandwood (1992) 90-120. The limitations of this kind of organization have been articulated, and scholars instead have offered thematic solutions. See, e.g., C. Kahn (1997) 48-59. An overview of thematic approaches taken to organize Plato’s corpus is given in D. Clay (2000) 283-86 and C. Zuckert (2009) 1-47, esp. 1-7. A full and certainly stimulating treatment of the topic is C. Griswold (1999). In fact, Zuckert’s project to treat the dialogues in order of dramatic date is suggested by Griswold (he call this “fictive chronology”), but this approach too has its own limitations. 9 My focus in this paper is on Laches, since it is in Socrates’ discussion with him that we find the Homeric misquotation, but for a good discussions of Nicias, see W. Schmid (1992) 132-176 and C. Zuckert (2009) 247-57. The International Journal of the PlatonicDownloaded Tradition from Brill.com10/03/2021 � (�0��) 7�-9 03:00:00AM� via free access Philosophical Pursuit and Flight 75 becomes a new paradigm for philosophical andreia himself.10 Plato, therefore, employs this tension between past and present views of courage to comment philosophically on the social, cultural, and political world of fifth-century Athens and to carve out Socrates’ place within it.11 Scholars have shown, more- over, the characters of Laches and Nicias in the dialogue represent parodies of their historical counterparts, particularly when Plato’s portrayal is compared with other sources, such as Thucydides and Aristophanes (and, to a lesser extent, Plutarch).12 Although literary approaches have allowed scholars to look beneath the Laches’ apparently simple exterior, the connections between Homer, Thucydides, and the Laches have not been fully explored or, for that matter, universally accepted.13 This paper seeks to present a new reading that shows how Plato connects Homeric and Thucydidean narratives with the philosophi- cal interactions between Socrates and Laches, the character around whom this tension exists most clearly and for whom the dialogue is titled.14 I will argue that probing Socrates’ (mis)quotations of Homer in the Laches reveals that this dialogue provides a philosophical approach not only to courage and virtue, as has been argued, but also to the literary texts that affirm and question tradi- tional Athenian value systems.