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The interrogation of Meletus: Apology 24c4–28al*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Lynette Reid Smith
Lynette Reid Smith
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Extract

The interrogation of Meletus in the Apology at 24c4–28al is not infrequently seen as a typical case of all that is intellectually and artistically dissatisfying in Plato's practice of the genre of philosophical dialogue: not only are we presented with a philosopher who makes some claim to being committed to setting a particularly stringent standard for honesty in argumentation making sophistical arguments, but we are presented also with a cardboard interlocutor who is forced by the hand of Plato to acquiesce to those arguments in a fashion that is completely dissatisfying to the reader. The best anyone seems to do to save Plato from these charges of artistic incompetence and intellectual dishonesty is to appeal to such a level of historical accuracy for the text that the stupidity of Meletus' responses can be attributed to the stupidity of Meletus himself, or to point out features of the political and legal situation that might prevent Meletus from answering the questions by drawing on his true motivation—which is presumably more coherent. Taylor says of this passage:

The humour of the situation is that the prosecutor cannot venture to say what he means by either of his charges without betraying the fact that, owing to the ‘amnesty’, the matters complained of are outside of the competency of the court… Hence, when Meletus is pressed to explain what he means, he has to take refuge in puerile nonsense.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , December 1995 , pp. 372 - 388
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1995

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References

1 A list of the complaints is provided in Calef's, Scott W. recent ‘Does Apology 24c–25c contain an argument that Socrates is innocent?’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 10 (1993), p. 293Google Scholar.

2 Taylor, A. E., Plato: The Man and His Work (London, 1960), p. 162Google Scholar.

3 Socrates on Trial (Princeton, 1989), p. 124Google Scholar.

4 Gorgias is, probably apocryphally, reported to have said of Plato's dialogue Gorgias, ώς καλς σ;ἶδε πλτων ἰαμβζειν (Diels, H., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed.Kranz, W. [ed.] [Berlin, 1952] vol. ii, 276 [15a])Google Scholar. The verb comes from ‘iambos', the verse form used by the earliest writers of satire; an ἴαμβοσ is an invective (Aristotle Poetics, 1448b31–32). Rosen, R. M., in Old Comedy and the Iambographic Tradition (Atlanta, 1988)Google Scholar, discusses the fifth-century Athenian understanding of the tradition in terms of the indiscriminate abuse of others (pp. 1–35, in particular, pp. 3–4 and 12–16). He cites another relevant anecdote from the passage in Athenaeus', Deipnosophists (505dGoogle Scholar) that DK quote from: in this anecdote, Gorgias is said to have called Plato a new Archilochus—Archilochus being one of the prime representatives of the iambographic tradition (p. 14 n. 20).

5 Dover notes that settling the question would involve discovery of παγνια that we can be certain are by Lysias, himself (Lysias and the Corpus Lysiacum [Berkeley, 1968], pp. 69–71)Google Scholar; de Vries, G. J., in his Commentary on the Phaedrus of Plato (Amsterdam, 1969)Google Scholar, claims that the debate is at an impasse, since everything that can be said to support the thesis that the speech is Lysias’ can equally well be said to be evidence for Plato's skill in the imitation of the style of others (pp. 11–14).

6 The French absurdist Alfred Jarry, looking for a technique to break up the tedium of a long treatise revealing the truth of his science of pataphysics, quotes as a possibility these eternal words of approval from the pen of Plato: 'ληθ λγεις, ἔφη/ 'Aληθ/ 'Aληθστατα/ Δλον λρ, κα τεφλῷ, and so on, for thirty-eight more response formulae. (Gestes et opinions de docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, suivi de l' Amour absolu [Paris, 1980], pp. 36–7Google Scholar.) We need not suppose that such lapses into dry formulaic dialogue betray a deep-set tendency to didacticism that Plato sometimes successfully holds off, and sometimes doesn't. On the contrary, this feature of the dialogues can be seen as a natural feature of the written work of a philosopher who is nourished by the give-and-take of intimate dialogue and who is convinced of its superiority over written treatises, as Plato, seems to be (Phaedrus 275d4–277a5)Google Scholar.

7 The evidence on this point is scant. There are two speeches of Lysias that actually contain erotesis of the accused (12.25 and 22.5), and one that contains indications that spaces are left for erotesis (13.30, 32). To submit to questioning was required of the prosecution and defendants, but not of witnesses, according to Demosthenes (46.10). One of the speeches in which erotesis is recorded is Lysias' Against Eratosthenes; it is interesting to note that while Eratosthenes' replies to Lysias' questions are as restrained as Meletus' to Socrates', Lysias addresses Eratosthenes harshly as ὦ σχετλιώτατε πντων (26). The other is in the speech Against the Grain-dealers, and there the accused answers in a similarly restrained fashion. These are both cases of questioning the accused, and not the accuser. In Andocides', On the Mysteries, Andocides questions the man who reads the names of those charged in previous, related court cases, and he reports the questioning he underwent at the preliminary hearing (14, 47, and 101–2)Google Scholar. Carawan, E. M., in his ‘Erotesis: Interrogation in the Courts of Fourth-Century Athens’, GRBS 24 (1983), 209–26Google Scholar, speculates that many of the passages that have come down to us as series of rhetorical questions might have originally been cases of erotesis.

8 He suggests after his conviction that the short time allotted to their discussion is responsible for it: οὐ ῥᾴδιον ν χρνῳ λλῳ μελας διαβολς πολεσθαι (37b1–2); he suggests that he might have been acquitted if the time allotted to trials involving a penalty of death were longer. This passage seems to say that Socrates is only contingently a fish out of water when he appears in the law-courts: Athens might, like other cities, give more time to cases like his. Plato has Socrates in the Theaetetus reflect on this problem and here it does not seem so superficial. Conflicting attitudes towards time are characteristic of the man of the law-courts and the philosopher: τοῖς μν τοτο ὂ σĐ εἶπες ε πρεστι, σχολ, κα τοĐσ λγοεσ ν εἰρνῇ π σχολς ποιονται…κα δι μακρφν ἢ βραχων μλει οὐδν λγειν, ἂν μνον τχωσι το ντοσοἱ δ ν σχολ ᾳ τε ε λγοεσι—κατεπεγει γρ ὕδωρ ῥον (172d4–el). This characteristic difference between the man of the law-courts and the philosopher is connected with the fundamental difficulty of the differences between what is required for the attainment of moral understanding and what is required for political action.

9 The Crito and the Euthyphro will provide us with one dialogue in which the tone is intimate and friendly and the portrait Plato is drawing of the interlocutor a sympathetic one, and one dialogue in which the interlocutor is clearly portrayed as a man who thinks over-confidently that he is an expert in deep and important things. The Gorgias has the advantage of giving us a range of characters and a variety of dramatic developments.

10 Denniston, , Greek Particles, 2nd ed., p. 114Google Scholar (see also pp. 114–15, 121–3, and 140–41).

11 At 6e2, 10c5, 13b6, 13d12, 14c7, 14d8, 15c4; not to mention numerous responses that consist in solitary versions of ἔμιγε

12 This distinction cannot be pressed too hard: the question of what in fact Euthyphro is doing in pursuing his lawsuit involves inquiry into the nature of the things that Euthyphro is concerned with; and the discussion in all cases is aimed at getting at the truth of the matter. But still there is a noticeable difference in the way questions are framed in these two cases.

13 See 453a6–454a6, 457c4–458b2.

14 452el; after his initial statement at 449a5, clarified at 449el, 450b6–c2, 451d7–8, and 452d5–8.

15 In passages of the Gorgias where Socrates raises this question, the use of γώ and ἔγωγε are particularly frequent, since the question is often framed as ‘Are you, like me, one of those who…’ and the answer, ‘I, like you…’. This more or less requires use of the first person pronoun.

16 This comes to two response formula usingἔγωγε (one of them a lone Ἑλωγε), two uses of ἔγωγε in the course of longer statements out of approximately seventy answers to questions, and one in a speech. But note that the four that occur in answers all occur in the last two thirds of their conversation.

17 462a7, 462b7, 462d7, 466d4, and 467a7.

18 466b2 and 466c6.

19 462c3, 463d4, and 466a6. There is another possible explanation of Socrates' use of ἔγωγε here. It is interesting to note that Socrates uses the simple γώ an unusual number of times in this dialogue when compared to the other speakers. He uses it most frequently in two kinds of situations. First, he uses it (as would follow naturally from the sorts of demands that this kind of statement make on its grammar) when he is comparing himself with his interlocutor in some fashion—either where he is setting out the fact that he is the sort of partner in conversation who likes nothing better than to be shown he is wrong about something rather than to win, and where he is inviting the interlocutor to join him in taking up this attitude (453a6–454a6,457c4–458b2), or where he makes a comparison between Callicles’ love of Demos (and the Athenian demos), and his own love of Alcibiades and philosophy (481c5–482c3, 492b5–c5). Second, he uses it frequently when he is (rather reluctantly) approaching a statement of his views of the nature of rhetoric as a branch of pandering, something he does with many apologetic asides to Gorgias, whom he appears to be at pains not to offend (463d4—466a8). For example, when he first states that rhetoric is a branch of pandering, he uses bothἔγωγε (these are the first two instances cited at the beginning of this note) and γώ when he lays out in quite general terms the taxonomy of pandering, after Gorgias assures him that he ought to speak freely, there is no instance of the first-person pronoun until he brings this account to bear on rhetoric (465d7,466al, and the third instance cited above, 466a6). This suggests that Socrates' ἔγωγε and γώ have a note of deference to them. (Socrates also uses the pronoun fairly frequently in the speech in which he responds to Callicles' charge that philosophy is a fine pursuit for the young, but disgraceful in an older man [486e5–488b6]. The focus that is exhibited by this use of the first person pronoun is not surprising, since Socrates is responding to a rather personal attack, and doing so in such a way that he emphasizes his own good fortune in finding someone as honest and as concerned for what is best for him as Callicles is.)

20 482d7, 485a7, c3, 489e5, 491a7, c6, 496c8, 497e8, 498a4, 501c7, 501d6, and 503b4.

21 490d4, 494b9, 495b9, 495c4, e5, 496d6, 497d3, e3, e7, 498d4, e2, e9, 500a2, 505all, and 520a1. There are two related kinds of clustering here: ἔγωγε is quite frequent in short question and answer sections framed in terms of ‘Do you call…’, and these sections occur less frequently as the dialogue progresses and Callicles gives up answering Socrates honestly. In the last section of the dialogue, Socrates gives him long statements with a question posed in the third person at the end, hardly offering an opportunity for the use of ἔγωγε It might seem odd that Callicles should be using ἔγωγε at all when he is so clearly not speaking for himself or saying what he thinks, but this is explained by the sarcasm with which Callicles puts on the act of being an agreeable and impressed interlocutor. An exaggerated instance of this is at 496c4–5: Gorgias agrees with Socrates by saying ‘Aλλ’ ὑπερφες ὡς μολογ.

22 Ἑγωγε is quite common throughout the Meno. There is an interesting point in this dialogue where the frequency of its use increases: in the interchange between Anytus and Socrates over the question of whether good men have been able to pass on their goodness to their sons, a full half of Anytus' answers employ ἔγωγε (93c2–95al). Socrates deftly diagnoses the source of Anytus' bristling at the argument here: Ἂνετος μν μοι δοκεῖ χαλεπανειν, κα οὐδν θανμζω οἴεται γρ με πρτον μν κακηγορεῖν τοτοupsilon;ς τοĐσ ἄνδρας, ἔπειτα γεῖται κα αὐτς εἶναι εἷς τοτων (95a2–4). His use of ἔγωγε increases at the point when he takes Socrates' general argument as having unflattering personal implications.

23 Denniston, , Greek Particles, pp. 7–20Google Scholar.

24 Except where the answer to the question is wrung out by force and is reluctantly given—but that doesn't seem to be the case with Crito.

25 Denniston, , Greek Particles, pp. 475–80Google Scholar, and the addendum (p. 587) where Denniston opts for the view that the corrective sense of μν οὖν is really its only sense (though admittedly he says that little remains of it in such expressions as this).

26 Kahn, C. H., ‘Proleptic Composition in the Republic’, CQ 43 (1993), 131–42, at p. 134CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 21.1 (1954), 102, 110Google Scholar.

28 Gorgias 491e5 (this immediately precedes his description of the sort of man he admires), 495c2 (this seems to be an instance of his exaggerated sarcasm); πνμ (γε) σφδρα appears twice each in the responses of Meno and Cratylus in the dialogues named for them, and once each in the cases of Lysis, Phaedo, Ctesippus in the Euthydemus (though not until quite late in the dialogue, when he has reached a fever-pitch of fury with the two eristic brothers), and Laches. Callicles is also particularly fond of σφδρα γε, which appears at 489e9, 495c7, 496bl, 496d3, 498b2. According to the TLG, the level of incidence of σφδρα γε that we see in Callicles' mouth is matched only in the Philebus and the Republic. It is interesting that the occurrence of σφδρα γε in the Republic is almost entirely confined to Book VIII and later. The Philebus is itself stylistically distant from all the dialogues under discussion, but there it occurs in the mouth of Protarchus, a young man who is defending for Socrates Philebus' thesis that pleasure is the proper aim of human action. It appears a few times in the Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman, and every incident but one is in the mouths of the young men.

29 (Minneapolis, 1980), pp. 3–16.

30 See also Feaver, D. and Hare, J., ‘The Apology as an Inverted Parody of Rhetoric’, Arethusa 14 (1981), 205–16Google Scholar.

31 I will not use the definitions offered in the Sophist, both because this dialogue is much later than the ones I am discussing, and because we have in the Sophist a discussion between Theaetetus and the ‘Stranger’, and I am convinced, along with Stanley Rosen (Plato's Sophist: The Drama of Original and Image [New Haven, 1983])Google Scholar, that we must not take the Stranger's opinions to be Plato's. There is undoubtedly light that can be shed on the Apology by the Sophist, but seeing this light would involve settling many difficult questions about the Sophist first.

32 The same line is followed in the Protagoras at 318a–319a.

33 Gorgias 510b2–511a3. In the Republic Plato describes something like this process happening when he discusses the nature of the success of a demagogic leader and how that transforms naturally into the kind of success that the tyrant enjoys. 563b4–564a8 describes the transitional period from democracy to tyranny, in which old men pander to young, and slave-holders have no more freedom than slaves; at 569b6–c4 Socrates describes tyranny as that system in which the democratic rulers who are slaves to the people in turn enslave the people, so that the people are slaves of slaves; and at 578el–579d2 he gives the analogy of the wealthy slave-owner who, isolated from the protection ordinarily afforded him by society with other slave-owners, ends up fearing and fawning over his own slaves in order to protect himself from them. See North, Helen F., ‘”Swimming Upside Down in the Wrong Direction”: Plato's Criticism of Sophistic Rhetoric on Technical and Stylistic Grounds’, Paradosis: Studies in Memory of Edwin A. Quain (New York, 1976), pp. 11–29, especially p. 26Google Scholar.

34 The breadth of application of the term ‘sophist’ here seems to have been encouraged by the sophists themselves, if we are to believe Plato's portrait of Protagoras, when in the Protagoras he claims that everyone who ever did anything great was in reality a sophist, but feared the persecution that goes with that name, and so kept his identity hidden (316c5–317c5). Plato must have this stand of Protagoras' in mind when he pays him the compliment of saying that every wise man but Parmenides agrees with his statement that man is the measure of all things (Theaetetus 152d2–e9). Another example of Plato's willingness to use the term ‘sophist’ very broadly is Phaedrus 257b7–258d5, where everyone who ever wrote a law in the standard Athenian formulae for laws stands charged. It is interesting to note that Socrates' own playful account of why the true wise men and sophists of the Greeks (the Spartans and Cretans) refuse to claim the title puts it down to the fact that they know that if the rest of the Greeks knew that they were outdone by the Spartans and Cretans in wisdom, they would all start practising (342a6–b6).

35 ‘Anytos, riche bourgeois d'Athénes, personnage considerable et «considéré», represented conformisme social dans toute son horreur; Ménon représente l'intellectuel «affranchi»; Socrate estime que, dans le fond, ils s'accordent parfaitement.’ (Koyré, A.. Introduction à la lecture de Platon [New York, 1945], p. 37nGoogle Scholar.)

36 This ignorance, and the ignorance in particular of his accusers, is dramatized in the Meno, where Plato has Anytus admit that he has never even met a sophist and is entirely unexperienced in them (92b6–9).

37 See Apology 41c8–d5, for example.

38 But see Barabas, Marina, ‘The Strangeness of Socrates’, Philosophical Investigations 9 (1986), 89–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar: she asks us to imagine what Socrates would look like in a busy intellectual and economic capital of our day.

39 Derenne, E., Les proces d'impiété (Liège, 1930), pp. 13–14Google Scholar; Davison, A., ‘Protagoras, Democritus, and Anaxagoras’, CQ N.S. 3 (1953) pp. 33–45, especially pp. 37 and 41Google Scholar; Guthrie, W. K. C., The Sophists (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 263–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 I do not, of course, mean ‘empirical’ in the modern sense connected with philosophical empiricism. I am simply referring to the fact that Aristotle thinks it appropriate to start such an investigation by collecting the data of what people in general think about the question at hand. The contrast with Socrates that I am suggesting is between the moral philosopher who starts by canvassing current opinion and the one who starts by asking the opinion of the person he is speaking to. That both approaches can result in starting from what is in some respects ‘the same opinion’ on the topic does not change the fact that there is a contrast between these two approaches.

41 I do not mean to suggest that Thucydides, Aristotle, and the entire sophistical movement together stand charged of holding unreflectively the same thesis: that the only goal worth having for a human being is political success, whatever that political success might require and whatever it might amount to. I take it that the people I am referring to here have various views about the relationship between political activity and the good, held as a result of various degrees of reflection. Socrates' criticisms are addressed both to those who have never thought carefully about the conflicts that can arise between the goal of success in public life and moral considerations, and to those who, having thought about it, have given pride of place in one way or another to success in the political sphere.

42 The problem is, of course, not unique to the language and concepts of the Greeks. See Winch, Peter, ‘Darwin, Genesis and Contradiction’, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford, 1987), pp. 132–9Google Scholar.

43 He refers to them or treats them thus at 252–3, 264–5, 269–74, 365, 423–4, and 627.

44 Richard Kannicht, in his commentary on Euripides' Helen, line 560 (θɛσ λρ κα τ γιγνώσκειν φlambda;ος), says ‘diese Formulierung ist dadurch möglich, daβ θες in 5. Jh. zu einem konventionellen Prädikat übermächtiger seelischen Zustände oder äuβerer Umstände geworden ist’. It is no t implausible (although this is no t Kannicht's understanding of this tendency) to think of the tendency to use θες so freely as a sign of irreligiousness.

45 M. R. Lefkowitz discusses the professions of ‘atheism’ in the mouths of Euripides' characters as arising from his desire to portray realistically the despair of humans in the face of the horrendous things that happen to them and in the face of the hiddenness of divine purpose that might make sense of such horrors—not from the desire to portray a universe without gods. (‘Impiety and Atheism in Euripides’, CQ 39 (1989), 70–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Riedweg, Christoph, ‘The “Atheistic” Fragment from Euripedes” Bellerophontes (286N2)’, ICS 15 (1990), 39–53)Google Scholar. Winiarczyk, M. discusses briefly the problem of the sense of ἄθεος and related terms in ‘Wer gait im Altertum als Atheist?’, Philologus 128 (1984), 157–83 (in particular, pp. 182–3)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The dominant use of ἄθεος in tragedy is in the sense of forsaken or hated by the gods, and it is used quite frequently of people who are gods, are related to the gods, or are in the process of dealing with the gods at the moment. In the Eumenides at 152, Orestes is called ἄθεος as he is in the process of supplicating Apollo; in the Trachiniae at 1038 Heracles' wife is called ἄθεος In Helen, Euripides has the chorus focus on precisely this as a measure of the unreliability of the things human beings say: Helen, daughter of Zeus by Leda, is called ἄθεος by men (1148).

46 This is presumably why he denies that the sophist is the philosophical nature in a state of corruption: the philosopher in the state of corruption would be a person who had the unity of soul, belief and purpose that the philosopher has, but who turned away from the good. It is not clear that Plato thinks such a character possible.