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PINDAR'S CHARIOTEER IN PLATO'S PHAEDRUS (227B9–10)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2014

Christopher Moore
Christopher Moore*
Affiliation:
Penn State University
*
[email protected]
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Extract

In his second question of the Phaedrus, Socrates asks Phaedrus how he spent (διατριβή) his morning with Lysias. Phaedrus answers: ‘You'll learn, should you have the leisure (σχολή) to walk and listen.’ Socrates responds:

What? Don't you think I would judge it, as Pindar puts it, a thing ‘surpassing even lack of leisure’ (καὶ ἀσχολίας ὑπέρτερον), to hear how you and Lysias spent your time?   (227b6–10)

Socrates quotes from First Isthmian 2. In this victory ode, Pindar celebrates, uniquely in his extant oeuvre, a charioteer winner who has driven his own team. The epinician poem and the dialogue, especially the myth in Socrates’ second speech, have remarkable systematic parallels. This suggests that Pindar's victor serves as model for the palinode's philosophical lover, and Pindar's song for Socrates’ conversation.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 64 , Issue 2 , December 2014 , pp. 525 - 532
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I gratefully acknowledge the help of Elizabeth Belfiore, Zoe Stamatopoulou, Christopher Long, and two anonymous referees.

References

1 His first was: ‘Dear Phaedrus, where to and where from?’ (ὦ ϕίλε Φαῖδρε, ποῖ δὴ καὶ πόθεν, 227a1); in response, Phaedrus tells him that he had been with Lysias, and is now taking a refreshing walk out of the city.

2 It is not the only record of a self-driving winner; a Peloponnesian inscription from about 440 b.c. records a multi-victoried Damonon who drove his own team (IG V.1.213 = IAG 16).

3 Bundy, Elroy L., ‘Studia Pindarica II: the First Isthmian Ode’, University of California Publications in Classical Philology 18.2 (1962), 35Google Scholar.

4 That Phaedrus is an Athenian is clear from his patronym Myrrhinus, his knowledge of Athenian geography, and other details known about his family (on which see Nails, Debra, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics [Indianapolis, IN, 2002], 232–4Google Scholar).

5 It often gets no comment except the reference, as in Hackforth, Reginald, Plato's Phaedrus (Cambridge, 1976)Google Scholar and Thompson, W.H., The Phaedrus of Plato (London, 1868)Google Scholar.

6 Yunis, H., Plato: Phaedrus (Cambridge, 2011), 87Google Scholar.

7 White, D., Rhetoric and Reality in Plato's Phaedrus (Albany, NY, 1993), 12Google Scholar; Ferrari, G.R.F., Listening to the Cicadas (Cambridge, 1987), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rowe, C., Plato: Phaedrus (Warminster, 1986)Google Scholar, ad loc. See also Burger, R., Plato's Phaedrus: A Defense of a Political Art of Writing (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1980), 9–10Google Scholar, 127 n. 4: ‘Socrates ironically suggests that hearing the diatribê between Lysias and Phaedrus is for him the equivalent of those interests of the city which transcend personal pursuits of leisure. In betraying his love of speeches for the sake of amusement, Phaedrus comes to light as an individual who thrives on freedom and leisure without redeeming those conditions through the practice of philosophy. Socrates, in contrast, reveals his love of speech as an urgent and most serious matter; but the playfulness of Socrates’ attention to the serious importance of sharing Lysias's feast even Phaedrus discerns (cf. 234d). The irony of Socrates’ elevation of his encounter with Phaedrus to a matter “higher than business” he betrays in concluding their discussion by identifying it as mere amusement (paidia, cf. 278b).'

8 Griswold, C., Self-knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus (New Haven, CT, 1986), 250Google Scholar n. 11: Pindar emphasizes his and the victor Herodotus’ shared Theban identity; ‘by contrast, the chariot and driver that Socrates ends up praising do not belong to any city; Socrates puts the command of the Delphic god (or, in the palinode, of Zeus) above even the concerns of his city’. The athletic champion makes time for exercise, but ‘Socrates has leisure only for self-knowledge’. And, whereas ‘Pindar suggests here that the supreme prize is the immortality obtainable when one is praised in speech by citizen and stranger alike’, Socrates does not take such fame as the highest accomplishment.

9 Note that the theme of charioteering comes up again at Lysis 208a1–b1: Lysis admits that his parents will not allow him to drive the chariots himself because he does not yet know how. On Socrates’ critical attitude toward praise speeches, see Nightingale, A.N., ‘The folly of praise: Plato's critique of encomiastic discourse in the Lysis and Symposium’, CQ 43 (1993), 112–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Demos, M., Lyric Quotation in Plato (Lanham, MD, 1999)Google Scholar, takes Plato to have a more sympathetic view toward lyric praise; Pender, E., ‘Sappho and Anacreon in Plato's Phaedrus’, LICS 6.4 (2007), 1–57Google Scholar, discusses Plato's various uses of lyric in the dialogue.

10 Silk, M., ‘Pindar meets Plato: theory, language, value, and the Classics’, in Harrison, S. J. (ed.), Texts, Ideas, and the Classics: Scholarship, Theory, and Classical Literature (Oxford, 2001), 26–45Google Scholar, provides another example of the depth of Plato's reading of Pindar on matters of central human concern, in his case comparing Pyth. 8.76–100 and Resp. 10.617d–e.

11 The translations are modified in several places from Race, W.H. (ed. and tr.), Pindar II: Nemean Odes, Isthmian Odes, Fragments (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 135Google Scholar. I have also been influenced by Nisetich, F.J., Pindar's Victory Songs (Baltimore, MD, 1980)Google Scholar.

12 According to Race (n. 11), 253 (cf. 132, 242), ‘Pindar undoubtedly refers to [Paean 4] at Isth. 1.7–9.’ In this attribution he was preceded by Kirkwood, G., Selections from Pindar (Chico, CA, 1982), 277Google Scholar, and followed by Rutherford, I., Pindar's Paeans: A Reading of the Fragments with a Survey of the Genre (Oxford, 2001), 284Google Scholar, who accepts this inference as natural but not necessary.

13 For some general remarks on this poem, see Instone, S. (ed. and tr.), Pindar: Selected Odes: Olympian One, Pythian Nine, Nemeans Two & Three, Isthmian One (Warminster, 1996)Google Scholar.

14 Which distinctions obtain between an author and his primary speaker (narrator or protagonist) – contentious matters in both Pindaric and Platonic studies – do not materially effect the argument of this paper.

15 Kirkwood (n. 12), 281, says that the word Pindar uses when he says that he will do both tasks, ζεύξω, suggests a harmonious combination of the two tasks, but does not speculate on what this would amount to.

16 Pindar speaks twice of his protagonist (in the dative) as Ἡροδότῳ; Socrates dedicates his Palinode in this way: Ἔρως … δέδοταί (‘Love, this has been given’, 257a3–4). If we ignore the perfective reduplication do we see a pun?

17 Cf. Morgan, K., ‘Socrates and Gorgias at Delphi and Olympia: Phaedrus 235d6–236b4’, CQ 44.2 (1994), 375–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 For example, crowns (10, 21), games (11, 18, 50), victory (22), gold (20), reward (τέλος: 27, μισθός: 47), glory (12, 50), being well praised (εὐαγορηθείς: 51, 52), good cheer (εὐθυμίαν: 63), honour (66).

19 On Herodicus’ advice see Yunis (n. 6), 88, citing Hermias 24.25–30. I thank Christopher Long for conversation about the parallels between the dialogue's opening and the palinode.

20 Cf. Stat. Theb. 6.255; Sid. Apoll. To Consentius 23.317–427.

21 Scott, D., ‘Philosophy and madness in the Phaedrus’, OSAPh 41 (2011), 169–200Google Scholar, argues that Socrates’ purported claim that philosophy involves irrational madness depends on a deliberately invalid argument.

22 See Bett, R., ‘Immortality and the nature of the soul in the Phaedrus’, Phronesis 31 (1986), 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 See Moore, C., ‘Deception and knowledge in the Phaedrus’, AncPhil 33 (2003)Google Scholar; Scott (n. 21).

24 See Werner, D., ‘Plato's Phaedrus and the problem of unity’, OSAPh 32 (2007), 91–137Google Scholar, for a good summary of the attempts to unify the dialogue.

25 See Yunis (n. 6), 2–14.

26 Socrates does not fall here to the criticism of praise he made in the Lysis because he is not praising Phaedrus himself; he is praising an ideal form of life, specifically an ideal which involves examining one's ideals.

27 He has neither ignored the Delphic, Panhellenic imperative to ‘know himself’ nor abandoned his usual business of definitional inquiry, but he has come to focus on something more human, his own city, and speaks with more encomia, rhetoric, and myth than perhaps usual.

28 Speaking of speeches as ‘dêmôphelic’ may pun contrastingly on ‘dêmophilic’ speeches, those that worked by flattering the audience; consider Grg. 481d and passim, on what a speech that truly displayed love for the people to which it speaks would be like. On dêmophilia, see Scholtz, Andrew, Concordia Discors: Eros and Dialogue in Classical Athenian Literature (Washington, DC, 2006), 46–70.Google Scholar

29 Agard, W.R., ‘Boreas at Athens’, CJ 61.6 (1966), 241–6.Google Scholar

30 Cassiod. Var. 3.51 analogized the stadium for chariot races with the cosmos: the emperor at the centre, the twelve gates the signs of the zodiac, two-horse chariots as moon and four-horse chariots as sun, and so forth. See Reid, H.L., Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World: Contests of Virtue (London, 2011), 9, 100–3Google Scholar, for the development of this idea.