Politics and Philosophy in Plato's Menexenus

Nickolas Pappas, Mark Zelcer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317592198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

Menexenus is one of the least studied among Plato's works, mostly because of the puzzling nature of the text, which has led many scholars either to reject the dialogue as spurious or to consider it as a mocking parody of Athenian funeral rhetoric. In this book, Pappas and Zelcer provide a persuasive alternative reading of the text, one that contributes in many ways to our understanding of Plato, and specifically to our understanding of his political thought.The book is organized into two parts. In the first part the authors offer a synopsis of the dialogue, address the setting and its background in terms of the Athenian funeral speech, and discuss the alternative readings of the dialogue, showing their weaknesses and strengths. In the second part, the authors offer their positive interpretation of the dialogue, taking particular care to explain and ground their interpretive criteria and method, which considers Plato's text not simply as a de-contextualized collection of philosophical arguments but offers a theoretically reading of the text that situates it firmly within its historical context.The book will become a reference point in the debate about the Menexenus and Plato's political philosophy more generally and marks an important contribution to our understanding of ancient thought and classical Athenian society.

Part I
The Menexenus, its Persons, its Problems

1
Synopsis of the Dialogue

The Menexenus divides obviously into two parts of unequal length: the frame, which consists in the opening and closing dialogues between Socrates and Menexenus, and the speech attributed to Aspasia sandwiched between them. The speech itself can be further divided into numerous sections, but for a useful first look it is worth identifying three: a history of Athens, an exhortation to virtue and a consolation for the living.

Opening dialogue (234a–236d)

The dialogue opens when Socrates encounters the young Menexenus, who wants to be chosen to deliver the coming funeral oration for the war dead. Socrates and Menexenus engage in atypical Socratic banter, in which Socrates describes how noble the orators can make anyone who died in battle seem to have been. Menexenus treats this as Socratic mockery. He laments the performance that the Athenians are likely to hear this time, given that the council will be making its decision at the last minute, leaving speechwriters very little time to compose.

But the speeches are generally prepared well in advance, Socrates says; and anyway, how hard could it be to praise Athenians in front of an Athenian audience? He speaks so breezily about the oratorical art that Menexenus asks whether Socrates could manage a funeral speech were he to be chosen. (One of the atypical touches in this exchange is the sight of Menexenus as questioner challenging Socrates’ claim to knowledge and ability – though Socrates does not crumple under questioning as his interlocutors tend to do.)

Yes, Socrates says, he could manage. He has a tutor in rhetoric, Aspasia, whom he just heard preparing a funeral speech. She has taught him what needs to be in such speeches, such as the one she composed for Pericles to deliver. After his training, Socrates could recite a funeral speech on the spot. He is or pretends to be reluctant, not wanting Aspasia to discover that he is giving her speeches away. But Menexenus insists and Socrates begins to recite.

Funeral speech (236d–249c)

The praise for Athens begins with a mythical prehistory that elides into a century’s worth of Greek history told from Athens’s point of view.

Praise of the dead via Athenian prehistory (236d–239c)

The speech as a whole begins with self-consciousness about its own role in the praise of heroes. The praise in this speech will cite the good lineage of the dead, their education and finally their deeds.

The dead soldiers boasted a pure lineage. Their ancestors did not immigrate from elsewhere; rather, Athenians sprang from and were nourished by the same earth to which they now return. Thus honouring the Athenian land honours the men. Athens itself deserves praise first because it is loved by the gods, and second because Athens boremen while all the other lands bore animals. As a proof, says Socrates, realize that Athens alone at the time produced the ideal food to nourish humans; and a true mother innately possesses and provides the resources to feed her offspring. The earth then introduced unnamed gods to educate her Athenian youth in the basic arts of life and weaponry.

The first Athenians created a good regime – also worth mentioning, inasmuch as good regimes make men good and bad ones ruin them. Thus praise for the dead soldiers should also includemention of the regime that educated them. The first Athenians established a constitutionunder which all Athenians since their time have lived, which is to say an aristocracy, regardless of the different names that subsequent generations gave to their form of government. For even when Athenian governance goes by the name “democracy” it consists in the multitude’s approving the best man to rule – which is to say that it amounts to aristocracy. The Athenian people are willing to put their best citizens into positions of authority because of their fundamental equality. Once upon a time all Athenians were born equal, so no one will be anyone else’s master or slave.

The poets have already hymned the accomplishments of those mythical first generations of Athenians: fending off the Amazons, protecting the Argives against the Cadmeians and then the Heracleidae against the Argives. No speech can match the poets’ versions of these great deeds; so why not devote the speech to the story still untold or unsung, the story of what Athens has done in recent years and within the community’s memory.

Athenian history (239d–246a)

The bulk of the speech follows; it is a history of Athens that mainly lists battles and wars, beginning on the eve of the first Persian invasion. Persia expanded under Cyrus the Great, first freeing the Persians from the Medes and then enslaving the Medes in turn.¹ Cambyses enlarged the empire into Egypt and Libya; his successor Darius added Scythia and took control of the sea.

Then Darius accused Athens and Eritrea of plotting against Sardis. He sent an army into Greece that the Athenians repelled at Marathon, while the rest of the Greeks refused to participate. Even without joining in, though, those other Greeks learned from the Athenians’ victory that the Persians were not invincible. By teaching that lesson to the rest of Greece, the Athenians of Marathon became the fathers of Athenian freedom and continue to deserve the highest praise. Second only to them are the victors at Salamis and Artemisium. Those victories at sea were notable for liberating Greeks at large from their fear of superior naval forces. And third in the praise they deserve are those participants in the Persian War who secured the joint victory over Persia – Athenian and Spartan forces fighting together – at Plataea.

Socrates’ history continues with more engagements between Greece and Persia: the final blows against the Empire at Eurymedon, Cyprus, and Crete. Athens and its Greek allies frightened the Persian king away by defeating Persia and Egypt at sea. The other Greek cities first wanted to emulate Athens and then were overcome by envy, and the result of this envy was warfare among Greeks.

First Athens fought on behalf of Boeotian freedom at Tanagra and Oenophyta, prevailing when the Spartans abandoned the battle. Then all Greece took up arms against Athens. The Athenians won again, defeating the Greeks and their Spartan leaders in sea battles at Sphagia, but refrained from destroying their vanquished enemies outright. Athenians consider it wrong to destroy fellow Greeks as one destroys barbarians, so they spared the lives of the Spartans at Sphagia.

In a third war, Athens fought in Sicily on behalf of freedom for the Leontinians. Treacherous Greek cities imposed heavy losses on Athens in land battles. Many cities also joined in naval warfare in the Hellespont, where Athenswon a ruinous seabattle over an alliance of Greeks. Those other cities’ treachery took the form of secret alliances with the same barbarians that a unified Greece had once expelled. Nevertheless Athens showed its strength at Mytilene, in the battle of Arginusae, defeating Sparta and Persia at sea in a disastrous battle.

By now Athens had earned a reputation for being undefeatable; what conquered the city was no outside enemy but internal strife. Even so, this civil unrest in Athens was the kind that all cities ought to wish for, if they had to endure civil divisions. Everyone was amicable, thanks to the kinship that began with Athenians’ collective birth from earth; today they have forgiven one another for a conflict that began in misfortune rather than in malice.

But Athens did not forgive the other Greek cities, which repaid the generous treatment they had received from Athens first by joining the Persians and confiscating Athenian ships, then by taking down the city walls. The Athenians decided not to go on fighting against the enslavement of Greeks, whether by barbarians or by other Greeks. Sparta took this inaction as an opportunity to reduce the rest of Greece to slavery, and soon Argos, Boeotia, Corinth and even Persia came to Athens seeking help. Prone to pity as usual, Athens liberated the Greeks; and indirectly saved Persia too, by permitting exiles and volunteers to help the Empire.

After being forced into the war Athens fought Sparta so successfully that the Persian king sought a quick resolution. He offered to side with Athens in exchange for recognition of his rights over the Greek cities in Asia Minor; but Athens, purely Greek that it is, refused the bargain. In the end Athens managed to keep its fleet, its walls and its allied cities, and bring the war to a close. Nevertheless the city lost good men, forced into defeat by rough terrain at Corinth and treachery at Lechaeum. For that matter those Athenians who freed the Persian king and drove the Spartans from the sea were also good men, and also deserving praise and honour.

Exhortation (246a–247c)

Socrates promises to keep reminding the audience of the praise that has gone to brave Athenian soldiers who died for their city. He links the dead with the living. As the soldiers now being mourned did not leave their posts in battle, the living must not abandon their virtue. He speaks in the first person on behalf of the fallen soldiers, fashioning a “speech from the dead” out of the kinds of things they had said while still alive. Here is what they would be saying to their family members now if they could.

Regardless of how they lived (the dead say), they died nobly. They did not disgrace their descendants. Their children ought to follow suit, for such other good possessions as wealth, physical beauty and knowledge lose their value, or even make the one who has them look worse, if they are not accompanied by virtue, and particularly by the virtue of courage. The dead ask of their children only that their children surpass them in virtue.²

Consolation (247c–249c)

The speech ends by consoling the dead soldiers’ family members. They in turn ought to console their parents, urging them to bear up under this misfortune. No further laments: what all parents wish is for their children to grow up to be virtuous and respected, and their dead sons now are both. It will only dishonour the fallen soldiers if their parents now indulge in grieving them. What the dead really want and need is that their families be cared for, and Athens has seen to this responsibility, with institutions to protect both the parents and the children of the war dead. In particular the city will nurture the orphans as a father does and arm them for battle when they are grown.

Socrates now dismisses his fictitious audience. They have discharged their duty to mourn and they should depart.

Closing dialogue (249d–e)

Socrates and Menexenus exchange a few words before parting. Menexenus says he has met Aspasia and knows what kind of woman she is. He doubts that she wrote the speech. Anyway he thanks Socrates for reporting the speech and promises not to tell anyone that he heard it; to which Socrates replies with the promise to deliver more fine speeches.

Notes

1 Although Persians and Medes were two different peoples, the classical Greeks seemed to have used the two names for them interchangeably. Thus one who adopted Persian customs and clothing was said to mêdizein “mede-ize”,to become a Mede. The biblical Bookof Esther combines them too, never referring to Persia alone but rather to “Persia and Media” (Esther 1:3, 14, 18; 10:2).

2 For an insightful summation of this passage (which we will not spend much time discussing) see J. T. Roberts (2012: 142–44).

2
Persons and Dates of the Dialogue

Readers can take the dialogue form of Plato’s works too far. He was not writing modern biography. Nor does the dialogue form have to mean that everything said in the dialogues, said by Socrates for example, must be understood strategically, as a claim being pitched to a particular person on one occasion with some concrete aim in view; or contextually, as a claim whose meaning always returns to its being meaningful for the person who espouses it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The Menexenus, its persons, its problems
• PART II Education and rhetoric
• PART III Myth and history
• Bibliography
• Index