When we return to Aristotle's discussion of friendship in Book 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics after examining the Lysis, we are able to see the ways in which Aristotle engages and responds to the arguments of the Lysis, at once silently conceding some of Socrates' central contentions and, at the same time, offering in Chapters 2 to 6 a sustained counterargument to Socrates' thesis about friendship and the good. Most prominent among Aristotle's tacit concessions is the fact that he nowhere attempts to argue that in friendship one can ever simply leave behind the concern with one's own good. To the contrary, Aristotle identifies the three sources of affection or types of objects that are loved or lovable (φιλητόν) as the good, the pleasant, and the useful, adding that the useful is loved only as a means to the good, and that the good that each man loves is not everything good but what is or what seems to him good for himself. Also striking is Aristotle's silence about the noble or beautiful as a fundamental and separate root of or inspiration for love.

Aristotle's account of the three objects of love differs in this important respect from his account of the three objects of choice in Book 2, which he lists as the noble, the beneficial, and the pleasant (1104b30–31).

In Chapter 8, Aristotle provides the capstone of the argument he has been building that the best friend is not another but oneself. He thereby demonstrates that the most important thing for happiness is not to have a good friend in another but to have the right stance toward oneself and the capacity to secure what is good for oneself, especially for one's soul or mind. Aristotle does not bend his efforts to making the case that all men in fact love themselves most of all, although he clearly indicates that they do. For showing that all the actual men that we know love themselves most would not prove that the rarest and best man, leading the best possible life, might not love others more. Instead, he makes the more radical claim that the greatest self-love is characteristic of the very best people, even or especially in their moments of seemingly greatest self-sacrifice; and what is more, that the truest form of self-love, in the best individuals, does in fact take precedence over everything and everyone else. In the process, Aristotle illuminates the difference between the self-love of ordinary people and that of the most moral citizens, while prompting some reflections upon the self-love of a third group, the philosophic souls who possess complete self-understanding.

The Goodness of Self-Love

Aristotle begins from the obvious truth that self-love is almost universally an object of reproach.

Friendship was a great subject of stories and of philosophical reflection in classical antiquity. Friendship was associated in the popular mind with courage, with republicanism, and with the spirited resistance to injustice and tyranny. The Greek poets celebrated the stories of such famous pairs of friends as Heracles and Iolaus, Theseus and Pirithous, and Orestes and Pylades. Festivals were held in honor of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who were stubbornly credited in folklore with unseating the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus, despite the efforts of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aristotle to prove that popular memory had gotten the story wrong. Most famous of all friends were of course Achilles and Patroclus, but equally revealing is the story of Damon and Phintias, who were said to have lived under the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius. Phintias had been discovered plotting against the tyrant and was condemned to death. When he asked leave to return home first to set his affairs in order, Damon offered to stand as pledge for his safe return. Dionysius consented, though he marveled at Damon's simplicity. But when in fact Phintias returned on the appointed day to take his place on the scaffold and save his friend, so moved was the tyrant by the friends' mutual constancy that he commuted the sentence and begged to be accepted as a third in their friendship. In the proud, unshakable loyalty and mutual trust of two men such as Damon and Phintias, we see classical virtue at its most impressive but also its most appealing, for it is the special charm and fascination of a great friendship that it seems at once so noble and so delightfully desirable.

In Nicomachean Ethics 8.13–8.14, Aristotle returns from a discussion of friendship in politics and the family to his broader theme of friendship and equality. Here, in the course of examining the reproaches and quarrels that arise in certain confused or deceptive forms of utilitarian friendship, he in fact offers his most profound reflections on the critical question of the relation of friendship to justice. Aristotle opens 8.13 with an explicit return to his threefold classification of friendships as based on utility, pleasure, and virtue. The sympathetic concern that grows out of kinship or similarity, which had come to appear as a fourth and crucial root of friendship, and which figured prominently in the previous chapters, now recedes again from the picture. Instead, Aristotle focuses attention on the difficulties of establishing and maintaining equality between friends, especially when their capacities differ greatly, reminding us of the unsolved questions of what motivates benefactors to act as they do, and how most unequal friendships can ever really be balanced to everyone's satisfaction.

Quarrels

“Complaints and reproaches arise solely or chiefly in friendships of utility, and with good reason,” Aristotle says (1162b5–6). But the reasons he goes on to give to explain why complaints and reproaches do not arise in friendships of virtue and pleasure in fact indicate just how unusual these friendships would have to be to be perfectly free of grievances:

Aristotle's discussion of the different types of friendship has so far been confined to friendships between equals, and his analysis has shown many reasons why equality is important in friendship. To the extent that the friendship turns upon utility, it is of course essential that the friends have something of more or less equal value to offer. To the extent that it turns upon pleasure, they must have similar capacities to please, and since the greatest pleasure in friendship is the pleasure of companionship and shared activity with a kindred spirit who has similar aims and feelings and desires, equality and similarity contribute enormously to the pleasantness of friendships. And Aristotle has stressed repeatedly that the perfect friendship of virtue will be a friendship of equals, each fully worthy of the other's confidence, trust, and generous support.

In 8.7, Aristotle turns to friendships between unequals, such as father and son, elder and youth, husband and wife, or ruler and subject. Not only do these unequal friendships differ as a class from those discussed previously, but each of them also has its own peculiar character and problems, and indeed each contains within it, as it were, two different friendships. For Aristotle says the superior and inferior have different virtues and functions and different grounds for their affection (1158b17–19). Thus, he explains, the partners do not receive the same thing from each other and should not expect to receive it.

In his long discussion of friendship and equality in 8.7 to 9.3, Aristotle has uncovered much self-interest at work in even the most virtuous friendships. But even if each man does love his own good “most of all” (1159a12), Aristotle has nowhere retracted his insistence that true friends also love one another for their own sakes. How are these two different concerns connected in one soul? Aristotle will suggest now that the love for the friend for his own sake is an extension or expansion of self-love.

The Elements of Friendship

Aristotle begins afresh in 9.4 with a new and fuller definition of friendship, specifying the elements that are universally acknowledged to constitute friendship. Ordinary opinion tends to think of true friendship and self-regard as altogether different, the one springing from noble generosity and the other involving qualities that are base or at best morally neutral. By taking common opinion as his starting point, however, Aristotle shows that the same elements that are agreed to be essential to friendship are found primarily and most completely in a good man's relation to himself: “The features of friendship that are found in friendship toward one's neighbors, in accordance with which the various friendships are defined, seem to come out of those that one has toward oneself” (1166a1–2). In the process, he proves again that the virtuous man is the one most capable of being a good friend to others.

The various functions of dialogue form considered in the last chapter are all complementary and mutually reinforcing. And all are inextricably bound up with Plato's use of characterization. By this I mean simply his discursive strategies for the representation of persons, which may be summarized as what they say and what others say to them or about them, together with the dramatic context in which they are situated through the discourse as a whole. The entire text of a Platonic dialogue may thus be understood as a vehicle for characterization. In this chapter I hope to substantiate this claim, as well as exploring several related matters concerning various conceptions of “character.” I begin by examining the various components of a person's “character” and the distinction between this meaning of the word and “character” as dramatis persona. In the next section I look in greater detail at the “maximal” Sokrates who emerges from Plato's dialogues overall. Finally, I outline some ancient Greek attitudes towards the construction of character in and through dramatic representation, as a matrix for considering how Plato may have expected his characters to influence his audience, and a context for understanding some of the dramatic strategies to be considered later in more detail.

“character”

When Aristotle says drama represents “people doing things,” he adds that these people are “necessarily” of good or bad character (ēthos). One might object that some representations of persons endow them with no moral qualities.

Theaetetus stands out among Plato's dialogues for its blurring of the boundaries between various proposed groupings of his works. It is self-consciously “Socratic” in the elenctic manner, uses the rich scene-setting and characterization, substantial argumentation, and eloquent Socratic speech-making associated with the constructive Sokrates, and overlaps with the “late” dialogues in important aspects of both style and content. In a more methodologically innocent age, its aporetic structure was taken by some as evidence of an early date; more recently, Theaetetus has been seen as anomalous among the later dialogues, prompted perhaps by a desire to pay homage to the eponymous interlocutor after his death. But whatever other reasons there may be for its unusual combination of elements, it displays a richness of characterization that serves to mark Plato's continuing preoccupation with the relations between personality, literary form, philosophical method and Socratic pedagogy. Through Sokrates, Theaitetos, Theodoros, and their interactions, Plato explores yet again the conditions under which Socratic pedagogy may successfully take place. Republic Book 1 asked, in dramatic terms, who could hope to learn from the elenctic Sokrates, while Books 2–10 showed what kind of interlocutor could enable Sokrates to move towards positive discourse. Theaetetus addresses similar issues but in a slightly different way, examining what kind of interlocutor can not only benefit personally from Socratic testing, but enable Sokrates to be productive without formally departing from an elenctic structure.

Republic provides a unique crucible for examining the relationship between the figures of Sokrates that I have called “elenctic” and “constructive,” and their interactions with others. The fracture line in his character between Books 1 and 2 allows us to examine the relationship between these two different avatars of Sokrates on the basis of the internal structure of a single work, without making any assumptions or inferences about the relative chronology of various dialogues. This remains true regardless of the circumstances of Republic's composition. I do not share the view that Book 1 was written earlier as a separate dialogue. But this issue is irrelevant to interpretation of the mature work as a whole. Since Books 2–10 are structurally a continuation of Book 1, we may expect the stylistic changes they present to tell us something about Plato's own shifting attitudes towards philosophical method and its literary expression. I shall begin this chapter, then, by looking at the dramatis personae of Book 1, in which the elenctic Sokrates faces three varied interlocutors, before turning to the radically different dramatic style of the rest of the work and considering some possible reasons for this transformation.

socratic testing: three responses

The conversation takes place on a summer evening in the house of Polemarchos, son of Kephalos, at Peiraeus (328b). Sokrates is there, as he tells us in the dialogue's famous opening words, for the first Athenian festival of “the goddess,” usually thought to be the Thracian goddess Bendis (327a; cf. 354a).

The reader of Plato's dialogues is seduced by a dazzling interplay of unity and multiplicity. This is generated in part by a series of interlocking and overlapping dualities, the chief of which is presented most often – and most reductively – as a tension between “philosophical” content and “literary” form. By articulating these two factors as interdependent we have already created an artificial split that distorts the lived experience of reading Plato. This emerges vividly from the way Cornford omitted certain “dramatic” elements from his translations of Plato, whereas Livingstone printed dialectical passages of Phaedo in smaller type “so that they can be either read or omitted.” Yet the “Western” history of ideas in general, and of Platonic studies in particular, makes some such formulation inescapable. Ironically, Plato himself is in part responsible for this situation, through his focus on the “quarrel between poetry and philosophy” (Rep. 607b). Indeed, it has recently been argued that he was the inventor (rather than an inheritor) of this supposedly “ancient” quarrel. If so, he was also the inventor of his own mutually hostile, or at least mutually suspicious, interpretive communities, which may be crudely divided into “literary” and “philosophical” camps.

Throughout the last century, however, increasing numbers of interpreters have acknowledged that it creates a false dichotomy, and one that undermines the specific power of Plato's writings, either to disregard the “dramatic” elements, or to view “the arguments as subordinate to the drama.”

PLATO'S TRIAD

The last chapter was concerned with Theaetetus on its own terms. But it is also the first of a triad of dialogues, completed by Sophist and Statesman, which are linked by a variety of thematic and structural connections. These three works are also bound together by formal features, in a way that is unparalleled among Plato's works. These features include dramatic sequencing, explicit cross-references, and an overlapping cast of characters. At the end of Theaetetus Sokrates looks forward to continuing his conversation with Theaitetos and Theodoros the next day (210d); at the beginning of Sophist Theodoros alludes to “yesterday's agreement” to continue (216a); and in Statesman, Sokrates refers back explicitly to his first meeting with Theaitetos and the previous day's discussion (257a, 258a). The explicitness and the dramatic character of these links distinguish them from other forms of Platonic intertextuality, and invite us to read these three works together, in a certain sequence, and in each other's light.

These interconnections, both thematic and dramatic, draw attention to the differences in form and content among the three works, as well as the similarities. The most striking of these is a series of discontinuities between Theaetetus on the one hand, and Sophist and Statesman on the other. The latter are markedly similar to each other in style, and unlike Theaetetus, form part of the group of Plato's dialogues known – relatively uncontroversially – as “late.”

Perhaps perversely, in view of the size of the present volume, I begin it by regretting some absences. The body of this book consists of readings of a select number of Plato's dialogues. Even at its present length, issues of enormous importance for understanding these works – especially the longer ones – have inevitably been neglected and other dialogues that would richly repay study from the present perspective have received little or no attention. I particularly regret the lack of a chapter on Symposium, and a concluding chapter, originally planned, on Timaeus-Critias.

My readers will probably feel, however, that the book is quite long enough as it is. In order to prevent it from bulking still larger I have, with regret, drastically reduced the number of secondary references that were present in earlier versions. For this reason the Bibliography contains many items that are no longer referred to in the text or notes. I hope this will make it useful to anyone who wishes to pursue these topics in more detail.

I write at a time when the canons for orthography and linguistic convention of various kinds are in flux. I therefore take this opportunity to clarify my usage in two such areas. First, when speaking of ancient authors and their views, I normally use the traditional, supposedly “unmarked,” pronoun “he,” reflecting the norms employed by these writers themselves. To supply them with gender-neutral pronouns would both be culturally misleading and provide credit where it is not due.