A MURDER MYSTERY

Parmenides' influence on Plato is both obvious and acknowledged. Parmenides claimed that there is no such thing as what is not, so all there is is one, single, uniform and self-identical entity, unchanging and imperishable, eternal and complete:

Proper reasoning and accurate speech should be directed at this entity alone; belief, which tries to talk about plurality, is fraught with contradiction and (so) unreason:

Plato's own account of the nature of forms (single-natured, eternal, unchanging) appears deeply indebted to Parmenides' account of the One, even if Plato allows the plural world of sensation to be quite satisfactorily real, and even if his forms are themselves plural. Plato's own account of reason, moreover, has an Eleatic origin; both Parmenides and Plato suppose that reason can deliver its conclusions without the benefit of sense-perception.

SOCRATES' METHODS

The early dialogues present Socrates in conversation with various people – sophists, religious experts, generals, old friends and new adversaries. Socrates insistently questions his interlocutors, about what they are doing and why. He asks because he wants to know and because he claims to be ignorant himself. Ironically he commends his interlocutor's expertise and then, by careful analysis, shows his interlocutor to be in an even worse cognitive case. For when the interlocutor defines some ethical notion Socrates elicits from him a whole collection of his sincere beliefs and assumptions, and then shows that those beliefs are inconsistent with the proposed definition. This, famously, results in dismay, irritation, even apoplectic horror on the part of the interlocutor.

You can see why they gave Socrates the hemlock. His methods are not only maddening for his victims; they also seem pretty destructive. For showing a set of propositions inconsistent shows that at least one of them must be false; but it does not show which one. The elenchus does not seem to offer positive progress unless the exposure of inconsistency is itself positive (e.g. Gorgias 482b–c). So the elenchus may be barren and negative. Matters may be made worse when Socrates insists that he knows nothing anyway (e.g. Apology 21b–c; Euthyphro 5a–b; Charmides 165b–c). Why does he do that? Does he intend to undermine anything his interlocutor believes, and thus save him from the horrors of doxosophy? Then Socrates' arguments may be therapeutic; but are they any more productive than sophistry? Or does Socrates have some knowledge himself which protects the argument from the waste of scepticism? If he does, how is that knowledge immune from the elenchus?

PROTARGHUS AND SOCRATES

Protarchus' attack on the negative ways of the elenchus at Philebus 19c seems to be accepted by Socrates, so that the Philebus ends – at least from Socrates' point of view – with some sort of positive conclusion. So perhaps also the dialectic of question and answer has been laid to rest; perhaps Plato no longer supposes there to be value in the investigation of someone's beliefs for consistency or in the exposure of confusion in someone's opinions. Perhaps even the preliminary activities of the noble sophist should be put aside, in favour of setting out some subject in the manner prescribed by (broad) collection and division (or if, as Protarchus allows, not by collection and division, then in some other productive way). It may be, therefore, that by the time the Philebus draws to a close, the significance of person to person dialectic has receded in favour of – what might seem – more analytic methods of philosophy, which require neither the personal engagement of any of the participants, nor that philosophical progress should be made by dialogue itself. By this time, that is to say, we may no longer need to search for the sincerity of an interlocutor, since propositions and theories and principles may be entertained and considered irrespective of whether they are believed. By this time, furthermore, we may no longer need to ask whether the dialogue form is significant to the philosophical content of the dialogue, since by now it has receded into a mere formality.

Introduction

Plato’s shortish dialogue Charmides ends with the following sequence, initiated by a response on the part of Charmides to the question whether he thinks he needs the Socratic ‘charm’ which will cure the soul (176b–d):

Xenophon (c.430 to at least 356 bc) and Isocrates (436–338 bc), contemporaries of Plato, had the opportunity to learn from Socrates and other philosophers who aimed to produce political virtue. Isocrates’ own ‘philosophy’ took the form of an ‘education through speaking and writing’ that prepared pupils to play their part in domestic and international politics. His speeches served as models. Xenophon spent his maturity in exile from Athens ‘hunting, writing his works and entertaining his friends’ in Scillus in the Peloponnese. His works also offer a ‘philosophic’ education in political virtue and sound government.

Aristotle believed that the aim of community government was to implement the common good. For him the polis was the supreme community, and its goal the greatest good (Pol. 1252a1–7; cf. 1278b30–1279a21, 1282b14–22). Xenophon and Isocrates addressed the government of other communities as well as the polis. Xenophon’s Cyropaedia sought to explain Cyrus’ successful government of eastern kingdoms (1. 1. 1–6); his Hiero dramatized the reform of tyrannical rule of a polis, while his Oeconomicus 7–21 examined Ischomachus’ successful government of his household; his Constitution of the Spartans (Lacedaimoniōn Politeia) described the excellent laws of the Spartan Lycurgus. These works made a lasting impression on political thought. Xenophon’s models seem undemocratic (a Persian prince, a tyrant, an aristocratic householder, Sparta), and he had no reason to love the Athenian democracy that had procured his exile and executed his teacher Socrates, but the principles that inform his models are consistent and have broad application. Isocrates wrote speeches that also endorse various kinds of government: Areopagiticus (probably 354) persuades the Athenians to restore their ancestral constitution, while Panathenaicus (339) proves their ancestral constitution superior to the Spartan constitution; ad Nicoclem (c.372) shows the prince Nicocles of Cyprus how to rule his subjects, while Nicocles (c.368) shows his subjects how to behave toward their king; Panegyricus (380) and Ad Philippum (346) persuade first the Athenians and then Philip of Macedon to unite and lead the Greeks against Persia.

Tragedy compromises political theory. From the very beginnings of philosophy as a discipline, there has been an uneasy and often conflictual relation between the way that philosophy defines its theoretical project, and the questions that drama allows. Plato, the first policeman of political thought, invents - and founds - a history of struggle between poetry and philosophy and, notoriously, banned drama from his Republic for ethical, psychological and epistemological reasons. Yet the ambivalence of his evident attraction to the poetry he dismisses at such length also leads to an anecdotal tradition that before he embarked on philosophy, even Plato wrote tragic verse. Aristotle attempted to save drama for pedagogy: he allowed theatre a role in the education of the philosophically trained man at least. Yet Aristotle, for all that he set himself critically against his teacher Plato’s arguments, also contributed to the devaluation and exclusion of drama both by his development of philosophy as a privileged and formal system of argumentation, and by his recognition of a peculiar pleasure in tragedy: ‘tragic pleasure’ has often since been utilized to impugn the seriousness of theatre’s teaching. Many modern philosophers have followed Plato’s lead, and mention drama or other literature solely to dismiss the play of narrative and character from the rigorous field of theory. Nietzsche, from his oblique perspective on the discipline of philosophy, formulates a particularly influential and striking view of this rejection of drama when he argues that ‘Socratism’ destroyed tragedy: rationalist argument, embodied in the figure of Socrates, brings about the - tragic - death of the Dionysiac spirit of tragedy.

The purpose of this volume is to provide a fresh, critical account of Greek and Roman political thought from its beginnings to the point at which The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought takes up the story, i.e. c. ad 350. The choice of this date is obviously to some extent arbitrary: there is no implication that ‘Greek and Roman’ political thinking then suddenly stops short, to be replaced by some entirely new way of thinking about political issues (the ‘medieval’). The latter sections of the volume, and the Epilogue, make clear the continuities, as well as the discontinuities, in political thought between the ‘ancient’ and the ‘medieval’ periods. Indeed, as the readers of the present History may discover, it is a moot question whether the discontinuities here are more significant than, for example, those between Greek and Roman ‘periods’, or better the ‘Classical’ and the ‘Hellenistic’ (beginning with the death of Alexander in the last quarter of the fourth century bc). The political triumph of Christianity over the Greco-Roman world - when for the first time an official, monotheistic, religion came to occupy centre-stage - was certainly momentous. But the changes in the political environment after the fourth century bc were themselves massive. What is striking in both cases is the extent to which political theorizing, if not political thought in the wider sense, remains comparatively, and remarkably, conservative, working as much by selection, adaptation and modification as by downright innovation.

Introduction

In Rome, quite unlike Athens, there grew up a professional class of lawyers. These ‘jurists’ were originally priests, but in the course of the third century bc they came to profess a secular jurisprudence. Their role in the Roman legal system was pivotal: neither the magistrates responsible for granting legal remedies nor the judges who decided cases were lawyers; all looked to the jurists for legal advice. Although the jurists did not in the modern sense practise law, this contact with practice shaped their distinctly pragmatic approach to it. But in debate and in their writing, they also developed a sophisticated analytical jurisprudence; and particularly during the ‘classical’ period of Roman law – from the late Republic until the early third century ad – they produced a substantial legal literature. Typical of their works were large-scale commentaries on civil law and the remedies contained in the magistrate’s edict, and books of collected legal opinions. While some of their works played their part in argument of interest only to the jurists themselves, others were suited to, and written to satisfy, the diverse demands of practice or even teaching.

In the surviving writings of the Roman jurists there is no extended discussion of the nature of political society, the legitimacy of its rulers, or the laws which govern or ought to govern it. Nor is there any such discussion about justice, the sources of law, or the conflict between positive and natural law. The writings which survive indicate that, although such questions were not entirely neglected, little attention was lavished on them.