Download Rhetoric and History in Plato: the Menexenus as the Myth about

Rhetoric and History in Plato: the Menexenus as the Myth about Athens
The Menexenus has been called the most enigmatic of Plato's writings. The plot of the dialogue can be
summarized in a few sentences. Socrates meets a young man named Menexenus, who has been at the
Council, that was going to select someone to make an oration over the dead of the Corinthian war.
Socrates launches an ironic tirade on the skillfulness of rhetoricians which recalls the blame he made
about rhetoric in the Gorgias. But in the Menexenus, unlike the Gorgias, Socrates goes beyond the
criticism and offers his own variant of the Funeral oration that he claims was thaugt to him by Aspasia.
Formally, the Socratic λόγος ἐπιτάφιος reproduces the traditional division of the speech into two
sections : the ἔπαινος, praise of deads, and the παραίνεσις, exhortation to the survivors. The ἔπαινος
includes the praise of the Athenians' noble birth, constitution and achievements from mythical times to
the Corinthian war. Socrates develops traditional topics and commonplaces of the genre of the λόγος
ἐπιτάφιος: Athenians are autochtones, their country is god-beloved, being all born of one mother, they
all are equal before the law, their constitution is and always was the rule of the best approved by people
for their wisdom and excellence. Socrates describes exploits of the Athenians: in the Persian wars when
they fought almost alone against the barbarians and gained numerous victories for the sake of freedom
of Greece, in the Peloponnesian war, when other Greeks attacked them, moved by envy, and the
Athenians defended themselves nobly, and, at last, in the Corinthian war, when the Greeks handed over
the Ionian Greeks to the Persians for money, and only the Athenian refused the dishonorable pact with
barbarians. Menexenus, doubtful enough about the authorship of Aspasia, expresses his admiration of
the speech, Socrates promises to report to him some other speeches of the same sort, and the
characters of the dialogue say goodbye to each other.
The dialogue has been subject to a variety of interpretations. The Socrates' Funeral oration has
been considered a parody of traditional rhetoric, a criticism of Athenian imperialistic politics, a
pamphlet which calls for union of the Greeks against the barbarians, a story of the idealized past that
could be used in the education of the young generation, or the illustration of the fall of the state run by
the politicians that don't have philosophical knowledge. The ambiguity of dialogue's purpose seemed
sometimes intentional and enabled to interpret the dialogue as a kind of amphibolic speech sustaining
two opposite thesis simultaneously.
The interpreter of the dialogue confronts two main difficulties: first, why Plato resorts to form
and topics of the λόγος ἐπιτάφιος; second, what is the function of numerous exaggerations, distortions
and inaccuracies of the historical account delivered by Socrates. These questions are related to the
more general problem of form and content of the rhetorical and historical narrative in Plato and cause
to think about the requirements, which Plato could impose on an unphilosophical text. In this talk, I
propose to discuss the place of the Menexenus in the broader context of Plato's work, in the aim of make
explicit on this example some characteristic features of Platonic writings.
1.
The Menexenus and the Gorgias : the question of τρόπος ζῆν and the new rhetoric
Ferdinand Dümmler in the Academica called the Menexenus a satyr play after a tragedy of the
Gorgias. In fact, two dialogues share the common subject matter, rhetoric and its use by Athenian
politicians: the Gorgias offering a theoretical discussion on the subject, the Menexenus illustrates it in
practice with the example of funeral oration.
Let's consider by what means Plato chooses to accentuate the connection of the two dialogues:
1) One of the first phrases of the Menexenus (παιδεύσεως καὶ φιλοσοφίας ἐπὶ τέλει ἡγῇ εἶναι,
καὶ ὡς ἱκανῶς ἤδη ἔχων ἐπὶ τὰ μείζω ἐπινοεῖς τρέπεσθαι, 234c) presents a paraphrase of words of
Callicles in the Gorgias (484с), who argues that the study of philosophy as the part of the education of
the youth is a good thing, but a older and more mature man ought pass to more serious things (i. e., to
politics). Too often neglected, the context of this phrase makes clear, why Plato chooses it to bind these
two dialogues together.
The Callicles' monologue, where this claim is enounced, opens the second part of the Gorgias
that makes explicit the main theme of the dialogue. The Gorgias, in fact, is not so much the dialogue
about rhetoric, as the dialogue about the choice of the course of life (τρόπος ζῆν). Socrates stresses this
several times (487e – 488a, 500c, 527e), sometimes as if he forgets the very subject of rhetoric,
because rhetoric is only one particular example among many others, that concern the question how one
should live one's life. In fact, the division into two τρόποι ζῆν is introduced in the Gorgias as a logical
development of the idea of two παρασκευαί (513d), πραγματείαι (517d, 518a) or θεραπείαι (517е,
521a), which aim at the Good or at Pleasure, and it is the same distinction that enables Socrates to
create his schema of true arts and their imitations (464b – 465e), where rhetoric takes its place.
2) The question of the course of life to choose is essential for the title character of the
Menexenus, a young man who prepares to enter politics. Adressing him at the beginning of the dialogue
with a paraphrase of Callicles' statement, Socrates de facto asks him the same question, that he asked
Callicles at the very end of the Gorgias (521a): what is your choice, is it to practice politics «after the
fashion of you modern politicians» (500c) or to pursue the life of philosophy that is directed to the
Good? If Callicles in the Gorgias answered that it was better to serve and to flatter the city, Menexenus,
ready to follow the lesson of Socrates, replies : «If you, Socrates, allow and counsel me to govern, I shall
do so gladly; but otherwise not» (234b). His admiration of the oration and the request to bring him
other political speeches of « Aspasia » mean, in all appearance, that he accepts to follow the path
proposed by Socrates.
3) At last, another common feature of the two dialogues refers to the same subject of choice of
the course of life: the image of Pericles. The funeral oration in the Menexenus seems to be the Plato's
counterpart to the famous Pericles' speech in the second book of Thucydides' History of the
Peloponnesian War: the Socratic oration is said to be composed from the « leftovers » from the Pericles'
speech, and, on the one hand, completes it with a historical narrative that was omitted by Pericles, and
on the other hand, refers to it, accentuating in a similar way the specificity of the Athens constitution. In
the Gorgias, Pericles personifies the idea that Athenians make about what the ideal rhetorician and
statesman is. The opposite ideal is Socrates himself who represents the other τρόπος ζῆν and therefore
can assume that he is the only real statesman in all history of Athens (521d). Philosophical activity in
the Gorgias is neither opposed nor foreign to politics. Indeed, philosophy is necessary to everyone who
seeks to participate in political life. As if to reply to Callicles's claim Socrates sums up at the very end of
the dialogue: only after we have practised virtue, we will apply ourselves to politics, if that seems
desirable (527d).
Thus all these parallels between two dialogues emphasise the idea of two opposite courses of
life, the former aiming at the Good, the latter aiming at Pleasure that pretends to be the Good. This idea
provokes in the Gorgias a kind of duplication of terms and practices: politics and rhetoric receive, in
spite of the common («false») meaning, the Socratic one («genuine»). This ambiguity of terms enables
Socrates to declare simultanously to be «not one of statesmen» (473e) and «almost the only one», who
attempts the «true art of statesmanship» (521d), this apparent contradiction reflecting what is called to
be politics and what it really is. In a similar way, Socrates suggests the possibility of an other rhetoric
than the traditional one: after descibing the caracteristical feature of the contemporary rhetoric, he asks
Polus, whether this is the rhetoric which Gorgias practices (462e). Similarly, during the conversation
with Callicles, he speaks about the «good orator» (504d) and «the true art of rhetoric» (517a),
enumerating his own criteria of the good political eloquence (502e – 503a, 503d – 504e), deduced on
the basis of the medical paradigm.
The topic of medecine is one of the essential in the Gorgias: Gorgias himself opposes rhetoric
and medecine to prove the superiority of his art, telling how he managed to persuade a patient to take
medecine, when his brother and other physicians failed to do that; Socrates suggests the possibility of
establishing the parenty between these two arts because of the deep analogy of objects they deal with.
He claims that everything has its order and harmony (κόσμος and τάξις, 504а) — their effects in the
body are health and strength, and justice and temperance in the soul. A person lacking these qualities is
incapable of communion and of friendship (κοινωνία καὶ φιλία), that govern all in the universe. It is
significant that all notions that are used here for describing harmony and order of the soul or the body
will play a key role in the Platonic political ideal of the Republic. In the Gorgias Socrates is concerned
above all with an idea of the evil, πονηρία (477b), that exists for all thing, and an art which delivers from
this evil: poverty and the art of making money for money, disease and medecine for the body, injustice
and justice for the soul. There is an evil and an art which delivers from it also for the city, and the
traditional rhetoric pretends to be this art. Seeking to prove the power of rhetoric, Gorgias assumes
that if a rhetorician and a physician were to argue in an assembly as to which of them should be elected
state-physician, the rhetorician would be chosen. The only problem is that statesmen and rhetoricians
are not at all competent to cure the sick city. Socrates criticizes Pericles, Cimon, Themictocles, and
Miltiades for they satisfied the wishes of people but failed to cure αἱ ἀρχαίαι σάρκες (518c) of the city
and just exacerbated the situation. One day, foreshows Socrates, the city will be struck with a real
disease (νόσος, 518d), and people will blame the statesmen of the hour and applaud the former,
thinking that they have made the city great. But what can seem the greatness is just a festering
(ὕπουλος, 518e): the politicians have filled the city (ἐμπεπλήκασι, 519a) full of harbours and docks and
walls and revenues, and have left no room for justice and temperance. This picture seems to respond to
the eulogy of Athens from the Pericles' Funeral oration and enables us to expect that the central theme
of the new rhetoric in the Menexenus will be the new and genuine ideal of the city.