Complete Works

by Plato, Cooper, John M. , Hutchinson, D. S.

  CLINIAS: Very true.

  ATHENIAN: These people, then, who are anxious to take part in the finest possible singing, should, apparently, look not for a music which is sweet, but one which is correct; and correctness, as we said, lies in the imitation and successful reproduction of the proportions and characteristics of the model.

  CLINIAS: It does indeed.

  ATHENIAN: This is certainly so in the case of music: everyone would admit that all musical compositions are matters of imitation and representation. In [c] fact, composers, audiences and actors would register universal agreement on this point, wouldn’t they?

  CLINIAS: Certainly.

  ATHENIAN: So it looks as if a man who is not to go wrong about a given composition must appreciate what it is, because failure to understand its nature—what it is trying to do and what in fact it is a representation of—will mean that he gets virtually no conception of whether the author has achieved his aim correctly or not.

  CLINIAS: No, virtually none, naturally.

  ATHENIAN: And if he cannot gauge the correctness of the composition, [d] surely he won’t be able to judge its moral goodness or badness? But this is all rather obscure. Perhaps this would be a clearer way of putting it.

  CLINIAS: What?

  ATHENIAN: There are, of course, thousands of representations that strike the eye?

  CLINIAS: Yes.

  ATHENIAN: Now, imagine someone who didn’t know the character of each of the objects that are imitated and represented. Would he ever be able to estimate the correctness of the finished article? This is the sort of point I have in mind: does it preserve the overall proportions of the body and the position of each of its various parts? Does it hit off the proportions [e] exactly and keep the parts in their proper positions relative to one another? And what of their colors and contours? Have all these features been reproduced higgledy-piggledy? Do you think that if a man did not know the character of the creature represented he would ever be able to assess these points?

  CLINIAS: Of course not.

  ATHENIAN: What if we knew that the thing molded or painted is a man, [669] and that all his parts with their colors and contours have been caught by the artist’s skill? Suppose a man knows all that; is he without further ado necessarily ready to judge whether the work is beautiful or falls short of beauty in some respect?

  CLINIAS: In that case, sir, pretty well all of us would be judges of the quality of a representation.

  ATHENIAN: You have hit the nail on the head. So anyone who is going to be a sensible judge of any representation—in painting and music and every other field—should be able to assess three points: he must know, [b] first, what has been represented; second, how correctly it has been copied; and then, third, the moral value of this or that representation produced by language, tunes and rhythms.

  CLINIAS: Apparently so.

  ATHENIAN: We ought not to fail to mention the peculiar difficulty about music, which is discussed much more than any other kind of artistic representation and needs much more careful handling than all the others. A man who goes wrong on this subject will suffer a good deal of harm [c] because he feels attracted to evil dispositions; and his mistake is very difficult to detect, because the authors hardly have the same degree of creative ability as the actual Muses. The Muses would never make the ghastly mistake of composing the speech of men to a musical idiom suitable for women, or of fitting rhythms appropriate to the portrayal of slaves and slave-like people to the tune and bodily movements used to represent free men (or again of making rhythms and movements appropriate to free men accompany a combination of tune and words that conflicted with those rhythms). Nor would they ever mix up together into one production [d] the din of wild animals and men and musical instruments and all kinds of other noises and still claim to be representing a unified theme. But human authors, in their silly way, jumble all these things together into complicated combinations; in Orpheus’ words, anyone ‘whose delight in life is in its springtime’, will find them a rich source of amusement. And in the midst of all this confusion, he will find that the authors also divorce [e] rhythm and movement from the tune by putting unaccompanied words into meter, and rob tune and rhythm of words by using stringed instruments and pipes on their own without singers. When this is done, it is extraordinarily difficult to know what the rhythm and harmony without speech are supposed to signify and what worthwhile object they imitate and represent. The conclusion is inevitable: such practices appeal to the taste of the village idiot. It is this fondness for speed and dexterity (as in [670] reproducing the noises of wild animals) which prompts the use of pipes and lyre otherwise than as an accompaniment to dancing and singing. Using either instrument on its own is in fact sheer showmanship that has nothing to do with art. But enough of theory: what we are considering is not what sort of music our citizens over thirty and fifty should avoid, but what sort they should go in for. I think our argument so far seems to point [b] to the conclusion that the fifty-year-olds who have the duty of singing must have enjoyed an education that reached a higher standard than the music of choruses. They must, of course, have a nice appreciation of rhythms and harmonies and be able to understand them. Otherwise how could a man assess the correctness of the tunes, and tell whether the Dorian mode was appropriate or not in a given case, or judge whether the author has set the tunes to the right rhythm or not?

  CLINIAS: Clearly he couldn’t.

  ATHENIAN: The belief of the general public, that they can form an adequate judgment of merit and demerit in matters of harmony and rhythm, is laughable: they have only been drilled into singing to the pipes and marching in step, and they never stop to think that they do all this without the [c] smallest understanding of it. In fact, every tune with the right elements is correct, but if it has the wrong ones, it is faulty.

  CLINIAS: Inevitably.

  ATHENIAN: What about the man who doesn’t even understand what the elements are? As we said, will he ever be able to decide that any aspect of the piece is correct?

  CLINIAS: No, how could he?

  ATHENIAN: So it looks as if once again we are discovering that it is virtually indispensable for these singers of ours (who are not only being encouraged to sing but compelled to do it in a willing spirit, if I may put [d] it like that), to have been educated up to at least this point: they should each be able to follow the notes of the tunes and the basic units of rhythm, so that they may examine the harmonies and rhythms and select those that men of their age and character could appropriately sing. If that is how they sing, they will give themselves harmless pleasure, and at the same time stimulate the younger generation to adopt virtuous customs [e] with the proper enthusiasm. Assuming the education of these singers reaches that level, they will have pursued a more advanced course of training than will be given to ordinary men, or even the authors themselves. The author is more or less obliged to have a knowledge of rhythm and harmony, but there is no necessity for him to be able to assess the third point—whether the imitation is a morally good one or not. The men we are talking about, however, must be equally competent in all three fields, so that they can isolate the primary and secondary degrees of goodness; [671] otherwise they will never prove capable of charming the young in the direction of virtue.

  ATHENIAN: Our argument has done its level best: we have to consider whether it has succeeded in its original intention of showing that our defense of Dionysus’ chorus was justified. A gathering like that, of course, inevitably gets increasingly rowdier as the wine flows more freely. (In fact, our initial assumption in the present discussion of this business was that such a tendency is unavoidable.) [b]

  CLINIAS: Yes, it is unavoidable.

  ATHENIAN: Everyone is taken out of himself and has a splendid time; the exuberance of his conversation is matched only by his reluctance to listen to his companions, and he thinks himself entitled to run their lives as well as his own.

  CLINIAS: He certainly does.

  ATHENIAN: And didn’t we say that when this
happens the souls of the drinkers get hot and, like iron in a fire, grow younger and softer, so that anyone who has the ability and skill to mold and educate them, finds them [c] as easy to handle as when they were young? The man to do the molding is the same one as before—the good lawgiver. When our drinker grows cheerful and confident and unduly shameless and unwilling to speak and keep quiet, to drink and sing, at the proper times, the lawgiver’s job will be to lay down drinking laws which will be able to make this fellow willing [d] to mend his ways; and to do battle with this disgraceful over-confidence as soon as it appears, they will be able to send into the arena, with the blessing of justice, this divine and splendid fear we have called ‘modesty’ and ‘shame’.15

  CLINIAS: Exactly.

  ATHENIAN: The cool-headed and sober should guard and co-operate with these laws by taking command of those who are not sober; fighting the enemy without cool-headed leaders is actually less dangerous than fighting drink without such help as this. If a man cannot show a willing spirit and [e] obey these commanders and the officials of Dionysus (who are upwards of sixty years of age), the dishonor he incurs must equal or even exceed that incurred by the man who disobeys the officials of the god of war.

  CLINIAS: Precisely.

  ATHENIAN: So, if they drank and made merry like that, the revelers who took part in the proceedings would surely benefit? They would go their way on better terms with each other than they were before, instead of loathing each other, which is what happens nowadays; and this would be [672] because they had rules to regulate the whole of their intercourse and had followed every instruction given by the sober to the tipsy.

  CLINIAS: Precisely—if indeed the party were to go as you describe.

  ATHENIAN: So let’s not abuse the gift of Dionysus any longer in the old unqualified terms, saying that it is bad and does not deserve to be received into the state. One could, indeed, enlarge on its benefits even more. But in front of the general public I would be chary of mentioning the main benefit conferred by the gift, because people misconstrue and misunderstand [b] the explanation.

  CLINIAS: What is the benefit?

  ATHENIAN: There is a little-known current of story and tradition16 which says that Dionysus was robbed of his wits by his stepmother Hera, and that he gets his revenge by stimulating us to Bacchic frenzies and all the mad dancing that results; and this was precisely the reason why he made us a present of wine. This sort of story, however, I leave to those who see no danger in speaking of the gods in such terms. But I am quite certain [c] of this: no animal that enjoys the use of reason in its maturity is ever born with that faculty, or at any rate with it fully developed. During the time in which it has not yet attained its characteristic level of intelligence, it is completely mad: it bawls uncontrollably, and as soon as it can get on its feet it jumps about with equal abandon. Let’s think back: we said that this situation gave rise to music and gymnastics.

  CLINIAS: We remember, of course.

  ATHENIAN: And also that this was the source of man’s appreciation of [d] rhythm and harmony, and Apollo and the Muses and Dionysus were the gods who co-operated to implant it in us.

  CLINIAS: Yes, indeed.

  ATHENIAN: In particular, it seems that according to the common story wine was given to men as a means of taking vengeance on us—it was intended to drive us insane. But our interpretation is entirely the opposite: the gift was intended to be a medicine and to produce reverence in the soul, and health and strength in the body.

  CLINIAS: Yes, sir, that’s a splendid recapitulation of the argument.

  ATHENIAN: We are now half-way through our examination of singing [e] and dancing. Shall we carry on with the other half in whatever way recommends itself, or shall we pass it over?

  CLINIAS: What halves do you mean? Where do you put your dividing-line?

  ATHENIAN: We found that singing and dancing, taken together, amounted, in a sense, to education as a whole. One part of it—the vocal part—was concerned with rhythms and ‘harmonies’.

  CLINIAS: Yes.

  ATHENIAN: The second part concerned the movement of the body. Here too we had rhythm, a feature shared with the movement of the voice; but the body’s movements were its own particular concern, just as in the other [673] half the tune was the special job of the vocal movements.

  CLINIAS: True enough.

  ATHENIAN: When the sound of the voice penetrates the soul, we took that to be an education in virtue, and we hazarded the term ‘music’ to describe it.

  CLINIAS: And quite rightly.

  ATHENIAN: When the movements of the body, which we described as ‘dancing in delight’, are such as to result in a fine state of physical fitness, we ought to call the systematic training which does this ‘gymnastics’.

  CLINIAS: Exactly.

  ATHENIAN: So much, then, for music, which is roughly the half of the [b] subject of choruses that we said we had examined and finished with; so that’s that. Shall we discuss the other half? Or what method should we follow now?

  CLINIAS: Really, my dear fellow! You are having a conversation with Cretans and Spartans, and we have discussed music thoroughly—leaving gymnastics still to come. What sort of answer do you think you’ll get to that question, from either of us?

  ATHENIAN: I should say that question was a pretty unambiguous answer. [c] I take it that your question, as I said, amounts in fact to a reply, an order even, to finish off our examination of gymnastics.

  CLINIAS: You understand me perfectly: do just that.

  ATHENIAN: Yes, I must. Of course, discussing a subject so familiar to you both is not very difficult. You see, you have had much more experience of this particular skill than of the other.

  CLINIAS: True enough.

  [d] ATHENIAN: Again, the origin of this form of recreation too lies in the fact that every animal has the natural habit of jumping about. The human animal, as we said, acquired a sense of rhythm, and that led to the birth of dancing. The tune suggested rhythm and awakened the memory of it, and out of the union of the two was born choral singing and dancing as a recreation.

  CLINIAS: Exactly.

  ATHENIAN: We have already discussed one of these two; now we are going to set about the discussion of the other.

  CLINIAS: Yes, indeed.

  [e] ATHENIAN: However, if you are agreeable, let’s give our discussion of the use of drink its final flourish.

  CLINIAS: What flourish do you mean?

  ATHENIAN: Suppose a state takes this practice we are now discussing sufficiently seriously to control it by a set of rules and use it to cultivate moderate habits; suppose it permits a similar enjoyment of other pleasures on the same principle, seeing it simply as a device for mastering them. In each and every case, our method will be the one that must be followed. But if the state treats a drink as recreation pure and simple, and anybody [674] who wants to can go drinking and please himself when and with whom he does it, and do whatever else he likes at the same time, then my vote would be in favor of never allowing this state or individual to take wine at all. I would go further than Cretan and Spartan practice: I would support the law of the Carthaginians, which forbids anyone on military service to take a drink of wine, and makes water the only permissible beverage during the entire campaign. As for civilians, it forbids slaves, male and [b] female, ever to touch wine; it forbids magistrates during their year of office; steersmen and jurymen on duty are absolutely prohibited from touching it, and so too is any councillor who is going to take part in an important discussion; nobody at all is permitted to drink wine during the day, except for reasons of training or health, nor at night if they intend to procreate children (this prohibition applying to men and women alike); and one could point to a great many other situations in which any sensible [c] person with a respect for the law would find it proper not to drink wine. This kind of approach would mean that no state would need many vines and as part of the regulations covering agriculture in general and the whole question of diet, the production of wine in particu
lar would be restricted to the most modest quantities. With your permission, gentlemen, let’s take that as the final flourish to our discussion of wine.

  CLINIAS: Splendid! Permission granted.

  1. See 643a ff.

  2. Reading hēi dē in a3.

  3. A playful etymology: choros (chorus) is derived from chara (charm, joy, delight).

  4. Deleting tharrounta in a7.

  5. ‘Moral standards’ here and ‘high moral standards’ just below translate aretē, elsewhere normally translated ‘virtue.’

  6. ‘Discerning taste’ translates phronēsis, elsewhere usually translated ‘good judgment’ or ‘wisdom’—it is one of the four basic virtues Plato recognizes, along with justice, courage, and self-control (or moderation or restraint—sōphrosunē).

  7. See 653b.

  8. Tyrtaeus: see 629a and note. The Athenian makes further brief quotations from the same poem. Midas and Cinyras, kings of Phrygia and Cyprus respectively, were notorious for extreme wealth.

  9. The expression is ambiguous: it may mean ‘miserably’ or ‘wickedly’. In his reply, Clinias is thinking of the first meaning.

  10. Accepting the conjecture of enantiōi in c3.

  11. Cadmus. See 641c and note.

  12. The god of healing.

  13. See 653d ff.

  14. See 659e.

  15. 646e ff.

  16. Cf. Euripides, Cyclops, 3.

  Book III

  ATHENIAN: We can take that as settled, then. But what about political [676] systems? How are we to suppose they first came into existence? I feel sure that the best and easiest way to see their origins is this.

  CLINIAS: What?

  ATHENIAN: To use the same method that we always have to adopt when we look into a state’s moral progress or decline.

  CLINIAS: What method have you in mind?

  ATHENIAN: We take an indefinitely long period of time and study the changes that occur in it. [b]

  CLINIAS: How do you mean?

  ATHENIAN: Look, do you think you could ever grasp how long it is that states have existed and men have lived under some sort of political organization?