Complete Works

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

  Critias was finding it very hard to go along with these arguments, that not everything we had mentioned could be property. When I realized that it would be—as the saying goes—as easy to persuade him as it is to boil [c] a stone, I said: “Let’s forget about those arguments, since we can’t agree whether or not useful things and property are the same. But what would we say about this? Would we consider a person to be more prosperous and better if his physical requirements and his requirements for day to day living were extremely numerous, or if they were as few and simple as possible? Maybe the best way to look at it would be to compare the [d] person with himself by considering whether his condition is better when he is sick or when he is healthy.”

  “We certainly don’t have to consider that for very long.”

  “No doubt it’s because everybody easily recognizes that the healthy person’s condition is superior to the sick person’s. Now then, in what circumstance would we have a greater need for all kinds of things, when we’re ill or when we’re healthy?”

  “When we’re ill.”

  [e] “So it’s when we’re in the worst condition that we have the most powerful and most numerous desires and needs, as far as physical pleasures are concerned?”

  “Yes.”

  “And just as a person is in the best condition when he himself has the fewest requirements of that kind, can the same reasoning apply to two people, where one’s desires and needs are powerful and numerous, while the other’s are few and gentle? For example, consider anybody at all who is a gambler, or a drunkard, or else a glutton—all such conditions amount to nothing but desires.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But all these desires are nothing but the need for something; and those who have the greatest needs are in a worse condition than those who have no needs at all or as few as possible.” [406]

  “As far as I’m concerned, people like that are certainly in a very bad state; the more they need the worse off they are.”

  “And so do we think that things can’t be useful for some purpose unless we need them for that purpose?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then if we suppose that these things are useful for taking care of the body’s needs, mustn’t we also require them for this purpose?”

  “I think so.”

  “So the person who possesses the largest number of useful things for this purpose would also appear to require the largest number of things for this purpose, since he’s bound to require all the things that are useful.”

  “That’s how it seems to me.”

  “According to this argument, at least, it appears that those who have a lot of property must also need many of the things required to take care of the body, since property was seen as useful for this purpose. So the wealthiest people would necessarily appear to us to be in the worst condition, since they are in need of the greatest number of these things.”

  1. Accepting the emendation talanton hen in b2.

  2. The king of Persia, proverbially wealthy.

  3. One of the wealthiest men in Athens, noted for his lavish spending on the sophists. See Apology 20a; the events of Protagoras take place in his house.

  4. A professional educator (sophist); see Protagoras 315d, 337a ff. The Lyceum was a public space just outside the walls of Athens.

  5. Early seventh-century-B.C. composer of iambic and elegiac poems. The line quoted is in frg. 70 Edmonds (Loeb) Elegy and Iambus, vol. 2.

  6. Accepting the conjectural deletion of kai before andra in c4.

  7. Accepting the emendation epetelesaton in d2.

  8. A coin; the Athenian stater was 17.5 grams of silver.

  9. Accepting the conjectural deletion of tou sidērou in b1.

  10. Parian marble; or else a red precious stone.

  11. Accepting the emendation blepein in a2.

  12. Assigning these two paragraphs to Socrates instead of Eryxias.

  13. Accepting the emendations toutois for touto and ta chrēmata for chrēmata ta chrēsima in d1.

  14. 394a–395d.

  15. 397e.

  16. Accepting the emendation katachrōinto in e4.

  17. Some words seem to have been lost in the transmission of the text. Possibly Critias claims that for doing certain things, certain items are always useful: then Socrates asks if some items can be useful for doing wicked things, others for doing good things.

  18. Accepting the conjectural deletion of ē (and the comma before it) in c8.

  AXIOCHUS

  Translated by Jackson P. Hershbell.

  Axiochus has come close to dying and was shaken by the experience, despite being familiar with arguments that used to make him laugh at death and at those who feared it. Socrates is summoned to his bedside to administer his usual consolations, of which he has a wide selection. Eventually some of them have the desired effect, and Axiochus welcomes the prospect of death as the release of his divine soul to a better place. He collects his thoughts, and Socrates goes on his way.

  This dialogue is an unconventional version of a very conventional genre—the consolation letter. Typical examples include Seneca’s Consolation for Marcia and Consolation for Polybius and Plutarch’s Consolation for His Wife. The Plutarchean Consolation for Apollonius is a sort of treasury of consolation arguments, and there are echoes and reflections of the genre in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations I and III, as well as in many other ancient sources, indicating its continuous popularity from at least the third century B.C. to the end of the pagan world, before being adapted by Christian writers. Every philosophical school produced arguments of consolation, especially Stoicism, and many letters of consolation freely borrowed arguments from all possible sources, whether or not the ideas were mutually consistent.

  It should therefore come as no surprise to see Socrates urging on Axiochus a wide variety of mutually incompatible consolations, including rhetorical and Cynic commonplaces as well as Epicurean, Stoic, and Platonic arguments. Some authors of this genre seem to have been less concerned with whether the arguments were true than with whether they were reassuring: “there are also some authors of consolation letters who combine all these kinds of consolation—for one man is moved by one sort, another by another—like the way I threw them all together in my Consolation, for my soul was in a fever and I tried everything to cure it” (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations III.76).

  The strategy of Axiochus seems to be derived from Plato’s Apology, where Socrates says that death is either a permanent loss of consciousness or a transition to somewhere else. The arguments which are effective for Axiochus are Stoic (370b–d) and Platonic (371a–372a); “whether above or below, Axiochus, you ought to be happy, if you have lived piously.” But the Cynic harangues and commonplaces (366d–369b) seem to make little impression, and the Epicurean arguments (365d–e and 369b–370b) are quite over his head.

  What makes Axiochus unconventional is that it is not a letter addressed to someone who has been bereaved, but a dialogue with somebody who is about to lose his own life, a situation in which the problematic emotion is not grief but fear. The author, probably a Platonist writing between 100 B.C. and 50 A.D., has borrowed characters from earlier Socratic writings to clothe the consolatio in the guise of a Socratic dialogue.

  D.S.H.

  While I was on my way to the Cynosarges and getting near the Ilisus, [364] I heard the voice of someone shouting, “Socrates, Socrates!” When I turned around to find out where it was coming from, I saw Clinias the son of Axiochus, running toward the Callirhoe,1 together with Damon the musician, and Charmides the son of Glaucon.2 (Damon was Clinias’ music teacher; Charmides and Clinias were companions, and in love with one another.) So I decided to turn off the main road to meet up with them [b] and get together as quickly as possible. With tears in his eyes, Clinias said:

  “Socrates, now’s your chance to show off the wisdom they’re always saying you have! My father has been unwell for a while,3 and is near the end of his life; and he’s miserable on his deathbe
d, even though he used to laugh at people who had a phobia about death, and tease them a little. [c] So come and reassure him in your usual way, so that he may meet his fate without complaining, and so that I and the rest of the family can also perform the proper rituals.”

  “Well, Clinias, you won’t find me refusing such a reasonable request, especially since what you ask involves religion. Let’s go; if that’s the situation, speed is essential.”

  “Just seeing you, Socrates, will revive him; in fact he’s often before managed to rally from this condition.”

  After hurrying along the wall to the Itonian gates—he lived near the gates [d] by the Amazon column—we found that Axiochus had already collected his [365] senses and was strong in body, though weak in spirit, very much in need of consolation, sobbing and groaning, again and again, as well as weeping and clapping his hands. I looked down at him and said:

  “Axiochus, what’s all this? Where’s your former self-confidence, and your constant praise of manly virtues, and that unshakable courage of yours? You’re like a feeble athlete who put on a brave show in training exercises and lost the actual contest! Consider who you are—a man of [b] such an advanced age, who listens to reason, and, if nothing else, an Athenian!—don’t you realize that life is a kind of sojourn in a foreign land (indeed, that’s a commonplace, on everybody’s lips), and that those who have led a decent life should go to meet their fate cheerfully, almost singing a paean of praise? Being so faint-hearted and unwilling to be torn from life is childish and inappropriate for someone old enough to think for himself.”

  [c]“True enough, Socrates, I think you’re right. And yet, somehow or other, now that I’m very close to that awful moment, all those powerful and impressive arguments mysteriously lose their strength and I can’t take them seriously; and a certain fear remains which assails my mind in various forms: that I will lose this light of day and these good things, and will lie somewhere or other, unseen and forgotten, rotting, and turning into maggots and wild beasts.”

  “In your distraction, Axiochus, you’re confusing sensibility with insensibility, [d] without realizing it. What you say and do involves internal self-contradiction; you don’t realize that you’re simultaneously upset by your loss of sensations and pained by your decay and the loss of your pleasures—as if by dying you entered into another life, instead of lapsing into the utter insensibility that existed before your birth. Just as during the government of Draco or Cleisthenes there was nothing bad at all that concerned you (because you did not exist then for it to concern you), nor will anything [e] bad happen to you after your death (because you will not exist later for it to concern you).

  “Away, then, with all such nonsense! Keep this in mind: once the compound is dissolved and the soul has been settled in its proper place, the body which remains, being earthly and irrational, is not the human person. For each of us is a soul, an immortal living being locked up in a mortal [366] prison; and Nature has fashioned this tent for suffering—its pleasures are superficial, fleeting, and mixed with many pains; but its pains are undiluted, long-lasting, and without any share of pleasure. And while the soul is forced to share with the sense organs their diseases and inflammations and the other internal ills of the body (since it is distributed among its pores), it longs for its native heavenly aether, nay, thirsts after it, striving [b] upwards in hopes of feasting and dancing there. Thus being released from life is a transition from something bad to something good.”

  “Well, Socrates, if you think that living is bad, why do you remain alive? Especially since you puzzle your brain about these things and you’re much cleverer than most of us.”

  “Axiochus, you don’t give a true account of me; you think, like most Athenians, that just because I’m an inquirer I’m also an expert on something. I wish I knew these ordinary things, so far am I from knowing the [c] extraordinary ones! My remarks are but echoes of the wise Prodicus,4 some purchased for half a drachma, others for two, and still others for four. (That fellow teaches nobody for free and is always repeating the saying of Epicharmus:5 “One hand washes the other”—give something and take something.) Anyway, just recently he gave a performance at the house of Callias son of Hipponicus,6 in which he denounced living, so much so that I came within a hair’s-breadth of writing it off; and since then, Axiochus, my soul has wanted to die.”

  “What did he have to say?”

  “I’ll tell you what I remember: What part of a lifetime is without its [d] portion of misery? Doesn’t the baby begin his life in pain, and cry from the first moment of birth? Certainly he lacks no occasion for suffering; hunger and thirst and cold and heat and hard knocks distress him, and he can’t yet say what the problem is; crying is his only way of expressing discomfort. When he reaches the age of seven, after having endured much physical pain, he is set upon by tyrannical tutors, teachers, and trainers; [e] and as he grows older there are scholars, mathematicians and military instructors, all a great crowd of despots. When he is enrollled among the Ephebes there is the Commander, and fear of beatings; then comes the [367] Lyceum and the Academy and the gymnasium-masters with their canings and excessive punishments; and his entire youth7 is spent under Supervisors of Young Men and the Committee for Young Men of the Council of the Areopagus.8

  “After he’s free of all that, worries immediately steal upon him, and considerations about his career in life present themselves to him. And the earlier troubles seem like child’s play, the bogey-men of babies, so to speak, compared with the later ones: military campaigns, wounds, and constant battles.

  “Then old age creeps upon you unawares, into which flows everything [b] in nature that is mortal and life-threatening. And unless you repay your life quickly, like a debt, nature stands by like a money-lender, taking security, sight from one man, hearing from another, and often both. And if you survive that, you’ll be paralyzed, mutilated, crippled. Some people are physically in their prime in great old age—and their old minds enter a second childhood.

  “And that is why9 the gods, who understand the human condition, give [c] a quick release from life to those10 they hold in highest regard. For example, Agamedes and Trophonius, who built the temple of the Pythian god, after praying for the best thing that might happen to them, fell asleep and never woke up. And there were also the sons of the Argive priestess,11 for whom their mother likewise prayed for some reward from Hera for their piety, since when the team of mules was late they yoked themselves to the cart and took her to the temple; that night after their mother’s prayer they passed away.

  [d] “It would take too long to go through the works of the poets, who prophesy with inspired voices the events of life while deploring life itself. I shall quote only one of them, the most important one, who said,

  Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals, that we live in unhappiness,

  and,

  Since among all creatures that breathe on earth and crawl on it there is not anywhere a thing more dismal than man is.

  [e] “And what does he say about Amphiaraus?

  [368]Whom Zeus of the aegis loved in his heart, as did Apollo, with every favor, but he never came to the doorsill of old age.12

  “And he who bids us,13 ‘Sing a dirge for the newly born; he faces so much misery’—what do you think of that? But I’ll stop now, so as not to break my promise and lengthen my speech by mentioning other examples.

  “What pursuit or trade has anyone ever chosen without criticizing it [b] and chafing at its conditions? Shall we discuss the jobs of tradesmen and laborers, toiling from dawn to dusk, barely able to provide for their needs, deploring their lot and spoiling all their sleepless nights with lamentation and tears? Well, shall we talk about the job of the merchant, who sails through so many perils and is, as Bias has shown, neither among the dead nor the living: terrestrial man throws himself into the sea as if he were [c] amphibious, and is entirely at the mercy of chance. Well, is farming a pleasant occupation? Really! Isn’t it just one big blister,
as they say, which always finds an excuse for pain? Now it’s drought, now it’s too much rain, now it’s blight, now it’s too much heat or frost, that makes the farmer weep.

  “Well, how about highly respected politics? (I’m skipping over many cases.) How many dreadful things is it dragged through, feverishly quivering and throbbing, sometimes with joy, sometimes with painful failure, [d] worse than a thousand deaths? How could anyone be happy living for the masses, when he is whistled for and lashed, like the electorate’s pet horse, driven from office, jeered, fined, and killed?14 Well then, Mr. Politician Axiochus, how did Miltiades die? How did Themistocles die? How did Ephialtes die?15 How did the ten commanders recently die, when I refused to refer the question to the people?16 I didn’t think it was proper for me to preside over a mad mob, yet on the next day the party of Theramenes and Callixenus suborned the presiding officers of the meeting and secured a condemnation against the men without a trial. Indeed, you [369] and Euryptolemus were the only ones to defend them, of the thirty thousand citizens in the Assembly.”

  “That’s quite right, Socrates, and since then I’ve had enough of the speaker’s platform, and I think that nothing is more irksome than politics. That’s clear to everyone involved. You speak, of course, as a distant observer, but those of us who go through the experience know it perfectly well. The electorate, my dear Socrates, is an ungrateful, fickle, cruel, malicious, and boorish thing: a club, so to speak, of violent fools, drawn from the rabble in the street. And he who associates himself with it is even [b] more contemptible by far.”