The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy

by A. A. Long

  In Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, the concept of equilibrium between individual and collective interest (which the democratic constitution had seemed to safeguard) comes to be increasingly seen as in a state of crisis. But the collision between interest and justice (where justice signifies the principle of resolving conflicts without recourse to violence) is revealed most harshly in Athens’ external politics. The words of Cleon concerning laws and intellectuals in the Mytilene debate (III.37.3-4), and still more clearly, the famous declaration of the Athenian ambassadors to the people of Melos ten years later (V.89) repudiate the principle, endorsed by Hesiod and Protagoras, that the human species (as distinct from the animal world) possesses justice. Instead, they maintain that justice holds only between equals (i.e., between citizens or a single group) but not where the balance of power is unequal, as in foreign affairs. In this case, what applies is Hesiod’s fable about the hawk and the nightingale (Works and Days 202): the one who is strongest wins.

  ANTIPHON

  The fragments of Antiphon’s work On truth are the only words of a sophist on the topic of justice that survive in an unmediated form. Although we have no firm evidence about their date of composition, it is a fair guess that they antedate the first performance of Aristophanes’ Clouds.18 Given the work’s antidemocratic stance and its clear hostility to contemporary culture, it could well have appeared at the end of the 430s.

  “Legitimate” (nomimon) is the first word of the text that can be plausibly reconstructed (17.1B.I.5).19 It suggests that Antiphon had mentioned the identification of legality/conventional norm and justice, and that his definition of justice as “not transgressing the laws/norms of the community in which one lives as a citizen” (1B.I.6-11) was the conclusion of the preceding argument, which is lost, and the premise of what follows.20

  To grasp Antiphon’s critique of justice, two points are important. First, in the surviving portions of the text, Antiphon consistently uses “justice” and “just” (dikaiosynê/dikaion) in their traditional and current sense.21 He does not, like Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias (483c), propose his own definition of justice – a “natural” or “true” justice – which contrasts with justice as conventionally conceived. Secondly, even if it is true that by the late fifth century nomimos “becomes the adjectival representative of nomos in the sense of ‘statute’; it describes persons or acts that ‘conform to the laws’,”22 there are many indications in the papyrus that Antiphon, in his use of these terms (nomos/nomimon), includes not only written laws but also the entire aggregate of a community’s norms and rules, whether their violation incurs shame (aischynê) or actual legal penalty (zêmia). This expansion of the sphere of nomos, which lets it encroach on the domain proper to “nature,” serves to emphasize the antithetical relationship between these concepts.

  For Antiphon, justice does have a bearing on an individual’s interests because it has to be practised, taking account of the laws, in the presence of witnesses. But in the absence of witnesses, one should follow nature. In the next step of his argument, he insists on the fact that nature’s prescriptions are necessary, not conventional. Violation of them inevitably brings harm, irrespective of observation by others. What Antiphon has in mind seems to be the primary, or biological, demands of human nature. He does not deny that in some situations following justice could be advantageous; what he finds to be “hostile to nature” is “the main part of what is just according to laws” (1B.II.26-27).23 But in fact his position appears quite radical when we take account of his emphasis on the strong contrast between laws and nature, on the role of witnesses, and on the difference between the sanctions that depend on doxa (“appearance”/“opinion”), which are only applicable when someone is caught, and the “necessary” and “true” sanctions of nature. Antiphon dissociates the individual’s interest from obedience to law per se (1B.I.14-23) and, in contrast with Protagoras, he removes from justice the universal foundation (Zeus’s gifts to man of aidôs and dikê) which makes it the distinctive characteristic of human nature and guarantees the coincidence of justice and utility. His position cannot fail to recall the premises of Glaucon’s account of Gyges and his ring.

  Numerous of Antiphon’s points seem to reflect experience of Athenian social life, perceived from a position emphasizing the inadequacy of its rules to answer the individual’s needs, and confirmed by evidence that stared everyone in the face. The recourse to nature, in terms of life and death, as the only criterion of advantage and disadvantage; the linkage between useful and pleasurable, on the one hand, and between harmful and painful, on the other (1B.IV.9-22); the observation that law cannot protect individuals even when they adhere to it (1B.V), and even less so when they are the innocent party; the reference to court proceedings and to persuasion’s being much stronger than truth or falsehood (1B.VI-VII) – all imply a morality that is primarily egoistical and self-protective, skilful in justifying itself by pointing out the shortcomings of justice and law to give human beings security.

  The second fragment of the papyrus includes a very subtle argument that can be appreciated if we presume that the pair of terms, “commit and suffer injustice” (adikein/adikeisthai), is strictly linked to the pair “commit and suffer harm” (blaptein/blaptesthai).24 Assuming that telling the truth is regarded as just (and advantageous) for human affairs, one who so acts will not be just on the conception of justice implying that no injustice has been done where none has been suffered. “It is necessary in fact that one who testifies, even if he testifies the truth, commits injustice in a sense against another, and suffers it in turn, to the extent that he incurs hatred” (2A.I.15-22). Injustice/harm is done both to the one who is convicted by the testimony, because it stems from someone who for his part has suffered no harm from the convicted person, and to the witness, who will have to be on his guard against retaliation and threats for the rest of his life. Antiphon continues (2A.II.17-25):

  These injustices do not seem of small importance, neither the one that he suffers nor the one he commits. For it is impossible that these things are just, and that justice should be doing no injustice and not receiving injustice, but it is necessary that either one of them is just, or both are unjust.

  In Antiphon’s words, “doing no injustice and not receiving injustice,” some scholars have wanted to find the sophist’s own ideal of justice, but Antiphon has the traditional conception in mind, as is shown by Plato’s Glaucon (Rep. II 359a), who comments on the fact that people find it useful to make a mutual agreement not to do or suffer injustice.25 Nothing excludes Antiphon’s thinking that this outcome might be welcome per se, but what we can be certain of is his effort to show why such an agreement has very little practical possibility and what its consequences would be. The link at the beginning of his text between “just” and “useful” (2A.I.6-7) and the antithesis at the end between “helping” and “harming” (2A.II.30-36) show that the foundation of his argument is the thesis (1B) that what counts is “utility.” He contrasts justice with nature precisely because justice cannot guarantee what is beneficial and useful to the individual.

  It is interesting that, starting from the premise (2A.I.3-9) that witnessing to the truth is regarded as just and collectively useful to human affairs, Antiphon immediately shifts his perspective to the single individual. Underlining the harmful effects of behaviour regarded as just, he shows that individual and collective utility do not coincide but are constantly in conflict. So he confirms once again his own distance from the position of Protagoras.

  A point that still requires examination is the function he accords to nomos and the conditions under which it would be worthwhile for people to submit to certain restrictions (1B.V.25-VI.3):

  Now if those who accept such provisions gained some assistance from the laws, and those who do not do so but resist them were disadvantaged, the restriction implicit in the laws would not be unhelpful. But, as it is, it appears rather that those who do accept such provisions do not get sufficient help
from legal justice.

  The laws are the fruit of an agreement between people, but this agreement does not produce the results they hope for, a society not controlled by violence and force majeure.26 These are not abstract and general problems; they concern the damage, suffering, and hardship of a single, concrete individual at every moment of his or her own existence. The inadequacy of nomos (and hence of justice consisting in legal prescriptions) arises from the fact that legal regulations scarcely ever correspond to the fundamental demands of nature, which are repressed by law. Nature is then the basic criterion for measuring pain and pleasure, utility and harm.

  Reading Antiphon from a Platonic perspective, where the grounds of inferences are made explicit, we may supply him with the basis for a valid conclusion drawn from two such premisses as these: (1) Law is inadequate to anticipate and to check aggression; and (2) The individual naturally seeks what will give him pleasure and avoids what will give him pain. Antiphon’s implied conclusion will be that the individual’s interest and what will give him pleasure consist essentially in giving free rein to all natural desires, in taking advantage of one’s neighbour, in short, in committing injustice. Thucydides has the unknown figure he calls Diodotus say that the violation of law is a natural instinct. In Antiphon’s case, this does not imply that he invites anyone who can do so with impunity to rob a passerby as a way of providing himself with the means of satisfying his hedonistic instincts. Rather, we should take him to be inviting reflection on the way to live one’s life with the minimum of discomfort in a cautious balance between natural demands and demands imposed by social life. His critique of nomos and justice is so impassioned because of its political tenor, which shows, in its contemporary allusions, what Ostwald has called “a certain upper-class bias against the Athenian democracy.”27

  From our limited evidence of Antiphon’s On truth, we may conjecture that the fragments I have discussed were placed by him in a larger scientific context, marked by a concept of nature (and not just human nature) that we may call, with the risk of anachronism, secular and materialist.28 Antiphon’s interest in biology (broadly construed), and his treatment of human nature and human utility recall the medical tradition as well as some aspects of Thucydides.29 This common ground is also evident in his psychological language, for instance, his use of nous to express the seat of the emotions, and the way he uses gnome to signify both decision and the faculty of deciding. Though he attributes a directive function to gnômê (DK 87 B2), he probably insisted on the fact that it is operative only if one takes account of nature.30

  For Plato, such a theory was contradictory because it attributed ontological and axiological priority to nature rather than intelligence. This error, in Plato’s eyes, was the sophisticated outcome of an ignorance so great that it could be mistaken for supreme intelligence (Laws X 886b). Its principal flaw was its elevation of body above mind (891e), for that inversion, according to Plato, makes it impossible to save human life from injustice and unhappiness.

  It is tempting to suppose that Antiphon’s shrewd analysis was in Plato’s mind when he wrote certain crucial passages in his dialogues. The fact that Plato never mentions him, or gives him the official space he accords to the other leading sophists, was probably a sort of damnatio memoriae, which is fully understandable only when Antiphon as a personality is reconstructed on the basis of all the evidence at our disposal.31

  In the case of Protagoras, Plato could share at least the sophist’s positive assessment of justice and his attempt to give it foundations by making it a property belonging to human beings in their social setting. Plato could also sympathize with Protagoras’ refusal to admit any polarization between nomos and physis, and the task he then had to undertake of making justice as a universal principle compatible with its varying local manifestations. The case of Antiphon was totally different – a speech-writer, affiliated with the oligarchical faction; an intellectually and politically disturbing personality, who refused to enter the political arena directly until the last phase of his life; and a man who liked to exploit his own intelligence without putting himself at personal risk, and who stopped short of drawing what Plato took to be the final and inevitable consequences of his own theories.32

  Plato chose not to put Antiphon in direct confrontation with Socrates, but he attacks him and those like him, by implication, in numerous dialogues where he exposes the enormous dangers to culture and politics that a radical criticism of nomos could present. Protagoras, in spite of his support for the utility of justice and laws, did not know how to defend them against opponents because, according to Plato, his own thought was the outcome of the unstable ontology prevailing at the time. Antiphon’s case for the weakness of law and for justice’s incapacity to restrain human nature from injustice derived, so Plato thought, from an erroneously “materialist” conception of the world. In the shadow of Socrates and on wholly new foundations, Plato took up the huge task of restoring the dichotomy between physis and nomos and of making justice the greatest good for the human soul.33

  NOTES

  1 For an excellent treatment of the connections between justice and the origins of democracy, see Ostwald [121].

  2 Much has been written about the possible connections between Thrasymachus’ definition of justice, and the position adopted by Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias (482c-484c). The chief difference is that Callicles grounds his views about the right to rule on the distinction between nature (physis) and convention (nomos), whereas, for Thrasymachus, all that matters is the possession of power as such.

  3 For a recent review of Thrasymachus’ argument, cf. T. D. Chappell, “The virtues of Thrasymachus,” Phronesis 38 (1993) 1–17.

  4 Cf. Gorgias 470d–471d.

  5 Cf. Rep. II 358b-362c and Laws X 881el–2.

  6 There are close parallels here to the themes developed in Laws X 885b-890a, especially in regard to the treatment of atheism in the later dialogue; cf. Decleva Caizzi [452].

  7 In his account of how Deioces acquired power over the Medes, Herodotus calls attention to the man’s just behaviour (I.96.2), using the term dikaiosynê in what may be its earliest attested occurrence in an absolute sense. See Havelock [442] and [100] 296–305, who has proposed that Protagoras was its inventor.

  8 Diogenes Laertius’ source for Aristoxenus’ accusation of Plato’s plagiarism was Favorinus (cf. D.L. III.57), who was active in the early decades of the second century A.D. We are in no position to know whether there was any truth to Aristoxenus’ charge, but Plato was evidently very interested in Protagoras’ work.

  9 Recent scholars, unlike those writing at the time the papyrus was discovered, are inclined to identify Antiphon the orator and Antiphon the sophist. See Narcy [457].

  10 DK 87 B44, which has been reedited by Bastianini and Decleva Caizzi [449].

  11 This point is not affected by the question of Pericles’ personal relationship with Protagoras; for doubts that have been raised about this, perhaps excessively, see P. A. Stadter, “Pericles among the intellectuals,” ICS 16 (1991) 111–24.

  12 See Ostwald [121] 199-290, who refers to “polarizations of the 420s,” and Ostwald [458].

  13 The Dissoi logoi (DK 90), a work of unknown origin and date, is customarily presumed to reflect sophistic thought; for a balanced account of it, see Burnyeat’s article on “Dissoi Logoi” in Craig [145].

  14 Cf. Herodotus III.80-82, and M. Ostwald, “Ancient Greek ideas of law,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. II (New York, 1973), 673–85, Nomos and the Beginnings of Athenian Democracy (Oxford, 1969), Ostwald [121].

  15 Note Cleon’s cynical words about the connection between a community’s strength and the stability of its nomoi, irrespective of their worth; on Thucydides, cf. Farrar [96] 127-91.

  16 Protagoras, by contrast, emphasizes the educative value of punishment (Plato, Prot. 324a-c). He also argues that a community’s presumption of the necessity of justice is so strong that anyone who truthfully admitted to being unjust would be reg
arded as mad (ibid. 323bc). Contrast Rep. II 359b, where Glaucon claims that anyone would be thought mad who had the means to commit injustice with impunity and declined to do so.

  17 The speech Thucydides gives to Diodotus reflects Antiphon’s thoughts on the intrinsic weakness of nomos as a sanction against nature’s demands (cf. Moulton [456] and Decleva Caizzi [451]). Also relevant is the famous fragment from Critias’ Sisyphus (DK 88 B25) to the effect that the gods are a human invention to supplement the weakness of law and extend the fear of detection, on which see p. 222 in this volume.

  18 423 B.C. See Ostwald [458] 296–97.

  19 I cite the text according to the edition of Bastianini and Decleva Caizzi [449] = CPF I.1* Antiphon I.17 (Antipho). In this edition, for 17.1 containing POxy 1364 + 3647, we have reversed the previous ordering of the fragments on palaeographical and contextual grounds; our 17.1A = DK 87 B44 fr.B, and our 17.1B = DK 87 B44 fr.A. Our 17.2 contains POxy 1797.

  20 Cf. Xenophon, Mem. IV. 4.12-18, where Socrates, using the sophist Hippias as his interlocutor and starting from premises like Antiphon’s, arrives at the very different conclusion that obedience to law is unequivocally advantageous to communities and individuals. Cf. Decleva Caizzi [450] 203–8

  21 See Furley [453], who partly builds on Kerferd [454].

  22 So Ostwald [121] 133.

  23 I do not take this passage to attribute any general utility to justice, even though, according to a passage cited by Stobaeus (DK 87 B58) Antiphon commented on the folly of thinking that one who does injustice to his neighbour will escape reprisals.