Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
Why in the world did the god command Socrates to serve as midwife to others but forbade him to give birth himself, as is said in the Theaetetus? For he would not, without irony or playfulness, have made use of the god's name in this way. And elsewhere too, in the Theaetetus, Plato has attributed to Socrates many lofty and haughty claims, among which are also these: "For indeed, my remarkable friend, many have been so disposed toward me that they are simply ready to bite me, whenever I take away some piece of nonsense of theirs, and they do not think I do this out of goodwill, being far from knowing that no god is ill-disposed toward men; nor do I do any such thing out of ill will, but it is in no way right for me to concede a falsehood and suppress the truth."
Did he then call his own nature a god because it was more discerning or more productive — as Menander says, "our mind is our god," and Heraclitus, "a man's character is his daimon"? Or did he mean to indicate that something truly divine and daimonic was the cause for Socrates of this kind of philosophy, by which, in examining others, he freed them always from conceit and error and pretension, and from being burdensome first to themselves and then to those they spent time with? For indeed, as if by chance, there occurred at that time a great abundance of sophists in Greece, and the young men, paying them a great deal of money, were filled with self-conceit and with the appearance of wisdom, and they aspired to leisure devoted to argument and to unproductive pursuits spent in contentiousness and rivalry for honor, but nothing noble or useful whatever. So Socrates, possessing his refutative style of argument as a kind of purgative medicine, was trustworthy in refuting others because he asserted nothing himself, and he took hold of people all the more because he seemed to be seeking the truth in common, not defending some private opinion of his own.
Then again, since judging is beneficial, begetting is an impediment to it. For what loves is blinded concerning what it loves, and nothing of one's own is so loved by the one who begot it as his opinion and argument. For the so-called fairest distribution of children is, when applied to arguments, most unfair; for there one must take what is one's own, but here, even if it belongs to another, one must take the best. Hence the one who begets his own arguments becomes a worse judge than others. And just as one of the wise men said that the Eleans would make better judges of the Olympic games if not a single Elean were a contestant, so the man who is going to preside rightly over arguments and adjudicate them has no right himself to be a lover of crowns or to compete against those being judged. And indeed the generals of the Greeks, when casting their votes for the prize of valor, all judged themselves to be the best; and there is no philosopher who has not experienced this same thing, apart from those like Socrates who confess to asserting nothing of their own. These alone present themselves as pure and incorruptible judges of the truth. For just as the air within the ears, if it is not steady and free of its own sound but full of ringing and rushing noise, does not accurately receive the sounds spoken to it, so too that which judges arguments in philosophy, if it clatters and echoes from within, will be hard put to understand what is said from outside. For one's own opinion, being a housemate, will not admit what disagrees with it, as is attested by the multitude of philosophical schools, of which, if philosophy is doing at its best, only one is on the right track, while all the others suppose themselves to be so and are in fact fighting against the truth.
Further, then, if nothing is graspable and knowable by man, the god quite reasonably prevented him from begetting things airy and false and unstable, but compelled him to refute others who held such opinions. For this was no small benefit but the greatest, this argument that delivered men from the greatest of evils, deception and empty-headed conceit — a benefit which not even the sons of Asclepius could give. For Socrates' healing was not of the body but a purification of a soul that was corrupt and diseased. And if there is knowledge of the truth, and the truth is one, the one who learns it has no less than the one who discovered it, from the one who discovered it; indeed the one who is not convinced that he already possesses it grasps it all the more, and grasps the best of everything, just as one who has not himself begotten a child adopts the best one there is. But consider whether it is not the case that everything else — poems and branches of learning and the speeches of rhetoricians and the doctrines of sophists, which the daimonic sign prevented Socrates from begetting — was worth no serious effort at all; whereas that which Socrates alone considered wisdom, concerning the divine and the intelligible, which he himself called "erotic" wisdom, has for men no coming-into-being or discovery, but only recollection. Hence Socrates taught nothing, but by supplying the starting points of perplexities, as if of birth pangs, he roused and stirred up and helped draw out the innate thoughts in the young; and this he called the art of midwifery, which does not implant intelligence from outside, as others pretended to do, in those they met, but shows that they have it as their own within themselves, though incomplete and confused, and in need of one to nourish and confirm it.
Why in the world did he call the highest god the father and maker of all things? Is it because he is father of the begotten gods and of men, as Homer calls him, but maker of things irrational and inanimate? For Chrysippus says that not even the one who supplies the seed is called the father of the afterbirth, although it too comes from the seed. Or is he using metaphor, as he is accustomed to do, and has called the cause "father" of the cosmos — just as in the Symposium he called Phaedrus "father" of erotic discourses, since he was their originator, while in the dialogue named after him he called him "father of beautiful children," because many beautiful arguments in philosophy came into being once he had supplied their starting point? Or does "father" differ from "maker," and does begetting differ from making? For just as what has been begotten has also been made, but not the reverse, so too what has begotten has also made; for begetting is the making of something ensouled. And of a maker — such as a builder, a weaver, a craftsman of a lyre or of a statue — the work, once it comes into being, is separated off from him; but the origin and power that comes from the begetter is blended into the offspring and holds its nature together, since it is a fragment and a part of the one who begot it. Since, then, the cosmos does not resemble things molded or fitted together as artifacts, but there is in it a great portion of life and divinity, which god sowed into it from himself and mixed with matter, he is fittingly called, since the cosmos has become a living creature, both father of the cosmos and its maker.
Since these considerations especially touch on Plato's own view, consider whether this too might plausibly be said: that, there being two things of which the cosmos is composed, body and soul, the one — the body — the god did not beget, but rather, matter supplying it, he shaped and fitted it together, binding the unlimited with its proper limits and shapes; whereas the soul, having a share in mind and reasoning and harmony, is not merely a work of god but also a part of him, having come to be not only by him but also from him and out of him.
"In the Republic, having divided the whole, as it were, into a single line cut into unequal segments, and then cutting each segment again into two according to the same ratio," he made, concerning all things, both the class of the visible and the class of the intelligible; and of the intelligible he declares the primary sort to be that which concerns the first forms, the second the mathematical; and of the sensible, the first to be solid bodies, the second their images and likenesses; and he assigns to each of the four its own proper criterion — mind to the first, understanding to the mathematical, belief to sensible things, and conjecture to those concerned with likenesses and images. What then was he thinking when he cut the whole into unequal segments, and which of the segments — the intelligible or the sensible — is the greater? He himself has not made this clear. It will seem at first glance that the sensible is greater; for indivisible being, ever remaining the same and in the same state, belongs to the intelligibles, drawn together into something small and pure, whereas the scattered kind, spread about among bodies and wandering, has furnished the sensible. Further, the incorporeal is proper to limit, while body is, in respect of matter, unlimited and indeterminate, but becomes sensible when it is bounded by participation in the intelligible. Further, just as each of the sensible things itself has many images and shadows and likenesses, and in general it is possible, both by nature and by art, for very many imitations to come from a single model, so it is necessary that the things here differ in multitude from the things there, since Plato posits the intelligibles as models and forms, and the sensibles as their images or reflections, so to speak. Further, he derives the understanding of the forms from abstraction and the excision of body, bringing it down through the order of the mathematical disciplines, from arithmetic to geometry, then after this to astronomy, and setting harmonics above all of these. For the objects of geometry come to be when magnitude is added to quantity, and solids when depth is added to magnitude; and the objects of astronomy, when motion is added to the solid; and the objects of harmonics, when sound is added to the moving body. Hence, if we take away sound from moving things, motion from solids, depth from plane figures, and magnitude from quantities, we shall find ourselves among the intelligible forms themselves, which have no difference from one another except in respect of the one and only thing conceived. For a unit does not make a number unless it comes into contact with the indefinite dyad; and having thus made number, it proceeds to points, then to lines, and from these to surfaces and depths and bodies, and to the qualities of bodies as they occur in their affections. Further, of intelligible things there is one criterion, the mind — for understanding too is a kind of mind — since intelligibles are reflected in mathematical objects as in mirrors; but for the knowledge of bodies, because of their multitude, nature has given us five powers and distinct organs of sense; and not everything is detected by these, but much escapes perception because of its smallness. Further, just as each of us, being composed of soul and body, has the ruling and intellective part small and hidden within the great bulk of flesh, so it is likely that the intelligible stands to the sensible in the universe as a whole; for indeed the intelligibles rule over the corporeal, and what proceeds from any principle is less and smaller than the principle itself.
On the other hand, one might say the opposite first, that in comparing the sensible to the intelligible we in a way equate mortal things to the divine, for god is among the intelligibles. Next, everywhere, surely, what is contained is less than what contains it, and the nature of the universe contains the sensible within the intelligible; for god, "having placed the soul in the middle, stretched it through the whole and wrapped the bodies around it from outside." And the soul is invisible and "imperceptible to all the senses," as is said in the Laws; and this is why each one of us is perishable, while the cosmos is not going to perish: for in each of us the mortal and dissoluble element contains within it the living power, but in the cosmos it is the opposite — the corporeal is always kept safe, contained in the middle, by the more sovereign principle which remains ever the same and in the same state. And indeed body is said to be without parts and undivided in the sense of smallness, while the incorporeal and intelligible is so as being simple and unmixed and pure of all solidity and difference. And besides, it is foolish to make inferences about the incorporeal from bodily things. The "now," at any rate, is called without parts and undivided, yet it is present everywhere at once, and no part of the inhabited world is bereft of it, but all affections and actions and all destructions and comings-into-being that occur beneath the cosmos are contained within the "now." And the sole criterion of the intelligible is mind, as sight is of light, on account of simplicity and likeness; but bodies, having many differences and dissimilarities, are naturally apprehended, different ones by different criteria, as by different instruments. But indeed people are not right to despise the intelligible and intellective power within us either; for being great and vast, it surpasses the whole of the sensible and reaches even to things divine. And the greatest point is this: Plato himself, in the Symposium, teaching how one ought to make use of erotic love, leading the soul up from beautiful sensible things to the intelligible, urges that one be subject and enslaved to the beauty neither of some one body, nor of some one pursuit, nor of some one branch of knowledge, but, standing apart from pettiness about these things, "turn toward the great sea of beauty."
Why in the world, having declared the soul to be always older than the body and the cause and origin of its coming-into-being, does he again say that soul could not come to be without body, nor mind without soul, but soul in body, and mind in soul? For it will seem that the body both is and is not, existing together at once with the soul and yet also being generated by the soul. Is what is often said by us true? For the mindless soul and the unformed body coexisted with one another always, and neither of them had a coming-into-being or a beginning; but when the soul partook of mind and harmony, and, having become intelligent through this concordant change, became a cause of change for matter, and, prevailing by its own motions, drew to itself and turned about the motions of that matter, thus the body of the cosmos acquired its coming-into-being from the soul, being given shape and being made to resemble it. For the soul did not fashion the nature of the body out of itself, nor out of what does not exist, but out of a body disordered and unshaped it produced a body ordered and obedient. So then, just as, if one were to say that the power of the seed always exists together with body, yet that the body of the fig tree or of the olive came to be from the seed, he would be saying nothing inconsistent — for the body itself, motion and change having arisen in it from the seed, grew and developed to be of such a kind — so too the shapeless and indeterminate matter, having been given shape by the soul present within it, took on such a form and disposition.
Why, given that of bodies and figures some are rectilinear and some circular, did he take as the starting points of the rectilinear ones the isosceles triangle and the scalene triangle — of which the one constituted the cube, being the element of earth, and the scalene the pyramid and the octahedron and the icosahedron, the one becoming the seed of fire, the other of air, the other of water — while he left aside altogether the circular figures, even though he had mentioned the spherical, in the passage where he says that each of the enumerated figures is capable of dividing a rounded body into equal parts? Did he, as some suspect, assign the dodecahedron to the spherical, saying that with this...
the divine artisan put to use in fashioning that model of the universe." For indeed it is chiefly by the multitude of its elements, and by the obtuseness of its angles, which allows it to escape straightness, that the dodecahedron is easily bent, and by its tension, like the twelve-piece leather balls, becomes rounded and all-enclosing; for it has twenty solid angles, each of which is bounded by three obtuse plane angles, each being one right angle and a fifth. And it has been fitted and compacted together out of twelve equilateral, equiangular pentagons, each of which is composed of thirty of the primary scalene triangles. For this reason it is thought to imitate both the zodiac and the year at once, since its divisions equal them in number.
Or is the straight prior by nature to the curved, or rather wholly so? Is the curved simply an affection of the straight? For the "right" is said to be "bent," and the circle is drawn by a center and a radius; and this radius is a region of a straight line, by which the circle is also measured, for the circumference is everywhere equally distant from the midpoint. A cone and a cylinder are also generated from rectilinear figures: the cone from a triangle carried around one side that remains fixed, together with the other side and the base; the cylinder from a parallelogram undergoing this same process.
Further, of the two the lesser is nearer to the origin, and the straight line is the least of all lines; for of the curved line, the inner part is concave and the outer convex. Further, numbers are prior to figures, for the unit is prior to the point; the point is simply a unit having position. And indeed the unit is triangular, for every triangular number, when multiplied eightfold and increased by a unit, becomes a square number; and this holds true of the unit as well. Therefore the triangle is prior to the circle; and if this is so, the straight line is prior to the curved as well.
Further, the element is not divisible into any of the things composed from it, whereas for other things dissolution proceeds down to the element. If, then, the triangle dissolves into nothing curved, while the two diameters cut the circle into four triangles, then the rectilinear figure would be prior by nature and more elemental than the circular one. That the rectilinear is indeed the antecedent, and the circular something that comes to be afterward, and is a mere attribute, Plato himself indicated: for having constituted the earth out of cubes, each of which is bounded by rectilinear surfaces, he says that its shape has nevertheless become spherical and round.
So there was no need to make some special element for curved things, if this shaping is naturally apt to arise even when rectilinear figures are somehow fitted together with one another. Further, a straight line, whether longer or shorter, preserves the same straightness, but the arcs of circles, when they are smaller, we observe to be more curved and more tightly drawn by their convexity, while when the circles are larger, the arcs are more relaxed; certainly, when people stand upon a convex surface, some touch the underlying plane at a point and others along a line, so that one might suspect that many small straight lines, put together, produce the curved line.
But take care lest none of the circular and spherical things found here in our world is truly exact, but rather, through the tautness and tension of rectilinear elements, or through the smallness of their parts making the difference imperceptible, the round and circular appearance emerges — which is why, of the bodies here, none by nature moves in a circle, but all move in straight lines. But that which is truly spherical: is it not, rather than belonging to any perceptible body, an element of soul and mind, to which he assigns the circular motion as properly belonging by nature?
"How, then, in the Phaedrus, is it said that the nature of the wing, by which what is weighty is lifted upward, has the greatest share in what pertains to the body of the divine?" Is it because the discussion there concerns love, and love concerns bodily beauty, and beauty, by its likeness to things divine, moves and reminds the soul? Or rather should one not labor over this at all, but simply understand that, of the soul's powers relating to the body, since there are several, it is the reasoning and thinking power that has the greatest share in the divine — the power which he said belonged to things divine and heavenly, and which he not inappropriately called a "wing," as lifting the soul up from things lowly and mortal.
"How can Plato ever say that the mutual replacement of motion, on account of there being no void anywhere, is the cause of the effects connected with medical cupping-vessels, and of those connected with swallowing, and with hurled weights, and with the currents of waters, and with thunderbolts, and with the attraction apparently exerted toward amber and the Heraclean stone, and with the concords of musical sounds?" For it will seem strange to assign a single cause to the origin of so many and such dissimilar effects. Now the matter of respiration, as to how it occurs by the mutual replacement of air, he himself has adequately demonstrated;
but as for all the rest, having said that they are wrought as if by wonder-working, and that, there being no void, things push one another around and exchange places, moving toward their own proper seats, he has left the working-out of each case to us. First, then, the matter of the cupping-vessel is as follows: the air enclosed by it next to the flesh, having been set aflame along with heat and having become rarer than the pores of the bronze,
escapes not into an empty space — for there is none — but into the air surrounding the cupping-vessel from outside, and pushes that air away, and that air in turn pushes the air before it; and undergoing and doing this continually, the air in front retreats, grasping after the vacated space which the first air has left; and thus, falling upon the flesh which the cupping-vessel has seized, and seething at the same time, it squeezes out
the moisture into the cupping-vessel. Swallowing occurs in the same manner: for the cavities around the mouth and the throat are always full of air; whenever, then, the food is pressed by the tongue, and the muscles around the tonsils are tensed at the same time, the air, being squeezed out toward the palate, clings to the air retreating before it and pushes the food along with it. As for hurled weights,
the missile splits the air with a blow as it falls upon it and forces it apart, and the air flowing around behind, since it is its nature always to pursue and fill up the space being vacated, follows along with the object released, speeding its motion further. The fall of thunderbolts also resembles a hurling: for the fiery substance, under a blow that occurs within the cloud, leaps out into the air; and that air, breaking back against it, retreats, and again,
colliding with itself from above, thrusts the thunderbolt downward, forcing it against its nature. As for amber, it draws none of the things lying near it, any more than does the lodestone, nor does anything leap toward these of its own accord from what is nearby; but the stone sends out certain heavy and wind-like effluences, by which the contiguous air, being pushed back, thrusts the air before it; and that air, circling around
and flowing back again toward the vacated space, is forced along and drags the iron with it. Amber, on the other hand, has something flame-like or wind-like in it, and it expels this by the friction of its surface, once its pores have been opened up; and while what escapes from it produces the same effect as that of the lodestone, it draws to itself the lightest and driest of the things nearby, because of their thinness and weakness — for such things are not strong,
nor do they have weight or force enough to expel a quantity of air sufficient to overpower larger objects, as the lodestone does. Why, then, does the air push neither stone nor wood, but only iron, and drive it toward the lodestone? This is a difficulty common both to those who suppose the composition occurs by an attraction from the stone, and to those who suppose it occurs by a movement of the iron —
a difficulty which Plato thus works his way around. Iron is neither too rarefied, like wood, nor too dense, like gold or stone, but has pores and channels and roughnesses, on account of its irregularities, that are commensurate with the air, so that it does not slip away but, being held fast by certain seats and counter-pressures possessing a proportionate interlocking, whenever it falls into the current moving toward the stone,
is forced along and driven onward as iron. Such, then, would be the account of these matters. But the flow of waters upon the earth does not offer so easily surveyable a manner of the mutual displacement of the air. Rather, one must observe that still and standing waters, in lakes, remain motionless because the air is poured around them and gathered together on every side by them, motionless, leaving no space anywhere empty. The water on the surface, at any rate, in
lakes and in open seas, is stirred and swells into waves whenever the air takes on a heaving motion; for it follows immediately upon the air as it shifts and flows along with it because of the irregularity — for the downward blow makes the hollow of the wave, and the upward blow makes its swell, until the air settles and comes to rest, the space that encloses the liquids growing still. The currents of things in motion, then, always
pursuing the air that yields before them, and being driven on by the air pressing back around them, possess this continuous and unceasing quality — which is why rivers flow faster when they are swollen; but when the flow is meager and shallow, the water moves sluggishly from weakness, since the air does not yield nor undergo much mutual displacement. In the same way, spring waters too must necessarily be borne upward, as the outside air is carried down into
the spaces being emptied at depth, and in turn sends the water forth to the outside. And in a deeply shaded room enclosing still, windless air, a floor sprinkled with water produces a breath and a wind, as the air, shifting from its seat because of the liquid falling into it and receiving blows, is by nature made in this way to be thrust out by, and to yield in turn to, other air, there being no void in which the one, once settled, would fail to share in the change undergone by the other.
And indeed, as for the matter of concord, he himself has explained the manner in which sounds are made alike to one another. For the swift sound becomes high-pitched, and the slow becomes low; wherefore also the high-pitched sounds move the sense of hearing first; and whenever the low sounds, just beginning, fall upon these already fading and dying away, the blend of the two, through a sympathetic likeness of affection, produces a pleasure in the hearing, which men call concord.
That the air is the instrument of these effects is easy to see from what has already been said. For sound is a blow delivered to the sense of hearing through the ears by means of the air; for the air, having been struck by the thing that set it in motion, itself strikes in turn — sharply, if the blow is forceful, more gently, if it is faint. The air, then, that has been struck forcefully and intensely, reaches the hearing first, and then, circling round again and overtaking the slower air,
follows and escorts the sensation along with it. "How does the Timaeus mean that souls were sown into the earth, the moon, and all the other bodies that are instruments of time?" Did Plato move the earth in this way, just as the sun, the moon, and the five planets, which he called instruments of time on account of their revolutions, and was it necessary to conceive of the earth, "winding about the axis stretched through the universe," not
as fashioned bound and remaining fixed, but as turning and revolving — as later Aristarchus and Seleucus demonstrated, the one merely proposing it as a hypothesis, but Seleucus even asserting it as fact? Theophrastus further records that Plato, when he had grown old, regretted having assigned to the earth the central place in the universe, as not being fitting for it. Or do many of the doctrines generally agreed to be Plato's own stand opposed to this view? Should one instead emend the text,
reading "to time" in place of "of time" — taking the dative instead of the genitive — and understand that the "instruments" spoken of are not the stars but the bodies of living creatures? Just as Aristotle defined the soul as "the first actuality of a natural body possessing organs and having life potentially." So that the statement would mean this: souls were sown, in time, into the bodily organs suited to them. But this too is contrary to what he actually held,
for not once but many times he has called the stars instruments of time, where indeed he says that the sun itself, together with the other planets, "came to be for the marking off and safeguarding of the numbers of time." It is best, then, to understand the earth as an instrument of time, not as moving like the stars, but as, by remaining fixed about itself, always providing to those bodies as they move their risings and settings, by which the first
measures of time, days and nights, are marked off; wherefore he also called it "the fashioner and guardian, exact and unfailing, of night and day." For indeed the gnomons of sundials, not shifting along with the shadows but standing fixed, have become instruments and measures of time, imitating the earth's blocking of the sun as it is carried around it — just as Empedocles said: "and night the earth makes, by standing before the light."
This point, then, admits of such an explanation; but the following one might rather cause one to suspect that it is not reasonably or fittingly said that the sun, together with the moon and the planets, came to be for the marking off of time. For otherwise the dignity of the sun is great, and by Plato himself, in the Republic, it has been proclaimed king and lord of everything perceptible, just as the
Good is of everything intelligible; for the sun is said to be the offspring of the Good, furnishing to visible things, along with their appearing, their coming to be, just as from the Good, being and being known belong to intelligible things. That a god possessing such a nature and so great a power should have come to be merely an instrument of time, and a plain measure of the difference in slowness and swiftness among the eight spheres relative to one another, does not seem altogether fitting, nor
reasonable in any other way. One must say, then, that those who are troubled by these considerations suppose, out of ignorance, that time is "the measure of motion, and a number reckoned according to before and after," as Aristotle said, or "the quantity present in motion," as Speusippus said, or "an interval of motion" and nothing else, as some of the Stoics say, defining it by an accident and failing to grasp
its essence and power — which Pindar seems, not ineptly, to have divined when he called time "the lord that surpasses all the blessed gods," and Pythagoras too, when asked what time was, answered that it was the soul of the universe. For time is not a passive attribute nor an accident of whatever motion it happens to attend, but is the cause, the power, and the source of the proportion and order that holds together all things that come to be — the order by which the
nature of the whole, being ensouled, is moved; or rather, being itself motion and order and proportion, it is called time; for "passing along a path without sound, it drives all mortal things according to justice." And indeed the essence of soul, according to the ancients, "was a number moving itself"; wherefore Plato too said that "time came to be together with the heaven," and that motion existed even before
...before the coming-into-being of heaven. But time did not yet exist; for there was neither order nor measure of any kind nor definition, but a movement without limit, like an unshaped and unformed matter of time. When this movement had, so to speak, flooded over and been cast in color and form -- shaping the matter into figures and the movement into periods -- it made the world and time together. Both are images of God: the world is an image of his being, and time, moving, is an image of his eternity, just as the world, in its coming-to-be, is an image of God. Hence he says that they came into being together and will likewise be dissolved together, should any dissolution ever overtake them; for it is not possible for what has come into being to exist apart from time, any more than for what is intelligible to exist apart from eternity, if the one is to remain forever and the other, though it comes into being, is never to be dissolved.
Since, then, time has this necessary connection and coherence with heaven, it is not simply movement, but, as has been said, movement within an order that has measure and limits and periods; and of these the sun, standing as overseer and watchman, marks off, presides over, brings to light, and displays the changes and the seasons which, in Heraclitus's phrase, "bring all things," no small or trivial matters but the greatest and most sovereign -- and in this the sun becomes a fellow-worker with the ruling and first god.
On the powers of the soul in Plato's Republic, where he likens the concord of the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive parts to the harmony of the lowest, the highest, and the middle string -- most aptly -- one might raise the difficulty: which did he assign to the middle string, the spirited or the rational part? For he himself, at least in that passage, has not made this clear. Now, in terms of the spatial arrangement of the parts, the spirited is placed in the region of the middle, and the rational in the region of the highest string; for the ancients called the upper and first position "hypate" (highest), which is why Xenocrates too calls that Zeus who is among the things that remain constant and unchanging "Hypatos," and the one beneath the moon "Neatos" (lowest). And even earlier Homer addressed the god who is ruler of rulers as "most high of the mighty."
And rightly has nature assigned the upper region to what is most powerful, establishing reason, like a helmsman, in the head, while she has settled the appetitive part far off, in the last and lowest place. For the lower rank is called "lowest" (neate), as is shown by the names given to the dead, who are called "the netherworld ones" and "those below"; and some say that even the wind which blows from below, out of the unseen, is named notos ("south wind") for this reason. As, then, the relation which the last bears to the first, and the lowest to the highest, is the same relation that the appetitive part bears to the rational, it is not possible for the rational part to be uppermost and first without also being "highest," and not something else. Those who assign to it, as its proper power, the position of the middle string fail to see
that they are taking away from it the more sovereign position, that of the highest string, which belongs neither to spirit nor to appetite; for each of these is by nature suited to be ruled and to follow, and neither of them is naturally fit to rule or to lead the rational part. It will appear all the more, from its very nature, that the spirited part occupies by position the rank of the middle string among these: since to the rational belongs ruling, and to the spirited belongs both being ruled
and ruling, in accordance with nature -- being obedient to reason, yet mastering and chastising appetite whenever it disobeys reason. And just as, among letters, the semivowels stand midway between the mutes and the vowels, sounding more than the former but less than the latter, so too in the human soul the spirited part is not purely a passion, but often carries within it an impression of what is noble, mingled with an irrational craving for retribution. And Plato himself, likening the form of the soul to a paired team and its charioteer, made the rational part, as is plain to everyone, the charioteer; and of the horses, the one concerned with the appetites is utterly disobedient and unmanageable, "shaggy about the ears, deaf, hardly yielding even to whip together with goad," while the spirited part is for the most part tractable
to reason and its ally. Just as, then, in a pair yoked together, it is not the charioteer who is intermediate in excellence and power, but rather, of the two horses, the one that is worse than the charioteer but better than its yoke-fellow -- so too, of the soul's parts, it was not to the part that has mastery that Plato assigned the middle rank, but to the part that shares less in passion than the third but more than the first, and shares more in reason than the third but less than the first.
For this arrangement also preserves the proportion of the musical concords: the spirited part stands to the rational as the highest string to the fourth interval, and to the appetitive as the lowest string to the fifth interval, while the rational stands to the appetitive as the highest to the lowest string, that is, the octave. But if we draw reason toward the middle, spirit will be found to be more distant from appetite -- spirit, which some philosophers, because of a certain resemblance, consider identical with appetite. Or rather, it is absurd to assign "first," "middle," and "last" strictly according to spatial position, when we can see that the "highest" string itself, on the lyre, occupies the topmost and first place, but on the pipes occupies the lowest and last place,
while the middle string, wherever on the lyre one places it and tunes it accordingly, sounds higher than the highest and lower than the lowest. So too the eye does not occupy the same position in every animal, yet, wherever and however it is placed, it is by nature fitted to see equally well. Just as the paidagogos (attendant) is said to "lead" the child not by walking in front but by walking behind,
and just as the Trojan commander is now seen among the foremost, now giving his orders among the last -- yet on either occasion he held the first place and the chief power -- so too the parts of the soul must not be judged by their position or by their names, but their power and proportion must be examined. For that the rational part is established, by position, first in the human body is merely incidental; but it holds the first and most sovereign power as the middle string does relative to the highest -- namely the appetitive part -- and to the lowest -- the spirited part -- by relaxing and tightening and, in general, bringing both into concord and harmony, removing the excess of each and yet not permitting either to be altogether slackened or to fall silent; for what is measured and proportionate is defined by a mean.
Rather, this is the very end of the power of reason: to produce means among the passions, which some call "sacred substances," possessing, through reason, a blending of the extremes both with reason and with one another. For the pair yoked together does not have as its mean the better of the two beasts of burden; nor should the art of driving be regarded as an extreme, but rather as a mean between the excess of swiftness and the excess of slowness in the horses -- just as
the power of reason, laying hold of the passions as they move irrationally, and fitting them to itself, establishes a mean between deficiency and excess.
"Why did Plato say that speech is blended out of nouns and verbs?" For it seems that all the other parts of speech, except these two, are nothing, though Homer, in a youthful display, crams them all into a single line, this one: "Go to his tent, your prize, that you may know it well."
For indeed pronoun, participle, noun, verb, preposition, article, conjunction, and adverb are all present in it: the particle "-de" is here set in the place of the preposition "eis" ("into"), for "klisiende" ("tent-ward") is of the same kind as "Athenaze" ("to Athens"). What, then, must be said on Plato's behalf? Perhaps that the ancients called what is now termed a "proposition" -- then called a "protasis" -- the primary form of speech, since it is in first uttering it that people speak truly or falsely;
and this is composed of a noun and a verb, of which the dialecticians call the one the "subject" and the other the "predicate." For on hearing that "Socrates philosophizes," and again that "Socrates flies," we shall say that the one statement is true and the other false, without needing anything further. And indeed
it is likely that human beings, when they first had need of speech and of articulate voice, wanted above all to make clear to one another actions and those who perform them, experiences and those who undergo them. Since, then, we adequately signify actions and experiences by the verb, and those who perform or undergo them by the noun, as Plato himself has said, these are held to signify,
while one might say that the rest do not signify -- just as the groans and wailings of actors, and often, by Zeus, a smile or a silence, make speech more expressive, yet do not have the necessary power to signify that the verb and the noun have, but rather serve as a kind of ornament varying speech, just as the aspirates and roughenings
and their lengthenings and shortenings vary the letters, in the view of those who set them down as elements in their own right, though they are rather affections and accidents and differentiations of the elements, as the ancients showed when they made do with the sixteen letters for speaking and writing adequately. Then consider whether we are not misreading Plato: he said that speech is blended out of these, not that it is composed of nothing but these. It is as though someone claiming that a drug is compounded
of wax and galbanum were slandering the one who says this because he left out the fire and the vessel, without which the compounding could not occur -- and we would likewise be at fault in charging Plato with omitting conjunctions and prepositions and the like; for speech is not made out of these, but, if anything, through these and not without these that it naturally comes to be blended. For it is not the case, as with one who utters "strikes" or "is struck," and again
"Socrates" or "Pythagoras" -- each of which somehow enables one to conceive and think of something -- that in the same way, when "men" or "gar" or "peri" is uttered by itself, one can grasp some notion of a thing or a body; rather, unless these are uttered concerning those things and along with them, they resemble empty noises and echoes, since by themselves they are naturally fitted to signify nothing, neither alone nor combined with one another;
but however we may weave or mix conjunctions, articles, and prepositions together, trying to make some single thing common out of them, we shall seem to be twittering rather than speaking -- whereas when a verb is combined with a noun, what results is at once a dialect and a speech. Hence it is reasonable that some regard only these as parts of speech; and Homer too, it seems, means to indicate this whenever he says "he spoke a word and named it by name" -- for he is accustomed to call the verb a "word,"
as in these lines: "O wife, truly this is a word that grieves the heart, which you have spoken," and "hail, father, O stranger"; and again, "if a dread word has been spoken, may the storm-winds snatch it up and carry it away." For neither conjunction, article, nor preposition can be called dread or grievous to the heart, but only a verb expressive of some shameful action
or some unfitting experience. This is why we are accustomed to praise or blame poets and prose writers by saying things like "so-and-so uses Attic nouns," "fine verbs," or again "plain ones" -- but no one would say that so-and-so has "conversed in plain" or "fine and Attic articles." One might therefore ask: do these other parts contribute nothing at all to speech? I would say, for my part,
that they contribute as salt contributes to a relish, or water to barley cake -- though Evenus used to say that fire too was the best of seasonings. But we do not say that water is part of the barley cake or the bread, nor that fire or salt is part of the boiled dish or the food, even though we are always in need of them, since speech, unlike these, is often independent of them -- as seems to be the case with the Roman tongue, which nearly
all men now use together: it has done away with nearly all prepositions save a few, and admits nothing whatsoever of what are called articles, but uses its nouns, so to speak, without fringes. And this is no wonder, when even Homer, excelling in the "ordering of words," attaches articles to only a few of his nouns, like handles to cups that need them, or crests to helmets; hence such lines, where he does this, have become notable, as "but Ajax the wise-hearted, the son of Telamon, was stirred most of all in spirit," and "they kept watch, that the sea-monster, escaping, might not elude them," and a few brief others besides these. In the countless remaining lines, though no article is present, the diction loses nothing in clarity or beauty.
And indeed neither animal, nor instrument, nor weapon, nor anything else that exists is by nature made more beautiful, more effective, or more pleasing by the removal and privation of a part proper to it; but speech, when its conjunctions are removed, often has a more emotional and more moving power, as in the line: "one lying newly wounded, another unwounded, another dead, he dragged by the feet through the tumult of battle"; and these words of Demosthenes: "For a man who strikes might do many things which the one who has suffered them could not even report
to another -- by his bearing, by his look, by his voice: when he acts insolently, when he is hostile, with his fists, with a blow to the face -- these are the things that stir, these unsettle men unaccustomed to being treated with outrage." And again: "But not Meidias! No -- from that very day he speaks, he reviles, he shouts. Is someone being elected to office? It is Meidias. Is a man from Anagyrus put forward as candidate? He acts as patron for Plutarchus, he knows the secrets, the city cannot contain him."
This is why the asyndetic (unconjoined) figure is held in especially high esteem among those who write on rhetorical technique, while they find fault with those who are overly rule-bound and who never let go of a single conjunction demanded by custom, on the grounds that they make their diction sluggish, unfeeling, and wearisome through its unvarying sameness. As for the claim that dialecticians have the greatest need of conjunctions for the connecting, combining, and disjoining of propositions -- like charioteers of their yoked teams --
and that the Odysseus in the cave of the Cyclops, binding the rams together with withies, shows the conjunction to be not a part of speech but a kind of connecting instrument, just as it is named, and one that binds together not everything but only what is not expressed simply -- unless indeed they would also claim that the strap of a burden and the glue of a book are parts of them, and that the distributions of the state's funds, as Demades called them, glueing together
the democracy's theoric fund. But what conjunction so binds one proposition together out of many, weaving and joining them, as the loadstone binds iron that has been softened together by fire? Yet it is not, and is not called, a part of the iron; and yet these things, entering into and fusing with what is being blended, do and undergo something in common, forming a single thing out of several. But there are those who do not think that conjunctions are one
...but that speech is a mere enumeration, as when archons are listed in succession, or days are catalogued one after another. And indeed, of the remaining parts of speech, the pronoun is plainly a kind of noun, not only because it shares in cases, but also because, together with its utterance, it makes the most proper indication of some things among those already defined. And I do not see that one who utters the name 'Socrates' has thereby indicated the person any more clearly than one who says 'this man.'
As for the so-called participle, it is a mixture of verb and noun and does not exist on its own, just as the common terms for feminine and masculine do not; rather, it is arranged together with those, touching the verbs in its tenses and the nouns in its cases. The dialecticians call such forms 'derivatives' -- for instance, 'thinking' from 'prudent,' and 'being temperate'
from 'temperate,' since they have the force of nouns and appellatives. As for prepositions, one might liken them to capitals and bases and pedestals, on the ground that they are not words in themselves but rather pertain to words. But see whether they do not instead resemble clippings and fragments of nouns, like the fragments of letters and abbreviated strokes used by those who write in haste: for 'to step in' and 'to step out' are plainly abbreviations of
'to step to the inside' and 'to step to the outside,' and 'to come before' is an abbreviation of 'to come earlier,' and 'to sit down' of 'to sit below' -- just as, of course, people say 'to stone' and 'to breach a wall' instead of 'to throw stones' and 'to dig through walls,' hastening and compressing their speech. Hence each of these forms supplies some use to discourse, but is no part of speech and no element of it, except
as has already been said, the verb and the noun, which together produce that first composition capable of admitting truth and falsehood -- the thing that some call a proposition, others an axiom, and Plato called a statement.