The Portable Plato (2 page)

I would therefore advise the present reader to stop reading this introduction at this point and turn to the dialogues. I promise him that the rest will wait for him until he comes back with the confused curiosity that the wonder of the dialogues themselves engenders. I would add only one suggestion, similar to the museum guide’s direction where to stand as one views the pictures: Plato is the craftsman of a very superior dramatic art; the play is the thing.

The secret of the power of these dialogues, the
Protagoras,
the
Phaedo,
the
Symposium,
and The
Republic,
is their dramatic wholeness. This is true of all the dialogues, but these have most often been chosen for their dramatic verve, and also because they contain most of Plato. The naming of the persons of the drama is a suggestion that the dialogues are dramas, and there is a further recognition of it in the theory that Plato was imitating the mimes, or short dramatic sketches, of Sophron. But this would lead one to suppose that Plato was sugar-coating high and difficult doctrine. This is not the case. His mind is always on the story, the narrative account of things done, the plot that is the soul of the conversation. It is not an accident that the highest philosophic teaching that Plato offers is not doctrine, but dialectic, a conversation in which ideas animate persons in search of wisdom. A dialogue, which is the practice of dialectic, is a historic event in which men with bodies, senses, passions, and thoughts live and move with purposes and willful intentions that involve even the reader in the highest and most serious human concerns. No thought is expressed except by a character, and no act is done without revealing an intention. This dramatic principle is realized throughout a dialogue and in the finest detail. There are no first acts where things are done and said merely to introduce a strange person; there are no interludes of humor merely to relieve the suspense; there are no episodes merely to summarize and to provide a spectacular end. There is nothing left unprocessed by dramatic workmanship. No poet except Shakespeare has more fully made people intelligible to themselves and to us.

There is nothing that more powerfully threatens to destroy the dramatic imagination than an idea; it is often said that Shakespeare’s sure and integral dramatic touch is due to his ignorance of ideas and his exclusive attention to people. Of course this is utterly false unless it means that he was the master of that learned ignorance that is identical with wisdom. The thought in Shakespeare is as high and as low as men go, and the same thing Can be said of Plato. Nevertheless, the threat of ideas in drama is real, and it is only the master who successfully copes with them as his essential materials.

Aside from what may be attributed to native genius, Plato had great aids to confirm his dramatic bent. No people had a more dramatic common life than the Greeks, which is as much as to say that the Greeks as a people had a dramatic sense of life. This sense is most impressively expressed in the two great historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, who report the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, respectively. Herodotus, who brings almost all of the religious ideas of his world to bear on his narrative of events, often skeptically and humorously, builds a towering and broad-based structure out of all the materials in the known world, and the secret of the structure is the Greek tragic view of life. Not only is the great arching pattern the tragedy of the Persian Empire, but every constituent episode is a small tragedy with its parts welded together with choral lyrics and comments. The amazing thing is that there is little evidence that this was his literary intention. He moves freely in the medium of popular thought, and at times seems to be merely the loquacious compiler of everyday stories. He merely records the sights that people had of themselves. Thucydides, in a much less richly imagined recollection, rises to greater tragic heights in a more tightly and powerfully reasoned plot in his account of the Peloponnesian War, of which Athens herself is the hero. In this dramatic pattern Thucydides seems to know, as we now know both from him and others, that the Peloponnesian War is the prototype and presiding spirit of all crises in Western culture. It has never been repeated, but every great incident has been an imitation of it. Thucydides did not write colloquially and facilely, as Herodotus did, but he speaks in full confidence that he will be understood by people acquainted with the style and principles of the great plays.

Plato as a youth must have heard both Herodotus and Thucydides recited in public, but he also lived in a community that continued to move and think in the mediums that the historians used. There is evidence to make us suppose that Plato conceived his philosophic assignment as the attempt to understand the mysteries that the tragic history of Greece presented. The assignment to himself of this problem was a far greater aid than the ton or so of pre-Socratic philosophic treatises of which we have only the fragments.

The other great aids to dramatic imagination are perhaps more incisive and germane, the poems of Homer and the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. The wholeness of Homer’s world and the integrity of his characters are miracles of poetic conception even for us. They were for the Greeks, of course, a bible, a manual carried in memory or in a tunic pocket everywhere and always. In Plato’s own lifetime a Homeric quotation was proverbial and aphoristic wisdom, like Spanish proverbs from the time of Cervantes until now. There is internal evidence that it was this use and wont in the Greek familiarity with Homer that set one of the basic loci of Plato’s thought. In the
Meno,
one of the so-called Socratic dialogues, Socrates is made to say in one of his most emphatic speeches that, although he is uncertain about most things, there is one thing that he will fight for as long as he lives, and that is that there is a valid distinction with a difference between opinion and knowledge. This distinction is both a problem and the first step in method for Plato throughout the dialogues, and one of his favorite devices is to have Socrates lay down a Homeric quotation as a touchstone beside any expression of opinion by a character in the dialogue. Opinion is somewhere between ignorance and knowledge; it is belief held when one does not know, but a belief within which there may be hidden some clarifiable and certain knowledge. Homer as quoted is the measure of such a matter of knowledge. There is no doubt here of the original wisdom of Homer or of the common man, but the mere second-hand expression, the myth, the unexamined meaning of it in the mouth of an Athenian, is the typical run of current Greek popular thought. So it gets extended to the so-called empirical wisdom of the artisan, the craftsman, the property owner, the soldier, the priest, the lawyer, and the political leader. As one must analyze the Homeric quotation, so must one analyze and criticize the common sense of every man, to get rid of the ambiguity, to eliminate the ignorance, and to save the spark of knowing that is in it. The common man and the poet utter oracles, and it is the pious man’s duty to inquire what of reality is being expressed. Socrates is a midwife who helps the pregnant common man to deliver his ideas. As Homer speaks for all men, so all men speak like Homer, and it is the business of Socrates to thrash and winnow the grains of truth from the perennial harvests of opinion in the market place.

That there is knowledge in poetry is not an original discovery of Plato, nor should it be news to us; practically all the philosophers before Plato wrote in verse, and we still have so-called philosophical poets. But only the mind of a playwright would find both wisdom and poetry in the talk of the ordinary man, and for the proper winning of such wisdom a character like Socrates would have had to be invented if he had not existed.

There are many other lesser poets with whom Plato was familiar, some that he quotes, criticizes, and even makes fun of, but it is the great tragic and comic poets that possess and move his mind. As Homer supplies the raw material of his craft, so Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes set the aim and the method of the dialogues.

Tragedy has a misty and perhaps a mystical origin. The anthropologists tell a story of prehistoric rituals connected with plant,. animal, and human fertility in which the god Dionysus is killed in the autumn, his flesh scattered on the fields as a kind of divine manure, and he is reborn in the spring as a child. He is both the prototype of the tragic hero and the god to whom sacrifices were made when the imitative plays were performed in the Greek theatrical festivals of Plato’s time. There is some evidence that the plays were popular presentations of both the Orphic and the Eleusinian mysteries, to which only the select few belonged as to rival state churches. There is heavy evidence that they were the canonical forms for theological speculation, in that they were serious attempts, only partially successful, to justify the ways of the gods to men. These may be heavy afterthoughts of modem scholarship to explain the simple spontaneous power that the tragedies still have even for us, but there is no doubt that their effects are not exaggerated in such estimates of their origins. Whether it was religious faith, common opinion, or just wonder at human affairs, the Greek mind found the tragic ordeal an effective purge of mystery and a savior of wonder.

The story or myth ran to a type. A good man is possessed by an idea, a plan, and a purpose. In his steps to carry it out, he becomes entangled in circumstance until there comes a step, difficult and ominous, but necessary if he is to be true to himself. Actually the step contains a destructive contradiction that he does not fully see. He hesitates to take it, but feels and thinks that he can choose no other; it is a choice that is not a choice. The step leads to the failure of his purpose, the crushing of his character, often of his person. But in this catastrophe and calamity he loses the blindness of his resolved action and sees himself and the world in a new light. Plays with such master-plots were written in trilogies in which the first play set the situation for the second and the second for the third, and the three were finally followed by a so-called satyr-play which gave a comic allegorical version of the three preceding episodes. The stories chosen for this treatment were usually familiar legends, though sometimes original constructions. They were reminiscences leading to recognitions.

The most illustrious example of these probing myths is the story of Oedipus, the prehistoric King of Thebes, as it is presented in Sophocles’ play, Oedipus the King. The first recording of the story in writing is in Homer,
¹
Odysseus reciting:

“And I saw the mother of Oedipodes, fair Epicaste, who wrought the monstrous deed in ignorance of mind, in that she wedded her own son, and he, when he had slain his father, wedded her, and straightway the gods made these things known among men. Howbeit he abode as lord of the Cadmeans in lovely Thebe, suffering woes through the baneful counsels of the gods, but she went down to the house of Hades, the strong warder. She made fast a noose on high from a lofty beam, overpowered by her sorrow, but for him she left behind woes full many, even all that the Avengers of a mother bring to pass.”

This and other things like it are seen by Odysseus as if mirrored in a sacrificial pool of blood when he visits the shades in Hades: a Homeric opinion.

Sophocles makes Oedipus the protagonist and hero and uses the circumstance and sophistication of the folk tradition to focus and magnify the tragic essence of the folk tale. Upon the birth of Oedipus Laius, his father is warned by the Delphic oracle that he will be slain by his son. Oedipus is therefore exposed to die, but the shepherd in charge of the exposure passes him on to the king of Corinth who brings him up as his son. Rumors of his real origin disturb him and he goes to Delphi where he is told that he will kill his father and marry his mother. In horror he avoids Corinth, and on the lonely road to Thebes he quarrels with and kills an old man. On, reaching Thebes he answers the riddle of the Sphinx, who dies in defeat. This brings him to court, where he marries the queen, and becomes king. After they have had four children, there is a plague in Thebes, and the oracle’s word is that there is a pollution in the city causing the plague. Oedipus orders a search and pronounces punishment by exile for the unknown agent of the unknown crime. He conducts the search with passion, honesty, and persistence. Final suspicion of both himself and of his courtiers pushes him to the desperate end in which it is demonstrated that he is the criminal and cause of the pestilence. Jocasta, the queen, mother, and wife, hangs herself; Oedipus, the king, son, and husband, blinds and exiles himself.

Sophocles’ play presents only the final action, the pestilence in the city and the search and discovery of its cause. The plot follows closely the machinery of judicial process, with Oedipus playing the parts of detective, prosecutor, judge, and finally guilty defendant. The tragic plot is complete, the action articulate and detailed. The final insight flows from complete collection and recollection of evidence. Catastrophe, the reversal of roles, and calamity, the destructive consequence, are completely reasoned and willed. The end is purgation of passion and clarification of mystery. The name Oedipus is usually accepted to mean “swollen-foot,” indicating the wound-scar that resulted from the manner of the infant’s exposure and that serves as mark of recognition of personal identity in the play, but it could equally mean “He who learned his roots,” the man who knew himself.

The story in this form presents a thoroughly Greek man who devoted himself to honesty with himself and justice for all, a king of men. There is the persistence and subtlety of Odysseus combined with a passionate acceptance of the burden of civilized justice. Sophocles puts his sure finger on the deep mystery and still deeper contradiction that genuine just government contains. The man sins and knows it and takes responsibility for it at last. One is reminded of the king-plays of Shakespeare where the study of this paradox is encyclopedic.