Plato: Statesman

255 Pages·1995·10.89 MB·English

by  Christopher J. Rowe

ARIS & PHILLIPS CLASSICAL TEXTS
PLATO
Statesman
EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION, TRANSLATION & COMMENTARY BY
C. J. Rowe
ARIS & PHILLIPS CLASSICAL TEXTS
PLATO
Statesman
with introduction, translation and commentary by
C. J. Rowe
Aris & Phillips Classical Texts
are published by
Oxbow Books, Park End Place, Oxford OX1 IHN
© C.J. Rowe 1995. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying without
the prior permission of the publishers in writing.
First published 1995, reprinted with corrections 2005
ISBN 0-85668-613-1
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
Printed and bound by Antony Rowe Ltd, Eastbourne
Contents
Preface
INTRODUCTION
Bibliography 21
GREEK TEXT AND TRANSLATION 27
COMMENTARY 177
Indexes 247

Preface
Attitudes towards the Statesman are typically mixed. On the one hand, it is generally
regarded as a pivotal work in the development of Plato's political thinking, and also —
thanks to the great myth of the reversal of the universe — as important for our
understanding of his view of the physical world. But the proportion of the dialogue
which is occupied with these topics is relatively small; a much larger part is taken up
with painstaking applications of the procedure of ‘division’, which it is easy to find
tedious. The main character in the dialogue, the 'Eleatic Stranger’, himself raises
questions on more than one occasion about the amount of time which he and his
respondent (a younger namesake of Socrates’) have spent on such things — admittedly,
for the most part, in order to dismiss the idea that it is excessive. But for some readers,
of some stretches of the dialogue, there have certainly seemed to be too many words
deploycd to too little effect. The result is that until recently, at least in modern times, the
work as a whole has been relatively neglected, and whatever attention has been paid to it
— with some honourable exceptions — has been directed to its more obviously attractive
and interesting parts. But this is in my view unfortunate. Modern readers may well not
feel in need of the lesson in Platonic dialectic which appears to constitute the main point
of the divisions themselves, but those passages which they have tended to find
interesting arc not fully intelligible except in the context of the whole, including the
divisions; and indccd it will be my contention that some of those passages have been
radically misunderstood, in a way that has scriously distorted our view of Plato's later
thinking. I should also claim that the laborious search for the definition of the statesman
is in fact essential reading for anyone interested in his metaphysics, his ontology, or his
conception of philosophy in gencral. Once its point, and its principles, are properly
grasped, it is also a good decal less tedious, and more subile, than it has often been taken
to be.
My own original encounter with the dialogue was in the company of J.B. Skemp's
translation, which in different versions has been the most widely used in the English-
speaking world for the last forty years. Subsequently, I used the Skemp translation in
teaching undergraduate courses in ancicnt political theory; but over the years my
disagrecments with it about the handling over some key passages and terms became
gradually more extensive, and the very elegance of its English seemed increasingly
unsuited to the needs of the students, who looked for a more direct way in to Plato's
arguments. They also evidently required more help of other sorts, in the form of
continuous notes on what is on any account a difficult work, whether in English or in
Greek. The present volume is meant partly as an immediate response to such needs,
though it is by no means intended exclusively for student use; it inevitably reflects
something of my own battles to understand Plato's text, and the reporting of these may
on occasion be more detailed than any undergraduate, or indeed graduate, student might
require. Another of the proximate causes of the volume was the Third Symposium
Platonicum, which took place in Bristol in 1992 on the subject of the Statesman: many
of the ideas contained in the commentary were originally. conceived in the course of the
editing of the Proceedings of that meeting (published in 1995 under the title Reading the
Statesman).
vi
I should like to express my thanks to Adrian Phillips for his enthusiasm for taking on
the project; to the University of Bristol, whose award to me of a University Fellowship
in 1993-4 enabled me to start and complete most of it; to the University of Wisconsin-
Madison, and to the University’s Institute for Research in the Humanitics in the Old
Observatory above Lake Mendota, where - as holder of a Friedrich Solmsen Fellowship
— I finished the work in the late summer and autumn of 1994; and finally to several
people who have rcad and discussed parts of the volume with me, especially Terry
Penner in Madison and Luc Brisson in Paris. It is dedicated to Joe Skemp, who would
have liked nothing better than to have continued to discuss his second favourite
dialogue. I hope he would have approved. ᾿
Madison, November 1994
Introduction
1. The subject(s) of the dialogue
The Statesman scts out — formally — to reach an account or definition, agreed between
the two protagonists, of what in Greek is referred to as the πολιτικός (Latinized as
politicus’), and πολιτική, terms which are traditionally translated into English as
‘statesman’ and 'statesmanship'. The second term is short for πολιτική τέχνη or
πολιτικὴ ἐπιστήμη, which is that body of specialized expertise or knowledge, whatever
it may be, in virtuc of which a man (in this work, at least, Plato assumes it will be a man
and not a woman) will be called πολιτικός. The expertise in question turns out not to
belong to any of those who currently occupy themselves with the affairs of statc, in any
city; if anyone did posscss it, it would justify the abandonment of all existing forms of
political arrangement — democracies, oligarchies, and the rest — in favour of the expert
rule of this individual. In other words, what turns out to be defined is someone who, if
he exists at all, is not actually in power at all (it is agrecd that the mere possession of the
requisite knowledge is a sufficient condition of being a πολιτικός). He is, as we might
put it, the (Platonic) ideal ruler. To modern readers, who suppose — because they have
been told so - that the dialogue is about the ‘statesman’, or statesmen, this is likely to be
a surprising discovery, in so far as we recognize all sorts of people as statesmen, if
usually elder ones, so that we are likcly to suppose that these, or their csscntial
characteristics, are going to be the object of the inquiry. But Plato's original audicnce
would probably have been [055 surprised, since the term πολιτικός, as applicd to an
individual, is not one in regular usc, and may well itsclf be a Platonic innovation. As
Hansen points out in his 1983 article (sec bibliography), there arc plenty of Greck
equivalcnts for ‘politician’, in the sense of 'person involved in the affairs of the city"
(ῥήτωρ, πολιτευόμενος, and σύμβουλος ; ‘political leaders’ are ῥήτορες Kal στρατηγοί,
‘orators and generals’, or simply ῥήτορες); but he discovers only one instance of
πολιτικός used by a non-philosophical writer, and that occurs in a speech dating from a
time after Plato's death (Acschines, On the Embassy 184). Plato uses the term without
apology,! and may cven be taken as suggesting that it is in current usage: in the Sophist,
which first introduces the subject of the πολιτικός for discussion,? the question which
introduces it — addressed by the elder Socrates to the 'Eleatic Stranger’ (216 d- 217 a)? -

1 Often in the sense of '(so-called) politician/political expert‘, as e.g. at Apology 21 c: see
below, and Skemp, in the original Introduction to his translation of the Statesman, p.19.
2 Along with the 'sophist’ (see below) and the philosopher; the first is treated in the Sophist,
but the philosopher ~ for whatever reason — never receives separate treatment. (The
conversation fictionally recorded in the Sophist is supposed to have taken place in the
morning, the discussion of the Statesman in the afternoon of the same day — with the
Theaetetus treatment of knowledge on the day before. But the important connections of the
Statesman are all with the Sophist, to which it refers, under the guise of referring to that
conversation, more than once.)
3 4216 d’, etc. is the standard way of referring to Platonic texts: '216' represents the page
number in the relevant volume of H.Stephanus' 1578 edition of Plato, and 'd' the fourth of
2 INTRODUCTION
is about what it is that people in his part of the world would apply the name to.
However that may be, the Greek term πολιτικός would have had a rather less well-
defined reference than our ‘statesman’. The question ‘what is a πολιτικός7 ᾽ is not so
much a request for a definition of an actual feature of the world (as ‘what is a statesman?’
could be, in so far as it might be answerable with reference to actual statesmen), more an
invitation to consider the proper specifications for someone charged with running, or
helping to run, a city-state or polis.4
This point about the remoteness, or distance, of the definiendum from the actual
world is reinforced by the alacrity with which the younger Socrates, who takes on the
task of responding to the Stranger in the Statesman, accepts the proposition that
‘statesmen’> possess a kind of expertise, that of 'statesmanship'. It would certainly not
have been a normal assumption, in the context within which Plato was writing, that
involvement in politics required any specialist qualifications; after all, the basis of
Athenian democracy was that any adult male citizen was qualified to contribute to the
processes of deliberation and decision-making just by virtue of being a citizen. What
may help to condition young Socrates’ acceptance of the proposition is the very form of
the word πολιτικός. Adjectives ending in -.kos (which like other adjectives can be
made into substantives, as in the case of [6] πολιτικός) mark out a particular arca of
specialism, with its associated expertise or rexvn/&metiun — though the kind of expert
knowledge involved may not be of a very high order, and feminine substantives ending
in τικη (sc. τέχνη, ic. ‘[the art]® of o-ing', where '#-ing' stands for something people do
in an organized way) will often refer primarily to the relevant activity, as e.g. in the case
of ῥητορική, ‘rhetoric’, or ἀριθμητική, ‘arithmetic’. In the case of the ‘sophistry’, which
is the formal subject of the Sophist, the Stranger gets Theaetctus to agree on independent
‘grounds that the sophist ought to be an expert of some sort: the title of 'sophist’ itself
suggests it (sc. because it suggests the epithet σοφός, ‘wisc’, and in fact σοφιστής,

what are usually five sections of that page (the line number in the section may also be
given).
4 This is what Socrates’ question to the Stranger in the Sophist probably amounts to, rather
than a request to be told about usage in the Greek colony of Elea in southem Italy: Td be
glad to discover from our guest ... what people in that region thought these things [sc.
sophist, πολιτικός, and philosopher] were when he was there, and what they called by these
names’,
5 *Statesman’ will hereafter function as the equivalent of the Greek πολιτικός; but of course
the caveats just introduced must continue to be bome in mind.
6 ᾿Απ' 15 οπς of the traditional translations of τέχνη (or ἐπιστήμη, ‘knowledge’, where — as for
the most part in the Statesman - this refers to a specific type of knowledge and so functions
as a synonym of τέχνη); ‘craft’ is another (sometimes 'skill’). But some of the things which
can be treated as τέχναι, as we soon discover from the Statesman, are neither ‘arts' nor
‘crafts’ in our sense: e.g. mathematics, or the playing of games. The generic concept is that
of expert, specialized knowledge, and for this reason I have usually chosen to translate
τέχνη as ‘expertise’ (plural ‘kinds of expertise’; ἐπιστήμη is ‘expert knowledge’). But in
contexts like 'the τέχνη of ...', [have retained ‘art of as a substitute for the gymnastics which
would be needed to bring in ‘expertise’.
INTRODUCTION 3
before Plato, can itsclf mean simply 'expert’).? The first definition is then stated in terms
of 'sophistic’ (223 b: i.e. σοφιστική [réxvn]); by the end of the conversation, it is clearly
established that sophists are in fact ignorant (267 c, 268 b), and yet the Stranger goes on
referring to him by using -ıkos and -ıxn forms. But when in the Statesman Socrates
agrees, at least provisionally, that the πολιτικός is ‘one of the experts’, it is apparently on
the basis of nothing except the name.’
In the case of the statesman, this initial assumption not only turns out not to be
disturbed, but actually becomes a vital premiss in the argument which the Stranger
mounts to demonstrate the difference between the real statesman and those who
currently occupy positions of power in cities (292 b).? By the end of the dialogue, some
kind of definition of the statesman has been offered, together with an extended
description of his central function in ‘weaving together’ the elements of a city (see
Section 5 below). But this is not the only, or perhaps even the main, purpose of the
Statesman. If it were, then the long scrics of divisions and expositions of
methodological points which has preceded would scem cxcessive. In fact, we find the
Stranger and young Socrates agrecing that the aim of the scarch for the statesman is at
least as much for the sake of their becoming beiter dialecticians, better able to discuss
important topics in a methodical and productive way (285 c ~ 286 b). This is not by any
means to suggest that the formal subject of inquiry is a mere training excrcise, or to deny
that significant results arc in fact reached about the nature of 'statesmanship', and the
proper way to run a city (or statc).'° But readers nced to be warned in advance that
despite its title, this is not an exclusively political dialogue. It is also in part a
demonstration lesson in method, and in precision. This is what accounts for its apparent
laboriousness: moving carcfully means moving slowly, and the degree of tedium which
we feel at the pedestrian speed with which the Stranger sometimes moves will (or so he
suggests) be in inverse proportion to our devotion to philosophy. Being the inventive
and versatile writer that he is, Plato frequently laughs at his own procedures, and

7 What Plato is defining is, of course, quite a different animal: two obvious examples who fit
his final definition in the Sophist are the two verbal prestidigitators of the Euthydemus, the
brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus.
8 258 Ὁ. ‘Now tell me,’ the Stranger says to young Socrates: ‘should we posit in the case of
this person too that he is one of those who possess knowledge, or what assumption should
we make?’ ‘This person too’, i.c. as well as the sophist, who has just been mentioned. The
Stranger might perhaps be taken as arguing a fortiori (if we began in the other case by
supposing that the sophist was an expert of some sort, surely we should suppose the same to
be true of the statesman?). But there is no positive indication of this, whereas the linguistic
argument — however inconclusive — looks ready to hand.
9 Young Socrates is asked at this point whether the assumption should be retained; and by this
time he has had ample grounds (if arguments from analogy are worth anything) for saying
that it should. If caring for human beings is at all like caring for other living things —
statesmanship has been described as a kind of ‘caring for the human herd’ — then we should
indeed expect it to involve specialist knowledge.
10 The conclusions of the dialogue, of course, relate explicitly and directly to the entity of the
polis or city-state, but the very generality of those conclusions, which claim to propose
something superior to any and every other (possible) form of political organization, invites
us to consider their applicability also within the very different context of the modern nation-
state.