PLATO AND THE STABILITY OF
HISTORY
It is a difficult task to isolate a Platonic theory of history, and equally problematic to specify the function he thought historical discourse should perform. Plato surely knew the works of Herodotus and Thucydides, and also the more popular forms of historical discourse, as his masterly pastiche of the funeral oration in the Menexenus shows.1 Like Thucydides, he never explicitly defines the genre we call ‘history’, preferring to speak of ‘inquiry into ancient matters’ or ‘the truth about ancient matters’. When he talks about the authors of suggramata, technical treatises, he can envision works on law and government, medicine or rhetoric, but not (apparently) historical compositions. As we shall see, historical narrative in Plato strays into territory closely associated with myth, and part of the task of this chapter is to investigate the implications of this overlap. I shall be focusing my attention on a group of narratives from dialogues that are generally regarded as late and that allow us a good view of the sweep of the past: the Statesman, the Timaeus and Critias, and Book 3 of the Laws. All of them present a cosmic history marked by cataclysm and destruction, although each has a slightly different flavour. Surveying these narratives will allow us to concentrate on some distinctive features of Plato’s approach to the past: the way that the past and the investigation of it are cut off from the present, and the circumstances under which the past may be allowed to inform our current projects. After sketching the content of these cosmic histories, I shall look briefly at an influential paradigm for interpreting Plato’s ‘theory of history’ before suggesting a change in focus: rather than asking whether Plato thought history conformed to a pattern, we should examine how he historicises the historiographic impulse and the role and usefulness he assigns to historical knowledge. In this connection it will prove significant that Plato constructs a universe where long-term accurate historical knowledge turns out to be both impossible and possibly irrelevant.
Issues of historical time and narrative are not prominent in Plato’s early and middle dialogues. This is in keeping with their ethical focus; discussion centres on understanding the soul and its various virtues. The temporal perspective under which we are to view the soul is a long one, since the soul is immortal and will be reborn (Resp. 498c–d) and individual lifetimes are trivial in comparison with all of time (Resp. 608c–d). In some of the later dialogues, however, we see a greater interest in (truly universal) history and in the process by which historical narratives are constructed. The context of these accounts is cosmic history (analogous to the longue durée in which we must place the soul), and leaves room for the consideration (in Statesman and Timaeus) of the activity of a creator deity. These accounts all spring from the postulation of cosmic upheaval and deploy a particular historiographic strategy: that of the rationalisation of myth.
Let us start with the Statesman. Here (268d–269c) an Eleatic Stranger tells the younger Socrates that they must use a ‘great myth’ in their search for the definition of a king – particularly appropriate since young Socrates is only just beyond childhood.2 In this instance the myths in question are, first, the story of Atreus and the reversal of the course of the sun and other heavenly bodies in the sky; second, that of the Age of Cronus; and third, autochthony.
All of these arise from the same event, and in addition to these countless others even more amazing than these, but because of the length of time some of them have faded from memory, while others are spoken of separately, scattered each from the other. No one has told the event that causes all of them, but it must now be told. For telling it will be fitting for our demonstration of the king.
The truth in question is that the world goes through phases in its rotation, in which God alternately helps the rotation and then lets go, so that the direction of rotation is reversed. Whenever a reversal occurs, there is great destruction (269c–271a). Autochthony belongs to a period of divine control under the rule of Cronus (271a–d), whereas sexual reproduction belongs to the current age and those like it (273e–274a). When god gives up control of the world, a gradual decline into chaos occurs because of the predominance of the bodily factor, and this, in the end, causes god to take control once more.3 The ‘history’ in this scenario is fairly minimal and schematic, brought in to set up political analysis. It does, however, make use of the familiar historiographic trope of the fading of memory through time, and also the discovery of an underlying cause that explains a number of different phenomena. It also uses transformations of myth as basis for a new analysis. Like Hecataeus and Acusilaus with their rationalising narratives, the Stranger looks for a historical truth that lies behind mythological accounts.4
In the Timaeus, the focus shifts further (though not so very far) towards historical narrative as we would understand it and towards the processes by which such narratives are developed and transmitted. The action of both Timaeus and Critias is set in motion by Socrates’ desire to see the ideal polis in action and performing something worthy of it (Ti. 19b–c). This desire will be fulfilled by the narration in summary (and partly also in full) of the story of the ancient struggle between the empire of Atlantis and Athens many thousands of years before. No one in Athens knows this story, apart from its narrator Critias and his family (and now his audience in the dialogue). How then has it been preserved? Because Solon once, we are told, brought the tale back from his travels in Egypt, where he had had an interesting encounter with an Egyptian priest. Of particular interest for us is the priest’s assessment of Greek historical knowledge. He tells Solon, who is attempting to draw him out about the past, that the Greeks are intellectual children:
‘You are all young,’ he said, ‘in your souls, for you have in them no ancient report from antique hearsay, nor any learning grey with age. The reason for this is the following: there have been and will be many destructions of mankind for many reasons, the greatest through fire and water, but other lesser ones because of countless different causes. The story that is told even by you – that Phaethon, the child of the Sun, once yoked his father’s chariot, but because he was unable to drive along his father’s route he burned some parts of the earth and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt – this has the form of a myth, but the truth is a deviation of the heavenly bodies as they moved around the earth, and the destruction of the surface of the earth over a long period of time.’ (Ti. 22b–d)
Once again Greek myths are presented as reflections of an underlying historical reality to which the Greeks themselves are oblivious. Greek ignorance means that they are unaware of the amazing story of ancient Athens and Atlantis, both cities founded by gods, where the former approximated the excellences of the ideal state of the Republic and the latter declined from ancient virtue into greed and imperialism.
In our third exhibit, Laws Book 3, the interlocutors, led by an Athenian Stranger, are trying to investigate the first beginning of a state, as part of their inquiry into laws and lawgivers, along with the development of virtue and vice.
– I think [that we can study the development of vice and virtue in a city] starting from the expanse of time and our inexperience of it and the changes that take place in it.
– What do you mean?
– Well, do you think that you ever could learn the amount of time that has occurred in the period cities have existed and men have formed governments in them?
– Not at all easily.
– But it would be immense and impossible to grapple with?
– Absolutely.
– So then, isn’t it the case that countless cities in countless lands have come into existence among us during this time, and according to the same calculation of extent no fewer have been destroyed. And these cities have been governed with all forms of government at various times in every location. Sometimes they have become greater after being small and sometimes smaller after being great, and worse after being better and better after being worse. (Leg. 676a–c)
The immensity of historical time is an obstacle to detailed knowledge.5 An interesting corollary is that almost any conceivable form of government has existed at some point. The task, therefore, is to discover the cause of change and in turn the basic form of a city. Yet the notion of the historical past as a kind of archive in which all possible political combinations and thus historical trajectories are stored challenges the significance of any one historical narrative. Any history one tells will be merely an example of a more general type. We shall see later how the account of the Laws, despite its claims to do justice to particular Greek histories, is in fact in thrall to a model of paradigmatic history. For the moment, however, we must return to the rationalisation of myth, which makes its appearance at Leg. 677a. Here the Stranger asks Clinias the Cretan:
– Do you think that ancient tales have a certain truth?
– What sort of tales?
– That there have been many destructions of mankind due to inundations and sicknesses and many other things, in which only a small part of mankind is left.
– Everyone thinks that something like this is credible.
Here in the Laws the Athenian Stranger’s interlocutor finds nothing strange in the rationalising assumption that there is truth behind myths of disaster; it is so obvious as almost not to need comment. This is certainly not the case when the theory of cyclic destructions of mankind is presented in the Timaeus and the Statesman, where the Eleatic Stranger and the Egyptian priest are telling their respective audiences something they did not know before. The Laws, then, generates an atmosphere of consensus rather than revelation, and it is no accident that this occurs in a dialogue where the movement from past to present to future is most smoothly effected – a point to which we shall return.
In the Timaeus, Statesman and Laws, the problem with historical knowledge is not just the normal difficulty of finding out what happened long ago, but that cosmic obstacles are set in the way of investigation. If most of humanity is periodically wiped out by fires, floods and/or cosmic reversals, we have to deal not just with the problems of memory or partisanship, but also with cultural trauma as civilisation is periodically forced to begin anew. As we shall see, the cultures of each cycle have no understanding of the cycle that has preceded their own, or even of the fact (and its implications) that history is cyclic. Their viewpoint must, therefore, be chronologically parochial. The immensity of time envisaged by Plato’s speakers is exponentially greater than that which causes problems for Herodotus and Thucydides, both of whom face the problem that knowledge is lost with the passage of time.6 The great stretch of history in question in Plato’s dialogues is not confined to the ages analysed by the Greek historians, but stretches back even further. To be sure, within our cycle our familiar historians may well have produced interesting accounts (which would, in turn, have to be judged by Platonic political and ethical standards), but the schema we have been sketching recontextualises them and thus changes their meaning, by projecting a future point after which both their knowledge and their methodology will be lost. The only cultural memory that survives the cycles is one of cosmic trauma and the past, as a result, becomes mythologised. Like early historicising rationalisers, Plato’s authoritative speakers can strip away the mythological veil and reveal the more mundane truth underneath. There is, however, a difference. Investigators such as Hecataeus would rationalise myth by stripping away the marvellous to leave the merely credible (thus Heracles did not descend to the Underworld and defeat the hound of hell, but killed a particularly poisonous snake nicknamed the ‘hound of Hades’, FGrHist 1 F27). Plato’s rationalisations work in the opposite direction, revealing a truth more terrifying and marvellous than we had expected: not Phaethon falling from his chariot, but the end of life as we know it. When the Eleatic Stranger in the Statesman mentions the myths of Atreus and Phaethon, he takes care to inform his audience that there are ‘countless others even more amazing than these’.
The universe is, then, more surprising than we think. Plato’s relentless focus on the big (cosmic) picture makes the work of the historians and historicising rationalisers of myth seem small by comparison. One way of understanding the contrast is to view it as reflecting the difference between cosmology (with its universal interests) and historiography (with its focus on res gestae). This is indeed a germane distinction, but what is most interesting for present purposes is that the kind of cosmos we inhabit (one characterised by catastrophe and discontinuity) dictates the nature of historiography and its connection with the discourse of myth.7 The imposition of periodic catastrophe means that historical and mythological investigation must address issues of radical discontinuity. Moreover, because catastrophe creates cultural discontinuity and trauma, mythologising becomes an inescapable aspect of the investigation of the past, rather than (as it is for Thucydides) a poetic or sentimental tendency that can be overcome by the rigorous application of stringent methodological standards. The destruction of culture at the time of catastrophe would also entail the destruction of any historiographic standards. Popular myths about floods and conflagration are all that is left and access to long-term history is thus through rationalisation of myth, so that mythical patterns take a privileged and foundational role.
The recurrence of patterns of cataclysm has tempted some to read ‘decadence’ as Plato’s governing notion of history. In 1951, R. G. Bury presented a succinct summary of this approach. We have seen already how in the Statesman the world slowly decays when god removes his hand from the tiller of the cosmos. This is caused by the bodily element in the cosmos, which gradually causes the world to move towards its original disharmony until it is in danger of destruction (at which point god again takes over) (273a–e). In the Republic the idealised polis is subject to decline: ‘since everything that is born is subject to destruction, not even a constitution like this will endure for all time, but it will be dissolved’ (8.546a). After this introduction, we are presented with the gradual degeneration of the city into tyranny. So too in the Timaeus/Critias we observe Atlantis sinking (so to speak) into vice and defeat because of the fading of the divine element in its kings and the concomitant growth of greed. Finally Book 3 of the Laws narrates the deterioration of the Dorian states (except for Sparta), as well as that of Athens and Persia (the representatives of pure democratic and monarchic constitutions).8 If we add to this picture a nostalgic portrayal of the Age of Cronus in Laws Book 4 (713b–e), we have a temptingly simple picture of the pessimistic philosopher. In this approach, human greed and corruption, stemming from the bodily nature of the cosmos, dictate historical degeneration, on both the cosmic and the historic level. For Bury and other adherents of this approach, human nature gives shape to history: ‘Ultimately all the phenomena, all the secondary causes of History are to be traced back to one and the same primary Cause, the Soul. That is the lesson which Plato would teach the historian: it is the core of his Philosophy of History.’9 In a similar vein Raymond Weil argued that the pseudo-history of the Timaeus, a history that had all the virtues of myth, allowed Plato to define historical causality specifically as the rhythms of the world and the quality of souls. These two were interlinked: ‘It is only through the mediation of passions that material causes operate.’10 Thus cataclysms and heavenly declinations would be material causes that express psychic disturbances. We would be dealing with the operations of an en-souled cosmos where the pathetic fallacy of projecting human passions onto nature is no fallacy.
This line of interpretation, especially in its crude form, is overstated. It seems unlikely that the schematic presentation of psychic and civic decline into tyranny that we meet in the Republic is meant to reflect actual processes. This is surely one instance where we may fruitfully deploy Frutiger’s notion that diachronic presentation in Plato can sometimes be a heuristic device for untangling a complex synchronic reality.11 Andrea Nightingale has shown that Plato’s scenario, particularly as we meet it in Laws Book 3, is much more complex than a simple tale of decline. In some ways humans progress over time while in others they lose valuable qualities; technology can be a blessing or a curse.12 Neither progress nor decline is simple, and a narrative of increasing social complexity can be given either a positive or a negative cast. In the accounts of both Timaeus/Critias and Laws it is clear that the march of time brings improvement as well as decline; only the Statesman envisages a scenario of progressive and inevitable degeneration. This latter vision is connected to the role played by divinity. If the mythical part of the dialogue presents the world being wound up and running down like a spinning top under divine agency and its lack, then the social and political progression of humanity is connected to the issue of divine guidance. When the world is left to its own devices, it, and we, decline.13
We should guard against the notion that recurrent cataclysm comes as a kind of divine punishment for corruption. In the Statesman, the return of god to the helm, while it causes cataclysm, is in fact an amelioration of the situation. In Timaeus, Solon’s Egyptian priest tells us that destruction comes whenever civilisation is advanced and at moderately regular intervals (except, of course, in the case of Egypt):
each time your civilisation and that of others have just been equipped with letters and everything else cities need, then once again after the usual number of years a deluge comes sweeping down upon them from the skies like a plague and leaves only those who are illiterate and uncultured, so that once again you become young, as it were, and start from the beginning, knowing nothing of what happened here or in your own country in ancient times. (23a–b)
To be sure, the repeated floods talked about by the Egyptian priests are seen in terms of the gods purifying the earth with water (Ti. 22d), but when the cataclysm overwhelms corrupt Atlantis (in Critias’ summary account), there is no indication that this is a punishment – for if it were it would be a punishment also for the virtuous Athenians whose exploits are celebrated in the myth.14
It is thus too reductive an interpretation of complex material to read Platonic accounts of cataclysm as expressing a material reflection of the operation of the soul in history or as indications of some belief Plato may have held about the way the universe really works. It is doubtless true to say that the problematics of the human soul are central to any Platonic notion of history, but it is equally true to say that Thucydides thinks that human nature is the primary driver of historical change. The interest is in how this notion cashes out and what difference it makes in the kind of history that each of them envisions. Plato’s pseudo-histories are not going to tell us anything about what really happened or even about what Plato thought really happened. It may be fruitful to sideline issues of divine governance and cosmic order in favour of a focus on cultural knowledge and on the operation of constructing history. Periodic destructions may (or may not) be a matter of divine purgation, but they are pre-eminently a fact of nature with particular cultural effects. We should note the convenience of the cyclic destruction scenario for these dialogues whose interests are so largely political. Each period of destruction creates an almost blank slate that can render more accessible, for theoretical purposes, the development of society and the identification of forces at work for change. The scenario functions as a heuristic device rather than emphasising a picture of history as decadence.
The creation of a cultural blank slate allows Plato’s speakers to explore the role of historical knowledge within a developing society. This is most explicit in Timaeus/Critias, where the concern with the construction of historical models is central. It is here that, as we have seen, Greek methodological ignorance is foregrounded: Greeks are intellectual children because their historical sensibility does not take cyclic destruction into account (Ti. 22b–c). Greek ignorance of the rationalised truth thus comes as a revelation (in contrast to the Laws, where the principle of rationalisation is accepted as commonplace). According to the Egyptian priest the Greeks have no ancient knowledge. The periodic destruction of mankind in most areas means that only those who are without letters and without culture are left. As soon as cities anywhere start to acquire the attributes of civilised life, the destruction comes again. At the beginning of the Critias, Critias explains how only the names of historical actors survive in oral tradition:
[Hephaestus and Athena put good men in Attica] whose names have been preserved, but whose deeds have disappeared due to the destructions of their successors and the expanse of time. For the race that remained on each occasion, as was said previously, was left behind in the mountains and without writing, a race that had heard only the names of those who had been powerful in the land and few things connected with their deeds. So they were happy to give their names to their offspring, since they did not know the excellence and the laws of those who came before, unless it was shadowy traditions about them. This was because they and their children existed in want of the necessities of life for many generations, and they directed their attention to the necessities they lacked. They therefore directed their discourse also to those things and neglected those that had taken place previously and long ago. For mythology and inquiry into ancient matters arrive in cities along with leisure, when they see that people are provided with the necessities of life, but not before that (μυθολογία γὰρ ἀναζήτησίς τε τῶν παλαιῶν μετὰ σχολῆς ἄμ’ ἐπὶ τὰς πόλεις ἔρχεσθον, ὅταν ἲδητόν τισιν ἤδη τοῦ βίου τἀναγκαῖα κατεσκευασμένα, πρὶν δὲ οὔ). In this way the names of the ancients were preserved without their deeds. (Crit. 109d–110a)
Similarly in the primitive city of the Laws specialist cultural knowledge is lost for thousands of years. The survivors are unsophisticated, with no expertise in politics or anything else. Musical culture is quite recent: within the last two or three thousand years, that is, ‘yesterday or the day before’. Indeed, the Athenian comments ‘if these advances [made in previous cycles] had survived through all of time embellished to the point that they are now, how would anything new ever be discovered?’ (Leg. 677b–d). We find, moreover, that in the first stages of renewal before the return of cities, humans were naive (εὐήθεις, 679c). When they heard something called good or bad they thought they were hearing the truth and believed it, ‘for nobody was clever enough to suspect a lie, as they do now’ (679d). This had its advantages. People were more just, more courageous, more truthful, more pious. Yet it takes only a moment’s reflection to see that this absence of a critical attitude would be fatal to the development of an analytic historical sensibility. As Thucydides says, ‘men accept from each other the traditions of their predecessors, even if they concern their own countries, with a uniform lack of scrutiny . . . for the majority make no effort in the investigation of the truth and they turn rather to what is ready at hand’ (1.20).
In the wake of cataclysms, then, the human race loses not only agriculture and metallurgy, but a cultural and, above all, a historical sensibility. The absence of a critical mindset in the early civilisation of the Laws and the Timaeus/Critias is clear. In the Critias passage cited above, mythology and historical inquiry are paired as cultural products of the leisured city. We can gloss them as the reporting of cultural hearsay and the attempt to investigate that hearsay more closely. History is thus marked as an advanced cultural product while simultaneously being set in a cosmic framework that renders its project intellectually troubling, since it is difficult to see how much real progress will ever be made given that destruction follows relatively closely on the heels of literacy. The cosmos guarantees a trajectory of steady socialisation and increasing complexity, a narrative that might well be thought to be one of progress, only to send the human race back to the drawing board. Ethical simplicity and its advantages come at the expense of intellectual sophistication, and we should note that philosophy as it is configured in Platonic dialogues is also a product of leisure culture.15 No one who is obsessed with achieving a subsistence level of existence will show an interest in either philosophy or history. Both will be elite activities.
It is also instructive to look at the issue of Greek historical naivety from the standpoint of its Herodotean predecessor. As has long been recognised, Plato’s portrayal of Solon and the Egyptians in the Timaeus looks back to a scene in Herodotus (and indirectly Hecataeus) where Herodotus tells of his visit to Egypt (2.142–3).16 Herodotus narrates how the Egyptians count 341 uninterrupted generations from the first to the last king of Egypt (for a total of 11,340 years). They tell also how the sun twice changed its direction during their history (twice rising from where it currently sets and vice versa), but added that this did not affect Egypt at all: there was no change in the way people died or in the way they were affected by disease. He juxtaposes this encounter with a vignette of the experiences of his predecessor, Hecataeus, who had made the same trip and tried to trace his own genealogy back sixteen generations to a god. The priests, says Herodotus, cast doubt on these calculations and proposed alternative genealogies (showing to their own satisfaction that no man had been born of a god within 345 generations). The next three chapters in Book 2 cast a sceptical eye upon Greek versus Egyptian religious traditions and lead to Herodotus’ conclusion on the subject of Pan and Dionysus that ‘they [the Greeks] trace their genealogy from the time they first learned of them’ (2.146).
Plato has developed this material on Greek genealogical inadequacy. Herodotus’ narrative has several goals: to establish the Egyptians as historical experts whose authority is based on precise record-keeping, to undermine the notion that any living Greek could be a descendant of a god, and to suggest that the Greeks are working with a drastically foreshortened timescale. In Plato this last point is thematised and made even more explicit. In Herodotus, the Greeks just have it wrong; in Plato we learn that ‘You Greeks are always children – there is no old Greek . . . You are all young in your souls, for you have in them no ancient report from antique hearsay, nor any learning grey with age’ (22b). Inaccuracy and pretension are replaced by chronic intellectual disability. The cycle of catastrophe means that Greeks are perpetually psychic children. Besides developing the motif of Greek immaturity, Plato also deepens the significance of the solar reversals mentioned by the Egyptians. These anticipate both the reversals of the Statesman and the deviations of the heavenly bodies in the Timaeus, although these latter do not affect Egypt (22c–e). Both Herodotus’ history and the Timaeus present the immunity of Egypt, but in Plato’s account it is clear, as it is not in Herodotus, that the rest of the world is subject to disasters, and that these very disasters are the root cause of Greek historical disability. Plato expands and merges the disparate elements of Herodotus’ account into one unified picture, and in so doing he one-ups the historiographic trope (Greeks in the face of superior historical authority) that the historian had formulated.17
The development of historical investigation, even in its most basic mythological form, is marked by cultural belatedness. The cosmic structure of cataclysm guarantees that this must always be the case. Yet, as noted above, the structure is also extremely useful as a heuristic convenience. This impression is reinforced in the passage of the Laws referred to above, where the Stranger dismisses the possibility of carry-over from cycle to cycle. If too much knowledge survived from a previous cycle, how could we isolate and investigate new discoveries? How could the conversation of Laws 3 achieve its goal of discovering the principle of change in history? Starting civilisation repeatedly with a modified blank slate is an opportune device for those with ‘scientific’ interests in state formation and performance.18 A similar impulse towards the creation of a blank slate is harnessed in the Republic to ethical and political ends. The famous Noble Lie (Resp. 414b–415d), taken in conjunction with other passages about philosophic rule, is a perfect example of the need to start from scratch and wipe out the past. In Book 3, the Lie itself envisages an ideal situation where all of the citizens can be brought to believe that their own vision of their past was a dream, and that they have, on the contrary, just been born from the earth already assigned to certain metallic social and intellectual classes. In Book 6, Socrates suggests that philosopher kings will take the city and the characters of its citizens as if they were a drawing tablet and then draw the outlines of the just city. First, however, they will have to clean the tablet, and this is not easy (501a). So it is that in Book 7 the founders of the ideal city once entrusted with rule will banish everyone over the age of ten and then bring up the children in virtue (540d–541a). If we adjust for the different interests of this dialogue, we can see that the founders here are anticipating the kind of cultural erasure achieved by cataclysms in the later dialogues, the difference being that knowledgeable representatives of the philosophical way of life survive the social trauma. In the Republic, social and ethical engineering replaces the construction of history we will see in the later dialogues.
I ended the first part of this chapter with the assertion that Platonic cataclysms exist precisely for the sake of rendering historical inquiry a matter of mythologising, so that the collocation that has been of such interest to scholars, that of history and myth, is guaranteed by cosmic structure. There is a general consensus that mythologia and history are closely related in Plato.19 In this and the following section we shall examine this relationship in more depth, first taking as our starting point Socrates’ theorising of it in the Republic, and then proceeding to the problematic transition from myth to history (a moment that had exercised both Herodotus and Thucydides) in Laws and Timaeus/Critias.
One of the core passages for the mingling of myth and history in Plato is Republic 2.382c–d. The context is the famous discussion on the censorship of poetry considered untrue and harmful. After a discussion of the iniquity of real falsehood, namely falsehood in the soul, Socrates passes on to the question of falsehood in words. This can sometimes be useful and thus does not deserve our hatred. We could use it against enemies, or as a medicine for a friend, or ‘in the mythical tales we were just now speaking about, because we do not know what the truth is about ancient matters, we make them useful by likening falsehood to truth’ (καὶ ἐν αἷς νυνδὴ ἐλέγομεν ταῖς μυθολογίαις, διὰ τὸ μὴ εἰδέναι ὅπῃ τἀληθὲς ἔχει περὶ τῶν παλαιῶν, ἀφομοιοῦντες τῷ ἀληθεῖ τὸ ψεῦδος ὅτι μάλιστα, οὕτω χρήσιμον ποιοῦμεν). The main focus of the passage as a whole is a critique of poets who represent the gods as liars: no god would need to make up stories about the past because he did not know (διὰ τὸ μὴ εἰδέναι τὰ παλαιὰ ἀφομοιῶν ἂν ψεύδοιτο), Socrates goes on to say, and so there is no lying poet in god (2.382d). It is significant, however, that Socrates dismisses, almost in passing, the possibility of knowing anything about ancient matters. This does not, of course, preclude that one might have accurate knowledge about the more recent past, but it does remind us, for example, of Thucydides’ frank avowal of the difficulty of accurate knowledge about what happened before the Peloponnesian War (τὰ γὰρ πρὸ αὐτῶν καὶ τὰ ἔτι παλαίτερα σαφῶς μὲν εὑρεῖν διὰ χρόνου πλῆθος ἀδύνατα ἦν, 1.1.3), a difficulty he solves by making inferences about the past based on what he sees in the present.20
Socrates’ comment locates inquiry about the past firmly in the realm of poetic endeavour; historical reconstruction is a matter of informed inference, ideally governed by principles of moral utility. The comment is also a pointed reworking of the announcement of the Muses in Hesiod’s Theogony, ‘we know how to speak many false things like genuine things, but also how to proclaim true things, when we wish’ (ἲδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα, / ἲδμεν δ’ εὖτ’ ἐθέλωμεν ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι, Theog. 27–8).21 Plato makes Socrates cleave this declaration down the middle: poets may well liken the false to the true, because they do not know anything (and the ignorance of mortals is of course an epic commonplace), but no god would do so. In Hesiod we are dealing with a statement of perceived theological fact; in Thucydides and Plato with a methodology of extrapolation (note that the ‘likeness’ word is adjectival in Hesiod (ὁμοῖα) but verbal in Plato (ἀφομοιοῦντες/ἀφομοιῶν)).22 Socrates theorises the extrapolation of the false from the true, although the precise valence of ‘false’ here is difficult to specify. One solution is to deploy the problematic category of fiction. If falsehood, pseudos, is taken to mean ‘fiction’, then we would have a statement that we create fiction by extrapolating from the truth.23 The use of pseudos would put the focus squarely on fabrication, with Socrates’ prescription that the object of the exercise should be utility. Or one might interpret pseudos as what is unverifiable. Either solution downgrades the importance of historical inquiry.24 For Socrates, ancient history can only ever be used for ethical and paradigmatic purposes; it is in principle unknowable. Only after systematic extrapolation has taken place can the material be ‘useful’.
Historical narration is thus always interested and often creative (‘poetic’). Socrates’ general statement in the Republic connecting narratives of the past with mythology and falsehood should be associated with the cycles of cataclysm in other dialogues. All reflect a desire that reconstruction of ancient history shall start from first principles. In the Republic the starting place is the lying and immoral tales of poets about the past, which are themselves examples of reconstruction and extrapolation and must also undergo transformation in order to make them useful.25 In Statesman, Timaeus and Laws the cosmos itself guarantees the truth of Socrates’ assertion in the Republic that we cannot really know about the distant past. Adam remarks tartly in his commentary on the Republic that ‘Plato seems to have supposed that ancient history and mythology could be manufactured to order’,26 and this seems to be largely justified. The ethical and political usefulness of any given narrative is primary.
Saying that that Plato produces a mythologised history thus means both that myth and history are intertwined for him at the level of methodology, and that when he refers to historical or quasi-historical events he uses them to make a moral or political point.27 The Atlantis myth is an obvious and acknowledged example of this. I have argued elsewhere that Plato’s presentation of the myth in Timaeus/Critias foregrounds the transformation of history into myth and vice versa. On the one hand, the war between Athens and Atlantis is a moralised transposition and amalgamation of the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, together with Athenian ambitions for regaining empire in the fourth century at the time of the Social War. This is history mythologised to make the moral clearer: land power (good) against sea power (bad), the temptations of empire (bad), lawfulness and austerity against opulence and greed.28 Yet the narrative also models explicitly and outrageously the transferral of the idealised and mythologised state of the Republic into the world of history. The interlocutors in the dialogue assert and accept that these events really happened. Critias remembers the story of Athens and Atlantis that Solon told his grandfather Critias, and proposes to use it to satisfy Socrates’ desire for an account that will set into narrative motion the ideal citizens of a state like that which we see outlined in the Republic. Socrates is delighted: the deed of the ancient Athenians is ‘not merely spoken of, but actually happened’ (οὐ λεγόμενον μέν, ὡς δὲ πραχθὲν ὄντως, 21a). The ideal state that was described ‘as if in myth’ (ὡς ἐν μύθῳ) will now be transferred to the realm of truth (ἐπὶ τἀληθές) (26c–d). The tale, he adds, has the great advantage of ‘not being an invented mythos but a true logos’ (μὴ πλασθέντα μῦθον ἀλλ’ ἀληθινὸν λόγον, 26e). We move from an account that was mythologised according to a set of principles to something that actually happened and is true (except, of course, that it is not).
In the case of Atlantis, the transition from myth to history is a conceptual one and showcases the similarity of the two types of narrative, as well as the differences. Yet it is clear that Plato’s treatment of the story is intended to evoke historiography. The specifics of the communication of the story from Solon to Critias’ grandfather to Critias himself have been constructed to demonstrate the mechanics of oral (or mostly oral) transmission.29 As Gill has remarked, the circumstantial details of the narrative itself are elaborated beyond what one might expect from an account whose only purpose is to illustrate a moral.30 It is, therefore, an attractive suggestion that in the later part of his writing career Plato’s interest in history and prehistory increased.31 The final section of this chapter will explore the limits of this interest. If it is true that Plato became authentically interested in generalising from historical realia, this might pose a challenge to my contention that he creates a universe where history is impossible. We shall see that, despite claims to the contrary, the survey of Greek history in Book 3 of the Laws is no real exception to the practice of mythologised history.
MOVING FROM MYTH TO HISTORY IN THE LAWS
If the story of Atlantis in the Timaeus shows Plato ‘playing the game of being a historian’,32 then his survey of respective pasts of the Dorian kingdoms of the Peloponnese, of Athens and of Persia in Laws Book 3 has been accorded even greater significance. The purpose of the interlocutors in this part of the discussion is to analyse the cities of the past in order to be able to see what causes civic change historically, and although the interlocutors are clearly envisioning an exercise in abstraction, the approach here is meant to be inductive (676c).33 Book 3 was called by Weil Plato’s ‘archaeology’ and is seen by him as marking a change in Plato’s approach to historical material. Weil acknowledges that Plato’s fabrications of history are designed to make a point, but also suggests that history becomes more and more important for Plato until, in the Laws, we leave the realm of legend and are presented with a systematic history of events.34 Here too there is a commingling of myth and history, as stories of cyclic cataclysm give way to events known from other sources,35 but what Plato is doing is serious history. Even champions like Weil, however, concede that the historical sketch in Laws 3 is schematic, reductive and partly imaginary. Quite apart from the discontinuities of civilisation dealt with in the first part of this chapter, the part of the narrative that focuses on Greece in (what we call) the historical period is hugely superficial; nobody would ever consult Laws 3 to find out what actually happened. It is, again, moralising history: the account of the foundation of the three Dorian kingdoms of Argos, Messenia and Lacedaemonia, where early hopes for law-abiding and virtuous monarchies are dashed, is followed by the juxtaposition of Athens and Persia as the two foundational types of government: democracy and monarchy. Both start out well but end badly: the Athenians lose their habit of obedience to the laws and the Persian monarchs are overcome by arrogance and ambition. If we ask where ‘history’ resides in this account, we must reply that we recognise the narratives because we already know them from elsewhere. We would not use them as a basis for historical reconstruction.
What, then, are we to make of the marked transition made by the Athenian Stranger from the time of myth to a time within the intellectual grasp of the present? This move is, of course, made both by Herodotus and Thucydides. Herodotus (1.5) contrasts the stories of Io, Helen and others with the man whom he himself knows first to have committed aggression towards the Greeks. Thucydides (1.1), in turn, is unwilling to trust hearsay even about the events immediately preceding the Peloponnesian War, not to mention the stories about remote antiquity. Where does the Stranger draw the line? His narrative had started, as we have seen, with the certainty that civilisations are periodically destroyed. He follows this with his reconstruction of early societies and urbanisation, starting at the point where all specialist knowledge was lost for tens of thousands of years. There was no city or legislation, no war or stasis, since people were lonely and therefore sociable: simple good men, living probably under a kind of patriarchal royalty. Slowly larger communities developed, as did legislation, followed by the emergence of aristocracies and monarchies. Finally came cities, and, to cut a long story short, the Trojan War and the return of the Dorians to the Peloponnese. This is the point at which the Stranger chooses to sum up what has preceded and make a new beginning: ‘We looked at a first and second and third city, succeeding each other, we think, in their foundations in the immense stretches of time, but now this our fourth city or if you wish, race, has arrived, founded in the past and still now founded’ (683a–b).
This is an important transition. At 682e the Stranger had referred to the Lacedaemonian traditions of the return of the Dorians: ‘everything that happened next [after the Dorians reassembled], you Lacedaemonians recount in your traditions (μυθολογεῖτε).’ The moment of the foundation of Lacedaemon, however, marks the end of a digression that began in Book 1: ‘We have arrived back again, as if by divine dispensation, at the very place from which we digressed in our discussion about laws, and our discourse gets a good hold, for it has come to the actual foundation of Lacedaemon’ (682e–683a). It also gives the Stranger the opportunity to make his new beginning now that he has arrived at a city ‘founded in the past and still now founded’. The next step is to ask his interlocutors to project themselves into the time when the three Dorian cities were founded in the Peloponnese:
Let us transport ourselves in our minds to that time (γενώμεθα δὴ ταῖς διανοίαις ἐν τῷ τότε χρόνῳ) when Lacedaemon and Argos and Messene and those areas subject to them had come pretty much under the control of your forefathers, Megillus. As for what followed, they resolved, as the myth/tradition says (ὥς γε λέγεται τὸ τοῦ μύθου), to divide the host into three parts and settle the three cities of Argos, Messene, and Lacedaemon. (683c–d)
The foundation of Lacedaemon is where the interlocutors can get a good grip, where mythological traditions transform themselves into knowable and useful material so that the discussion can engage with the central issue of constitutions. It is, Weil remarks, the point where the history of the three Dorian states really starts.36
It is also the moment where the Stranger obtrusively marks the convergence of history and theory. After naming the three original kings of the Dorian kingdoms, he declares that everyone swore at that time to come to the aid of the kings if anyone tried to undermine them. He then returns to an axiom he says they established earlier in the conversation: ‘By Zeus, is any kingdom or rule ever dissolved by any force other than itself? Or shall we now forget that when we came across these arguments a little previously we made this hypothesis?’ (683e).37 They now have the chance to see this axiom in action:
So now we shall confirm this point, for we have arrived at the same conclusion having come across deeds that happened, as it seems (ἔργοις γενομὲνοις, ὡς ἔοικεν), so that we shall not search for the same conclusion in the matter of something empty (οὐ περὶ κενόν τι), but in the matter of something that happened and is true (περὶ γεγονός τε καὶ ἔχον ἀλήθειαν). (683e–684a)
The Stranger then proceeds to reconstruct a series of foundational oaths and laws, together with measures for land distribution (measures that worked particularly well because there was no reason to object to the land allotments and there were as yet no long-terms debts – a blank slate again) (684d–e). In the sections that follow the inter-locutors speculate on the causes for the decline and corruption of two of the three foundations (Argos and Messene) and the preservation of Lacedaemon.
This sequence of narrative and argument is noteworthy. The moment of foundation is presented as decisive for the nature of the tradition (one that now relies on events that took place) and it also sets up the opportunity for confirmation of a priori assumptions (in this instance the hypothesis that governments fall only through their own faults). The collocation is not an innocent one. At the point where we embark on the analysis of a period that is clearly meant to be less conjectural and mythical than what has come before, the Stranger introduces a principle of history (governments fall through their own faults) that will govern our interpretation of the historical period (the examination of the events that really happened, we note, is supposed to confirm this principle). The lesson is repeated again at 688d and its universal application to past, present, and future is underlined: ‘[that the three Dorian kings fell not through cowardice or military ignorance but through vice and folly] that these things happened like this in the past, and happen now too in similar cases and will happen like this in the future, I shall try to discover by going through the narrative and reveal to you, my friends, to the best of my ability’. Yet we are also supposed to be reassured, somehow, by the assurance that we are now dealing with fact rather than abstract discussion.38 What guarantees the authenticity of the procedure, it seems, is that the major player in the scenario, Lacedaemon, is still in existence.
When we examine the reconstruction of the failures of the Dorian cities produced by the Stranger, we see that it is, indeed, an exercise in historical imagination designed to produce useful conclusions. Thus it is ‘pretty clear’ that the purpose of their alliance was protection against enemies (685b–c). It is likely (εἰκός) that the founders expected their constitutional arrangements to last (to which Megillus responds ‘Of course it’s likely’) (686a). The decline of Argos and Messene must have started when the kings became arrogant and eager for luxury, as ‘most instances’ suggest (τὸ μὲν εἰκὸς καὶ τὸ πολύ, 691a). It is, moreover, possible to ‘guess most reasonably’ (μετριώτατα τοπάσαι) what happened in the past (691d). The entire sequence is a conjectural reconstruction.39 This is, of course, no sin in itself. Historians always work with and manipulate what is plausible in order to create their vision of the past, and the criterion of likelihood was an obvious and favoured option when dealing with events in the heroic past.40 Yet when we juxtapose this narrative of Dorian decline and (partial) preservation with the statements of the Athenian Stranger considered above (on the happy arrival at the territory of hard facts), it is hard not to feel discomfort. In spite of the rhetoric of change from myth to what actually happened, the material on one side of the divide is just as conjectural as that on the other. The methodology is continuous.
Why then does Plato make his Stranger choose the foundation of Sparta as the transition to the realm of the verifiable, the spatium historicum? This issue is all the more pressing because both Herodotus and Thucydides had made their historical space commence much later, with Croesus and the fifth century respectively. Plato, by contrast, pushes back many centuries before them. He may not have been the first to draw the line where he did. Ephorus (later in the fourth century) began his universal history with the return of the Heracleidae (that is, the arrival of the Dorians), and was probably acting upon precedent. As Fornara remarks, ‘It cannot be coincidence that Hellanicus of Lesbos, a strong influence on Ephorus, had terminated his many mythographical works precisely at this point.’41 Yet even if Plato does make historical time begin where Hellanicus ended the ages of myth, we still need to explain why he used Hellanicus as his model here.
This must partly be because of the dialogue’s interest in constitutions and constitutional change. In order to be able to verify any political hypothesis, his investigators had to have enough time to work with to be able to see a process of change. He has also placed his transitional point far enough back for the momentum of his reconstruction to carry him through the subsequent histories of Athens and Persia.
Most important, however, is that the point of transition is a point of continuity. The historical sketch had started with the observation that many cities had come into existence and perished in the great length of time; the foundation of Lacedaemon, however, marks the stage where the past reaches through into the present, a point of stability (at least in the case of Sparta). The city (or ‘race’) was ‘founded in the past and [is] still now founded’ (683a),42 and its history proves congruent with previously suggested political truths. As we saw in the previous section, this technique is familiar from the Atlantis narrative of the Timaeus, which was motivated by Socrates’ desire to see ideal citizens in action. Socrates was curious about Critias’ proposed narrative: ‘But what kind of deed done by this city was this one that Critias narrated according to what Solon heard, a deed that was not merely spoken of but really happened?’ (οὐ λεγόμενον μέν, ὡς δὲ πραχθὲν ὄντως, 21a), and was pleased that a state described described ‘as if in myth’ would now be transferred to the realm of truth (ἐπὶ τἀληθές) (26c–d). He makes much of the fact that the details of the Atlantis story match precisely the abstract entity that had been hypothesised by previous discussion, and that it is absolutely true. The Laws presents just the same movement from an account that was mythologised according to a set of principles to something that actually happened. Yet in neither dialogue are we (most of us) in any danger of believing this – no more than we believe the Athenian Stranger’s account of the degeneration of Athens and Persia later in Book 3. The stories of historical Athens, Sparta, Argos, Messene and Persia are very much like those of Atlantis. We are offered a demonstration of the congruence between history and theory. In the case of Atlantis, the Egyptian priests who preserve the story act as guarantors of historiographical continuity even as the Greeks themselves are catastrophically cut off from their past. In the Laws it is the continuity of Sparta that guarantees congruence.43
As this chapter draws to a close it is worth pausing over Weil’s question, one he posed even as he conceded that the narrative of Laws 3 was largely imaginary: do we not need to explain Plato’s systematic recourse to a history that was relatively well known?44 Yes we do. I remarked earlier that the rationalising approach to myths of cataclysm was taken for granted only in the Laws, as opposed to Timaeus and Statesman where it came as a revelation. In the Laws there is a smoothness of intellectual texture: everyone agrees to the ration-alising approach, everyone agrees that the history of Messene and Argos is one of pleonectic kingship gone mad. In spite of cataclysm, everyone can see a continuous historical development from the return of the Dorians to the present. This perception of continuity between past and present makes the historical narrative of the Laws rhetorically effective in context. As opposed to the procedure in Statesman and Timaeus, historical lessons are applied to contemporary and quasi-contemporary societies, although in carefully controlled circumstances. We do not find a real desire to investigate recent and not-so-recent history, but to find exemplification in it of more general conclusions about the operation of constitutions. A crucial aspect of the Stranger’s reconstruction of the past is to model strategies of historical investigation and their reception, and the complexities of his rhetoric surrounding the foundation of Lacedaemon must be seen in the context of this project. What is it we learn about the uses of history (and particularly in the context of a discussion about state-building)? That an investigator and his audience derive the greatest intellectual profit when they can see a continuum and make connections between past and present, but also when they feel they can distinguish the point at which theory or mythology becomes fact and truth. The issue is intellectual control over the material, and as we have seen, the move to say, ‘this is material that I control’ is made by both Herodotus and Thucydides. The identical impulse to control and validate the past is modelled by Plato’s characters even when the material on the one side of the divide between myth and history is nearly as mythical or theoretical as that on the other. It is the gesture that is important.
Plato uses the familiar outlines of archaic and classical history in the Laws because the familiarity lends verisimilitude to his ethical and political trajectories and because he has realised that ‘designer history’ is most effective when connected to, rather than cut off from, a present reality. Like any orator, Plato uses history to make his point and has no qualms about making any adjustments that are necessary to ensure a good fit.45 He is, of course, painting a broader canvas than the history of any particular city; the scale is cosmic. Invention and schematisation do not surprise; what is more surprising (in the case of the Laws) is a priori invention in a context that purports to be an inductive investigation into the principles and results of state-formation. It is even more startling and paradoxical to combine this with a cosmic structure designed to block long-term historical sensibility and encourage a priori reconstruction.
At the end of the eschatological myth of the Phaedo, Socrates says: ‘It is inappropriate for a sensible man to insist that these matters are exactly as I have narrated them. Nevertheless, that either these things or things like them are the case . . . this, it seems to me, is a fitting suggestion’ (114d). One might, with some modification, take this as emblematic of Plato’s historical reconstructions also. He has no desire to become bogged down in details or in the explanation of matters he deems unimportant. He carves the past of the cosmos into predictable chunks. He parades rationalisation as an interpretative tool because it is a practice that allows one to pick and choose as genuine the pieces of the past that are conducive to one’s purposes. But like Socrates in the Phaedrus when faced with the rationalising possibility that the rape of the Athenian princess Oreithyia by the wind god Boreas was merely a case of a young girl getting blown off a rock by accident, he refuses to get drawn in too far. If he were to play that game, he would be obliged to spend his time explaining centaurs and Gorgons and other mythical monsters (Phdr. 229b–e). He has bigger fish to fry. Not for Plato Thucydides’talaiporia.46 He is perhaps more interested in how the many turn to ready-made models, since he would have dismissed with contempt the notion that a history of fifth-century Greece could be a possession for all time.
Narratives of cataclysm thus have an important methodological and heuristic part to play in Plato’s manipulation of the past. Although Plato has adopted many of the historiographical gestures we find in Herodotus and Thucydides, he surrounds them with a cosmic machinery that produces a different interpretative universe. While these fifth-century historians construct a historical space and methodology that enable them to exercise exact control over the recent past and present (respectively), and to predict that the result of their work will be an account that prevents great deeds from being obliterated or helps them last forever, Plato makes his characters theorise the slow growth of historical sensibility but dooms accounts so produced to future destruction. This approach has its irritations, but at the same time it allows an interestingly experimental approach to the development of historical thinking, one that repeatedly presents an intellectual blank slate and its concomitant opportunities. It lets Plato meditate on the uses of history and the emotional and political value of deploying a past that is or is not cut off from the present. Finally, it permits him to present a valuably complicated picture of the relationship between inquiry into the past and the difficult category of ‘myth’. Plato presents a world of historically parochial and belated Greeks with a problematically foreshortened vision of the past. This is, of course, an ethically driven vision, but it is a vision in line with a larger philosophical project in which we are all encouraged to look beyond local interests and see the soul in a more universal context.
The author wishes to express her thanks to Claudia Rapp, Andrea Nightingale, Alex Purves and Mario Telò.
| 1 | R. Weil, L’‘archéologie’ de Platon (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1959), pp. 26, 45. For an example of Plato’s intertextual relationship with Herodotus see the discussion of Plato’s Solon in Egypt below. For Thucydides and Plato see S. Hornblower, Thucydides (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 112–25. For a recent discussion of the Menexenus (and connections with the funeral oration) see S. D. Collins and D. Stauffer, ‘The challenge of Plato’s Menexenus’, Review of Politics 61 (1999), pp. 85–115; F. Pownall, Lessons from the Past: The Moral Use of History in Fourth-Century Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 38–64. On the whole I align myself with Loraux’s view of the oration in the Menexenus as an ironic manipulation of generic commonplaces (N. Loraux, The Invention of Athens, tr. A. Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 176, 189, 264–70; first published as L’invention d’Athènes: Histoire de l’oraison funèbre dans la ‘cité classique’ (Paris: Mouton, 1981)). | |
| 2 | For the connection between myth and childhood, see L. P. Brisson, Plato the Myth Maker, ed. and tr. G. Naddaf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 62, 82–3; K. A. Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 175–7, 251–2. | |
| 3 | This scenario of alternating revolutions is fraught with interpretative difficulties. Is our current age one controlled by deity or not? Is the ‘Age of Cronus’ in the myth opposed to the ‘Age of Zeus’ in terms of its revolution? Consideration of these problems is beyond the scope of this chapter, but G. R Carone, ‘Reversing the myth of the Politicus’, CQ 54 (2004), pp. 88–108, works through the issues in detail (with a review of the scholarship). | |
| 4 | For Hecataeus and Acusilaus, see C. Fornara, The Nature of History in Greece and Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 4–6; Morgan, Myth and Philosophy, pp. 65–6. | |
| 5 | The adjectives apleton and amēchanon here (‘immense’ and ‘impossible to grapple with’) lend a heroic note, as though the investigator is wrestling with a monstrous beast. | |
| 6 | Hdt. 1.1, Thuc. 1.1.3: ‘What happened before [this war] and even earlier was impossible to discover because of the amount of time (σαφῶς μὲν εὑρεῖν διὰ χρόνου πλῆθος ἀδύνατα ἦν).’ Cf. Weil, L’‘archéologie’ de Platon, p. 17. | |
| 7 | A point also made in passing by Weil, L’‘archéologie’ de Platon, pp. 13–14. | |
| 8 | R. G. Bury, ‘Plato and history’, CQ 44 (1951), pp. 86–93, at pp. 86–9. | |
| 9 | Bury, ‘Plato and history’, p. 89. | |
| 10 | Weil, L’‘archéologie’ de Platon, p. 32. Weil allows that decadence is not inevitable, since god may intervene, but it seems clear that decline is the natural course in the absence of divine control. He concludes that Plato never harmonises accounts of progress and decadence. | |
| 11 | P. Frutiger, Les mythes de Platon (Paris: F. Alcon, 1930), pp. 190–1. | |
| 12 | A. Nightingale, ‘Historiography and cosmology in Plato’s Laws’, Ancient Philosophy 19 (1999), pp. 299–326, at pp. 306–11. J. de Romilly, The Rise and Fall of States According to Greek Authors (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), pp. 1–12, mounts a more general argument that imposing patterns of decadence on Greek authors (including Plato) is misguided. G. Naddaf, ‘The Atlantis myth: An introduction to Plato’s later philosophy of history’, Phoenix 48 (1994), pp. 189–209, at pp. 200–3, 208, while arguing against Vidal-Naquet’s version of the decadence thesis, also pushes for a reading of the Laws as expressing a ‘wholly realizable solution’ (p. 208) to problems of political deterioration. | |
| 13 | Yet even here, the comments made by the Eleatic Stranger about the Age of Cronus make us doubt whether many ethical or intellectual advances were made when mankind was managed directly by god. At Plt. 272b–d he remarks that if humans in that age did not use their leisure for inquiry and philosophical discussion, their state would be inferior to our own. As J. Dillon, ‘Plato and the golden age’, Hermathena 153 (1992), pp. 21–36, at pp. 28–30, points out, it is by no means certain from the text that their leisure was so employed. For an optimistic reading of human progress in the Statesman myth, see Carone, ‘Reversing the myth’, esp. pp. 106–7. | |
| 14 | See S. Broadie (2001), ‘Theodicy and pseudo-history in the Timaeus’, OSAP 21 (2001), pp. 1–28, at pp. 2–6, for an illuminating examination of how issues of theodicy are not connected with cataclysm in the Timaeus account. | |
| 15 | Morgan, Myth and Philosophy, pp. 176–7. | |
| 16 | Weil, L’‘archéologie’ de Platon, p. 15; C. Gill, ‘Plato’s Atlantis story and the birth of fiction’, Ph&Lit 3 (1979), pp. 64–78, at p. 75. | |
| 17 | In making Solon, rather than Herodotus or Hecataeus, his Egyptian traveller, Plato is reinforcing a preference stated earlier, that philosopher-statesmen are superior to poets and sophists when it comes to narrating the distinguished exploits of cities. | |
| 18 | It is no accident that the cyclic structure discussed here matches in some respects the fate of the individual soul in dialogues (such as Phaedrus, Republic and Timaeus) where individual souls undergo multiple incarnations but start each one with some memory, perhaps a dim one, of the real nature of the universe that they experience while disincarnate. They access this realm through recollection, a form of memory. These recollective memories thus correspond to the vague traditions (perhaps only names) that, as has been noted above, the survivors of cataclysms bring with them into their new world and then pass on. | |
| 19 | See in particular C. Gill, ‘The genre of the Atlantis story’, CPh 72 (1977), pp. 287–304; C. J. Rowe, ‘Myth, history and dialectic in Plato’s Republic and TimaeusCritias’, in R. Buxton (ed.), From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 263–78. Cf. M. Detienne, The Writing of Orpheus: Greek Myth in Cultural Context, tr. J. Lloyd (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), pp. 146–9 (first published as L’écriture d’Orphée (Paris: Gallimard, 1989)). | |
| 20 | Cf. J. Morrison, ‘Preface to Thucydides: Rereading the Corcyrean conflict (1.24–55)’, ClAnt 18 (1999), pp. 94–131, at pp. 101–2. | |
| 21 | E. Belfiore, ‘Lies unlike the truth: Plato on Hesiod, Theogony 27’, TAPA 115 (1985), pp. 47–57, considers Republic 2 to be an exploration of Hesiod’s claims about the Muses, concluding that Socrates’ statements at 382d are focused on matters (gods, heroes and the Underworld) about which no facts can be ascertained. See also L. H. Pratt, Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar: Falsehood and Deception in Archaic Greek Poetics (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 147–8, who, with Gill, ‘Plato’s Atlantis story’, pp. 66–70, understands the distinction as one ‘between factual truth and representative truth’. | |
| 22 | For further considerations on extrapolation in Thucydides, see J. Morrison, ‘Memory, time, and writing: Oral and literary aspects of Thucydides’History’, in C. J. Mackie (ed.), Oral Performance and its Context (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 95–116, at pp. 98–100. | |
| 23 | Gill, ‘Plato’s Atlantis story’, p. 76, argues that in the Atlantis myth of the Timaeus and Critias, Plato is playing the ‘game of fiction . . . presenting the false as true’, although he later disavowed the utility of fiction as an analytic category in Plato (C. Gill, ‘Plato on falsehood – not fiction’, in C. Gill and T. P. Wiseman (eds), Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1993), pp. 38–87, at pp. 46, 51, and passim). | |
| 24 | For Brisson, Plato the Myth Maker, pp. 91–102, the discourse of mythos in Plato is in principle unfalsifiable because its referent is inaccessible to the intellect or belongs to a distant past of which an author has no experience. Faced with our problematic passage in Republic 2, he explains the connection of myth with false discourse by positing a change in perspective whereby standards of truth and falsity have changed, now confirming to the higher discourse of the philosopher (pp. 105–9). | |
| 25 | The Republic’s ‘Noble Lie’ is itself an example of this utilitarian employment of mythical/historical narrative, as Gill, ‘Plato on falsehood’, pp. 52–4, points out, rightly connecting it with Resp. 382c–d. | |
| 26 | J. Adam, The Republic of Plato, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), vol. 1, p. 123. | |
| 27 | Not that moralising history is unique to Plato. Indeed, whatever we think of the moral didacticism (implicit or explicit) of Herodotus and Thucydides, fourth-century historians contemporary with and subsequent to Plato were certainly obtrusive in their treatment of the past as a moral paradigm (see Pownall, Lessons from the Past). | |
| 28 | K. A. Morgan, ‘Designer history. Plato’s Atlantis story and fourth-century ideology’, JHS 118 (1998), pp. 101–18. See also the important studies of P. Vidal-Naquet, ‘Athènes et l’Atlantide: Structure et signification d’un mythe platonicien’, REG 77 (1964), pp. 420–44, and L. P. Brisson, ‘De la philosophie politique à l’épopée: Le “Critias” de Platon’, RMM 75 (1970), pp. 402–38. | |
| 29 | And have been so studied: Brisson, Plato the Myth Maker, pp. 25–39. | |
| 30 | Gill, ‘Plato’s Atlantis story’, p. 74. | |
| 31 | Gill, ‘Genre of the Atlantis story’, pp. 294, 299; cf. Gill, ‘Plato’s Atlantis story’, pp. 75–6. | |
| 32 | Gill, ‘Plato’s Atlantis story’, p. 75. | |
| 33 | Gill, ‘Genre of the Atlantis story’, p. 301: ‘the interest in . . . surveying historical events to formulate descriptive generalizations’. | |
| 34 | Weil, L’‘archéologie’ de Platon, pp. 32–3. | |
| 35 | Weil, L’‘archéologie’ de Platon, pp. 43–6. | |
| 36 | Weil, L’‘archéologie’ de Platon, p. 44. | |
| 37 | It is troubling, of course, that this axiom has not been previously stated in the course of the Laws; cf. E. B. England (ed.), The Laws of Plato, 2 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1921), vol. 1, pp. 360–1 ad 683e5. | |
| 38 | If this is what kenon means (cf. England, Laws, p. 361 ad 683e9). | |
| 39 | Weil, L’‘archéologie’ de Platon, p. 44. | |
| 40 | Fornara, Nature of History, p. 8. | |
| 41 | Fornara, Nature of History, p. 9. | |
| 42 | The Stranger’s qualification ‘or, if you wish, race’ is curious and deserves further attention, transporting us, as it does, to a quasi-Hesiodic world of successive races. The Dorians self-represented as an ethnic group, but it is striking that the fourth city receives ethnic qualification when no prior one did. | |
| 43 | Athens, the heroine of the Atlantis story, could not hope to be a paradigm of continuity in the Laws because it was a paradigm case of democracy. This entailed eliding the Peisistratid tyranny that came before it, so that Athens enters the scene at 698b as possessing an ‘ancient constitution’. | |
| 44 | Weil, L’‘archéologie’ de Platon, p. 33 n. 4. | |
| 45 | Cf. the comments of R. Fowler (‘Herodotos and his contemporaries’, JHS 116 (1996), pp. 62–87, at p. 82) on Herodotus: ‘If he massages his data to produce typical patterns, it is because, to him, that is the structure of truth and reality. Future historians of historiography will identify ways of thinking that have affected our explanations of historical events, and with a similar lack of generosity accuse us of lying, or at any rate, of writing nothing better than historical fiction.’ Plato, however, works at a considerably higher level of generality. | |
| 46 | Thuc. 1.20.2–1.21.1, also quoted above: ‘the majority make no effort in the investigation of the truth and they turn rather to what is ready at hand’ (οὕτως ἀταλαὕπωρος τοῖς πολλοῖς ἡ ζήτησις τῆς ἀληθείας, καὶ ἐπὶ τὰ ἑτοῖμα μᾶλλον τρέπονται). |