So far, I’ve posted on Generals O.O. Howard and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and classical education, Robert Montgomery Bird’s antebellum drama The Gladiator, the classical courtship of Lucretia and James Garfield, and the Civil War career of classicist Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve.  My next post will focus on William Sanders Scarborough.

Week I Primary Readings

I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range.

You can read the rest of the story here.

To pass the time until the crisis has passed and some original content becomes available, here’s a an article I published in New England Classical Journal about Latin in the Progressive Era, focusing specifically on an episode in Jean Webster’s novel for girls, Just Patty (1911).  The article is a downloadable PDF file.

“Girls Reading Vergil: Stories of Latin and Progressive Education.” Originally published in New England Classical Journal 32.2 (May 2006).  Copyright © 2006 by Rob Hardy.

There are some interesting affinities between George Eliot, the philosophic novelist, and Gibbon, the philosophic historian. Both probe into the dark recesses of human motivation; both approach their subjects with an equal measure of irony and sympathy. David Womersley, in his introduction, writes: “[T]he belief in unintended consequences naturally led the philosophic historian to form surprisingly nuanced judgements prompted by unexpectedly broad sympathies… Individuals and institutions, which he could only condemn as in themselves criminal or perverse, at moments contributed positively to human society, while, in obedience to the same principle, those he admired or loved may, despite their best endeavours, have exerted a harmful influence” (xxiii).

Thus Gibbon praises and admires the good emperor Marcus Aurelius, but shows us that, through his indulgence as a father, Marcus bequeathed to Rome the troubled reign of his unstable son Commodus. On the other hand, he dates the beginning of the end of Rome to the reign of the murderous and self-interested Septimius Severus, who temporarily restored a measure of peace and justice to the empire.

Of Marcus Aurelius, Gibbon writes: “The mildness of Marcus, which the rigid discipline of the Stoics was unable to eradicate, formed, at the same time, the most amiable, and the only defective, part of his character” (108). This is typical of Gibbon’s style, contrasting, in the same sentence, a positive and negative assessment of a person’s character or actions. “The most amiable, but only defective, part of his character.” There’s a kind of dizzying, dazzling even-handedness about Gibbon as he performs his stylistic juggling act, making judgments while seeming to keep judgment suspended in the air.

Cross-posted on Rough Draft.

The subtitle for this one is “lover of gain” as it is this term (philokerdes) Socrates and an unnamed friend set out to define.  The term is derogatory for the Athenians as it is for us (although we don’t have a single word for this, do we?).  The dialogue shows up the paradox here: gain is of course good, so are we all not lovers of gain?  The friend keeps trying to shift the definition to show that it’s a bad thing, but Socrates refutes each attempt.

The Hipparchus story is attached only because of the wise saying “don’t deceive a friend” found on a herm; Hipparchus set up the herms with their wise sayings, and Socrates (accused of deception by his interlocutor) denies that he would ever disobey the saying.  But the digression is really interesting for a couple of reasons.  First, because on Socrates’ account the tyrannicides didn’t simply act because of a love rivalry gone wrong (as in Thucydides’ narrative), but rather because of an educational rivalry.  Harmodius was in love with a boy who at first thought him a good teacher, but then when he encountered Hipparchus thought him wiser; Harmodius therefore plotted with Aristogeiton to eliminate his rival in wisdom!

This is cute, and probably a little tongue-in-cheek.  But lurking in back of Socrates’ alternate story, as well as the larger dialogue, are some really interesting class issues.  Socrates’ Hipparchus may be the sole ruler of Athens, but he is educated and enlightened, and cares deeply about educating all his citizens — those in the countryside as well as those in the city.  His educational program is in fact superior to those of the regular citizens, Harmodius and Aristogeiton.  Score one for the aristocrats.  (Contrast Thucydides’ version, which seems much more to democratize the normally elite erastes-eromenons relationship, and mobilize it in the service of political rights for all classes; Virginia Wohl’s take on this is really interesting.)

But the whole dialogue seems to lean in a different (much less characteristically Socratic) direction.  The negative charge philokerdes seems made for aristocrats, with old money, to level against upstart tradesmen.  One definition attempted is this: “The right view of the lover of gain is that he is the one who concerns himself with, and thinks fit to make gain from, things from which honest men (hoi chrestoi) do not dare to make gain” (227d).  Chrestoi is notoriously code for aristocrats; the “useful” men who benefit the city with their wealth and intelligence; it is commonly contrasted with poneroi which literally means “wretched” but generally means poor.  Philokerdes becomes an instrument of social control — a means for the current elite to beat back competitors for their place in society.

Now Socrates’ questioning of the “friend” here doesn’t of course make this charge, but the exposure of confusion over the moral value of “gain” certainly might lead down that path.  But along the road we’d find one of Hipparchus’ herms, reminding us of the excellence of the nobility after all!

Even this discussion begins elsewhere, with Socrates showing the boy that he is ignorant and in need of a guide.  But when the boy has been convinced of this, his pal (and age-mate) Menexenus returns to the scene, and Lysis quietly asks Socrates to ask Menexenus the same sorts of questions.  At this point begins the discussion of friendship.

Part of the reason I don’t know how to respond to the dialogue is that Socrates really seems to be cheating through lots of this — to be purposefully confusing, or deceptive, in his argument.  And part of the difficulty is probably that philia covers a broader semantic range than “friendship” and Socrates sneakily shifts from one sense to another throughout the dialogue.  Thus he can say that one’s body is a “friend” to medicine for the sake of health, and that health, as it is good, is also “a friend” — but of course using these abstracts takes the discussion far from what I would consider “friendship.”

So while other dialogues, even when I haven’t closely followed the argument or when I disagree with parts, have given me a sense of an important set of ideas being debated, this one really didn’t.  My Loeb claims that “we learn how large and morally important is the question that we have been discussing” but I just don’t see it; the dialogue doesn’t strike me as showing that at all.  And the relationship between eros and philia which I was initially hoping might be clarified is only glancingly touched upon.  So anyone who can let me know what I’m missing here should chime right in!

First: the end of the Charmides did include the heartening statement that if a “science of sciences” were possible, then “he who has it will not only learn more easily whatever he learns, but will perceive everything more plainly, since besides the particular things that he learns he will behold the science” (172b).  However Socrates ends up rejecting this as a definition of temperance, which he seems to assume is something more limited.  But my hopes for the metacognitive project I mentioned last time were encouraged.

The Charmides does not end up producing a satisfactory definition of sophrosune, but it does indicate toward the end that knowledge of good and evil might be the key to happiness (again, this path isn’t followed through because it seems to the interlocutors to go beyond the concept of temperance).  In the Laches, also, knowledge ends the debate, this time over what constitutes andreia (“courage” but more literally “manliness”).  Nicias has suggested that true courage consists of knowledge of “what is to be dreaded or dared, either in war or in anything else” (195).  He thus denies that boldness, in the absence of knowledge, is really courage.  (He also sidesteps the notion of action in response to knowledge: if one knows “what is to be dreaded” and rationally runs away, is that courage?).

As in the Charmides, however, Socrates’ questioning shows that this definition will end up being too broad for the more limited notion of courage.  I’m not sure I buy his argument, but his claim is that “what is to be dreaded” must be knowledge of future things (since “fear is expectation of coming evil” 198b).  But (Socrates claims) you can’t really separate out knowledge of future things from knowledge of present or past things, but such knowledge would have to be “knowledge of goods and evils not merely in the future, but also in the present and the past” (199b); thus again we have reached something that looks way more comprehensive than simply “courage.”

An entertaining feature of the dialogue is the characterization of Laches and Nicias, the two principal interlocutors: Laches in particular is clearly very competitive and if his definition is going to be shot down by Socrates, then by gum Nicias’s definition had better be as well.  Nicias is portrayed as much more careful and rational, although in the end he also fails to define courage satisfactorily.  But both are also interesting figures because of what we know of their careers: Laches led the first expedition against Sicily, and was prosecuted on his return for having failed to subdue it; Nicias led the second, and was executed by the Sicilians after the horrendous defeat of the Athenian forces in 413.  One of the most painful parts of Thucydides’ narrative of the failed expedition is toward the end, when it is clear the Athenians have been defeated, but there still seems to be some chance of them getting their surviving forces home safely.  But Nicias is spooked by a lunar eclipse, and is advised by his priests to delay for twenty-seven days; this delay — pretty clearly inspired by the attempt to understand “what is to be dreaded or dared” — proves disastrous.

It’s hard to tell whether Plato intended the historical careers of his interlocutors to color our response to their dialogues; Nicias is in many ways a tragic figure, and was certainly highly respected in Athens for his caution and his military success.  Perhaps that reputation, in the fourth century, is all Plato’s audience would have associated with him.  But it’s hard not to let the disaster of Sicily influence the way we respond to him.