|
|
|
|
|
|
|
generate) the far more perplexing challenges posed by a second, much larger category of texts (let us call them "literary texts"), those which were not originally intended as challenges at all, or at least not as they later seemed, and to which no single response can ever claim full and exclusive legitimacy. Hermeneutics is a Greek word, but not, at least until quite late, a Greek scholarly discipline.5 And if, as I have suggested elsewhere,6 one reason for the relative lack of ancient theoretical interest in the perplexities to which this latter category of texts give rise was Plato's forceful opposition to any attempt to develop a non-philosophical method for dealing with them, then it becomes all the more interesting that the problems which can be encountered in such texts are so well illustrated by Plato himself, in the episode in the Protagoras in which Protagoras presents Simonides' ode to Scopas as a challenge to Socrates, and Socrates attempts to meet that challenge. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Protagoras begins by asserting that the most important part of education for a man consists in learning to be clever ( ) with regard to poetry: that is, to be capable of understanding the statements that the poets have made rightly or wrongly, to tell these apart, and to explain them when asked (338E339A). He then introduces into the discussion a poem Socrates admits he knows well, Simonides' ode to Scopas. According to Protagoras, the matter at issue is the same as that in their whole disputation,  , merely transferred ( ) now to the domain of poetry (339A). Socrates acknowledges that he considers the poem well made and that he could not do so if it turned out that Simonides contradicted himself in it (339B). Thereupon Protagoras, who has already quoted the poem's opening,  ("It is hard to become a man truly noble, in hands and feet and mind, fashioned foursquare without reproach," 339B), introduces another passage from somewhat later:  ("Nor do I think that the word of Pittacus was said harmoniously, although said by a wise man. He said that it is hard to be noble," 339C).7 Once Protagoras has explained that it is self-contradictory to assert some proposition and then to attack someone for asserting it (339C-D), the audience roars approval and Socrates feels as though he has almost been knocked out (339D-E). He tries to buy time by enlisting Prodicus' help twice, first in establishing a contrast between becoming and |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
5 I have argued this general point in more detail in Most (1984) and (1986). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
6 See especially Most (1986), where this point is argued with regard both to the fragments and testimonia of the Sophists and to Plato's dialogues. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
7 I use the text of the poem printed as fragment 542 in Page (1962) 2823. For the sake of convenience, all translations of the poem, unless otherwise indicated, are taken, slightly modified, from Bowra (1961) 3418. |
|
|
|
|
|