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being (340B-D), then in claiming that by "hard" Simonides had really meant "bad" (341A-C). Protagoras has no difficulty pointing out the futility of both attempts, and Socrates drops them without demur (340D-E; 341D). In the meantime, however, Socrates has managed to prepare a more ambitious, and in certain regards a more serious, answer. This falls into two parts. It begins with a circumstantial disquisition on Crete and Sparta as the true homes of Greek philosophy, as reflected later in the maxims of Pittacus and the other sages, and attributes to Simonides the intention of trying to achieve glory for himself by criticizing Pittacus' celebrated saying (342A-C). Socrates then goes on to examine the poem in sequence from beginning to end, interpreting it line by line in the light of that presumed intention (342C347A). |
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Protagoras' challenge is addressed simultaneously to Socrates and to Simonides: if the poet cannot be acquitted of the charge of being self-contradictory, the philosopher too will be convicted of insufficient  in matters poetic and consequently in education. Socrates must defend himself, but the only way he can do so is by rescuing Simonides. Protagoras' polemic strategy is to propose the two passages for consideration without any regard to possible contexts for them: he resolutely ignores not only the poem's external context, that is, the circumstances under which it was originally performed (though he is quite aware that it was addressed to Scopas8), but also its internal context, consisting of the other utterances within the poem surrounding the ones he cites (though of course he knows that both passages come from the same poem9). As a result, the two sentences he quotes seem to float like monads, pure citations quite free of any determinate attachments, and to collide with one another in unmediated and windowless contradiction. It is surely not accidental that Protagoras introduces both passages with pou, the vaguest of particles, in which gentlemanly contempt for pedantic niceties mixes with a genuine indifference to precision of context. |
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Once the diversionary preliminaries are out of the way, Socrates directs his counter-strategy precisely to the goal of supplying both kinds of context, external and internal10 his aim, as it were, is to specify both of Protagoras' pou's. To be sure, Socrates' lecture on Doric philosophy may well strike us as being playful, both in its details and in its basic thesis. Nevertheless it provides an example of the kind of story which must be told by anyone who wants to integrate a text plausibly into a determinate external context. By establishing Pittacus' philosophical dignity, Socrates aims to vindicate Simonides' seriousness as well. Socrates transposes the |
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8 This is made clear by the words with which he introduces his first quotation:  (339A). |
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9 This is made clear by the words with which he introduces his second quotation:  . (339C). |
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10 See Gundert (1952) 723, 789. This crucial point is misunderstood in Scodel (1987) 30. |
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