Charmides

Introduction

The dialogue

The Charmides is a conversation about sōphrosynē, the virtue this edition calls temperance, and Socrates tells it himself. He has just come home from the siege of Potidaea, and on the day after his return he goes back to his old haunt, the wrestling-school of Taureas, to ask how philosophy has been doing and whether any of the young men has turned out outstanding in wisdom or in beauty (153a–d). The answer is Charmides, son of Glaucon, the most admired boy of the moment, whose cousin and guardian Critias is there to introduce him (154a–b, 155a). Socrates tells the story to an unnamed friend, whom he addresses now and then (“my friend”, 154b; “my noble friend”, 155d), and no one else has a speaking part except Chaerephon at the start, Critias and Charmides. The dialogue runs from page 153 to page 176 in the pages of Stephanus’ edition, by which Plato is still cited, and fills thirty-seven pages of Burnet’s Oxford text.

The ancient arrangement of Plato’s works by Thrasyllus, which Diogenes Laertius preserves (3.59), gives the dialogue the subtitle “On temperance”, classes it as “peirastic”, a dialogue of testing, and places it in the fifth tetralogy with the Theages, the Laches and the Lysis; Burnet’s third volume prints them in that order. Like the Laches on courage and the Euthyphro on piety, the Charmides asks what a single virtue is, tests a series of answers, and ends without one. When it was written is not known; it is usually counted among the earlier dialogues.

The question and the first answers

The question is what temperance is, and Socrates puts it to Charmides in a particular form. If temperance is present in him, it must give rise to some sense from which he would have an opinion about it, and since he can speak Greek he can say what that opinion is (158e–159a). The boy tries three times. First, temperance is “doing everything in an orderly way and quietly”, “a kind of quietness” (159b); Socrates runs through a schoolboy’s lessons, writing, reading, the lyre, wrestling and learning, to show that quick things are at least as often fine as quiet ones, and temperance is something fine (159c–160d). Second, temperance “makes a person feel shame”, and is the same as modesty (160e); but Homer says that modesty is no good thing for a man in need, and temperance is good (161a–b). Third, Charmides offers something he has heard: temperance is “doing one’s own business” (161b). Socrates takes “doing” literally. A city in which every man wove his own cloak and cobbled his own shoes would not be well run, so the phrase must be a riddle (161d–162b).

The phrase is Critias’, and at this point he can contain himself no longer (162c–d). He takes the argument over, and his defence turns on words. On the authority of Hesiod he separates making from working and doing: only what is made finely and beneficially is a work, and only the making of good things is a doing; temperance is “the doing of good things” (163b–e). Socrates asks whether a man can be temperate without knowing it. A doctor who makes a patient healthy does something beneficial, and so, on Critias’ account, acts temperately, yet he may not know whether his treatment will benefit (164a–c). Rather than grant that a man who does not know himself can be temperate, Critias gives up everything he has said and starts again: temperance is knowing oneself, the “Know thyself” inscribed at Delphi (164d–165b).

Knowledge of knowledge

Nearly half the dialogue (164d–175b) examines this last definition and what Critias makes of it. Asked what temperance produces, as medicine produces health and house-building houses (165c–e), Critias answers that temperance is unlike the other kinds of knowledge: it alone is knowledge both of the other kinds of knowledge and of itself (166c), and, as he then agrees, also of the lack of knowledge (166e). Only the temperate man, then, will know what he knows and what he does not know, and be able to examine others in the same way (167a).

Socrates asks two questions: whether such a knowledge is possible at all, and whether it would benefit us (167b). On the first he offers a procession of parallels: a sight that sees no color but only itself and the other sights, a hearing that hears no sound, a love that loves nothing beautiful, a fear that fears nothing dreadful (167c–168a), and a greater that is greater than itself and so smaller than itself (168b–c). He leaves the question to “a great man” (169a), and, with Critias too embarrassed to admit that he is at a loss (169c), grants for the sake of argument that knowledge of knowledge exists (169d). The second question does the damage. A knowledge that knows only knowledge could tell that a man knows something, but not what he knows, and so it could not tell a doctor from a man pretending to be one, since only medicine knows the healthy and the diseased (170a–171c). Socrates describes the life that temperance as first imagined would have given, households and cities run without error because everyone would do only what he knew (171d–172a), then doubts that it would even do that much good (172c–d). In his “dream” he grants it everything (173a–d) and asks whether living knowledgeably would make us happy. It would not, unless one knew the right things; and when Critias names the knowledge that makes men happy, it is the knowledge of good and bad (174b). Without it the other crafts go on working, but nothing is done “well and beneficially” (174c–d). Critias tries to save his definition by putting temperance in charge of this knowledge too (174d–e), but temperance was agreed to be knowledge of knowledge and of nothing else, and so it turns out to be “the craftsman of no benefit” (175a).

The ending

Socrates declares the inquiry a failure: “we are beaten on every side” (175b). He and Critias granted, against what the argument allowed, both that there is knowledge of knowledge and that by it one knows the works of the other kinds of knowledge, and even so temperance has come out of no benefit (175b–d). He blames himself, not temperance: he is “a poor inquirer”, and temperance “a great good” (175e). Charmides, who does not know whether he has it, asks to be charmed every day; Critias orders him to it as proof that he is temperate; and Charmides, speaking for both, tells Socrates playfully that they will use force if he resists. “Then I won’t oppose you,” he says, and the dialogue ends (176a–d).

What is most exposed

Three things in the dialogue are likely to trouble a first-time reader, and they are best stated plainly.

First, the dialogue fails on its own terms, and says so. It is not only that no definition survives. Socrates says that he and Critias “conceded many things that did not follow in the argument” (175b), and that the inquiry “has made such a mockery of the truth” (175d). Readers have long looked for a positive teaching behind the failure, and the likeliest place is the knowledge of good and bad at 174b–d, which temperance, as Critias defines it, cannot contain. That is an interpretation, and the notes mark it as one.

Second, the knowledge of knowledge that the argument takes apart looks very like Socrates’ own. In the Apology he examines others to find out who thinks he knows and does not, and he does not think he knows what he does not know (21d; compare 21b–23b). Critias’ account at 167a describes this activity closely, and the argument concludes that such a knowledge could not tell who knows what (170d). Whether Plato is testing Socrates’ wisdom or only Critias’ version of it, the text does not say.

Third, the two men who discuss temperance here were remembered for the opposite. A quarter of a century later Critias was the leading figure among the Thirty, the oligarchy that ruled Athens by terror in 404/3, and Charmides served it as one of the Ten set over the Piraeus; both died fighting the democrats in 403. Plato was their kinsman: Critias was his mother’s cousin, Charmides her brother, and Pyrilampes, praised at 158a, later married her. The dialogue mentions none of this. But its last lines, in which Charmides and his guardian resolve, in fun, to use force, were written for readers who knew how the story ended.

The manner

The Charmides is among the funniest of Plato’s dialogues, and much of it is carried by its comedy. The prologue is openly erotic and self-mocking. Socrates, “a white measuring-line on white stone” where the beautiful are concerned (154b), proposes to strip the boy’s soul before his body (154e), joins the men on the bench in shoving his neighbor to make room for the boy, until one man at the end is made to stand up and another is tipped off sideways (155c), and, glimpsing inside his cloak, is “on fire” and “no longer in my own possession” (155d). His cure for the boy’s headache is a charm that must be applied to the soul first (155e–157c), and the charm, on the dialogue’s own hints, is conversation of the right kind (157a).

The comedy of the argument is quieter. Charmides passes his guardian’s phrase to Socrates, then, when it is in trouble, laughs slyly and glances across at its author (162b). Critias is proud of his learning and fond of distinctions (163b–d), and when he catches Socrates’ perplexity “like people who catch a yawn”, he is too vain to admit that he is at a loss (169c–d). Socrates’ examples are deliberately homely: cutting leather, working bronze, wool and wood (173d–e), draughts (174b), cobbling (174c); and his tone runs from the mock-solemn (“the third time, for the Savior”, 167a) to open teasing (“You rascal!”, 161b, 174b). The translation tries to keep all of this and to add nothing: the jokes are Plato’s, and where the English cannot carry one a note says what it was.

On reading this edition

Each left-hand page is a page of Burnet’s Oxford text, line for line, with his apparatus at the foot; each right-hand page translates it. The Key Words of the Dialogue, which follow, explain the words on which the argument turns and how they are rendered; the Outline gives the argument’s joints by Stephanus page; and the Editorial Note sets out the conventions of both pages. At the back, the Glossary lists the renderings for reference, and the Note on this Edition says how the volume was made and where a reader should be careful.

A note on the persons

The dialogue itself establishes little about its characters. Socrates has just come back from Potidaea after a heavy battle (153b–c). Critias is the son of Callaeschrus (153c, 169b) and the cousin and guardian of Charmides (154b, 155a, 176c); Charmides is the son of Glaucon (154b, 158b) and the nephew of Pyrilampes (158a), and his father’s house descends from Critias son of Dropides, whose family was kin to Solon (155a, 157e). Charmides was not yet grown up when Socrates left for Potidaea (154a–b), and he is already thought a philosopher and a poet (154e–155a). Chaerephon is Socrates’ excitable friend (153b).

The rest comes from other sources, and on some points they disagree. Socrates (469–399 BC) served at Potidaea (Plato, Symposium 219e–220e). The city revolted in 432 and surrendered in the winter of 430/29 (Thucydides 1.56–66, 2.70), and scholars differ over whether the homecoming is set in 432 or in 429. Critias (c. 460–403) was a poet and prose writer as well as a politician; some works ascribed to him, among them a speech on the invention of the gods from a play called Sisyphus, are also ascribed to Euripides. Charmides appears in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (3.7), where Socrates urges him, a capable man too diffident to speak in the Assembly, to take part in public life, and in Xenophon’s Symposium (4.29–32), where he praises the freedom of being poor. Under the oligarchy of 404/3 Critias was one of the Thirty and among their leaders, and Charmides was one of the Ten in the Piraeus; both fell at Munychia (Xenophon, Hellenica 2.4.19). Plato (c. 428/7–348/7) was the son of Perictione, Charmides’ sister.