Charmides

Editorial Note

The Greek text. The Greek is John Burnet’s, from the third volume of his Oxford Classical Text of Plato (1903), which remains the standard critical text of the Charmides. The copy reproduced is the second impression of January 1909, “corrected in a number of places”, printed at Oxford by Horace Hart. It is reproduced page for page and line for line: each left-hand page of this edition is one page of Burnet, with his line-ends, his marginal section letters and line numbers, and his apparatus criticus at the foot. The words were taken from the Perseus Digital Library’s digital transcription of Burnet, and every line was then checked against the photographs of the 1909 impression; where the two differ, this edition prints what Burnet printed, including a few forms that look like misprints (the grave accent on Θρᾲξ at 156d6, for instance). Burnet’s paragraphing (a new, indented paragraph at each change of speaker), his capitals at the openings of speeches, his quotation marks (157b, 165c–e), his letterspacing of the quoted verse at 155d and his setting of Homer’s line on a line of its own at 161a are all kept. In his text, square brackets [ ] enclose words he believed spurious, and angle brackets ⟨ ⟩ words that are not in the principal manuscripts and have been supplied from later ones or by conjecture.

Reading the apparatus. The notes at the foot of each Greek page are Burnet’s, unaltered. Entries are keyed by section letter and line as numbered in the margin, so that “a 4” is the fourth line of section a; a further entry on the same line follows after a wider space without repeating the key. Usually the reading printed in the text comes first, followed by the witnesses that have it; a colon separates it from the alternatives, each followed by its witnesses. Where the text’s reading is followed by a square bracket, as in “a 4 ἄν που] δήπου ci. Naber”, the witnesses for the text are not listed and only the alternatives are given; three spaced points stand for words left out of a quotation. A scholar’s name alone marks a reading, addition or deletion made in that scholar’s edition or study; ci. marks a conjecture he proposed; scripsi, “I have written”, marks Burnet’s own emendation, and an …?, “perhaps …?”, a suggestion of Burnet’s that he did not adopt.

The witnesses. The three principal manuscripts are B, the Bodleian Plato (MS. E. D. Clarke 39, written in 895); T, the Venice manuscript (Marcianus, Append. Class. 4, cod. 1); and W, the Vienna manuscript (Vindobonensis 54, suppl. phil. Gr. 7). The raised numerals and small letters are correcting hands: B² is an early corrector of B (Burnet’s Preface suggests Arethas or his scribe), B³ a further hand in B, and b later hands; T², T³ and t are the corresponding hands in T. Letters written together share a reading: “BW” is B and W, “Bt” B and a later hand in T. Burnet also cites, by name, the Coislinianus (Coisl.), Ambrosianus 56 (Ambr. 56), Parisini 1809 and 1812 (Par.), Laurentianus lxxxv. 6 (Laur.) and Venetus 189 (Ven. 189), and a manuscript he calls Θ, which he does not identify in this volume. In the Protagoras (329c) Θ shares gaps in B that a later hand filled, which suggests that it was copied from B; it may be the Vaticanus gr. 226 that Bekker and Stallbaum cite as Θ, though this has not been confirmed. The printed editions cited are the Aldine (Aldina, Venice 1513), the second Basel edition (Basileensis altera, Basel 1556) and that of Stephanus (1578), whose pages give the standard references. Burnet cites two ancient authors who quote the dialogue: Stobaeus, the anthologist, whose excerpts cover 156d–157b, 164d–165a and 173a–d, and the grammarian Priscian (Priscianus), whom he cites only at 160c, although Priscian also quotes 155e and 175d–e.

Abbreviations. add., added; addub., doubted; al., other manuscripts; altera manu, in another hand; ante, before; bis, twice; ci., conjectured; compendio, in an abbreviated form; corr., corrected (with a manuscript’s name, a correction found in that manuscript); del., deleted; et, and; et mox, and just after; fuit qui … mallet, there was one who preferred; γρ., a variant introduced by γράφεται, “it is (also) read”; in marg., in the margin; in ras., written over an erasure; lacunam indicat, marks a gap; om., omitted; post, after; posterius, the second (of two occurrences); re vera, in fact; rec., a later hand; recc., later manuscripts; scr., written in (scr. recc., the reading of later manuscripts; with a manuscript’s name, the reading of that manuscript); secl., bracketed as spurious; sed, but; sic, so written; supra, above; suprascr., written above the line; transp., transposed; ut videtur, as it seems; vel, or. “W. Dindorf” is the scholar Wilhelm Dindorf, not the manuscript W.

The English. The translation is new. It aims to be exact, with every clause answering to a clause of the Greek, and to keep what translations of this dialogue often lose: Socrates’ humor. That means his deadpan understatement, his mock-heroics, his teasing of Critias, his comic confession of being thrown into confusion by a beautiful boy, and the quick timing of the short exchanges. Socrates tells the story to an unnamed friend, and his asides to that friend are kept. Where a joke depends on the Greek and cannot be carried into English, a note explains it briefly. Nothing is added to the text to make it funnier, with one declared exception: at 154b Plato quotes half of a proverb his hearers would finish for themselves, and the English finishes it. Words that Burnet brackets as spurious are not translated. Words added in angle brackets are translated, and marked in the English only where the addition changes the sense (167b).

Each right-hand page translates the Greek page opposite. When a sentence runs over the turn of Burnet’s page, the English breaks at the nearest point English word order allows and leaves the sentence unfinished at the foot of the page, as the Greek does. The Stephanus section letters in the margin of the English mark where each section begins, so that any passage can be found in the Greek or cited by the standard reference.

Temperance. The dialogue is an inquiry into sōphrosynē, a virtue whose Greek range (soundness of mind, self-control, moderation, modesty, decorum) has no single English equivalent. It is rendered “temperance” throughout, one word for one word, because the argument tests definition after definition of that word and the reader needs to see the same thing being tried each time. The note at 157a and the Key Words of the Dialogue say more.

The notes. The translator’s notes at the foot of the English page identify people, places and quotations; explain the jokes the English cannot carry; flag the places where Burnet’s choice of reading changes the sense; and mark the dramatic irony every ancient reader would have felt, since the two aristocrats who answer Socrates here, Critias and his young cousin Charmides, were a quarter of a century later among the men of the oligarchy of 404/3, Critias as a leader of the Thirty and Charmides as one of the Ten in the Piraeus. Where a note offers an interpretation, it says so. The notes are numbered afresh on each page.

This edition. The volume contains the whole dialogue, 153a–176d, in Burnet’s thirty-seven pages. It was made in five blocks, each checked before the next was begun, and then read through and checked again as a whole; the Introduction, the Key Words of the Dialogue, the Outline and the Glossary were written last, from the finished text. The Note on this Edition, at the back, says how the volume was made, what the checks found, and what remains undone.