Hipparchus

Outline

The divisions follow the argument. References are to Stephanus pages and sections, which stand in the margins of both pages of the text.

I. The question and the first answer (225a–226d)

225a Socrates: “What, then, is the love of gain? What is it, after all, and who are the lovers of gain?” The companion: those “who think fit to gain from things worth nothing”.

225a–b Do they know that these things are worth nothing, or are they ignorant of it? If ignorant, “it is senseless men you are calling lovers of gain”. The companion calls them “unscrupulous and base, and no match for gain”, men who know, “and yet dare to love gain, out of shamelessness”.

225b–c Is the lover of gain a farmer who knows that what he plants is worth nothing and thinks fit to gain from it when it has grown? The companion: “The lover of gain, at any rate, Socrates, thinks he ought to gain from everything.” Socrates: “Don’t answer me so at random, as though someone had done you some wrong”; the lover of gain “has knowledge of the worth of that from which he thinks fit to gain”.

225c–d Who has knowledge of the worth of plants, “in what time and clime they are worth planting”? “I think a farmer.” By “thinking fit to gain” the companion means “thinking that one ought to gain”.

225d–226a “Then don’t try to deceive me, an older man by now, when you are so young”: no farming man who knows that his plant is worth nothing thinks he gains from it. “By Zeus, not I.”

226a–c The horseman who gives his horse food worth nothing; the pilot with sails and rudders worth nothing, who knows that “he will suffer loss”; the general; the flute-player, the lyre-player, the archer, “or anyone at all, in sum, of the craftsmen or of the other intelligent men”: none thinks he gains from what he knows is worth nothing.

226d So “in the way you say, my wonderful friend, there is no one among men who is a lover of gain”.

II. The second answer: all men lovers of gain (226d–227c)

226d–e The companion: the lovers of gain are those “who, out of insatiability, every time crave prodigiously even things quite small and worth little or nothing, and love gain”.

226e “Not, surely, my excellent friend, knowing that they are worth nothing”: that was refuted. So they are ignorant, “thinking that things worth nothing are worth a great deal”.

226e–227a The lovers of gain love gain; gain is “the opposite of loss”; “men are harmed by loss”; “Then loss is bad”; “Then gain is good.”

227b “Then you call lovers of gain those who love the good.” “It seems so.” Socrates: “It is not madmen, at any rate, my friend, that you call lovers of gain.” The companion loves all good things, and Socrates too: “Ask me too, then, whether I do not as well”.

227c All other men “love good things” and “hate bad ones”; and gain was agreed to be good. “In this way, in turn, all men appear to be lovers of gain; but in the way we were speaking of before, no one was a lover of gain.”

III. The third answer: the gain that decent men do not dare (227c–228a)

227c–d “Which of the two arguments, then, could one use without making a mistake?” The companion: “it is right to think that man a lover of gain who is in earnest about those things, and thinks fit to gain from them, from which decent men do not dare to gain.”

227d Socrates: they “agreed just now that to gain is to be benefited”, and also “that everyone wishes for good things, and always”; so “good men too wish to have all gains, if indeed they are good things”.

227e “Not the gains, at any rate, Socrates, from which they are going to be harmed”: that is, “going to suffer loss”; men suffer loss “both by loss and by base gain”. “Well, does any decent and good thing seem to you to be base?” “Not to me.”

228a Gain was agreed to be the opposite of loss, which is bad, and so good: “You see, then: you are trying to deceive me”. The companion: “it is you who are deceiving me, and I don’t know how you twist things up and down in the arguments.”

IV. Hipparchus (228b–229d)

228b Socrates: “Speak auspiciously! I would certainly not be acting well if I did not obey a good and wise man”: Hipparchus, “who was the eldest and wisest of Pisistratus’ sons”, who was the first to bring “the epics of Homer into this land here” and compelled the rhapsodes at the Panathenaea “to go through them in order”.

228c He sent a fifty-oared ship for Anacreon and kept Simonides about him, “because he wished to educate the citizens, so that he might rule over them as men who were as good as could be”, “not thinking that he ought to begrudge wisdom to anyone, since he was a fine and good man”.

228d–e Hipparchus, “plotting in turn to educate those in the country”, set up Herms along the roads with his own sayings in elegiac verse, so that his citizens “would not admire those wise inscriptions at Delphi” but “would think the sayings of Hipparchus wiser”.

228e–229b The two inscriptions on each Herm: on the left, Hermes says that he stands midway between the town and the deme; on the right, “This is Hipparchus’ memorial: go your way with just thoughts”. On the Steirian road: “This is Hipparchus’ memorial: do not deceive a friend.” Socrates: “So I would surely not dare to deceive you, who are my friend, and to disobey him”.

229b After Hipparchus’ death his brother Hippias ruled as tyrant for three years, and “you could have heard from all the men of old that only in those years was there a tyranny in Athens, and that the rest of the time the Athenians lived nearly as in the reign of Cronus”.

229c–d The more cultivated say that Hipparchus died “not for the reasons the many thought, the dishonour to the sister over the basket-bearing”: Aristogeiton “prided himself on having educated a man, and thought Hipparchus his opponent”, and the young man whom Harmodius loved, “after keeping company with Hipparchus, despised them”; “deeply pained by this dishonour”, they killed him.

V. Taking back a move: good gain and bad gain (229d–231a)

229d–e The companion: “either you do not think me a friend, or, if you think me a friend, you do not obey Hipparchus. For I cannot be persuaded that it is not you who are deceiving me”.

229e–230a Socrates offers, “just as when playing draughts”, to take back whatever the companion wishes. Not that all men desire good things, nor that loss is bad, nor that gain is the opposite of loss; but that gaining is good: “Not all of it, at any rate. Take that back for me.” “Then, it seems, some gain seems to you to be good and some bad.”

230a–c “But the good one of them is no more gain, at any rate, than the bad”: good food and bad food are “equally food”; so with drink; and of men “one is decent, another base”, but neither “is more or less a man”.

230c–d Base gain and decent gain: “both the base and the decent are, at any rate, equally gain”; “to neither of them does the more or the less belong”.

230d–231a So “this is what we must look into: why ever do you call both of them gain? What do you see in both that is the same?” Food is “dry nourishment of the body”, drink “the wet nourishment of the body”. “Try, then, you too, to imitate me as I answer in this way.”

VI. What gain is: acquiring more, and worth (231a–232a)

231a–b Socrates’ proposal: “do you call gain every possession that one acquires either without spending anything, or by spending less and getting more?” “I think I call that gain.”

231b–c The man who feasts at no cost and acquires a disease has not gained; one who acquires health has. “Then this, at least, is not gain: to acquire any possession whatever.” If what he acquires is good, he acquires gain; if bad, loss. Socrates: “Do you see, then, how you are running round back again to the same place? Gain appears good, and loss bad.”

231c “I am at a loss what to say.” “Not unjustly, at any rate, are you at a loss.” The companion means “if, spending less gold or silver, he gets more”.

231d Half a weight of gold for twice that weight of silver: “Loss, surely, Socrates”. Yet he has got more, Socrates objects. The companion: “Not in worth, at any rate, is silver more than gold.” Socrates: “Then, it seems, gain must have this belonging to it as well: worth.”

231e–232a “Then what is of worth is gainful”, and “what is of no worth is without gain”; what is of worth is “worth possessing”, what is worth possessing is “beneficial”, and the beneficial is good; so it is “agreed for the third or fourth time, that what is gainful is good”.

VII. All men lovers of gain (232a–c)

232a “Do you remember, then, where this argument of ours started from?” Socrates: “You disputed with me, holding that good men do not wish to gain all gains, but of gains the good ones, and not the base.”

232b “Then hasn’t the argument now compelled us to agree that all gains, both small and great, are good?” “It has compelled, yes, Socrates—me, at any rate—rather than persuaded.” “Well, perhaps after this it might also persuade you”.

232b–c Decent men “wish for good things, every one”; base men, as the companion himself said, “love gains both small and great”. “Then by your argument all men would be lovers of gain, both the decent and the base.”

232c “Then if anyone reproaches someone with being a lover of gain, he does not reproach him rightly; for even the one who casts this reproach is himself, in fact, such a man.”