Hipparchus

Introduction

The dialogue

The Hipparchus, or The Lover of Gain, is a conversation between Socrates and an unnamed companion (hetairos) about what the love of gain is and who the lovers of gain are. It opens abruptly, with Socrates’ “What, then, is the love of gain?” (225a), as though a conversation were already under way; no place or occasion is given, and no one else speaks. The title comes from Hipparchus, son of the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus, whose story Socrates tells in the middle of the argument (228b–229d). The dialogue fills pages 225 to 232 of the second volume of Stephanus’ edition, by whose pages Plato is still cited, and twelve pages of Burnet’s Oxford text.

The ancient arrangement of Plato’s works by Thrasyllus, which Diogenes Laertius preserves (3.59), places it third in the fourth tetralogy, after the two Alcibiades and before the Lovers, with the subtitle “or The Lover of Gain”, and classes it as “ethical”; Burnet’s second volume prints the four in that order. Its authorship was doubted in antiquity: Aelian, writing about AD 200, retells its account of Hipparchus as Plato’s, “if the Hipparchus is really Plato’s” (Historical Miscellany 8.2). Most modern scholars do not think it his, though it has had defenders, and no date for it is certain. Its nearest companion among the works handed down under Plato’s name is the Minos, likewise doubted, which also opens with a bare question from Socrates to an unnamed companion, “What is law for us?”, sets beside it the point that law does not differ from law in being law, as gold does not differ from gold, and turns to a portrait of an ancient ruler.

The question and the answers

The companion gives three answers, and Socrates tests each. The first is that lovers of gain are those “who think fit to gain from things worth nothing” (225a). Do they know that these things are worth nothing? If not, the companion is calling them senseless; but he means “unscrupulous and base, and no match for gain”, men who know and “yet dare to love gain, out of shamelessness” (225a–b). Socrates goes through the farmer, the horseman, the pilot, the general and the flute-player: none who knows that his plants, food, tackle, arms or instruments are worth nothing thinks he gains from them (225b–226c). So “in the way you say … there is no one among men who is a lover of gain” (226d).

The second answer is that lovers of gain are those who, “out of insatiability, every time crave prodigiously even things quite small and worth little or nothing” (226d–e). Not knowingly, Socrates replies, for that was found impossible; so they are ignorant, and think that “things worth nothing are worth a great deal” (226e). He turns to gain itself. The lovers of gain love gain; gain is the opposite of loss; men are harmed by loss, so loss is bad; “Then gain is good” (226e–227a). But every man loves good things, so “In this way, in turn, all men appear to be lovers of gain” (227c).

The third answer is that the lover of gain is the man “who is in earnest about those things, and thinks fit to gain from them, from which decent men do not dare to gain” (227c–d). Socrates says they agreed “just now” that “to gain is to be benefited”, and that “everyone wishes for good things, and always”; so good men too wish to have all gains, “if indeed they are good things” (227d). The companion excepts the gains from which they are going to be harmed, that is, going to “suffer loss”: men suffer loss “both by loss and by base gain” (227e). But no decent and good thing is base, and gain, the opposite of loss, was agreed to be good; so the companion is “trying to deceive me”, Socrates says, and the companion answers that “it is you who are deceiving me, and I don’t know how you twist things up and down in the arguments” (228a).

The argument’s main stretch

Socrates replies with a story. He would not deceive the companion, for he obeys “a good and wise man”: Hipparchus, “the eldest and wisest of Pisistratus’ sons”, who brought Homer’s epics to Athens and made the rhapsodes recite them in order at the Panathenaea, sent a fifty-oared ship for Anacreon, kept Simonides about him, and, to educate the country people, set up Herms along the roads inscribed with his own sayings in verse, so that the Athenians would think them wiser than the inscriptions at Delphi (228b–e). One says “This is Hipparchus’ memorial: go your way with just thoughts”, another “This is Hipparchus’ memorial: do not deceive a friend” (229a–b). Socrates adds that the Athenians lived “nearly as in the reign of Cronus” except in the three years of Hippias’ tyranny after Hipparchus’ death, and that, as the more cultivated tell it, Hipparchus was killed not over Harmodius’ sister but because Aristogeiton, who had educated Harmodius, “thought Hipparchus his opponent”, and a young man whom Harmodius loved, after keeping company with Hipparchus, despised them both (229b–d).

The companion is not won over: either Socrates does not think him a friend, or he does not obey Hipparchus (229d–e). So Socrates offers, “just as when playing draughts”, to take back whatever the companion wishes of what has been said (229e). The companion takes back the claim that all gaining is good: some gain is good and some bad (230a). But, Socrates asks, is good gain any more gain than bad? Good food and bad food are “equally food”; so with drink, and a decent man is no more a man than a base one; so “why ever do you call both of them gain? What do you see in both that is the same?” (230a–231a). He offers an answer himself: gain is “every possession that one acquires either without spending anything, or by spending less and getting more” (231a). A man who feasts at no cost and acquires a disease has acquired no gain, and one who acquires health has; so gain is not “to acquire any possession whatever”, and “Gain appears good, and loss bad” once more (231b–c). The companion is “at a loss what to say”, and tries again: he means spending less gold or silver and getting more (231c). But a man who spends half a weight of gold and gets twice the weight in silver has got more and lost; so “gain must have this belonging to it as well: worth” (231d). What is of worth is gainful; what is of worth is worth possessing, what is worth possessing is beneficial, and what is beneficial is good; so “for the third or fourth time”, what is gainful is good (231e–232a).

The ending

Socrates reminds the companion how the argument began: he “disputed with me, holding that good men do not wish to gain all gains, but of gains the good ones, and not the base” (232a). Socrates asks whether the argument has not now “compelled us to agree that all gains, both small and great, are good”, and the companion grants it: “It has compelled, yes, Socrates—me, at any rate—rather than persuaded” (232b). Decent men wish for all good things; base men, by the companion’s own account, love gains small and great; so “all men would be lovers of gain, both the decent and the base”, and whoever reproaches another with the love of gain “is himself, in fact, such a man” (232b–c). There the dialogue stops.

What is most exposed

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

First, it may not be Plato’s. Aelian’s doubt is shared by most modern scholars, though the dialogue has had defenders; this edition calls it Plato’s only in the sense that the tradition handed it down among his works.

Second, the argument proves its conclusion by moves that are not all sound, and the companion says as much. At 227d Socrates says that they “agreed just now that to gain is to be benefited”, though nothing so worded was agreed (see the note there). Gain is shown to be good from its being the opposite of loss, which is bad (227a), as though the opposite of a bad thing must be good. On one reading, the word “gain” serves both for the gaining and for the thing gained, and “good” both for what benefits and for what is decent, and the conclusion that every man is a lover of gain depends on letting the meanings run together. The companion’s own verdict on the argument is that it has “compelled … rather than persuaded” him (232b). Whether the dialogue means its reader to find these faults, as an exercise, or makes them unawares, is a question it leaves open.

Third, its history is not the historians’. Thucydides insists, against what most Athenians believed, that Hippias was the eldest son of Pisistratus and the ruler (1.20.2, 6.54.2, 6.55), and tells how Hipparchus was killed over a love affair and the insult to Harmodius’ sister (6.54–59); the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians gives the love to a younger brother, Thessalus (18.2). The Hipparchus makes Hipparchus the eldest and wisest of the sons, the tyranny last only three years, and the murder the work of rivals in wisdom (228b, 229b–d), and no surviving source independent of it tells the story so; Aelian, who repeats it, names the dialogue as his source. Whether Socrates’ praise of a tyrant as “a fine and good man” (228c) is meant straight or with irony, the dialogue does not say. Some of it is confirmed: a Herm inscribed in Hipparchus’ manner survives, found at Koropi in Attica, whose verse gives its place as “midway between Kephale and the town” (IG I³ 1023).

Fourth, the lover of gain was a figure of reproach, and the dialogue knows it. The companion’s first answer calls him “unscrupulous and base” (225a–b), and in the Republic Plato calls the appetitive part of the soul “money-loving” and “gain-loving”, and names a kind of man, beside the lover of wisdom and the lover of victory, after it (9.581a–c). The Hipparchus ends by making everyone such a man.

The manner

The comedy is of the argument and of the persons. The companion answers at first like a man with a grievance, and Socrates tells him so (“as though someone had done you some wrong”, 225b). Socrates asks who knows the worth of plants “in what time and clime they are worth planting”, a rhyme in the Greek too, so that “we too may throw in some of those wise sayings with which the men who are clever at lawsuits speak finely” (225c). He calls the companion “my wonderful friend” (226d) and “my sweetest friend” (227d) as he corners him, and “most courageous of all men” (232a) when he will not give in. When the companion accuses him of deceiving, he cries “Speak auspiciously!” and appeals to a tyrant who set up his verses on the roads, “plotting in turn to educate those in the country” (228b–d), and whose verse “do not deceive a friend” is his answer to the charge (229b). Simonides, whom Hipparchus kept about him, “persuading him with large fees and gifts” (228c), was a byword for the love of money: in Aristophanes the aged Sophocles is said to be turning into Simonides, since for gain he “would put to sea even on a wicker mat” (Peace 695–699), and Aelian, retelling this passage, adds that no one will deny he loved money (Historical Miscellany 8.2). The draughts game, in which a move is taken back on request (229e–230a), turns the companion’s complaint into a courtesy. And the last sentence turns the dialogue’s question against its asker: the one who reproaches another as a lover of gain is one himself. The translation tries to keep all of this and to add nothing; where the English cannot carry a joke, 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, with the Stephanus section letters in the margin so that any passage can be found on both sides. A word in angle brackets ⟨ ⟩ in the Greek is not in the manuscripts and has been supplied by a scholar’s conjecture; it is translated. A word in square brackets [ ] is one Burnet thought spurious; it is not translated. The two verses of Hipparchus quoted at 229a–b are set as verse on both pages, and the Delphic sayings at 228e stand in quotation marks, as in Burnet. The Key Words of the Dialogue, which follow, explain the words on which the argument turns and how they are rendered. At the back, the Outline gives the argument’s joints by Stephanus page, the Editorial Note sets out the conventions of both pages and explains the abbreviations of the apparatus, 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 establishes little about the companion. He is younger than Socrates (“an older man by now, when you are so young”, 225d–226a), an Athenian (“A fellow citizen of mine and yours”, 228b), and Socrates calls him his friend (229b). Of Socrates it says only that he is the older man and an Athenian, and that he obeys Hipparchus’ inscription, or says he does.

The rest comes from other sources. Pisistratus was tyrant of Athens, with interruptions, from about 561 BC until his death about 528. His sons Hippias and Hipparchus held power after him; Hipparchus was killed by Harmodius and Aristogeiton at the Panathenaea of 514, and Hippias was driven out four years later and went over to the Persians. The two killers were honoured at Athens as tyrant-slayers. Anacreon of Teos and Simonides of Ceos were lyric poets of the later sixth century; Simonides, the younger, lived until about 468; the Constitution of the Athenians also makes Hipparchus the one who sent for them (18.1). The rhapsodes were professional reciters of epic, and the Panathenaea the festival of Athena at Athens, at which they competed.