Theages

Introduction

The dialogue

The Theages is a conversation of three: Demodocus, an older Athenian of standing, his son Theages, and Socrates. Demodocus asks Socrates for a private word; at his suggestion they withdraw into the stoa of Zeus Eleutherios, on the west side of the Agora (121a). There is no narrator and no frame: the dialogue is spoken from beginning to end, and Burnet names the speakers at the head of each speech. Later Socrates tells three stories in which others speak, and the English sets their words in quotation marks, as Burnet does.

It is short, eleven pages of Stephanus’ edition (121a–131a), seventeen of Burnet’s. The ancient arrangement of Plato’s works by Thrasyllus, which Diogenes Laertius preserves (3.59), puts it first in the fifth tetralogy, before the Charmides, the Laches and the Lysis, with the subtitle “or On Philosophy”, and classes it as “maieutic”, a dialogue that brings out what is in the respondent; Burnet’s third volume opens with it. Whether Plato wrote it has been doubted since the early nineteenth century, when Schleiermacher, Plato’s German translator, judged it not to be his, and many scholars since have placed it among the works of his followers; the ancient catalogue gave it to Plato, and this edition translates it as the tradition gives it, without taking a side.

The conversation can be dated only from inside. Archelaus is “this new ruler in Macedonia” (124d), and he came to the throne about 413 BC; the disaster in Sicily, which ended in 413, is past (129c–d); and Sannion has “gone now with Thrasyllus on campaign, straight for Ephesus and Ionia” (129d), an expedition that sailed at the beginning of summer, in 409 by the usual reckoning. Taken strictly, these words set the conversation in that summer, ten years before Socrates’ trial.

The question and the answers

Demodocus has a son who “desires, Socrates, so he says, to become wise” (121c–d). The desire “is not ignoble, but it is unsafe”: some of the boy’s own age and deme, his father thinks, unsettle him with arguments they repeat from memory, and he thinks fit that his father should “pay money to one of the sophists, who will make him wise” (121d). The father has held out, but can hold out no longer, and has come for just this, to introduce him to one of “those who are thought to be sophists”; Socrates has appeared “at just the right time”, the man whose advice he would most wish to take (122a).

Socrates turns the request into a question. Before they deliberate, they must agree what they are deliberating about; and before that, they must find out “what it is that he desires” (122c–d). So the question of the dialogue is put to the son: what is the wisdom he desires? Socrates’ first examples, piloting, “the wisdom by which men pilot ships”, and charioteering (123b–c), are wisdoms with names; the one Theages desires rules men, and it is not medicine, music, gymnastics, farming or carpentry (123d–124b). Theages answers, under questioning, that it is “the one by which we rule those in the city” (124a), and agrees when Socrates puts it more fully: the one by which we rule “all these, and the farmers themselves, and the carpenters, and all the craftsmen, and private persons, and women and men” (124b). Socrates runs through rulers who ruled these same people, Aegisthus, Peleus, Periander, Archelaus and Hippias, and asks what title Hippias and Periander have on account of that rule; Theages answers, “Tyrants, I think; what else?” (124c–e). Then the desire is a tyrant’s: “You rascal! So it was in desiring to be our tyrant that you have long been blaming your father” (124e–125a).

The argument’s main stretch

The middle of the dialogue asks who could teach such a wisdom. Socrates borrows a line he gives to Euripides, “Wise are tyrants by being with the wise”, and asks what the wise must be wise in, on the pattern of farmers, cooks and wrestlers (125b–d); the answer, “the things that Anacreon said Callicrite knew”, “tyrannical things”, is a joke, and Theages takes it as one at his own expense (125d–e). Theages protests that he is being mocked. He would pray, he admits, to become a tyrant over all men if he could, and if not, over as many as possible, as would Socrates and all other men, and “still more, perhaps, to become a god”; but what he desires is to rule “not by force, at least, nor as the tyrants do, but over those who are willing, as the other men of repute in the city do”, like Themistocles, Pericles and Cimon (125e–126a).

Then, Socrates says, he should go to the statesmen, as one who would become a clever horseman goes to those skilled in horsemanship, and whichever he chooses will be with him for nothing (126b–127a). Theages has heard the argument Socrates is said to make against this: “the sons of these statesmen are no better than the sons of the shoemakers” (126d). He wants Socrates himself: “For if you were willing to be with me, that suffices, and I look for no one else” (127a); and Demodocus, ashamed even to say how much he wishes it, begs them both, Socrates to be willing to be with the boy and the boy to seek no one else (127b–d).

The ending

Socrates answers that he wonders where either of them got the idea that he could benefit the boy more than his own father could (127d–e). The father is older, has “ruled in many offices”, and is honored; the famous sophists, Prodicus, Gorgias and Polus, are better choices; Socrates knows “nothing except a certain small subject, the things of love”, though at that subject he counts himself “clever at beyond anyone” (127e–128b). Theages knows young men who were worth nothing before they were with Socrates and “in a very short time … appear better than all those they were worse than before” (128c). Socrates tells him what this is: “there is something daimonic that has accompanied me by a divine lot, beginning in my childhood. It is a voice, which, whenever it comes, always signals to me a turning away from whatever I am about to do, but never turns me towards anything” (128d). It turns his friends away too, and he gives instances of the sign at work: Charmides, who trained for the stadion at Nemea against it (128e); Timarchus, who went out to commit a murder against it and was put to death (129a–c); the expedition to Sicily (129c–d); and Sannion, gone with Thrasyllus to Ephesus (129d). The same power governs “being with those who spend time with me” (129e): “it opposes many”, some are with him and gain nothing, and some “make progress quickly, at once”, and of these, some keep it and some lose it, like Aristides son of Lysimachus, who made progress when he sat near Socrates and touched him, and lost it all when he went to sea (130a–e). “If it is dear to the god, you will make very great progress, and quickly; if not, not” (130e). Theages proposes that they make trial of the daimonic thing by being with one another, and, if it does not allow them, deliberate at once whether to be with someone else or to try “to soothe the divine itself that comes to you with prayers and sacrifices” (131a). Demodocus agrees, and Socrates gives way: “Well, if it seems we should do so, let us do so.”

What is most exposed

A reader who knows the Apology will find Socrates’ sign here doing more than it does there. In the Apology it is a voice that turns him away and never turns him towards anything (31c–d), as here (128d); but in the Theages it also turns away his friends, foretells what will happen to men on campaign, and decides which of his companions will profit from being with him. In Xenophon the sign does both: Socrates said that the daimonic thing signalled to him beforehand what he should do and what he should not (Memorabilia 4.8.1), and he told many of his companions to do some things and not to do others, as it signalled (1.1.4). In the Theaetetus, too, the daimonic thing that comes to Socrates prevents him from being with some of those who come back to him and allows others, and these make progress again (151a). The reader should keep these accounts apart, and not read this one into the Apology.

Socrates’ teaching, as Aristides describes it, is not teaching. “I never learned anything from you, as you yourself know; but I made progress whenever I was with you”, most of all “when I sat beside you, keeping hold of you and touching you” (130d–e). The story is comic, and Socrates neither explains it nor qualifies it; he draws from it only this: “Such, then, Theages, is our being with one another” (130e). On this reading, the question the dialogue raised at the start, what a young man gains from being with a wise man, is answered by a power that no one can teach or buy.

The dialogue is also exposed where it leans on others. The line of verse Socrates gives to Euripides is given to Euripides in the Republic too (568a–b), but Aulus Gellius found it in a play of Sophocles (Attic Nights 13.19.2); the song of Callicrite is known only from this passage (125d); and the persons of the stories at 129a–b are, for the most part, known from nothing else.

The manner

The comedy begins with the father. Demodocus opens with the farmer’s view of children: “the planting of this son here—whether one should name it planting or begetting—has proved the easiest thing of all, but his rearing has been troublesome” (121c). Socrates turns everything gravely: the boy’s name is “befitting the sacred” (122d–e); advice “is indeed said to be a sacred thing” (122b); the would-be tyrant gets “You rascal!”, and the father a mock reproach: “you have somewhere you could have sent him and so made him a craftsman of the wisdom he desires, and then you begrudge it him” (125a). The line of Euripides is varied on farmers, cooks and wrestlers until it yields Callicrite (125b–e), and Theages, who has seen where it is going, says, “You have long been mocking me, Socrates, and joking with me” (125e). Socrates’ refusal at 127e–128b is the familiar self-deprecation turned into a list of better teachers.

Aristides’ confession is the dialogue’s most comic page. He was once a match for anyone in argument; now “I flee if I so much as perceive that anyone is educated, so ashamed am I of my own poor quality”. Did the power leave him suddenly? “Little by little” (130c). It came in degrees: some when he was only in the same house, more in the same room, much more when he looked at Socrates as he spoke, and most when he sat beside him and touched him; “But now,” he said, “all that state has drained away” (130e).

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. The speakers are named at the head of each speech, as in Burnet. Words in square brackets [ ] are ones Burnet thought spurious; they are not translated. The words enclosed by the obeli † † at 129a are ones Burnet thought corrupt; they are translated as printed, between the same signs, with a note. The line of verse at 125b and the lines made on its pattern are set as verse on both pages. 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 this about its persons. Demodocus is older than Socrates, has “ruled in many offices, and the greatest, for the Athenians”, and is honored by “the Anagyrasians, your fellow demesmen”, above all (127e); he farms, or speaks as one who does (121b). Theages is young, and his father thinks him unsettled by “those of his own age and his own deme, coming down to the town” (121d); he has been taught letters, the cithara and wrestling (122e), and wants to rule the city as Themistocles and Pericles did (126a). Socrates is at leisure (121a) and holds no office (127e), and calls himself knowing “nothing except a certain small subject, the things of love” (128b).

The rest comes from other sources. In the Apology Socrates points to “Paralius here, son of Demodocus, whose brother was Theages” among the men present at his trial (33e); the past tense suggests that Theages had died by then. In the Republic Socrates speaks of “the bridle of our companion Theages”: ill health kept him out of politics and so held him to philosophy (496b–c). Thucydides names a Demodocus among the Athenian generals of 424 BC (4.75.1), who may be the same man. Aristides son of Lysimachus and Thucydides son of Melesias, grandsons of the statesmen whose names they bear, are the boys whose education their fathers ask about in the Laches (178a–179d); in the Theaetetus Socrates names Aristides among those who left him too soon (150e–151a). Charmides, son of Glaucon and Plato’s uncle, is the young man of the Charmides.