Callaeschrus

Use in the book

Critias enters the story by his father's name. Socrates is just back from the siege of Potidaea, the rebel city in the north Aegean, and his friend Chaerephon, eager for news of the battle, "takes me over and sits me down beside Critias, the son of Callaeschrus", Socrates narrates (153c; see Chaerephon). Critias soon names the boy on his way in: "Charmides, our uncle Glaucon's son. My cousin" (154b). He is also the boy's guardian (155a), and Socrates traces Charmides' gift for poetry to the family's kinship with Solon (155a).

The father's name returns at the turn of the argument. Critias has said that temperance alone of all the kinds of knowledge is knowledge of itself and of the others (166c, 166e), and has granted that it is knowledge of the lack of knowledge too (166e). Socrates will not accept it as temperance until he has looked into whether it would benefit us (169a–b2; see Benefit), and turns to Critias: "So you, son of Callaeschrus, since you lay it down that temperance is this, knowledge of knowledge and indeed of the lack of knowledge, first show this: that what I just mentioned is possible; and then, besides its being possible, that it is beneficial too" (169b–c). Critias cannot. "Used to being admired on every occasion", he is ashamed in front of the company and keeps covering up his perplexity (169c–d; see Agreement and concession).

Socrates has used the address by the father's name once before in the dialogue, to the boy: "dear son of Glaucon" (158b). At 169b it can be read as calling Critias to account in his family's name, before the company whose admiration he is used to, at the moment the burden of proof passes to him.

Places to read

1. 153cChaerephon seats Socrates beside "Critias, the son of Callaeschrus".
2. 169b–cSocrates, addressing Critias as "son of Callaeschrus", asks him to show first that knowledge of knowledge is possible and then that it is beneficial.

Translation in this edition

"Critias, the son of Callaeschrus" renders Κριτίαν τὸν Καλλαίσχρου (153c), literally "Critias, the one of Callaeschrus"; the Greek has no word for "son", which English needs. At 169b "So you, son of Callaeschrus" renders σὺ οὖν, ὦ παῖ Καλλαίσχρου, and here "son" does render a Greek word, παῖ, "child", as it does in "dear son of Glaucon" (158b; see Age and maturity).

Καλλαῖσχρος

Attested: Καλλαίσχρου (Kallaischrou; 153c, 169b). Callaeschrus, father of Critias, named only in his son's patronymic: in Socrates' narration, "Critias, the son of Callaeschrus" (153c), and in Socrates' address to Critias, "son of Callaeschrus" (169b). Lemma: Κάλλαισχρος.

Elsewhere in Plato

Plato names Callaeschrus once more, in the Protagoras, and again only as a father: Socrates tells how, just after he and his friend Hippocrates had come into the house of Callias, the host of the visiting sophists, "Alcibiades the beautiful", the future general, and "Critias son of Callaeschrus" came in behind them (316a). In the Timaeus the Critias who speaks calls Dropides "our great-grandfather" and an elder Critias "our grandfather" (20e), without naming his father; if he is the son of Callaeschrus, which the dialogue does not say, then Callaeschrus was the son of that elder Critias and the grandson of Dropides. The address by the father's name that Socrates uses at 169b is one he uses often, to boys and grown men alike: it opens the Alcibiades I, "son of Cleinias" (103a), and in the Symposium he says it to the doctor Eryximachus, "son of Acumenus" (198a).

Other ancient sources

Outside Plato, too, Callaeschrus is chiefly a father's name. Athenaeus, whose Deipnosophists (The Learned Banqueters) of about AD 200 is a vast miscellany of quotations, cites verses from the Elegies of "Critias son of Callaeschrus".¹ Diogenes Laertius, the biographer of the philosophers, probably of the third century AD, sets out the family at the start of his life of Plato. Plato's mother Perictione traced her descent to Solon, "for his brother was Dropides, whose son was Critias, whose son was Callaeschrus, whose sons were Critias, the one of the Thirty, and Glaucon, whose children were Charmides and Perictione", and so Plato was "sixth from Solon".² The Thirty were the oligarchy that ruled Athens in 404–403 BC, and their Critias is the Critias of the dialogue. Read as it stands, Diogenes' sentence makes Glaucon a son of Callaeschrus and a brother of Critias, and so makes Charmides Critias' nephew; in the dialogue Critias calls Glaucon "our uncle" and Charmides "My cousin" (154b). It also makes Critias son of Dropides the grandfather of the Critias of the Thirty, where on the modern reconstruction that the edition's note at 157e follows he was his great-great-grandfather. Diogenes' line disagrees with the dialogue about the cousins and with the modern reconstruction about the generations, but it agrees with the dialogue on the one fact the dialogue gives: Callaeschrus was Critias' father.