Chaerephon

Use in the book

Socrates, just back from the siege of Potidaea in the north Aegean, finds a crowd at a wrestling-school. They greet him "from across the room, from every side", but, as Socrates tells it, "Chaerephon, madman that he is, jumped up from the middle of them all, came running over to me, and seized me by the hand" (153b; see Athletics). "Madman" is Socrates' word for his friend, and what it names is affection in a hurry. Chaerephon's first words are about the war: "Socrates … how did you come out of the battle alive?" Socrates answers drily, "Like this, as you see." "Well, the word here," Chaerephon goes on, "is that the fighting was very heavy, and that many people we know were killed in it" (153b–c). Socrates was there, and Chaerephon tells him, "Then come over here … sit down, and tell us all about it"; and, Socrates narrates, "with that he takes me over and sits me down beside Critias, the son of Callaeschrus" (153c; see Callaeschrus). Socrates gives the news, then asks his own questions, about philosophy and the young men (153c–d2).

Chaerephon speaks once more, when Charmides has come in: "Well, Socrates, what do you think of the young man? Hasn't he a lovely face?" "Extraordinarily," Socrates answers, and Chaerephon caps him: "And yet if he were willing to strip … you'd think he had no face at all, his figure is so perfectly beautiful." The others all agree (154d). Socrates turns the praise to the boy's soul, and proposes to strip that first (154d–e; see Beauty). Chaerephon is not named again.

The two scenes can be read as one pattern: Chaerephon sets the subject and Socrates turns it, from the battle to philosophy and from the body to the soul. Chaerephon is then the dialogue's doorkeeper, who brings Socrates in and leaves the conversation to others.

Places to read

1. 153b–cChaerephon jumps up, runs to Socrates and takes his hand, asks how he came out of the battle alive, and seats him beside Critias to tell the news.
2. 154dChaerephon asks Socrates what he thinks of the young man and whether he hasn't a lovely face, and says that stripped the boy would seem to have no face at all; the others agree.

Translation in this edition

"Madman that he is" renders ἅτε καὶ μανικὸς ὤν. Ἅτε with a participle gives a cause that the speaker vouches for himself: the leap is explained by Socrates, the narrator, and the English sets the explanation off as an aside. At 153c the English keeps the present tense of the Greek in the middle of the past narration: "he takes me over and sits me down" renders καθίζει ἄγων, literally "he seats me, leading me". At 154d Chaerephon's two adjectives answer each other in the Greek, εὐπρόσωπος (euprosōpos), "fair of face", and ἀπρόσωπος (aprosōpos), "faceless", and the English gives them as "Hasn't he a lovely face?" and "you'd think he had no face at all". Socrates answers him in his own terms: "strip" renders ἀποδῦναι in Chaerephon's mouth (154d) and ἀπεδύσαμεν in Socrates' (154e), and εἶδος (eidos) is "figure" both in Chaerephon's "his figure is so perfectly beautiful" (154d) and in Socrates' "before we look at his figure" (154e; see Body).

ἄγων (agōn)

Attested: ἄγων (agōn; 153c). To lead or bring. In Socrates' narration, Chaerephon "takes me over and sits me down beside Critias" (153c); the participle is "takes me over". Lemma: ἄγω.

ἀναπηδήσας (anapēdēsas)

Attested: ἀναπηδήσας (anapēdēsas; 153b). To leap up. While the others greet Socrates from across the room, Chaerephon "jumped up from the middle of them all" (153b). Lemma: ἀναπηδάω.

λαβόμενος (labomenos)

Attested: λαβόμενος (labomenos; 153b), λαβεῖν (labein; 171a). To take; in the middle with a genitive, to take hold of. In Socrates' narration, Chaerephon "seized me by the hand" (153b). In πεῖραν λαβεῖν, "to take a trial", it is "test": the temperate man will know that the doctor has some knowledge, "but when he has to test what knowledge it is, won't he look into what it is of?" (171a). Lemma: λαμβάνω.

χειρός (cheiros)

Attested: χειρός (cheiros; 153b). Hand: in Socrates' narration, Chaerephon "seized me by the hand" (153b). Lemma: χείρ.

Χαιρεφῶν

Attested: Χαιρεφῶν (Chairephōn; 153b, 154d), Χαιρεφῶντι (Chairephōnti; 154d). Chaerephon, Socrates' friend, who welcomes him home and seats him beside Critias (153b–c), and praises Charmides' face and figure; "The others all said the same as Chaerephon" (154d). Lemma: Χαιρεφῶν.

Elsewhere in Plato

In the Apology Socrates names the god at Delphi as the witness to his wisdom, and tells how Chaerephon put his question to the Pythia, Apollo's prophetess there. "Chaerephon you know, I take it. He had been my friend since we were young, and he stood with your people's party: he fled with you in this exile and came home again with you. You know too what Chaerephon was like, how vehement in anything he went after. One day he went to Delphi and dared to put this to the oracle (and, as I said, gentlemen, no uproar): he asked whether there was anyone wiser than I. The Pythia's answer was that no one was wiser." Since Chaerephon himself has died, his brother, who is in court, will bear witness to the answer (20e–21a). The answer sends Socrates to question those reputed wise, to find who knows and who only thinks he knows (21b–22e). That is the very power the Charmides, on Critias' definition, credits to temperance (167a), and which the argument then shows such a temperance could not have (170d–171c2), as the edition's note at 170d observes.

In the Gorgias Chaerephon again sets the talk going. Socrates blames him for their late arrival, since he kept them in the market-place, and Chaerephon promises to put it right: Gorgias, the Sicilian teacher of rhetoric, is his friend and will give them a display (447a–b). At Socrates' prompting he puts the first questions, to Gorgias and then to Polus, who offers to answer in Gorgias' place (447c–448c). Later he speaks for the audience who want to hear the argument out (458c), and when Callicles, Gorgias' Athenian host, asks him whether Socrates means all this seriously or is playing, he answers that Socrates seems to him extraordinarily serious, "but you had best ask the man himself" (481b). In the Gorgias, as in the Charmides, he starts the talk and then gives way to others.

Other ancient sources

Comedy made Chaerephon Socrates' shadow. In Aristophanes' Clouds of 423 BC Pheidippides, the horse-mad son of old Strepsiades, knows the men of Socrates' school as "the impostors, the pale ones, the barefoot ones", "among them the wretched Socrates and Chaerephon"; a student reports that "Chaerephon of Sphettus" asked Socrates whether gnats hum through the mouth or through the rump; and when Strepsiades asks which of the students he will come to look like if he studies hard, Socrates tells him, "In your nature you'll be no different from Chaerephon", and he groans, "I'll be half-dead". In the Birds of 414, where Athenians are given the names of birds, Chaerephon's is "bat", and the bat Chaerephon comes up from below to the blood of a sacrifice at the lake where Socrates calls up souls.¹

Xenophon, the Athenian soldier and writer who also knew Socrates, names Chaerephon and his brother Chaerecrates among the friends who kept company with Socrates, not to become speakers in the assembly or the courts, but to become "beautiful and good" and able to deal well with house and servants, kin and friends, city and citizens; none of them, he says, did any wrong or faced any charge. The list answers the accuser's charge that Critias and Alcibiades, the Athenian general, had kept company with Socrates and done the city very great harm. Elsewhere Socrates tries to reconcile the brothers, urging Chaerecrates, the younger, to make the first move, though Chaerecrates complains that Chaerephon is more harm than help to him wherever he is.² In Xenophon's own Apology the oracle Chaerephon brought back is fuller: with many standing by, Apollo answered that no man was more free in spirit than Socrates, or more just, or more temperate.³ The friend who greets Socrates at the start of the dialogue on temperance is, on Xenophon's account, the man to whom the god said that no one was more temperate than Socrates.

Two more things can be read into the opening scene. The man who seats Socrates beside Critias was, a quarter of a century later, among the democrats who fled Athens under the Thirty, the oligarchy Critias led, and came back with the people in 403 (Apology 21a; edition's note at 153c).⁴ And Plato's Chaerephon, who jumps up and runs, can be read as an answer to the comic one, pale, half-dead and a bat.