From the book
The Lovers
Plato · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordMna is a mina, a unit in the monetary comparison; drachmē is a drachma.
- In The LoversSocrates offers five or six minae for a carpenter and says a top master builder could not be bought even for ten thousand drachmas.
- In this editionThe conversion and the comparison with sixteen carpenters come from edition note 16.
- A place to readπέντε ἢ ἓξ μνῶν — The ordinary carpenter’s hypothetical price is a range.
Meaning
Mna is a mina, a unit in the monetary comparison; drachmē is a drachma. The source uses their genitive plurals, mnōn and drachmōn, for the amounts of the purchase. Priasthai is the infinitive “to buy”; the attested priaio is a second-person optative within a hypothetical statement, “you could buy.” The figures concern the purchase of a skilled person, not the purchase price of a completed building.
Use in the book
Socrates offers five or six minae for a carpenter and says a top master builder could not be bought even for ten thousand drachmas. With the edition’s conversion of a mina to one hundred drachmas, the carpenter’s range is 500–600 drachmas. Ten thousand is one hundred minae. It is already more than sixteen times the higher carpenter price, and the master builder remains beyond that offered sum.
The asymmetry matters. The carpenter has a stated range, while the master builder has a rejected amount, a lower bound on what would suffice rather than an exact price. A table that assigned “master builder: 10,000 drachmas” would therefore erase the force of “not even.” Nor can this small example support a general reconstruction of wages, purchasing power or ordinary prices across ancient Greece.
Its philosophical work is comparative. The lover has separated understanding from handiwork. Socrates places exceptional understanding at such a height of rarity and value that acquiring it across several crafts looks impossible. Monetary magnitude makes the difference in competence legible, but the issue is how demanding the proposed education would be. The lover responds by reducing the required precision, not by contesting the figures.
Places to read
Translation in this edition
The conversion and the comparison with sixteen carpenters come from edition note 16. No modern currency equivalent is offered: the supplied text does not provide the economic evidence needed for a responsible conversion. Its own monetary units are sufficient to explain the scale of the rhetorical contrast.