Pentathlete and the generalist ideal

Use in the book

Socrates offers the image while still professing uncertainty about the lover’s account. The pentathlete falls short of a specialist racer at racing and of a specialist wrestler at wrestling, but surpasses the other athletes. Applied to education, this means second rank in the understanding of each craft and superiority to other nonspecialists. It does not mean winning every event, being the best athlete overall by a calculated aggregate, or merely knowing a few disconnected facts.

The cultivated lover welcomes the analogy. It allows him to describe breadth as an achievement: he is independent of any one pursuit and has laid hold of all in moderation. There is also dramatic irony in the use of an athletic image to flatter the man who had disparaged his athletic rival. Socrates explains the intellectual’s identity through the very world the intellectual has treated with contempt.

Once the analogy has been accepted, Socrates asks what these runners-up are useful for. In the immediate crises of illness and storm, the specialists who beat them in the relevant event are precisely the people one wants. The favorable ranking against everybody else no longer settles the issue. The argument has moved from comparative accomplishment to a practical demand.

At 138e Socrates explicitly brings the pentathlete back. Should the philosopher be second here too, in the judging and ordering just identified with justice and temperance? The accepted answer is no. One’s household and entrusted decisions require responsible leadership. The analogy is therefore first accepted as a model of cultivated breadth, then rejected as a sufficient model for philosophy. Its explanatory usefulness does not make it the dialogue’s final ideal.

Places to read

1. 135eοἱ πένταθλοι πρὸς τοὺς δρομέας ἢ τοὺς παλαιστάς — The comparison is with event specialists.
2. 136aἀπεικάσας αὐτὸν τῷ πεντάθλῳ — The lover warmly accepts Socrates’ likeness.
3. 138eπένταθλον αὐτὸν δεῖν εἶναι καὶ ὕπακρον — The ending reopens and rejects the second-place ideal in its crucial field.

Translation in this edition

According to edition note 17, Diogenes Laertius reports that Thrasyllus conditionally identified the speaker behind this ideal with Democritus, “if” the dialogue is Plato’s. This is an ancient interpretation reported by the edition, not a personal name supplied by the dialogue. The anonymous lover should not simply be relabeled Democritus.