Time and place

Use in the book

Socrates asks who knows the worth of plants, including the time and place in which they are worth planting. The companion answers that a farmer does. These circumstances qualify the practical evaluation: knowing a plant’s worth is not presented as recognising an isolated label independently of what is to be done with it. Suitability is related to an activity undertaken somewhere and at some time.

The question also deliberately makes itself sound clever. Socrates interrupts to say that he too is throwing in one of the wise expressions used by people clever at lawsuits. The rhyming pair therefore operates at two levels. It specifies the content of agricultural competence, and it exhibits a verbal ornament that the speaker acknowledges as borrowed. The practical point does not cease to be serious because its phrasing is playful.

This qualification helps identify what the following argument presupposes. A plant known to be worthless for planting in the relevant circumstances does not promise the farmer gain. That conclusion need not imply that the plant has no possible worth anywhere or ever. Socrates’ opening “worth nothing” is sweeping; the expert question introduces a context for applying it. The relation between absolute-sounding worthlessness and situated practical judgment deserves attention, especially when the later argument broadens the claim to all gain.

The two nouns do not return as a pair. Place nevertheless becomes important in the account of Hipparchus’ educational arrangements at 228d–229b2: Herms stand on roads between town and demes, and one saying is located on the Steirian road. Those passages use other vocabulary. They show instruction organised by location, but they do not themselves renew the agricultural rhyme or establish that Hipparchus possesses the farmer’s kind of expertise.

At 231d–e worth is again distinguished from a feature that can be measured without understanding its relevance: more silver by weight need not mean more value than gold. As with planting circumstances, the crucial question is what the comparison measures. The dialogue never turns either example into a comprehensive account of how context fixes value.

Places to read

1. 225cὥρᾳ καὶ χώρᾳ — The grammatical forms rhyme and specify the circumstances of planting.
2. 225cἄξια φυτευθῆναι — The relevant worth is worth being planted.
3. 228dἐν μέσῳ τοῦ ἄστεος καὶ τῶν δήμων ἑκάστων — A later arrangement of education depends on location, under different wording.

Translation in this edition

The edition gives “in what time and clime,” explicitly reproducing a rhyme rather than translating chōra by the more ordinary “place.” Its note glosses the Greek as “season and place.” “Clime” should therefore not be narrowed to temperature or weather alone. Burnet’s apparatus reports the printed order “time and place” in B and the reversed order in T. Both preserve the pairing; the edition’s English follows the printed order.