The Sons of Pericles

by Plato, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Themistocles had a son called Cleophantus, and he had him taught to ride. The boy learned well. He could stand upright on the back of a moving horse and throw a javelin from there, and people came to watch him do it. Aristides had a son called Lysimachus and gave him the best masters in Athens. Pericles had two sons, Paralus and Xanthippus, and made them the foremost horsemen in the city, and had them trained in music and gymnastics besides. Thucydides, son of Melesias, had two sons and made them the best wrestlers in Athens; he sent one to Xanthias and the other to Eudorus, who were the masters of the art in those days.

I set this list down in a dialogue, the one that carries Meno's name, and I put it into the mouth of Socrates, who is speaking to a man named Anytus. The list makes a simple point. Each of these fathers was a good man by the judgement of the city, and each was rich and willing to spend money on his sons. Each had his son taught everything that a master could teach. And not one of the sons became what his father had been. If the thing that made Pericles Pericles could have been passed on, Pericles would have passed it on. He did not grudge his sons a riding master. Why would he grudge them himself?

Anytus does not like the argument. He tells Socrates that he is too ready to speak ill of people, and that in most cities, and in Athens especially, it is easier to do a man harm than good. Then he warns him to be careful.

I wrote that scene after Socrates was dead. Every reader in Athens who read it knew what I knew, that Anytus was one of the three men who brought the charge. So the scene is not innocent, and I will not pretend it is. But I do not want to talk about the trial, not yet. I want to talk about the question, because I put it to Anytus deliberately, and I have never been able to leave it alone. Can goodness be taught?

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Let us begin, as we should, by asking what we mean.

When we say that a thing is taught, we seem to mean something like this. There is someone who has it, and someone who does not. The one who has it does something, by speech or by showing, and after a while the other has it too. And we can check. The riding master puts the boy on the horse; either the boy stays on or he falls off. The wrestling master can say: this one is ready, that one is not yet. Where there is teaching there are teachers, there are learners, and there is some way of telling whether the thing has passed from the one to the other.

That is the test Socrates applies in the dialogue. If goodness is taught, he says, there will be teachers of it, and we ought to be able to point to them. He proposes two candidates. The first are the men who said, in those years, that they could teach it for a fee: the sophists, Protagoras and the rest. Anytus will not hear of them. He calls them a pest and a corruption. Socrates asks him whether one of them has ever done him an injury, and Anytus says that he has never had anything to do with any of them and never will. Then how, Socrates asks, can you know whether there is any good in them, if you have never met one? Anytus says that he knows what sort of men they are, whether he has met them or not.

I should like you to notice that. Anytus is certain about something he has never examined, and his certainty is exactly as strong as it would be if he had examined it. That is the condition I spent my life writing against, and I put it into the mouth of a man who helped to kill my teacher, and I gave him the second candidate to propose. Who, then, teaches goodness? Any gentleman of Athens, Anytus says. Any decent citizen can make a young man better than a sophist can.

And so Socrates produces the list. Themistocles, Aristides, Pericles, Thucydides. These were the best gentlemen Athens had. If any gentleman can teach goodness, these could, and they had every reason to. They did not. Their sons could stand on horses.

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I want to be fair to Anytus, more fair than the dialogue is, because the argument has a hole in it and I knew it when I wrote it.

The list proves that four men did not pass their goodness to their sons. It does not prove that they could not. Perhaps they were busy. Perhaps the sons were dull. Perhaps there is a kind of goodness that can be taught to a stranger and not to one's own child, as a physician may treat everyone in the city except his wife. And there is a worse difficulty. A man may be very good at a thing and very bad at explaining it. The best horseman in Athens is not always the best riding master. If Pericles governed well but could not say how, that would show something about Pericles. It would show nothing about whether the thing he had could be put into words by someone else.

So the argument, taken by itself, is weak. Anytus could have said so. He did not, because he was angry, and anger is a poor examiner.

But I did not leave the matter there, in that dialogue or in others. In the one that carries Protagoras' name I made the question face the other way. There Socrates begins by saying, with the same list of good fathers and dull sons, that goodness does not seem to be teachable, and Protagoras answers him with a long and beautiful story about how the gods gave every human being a share of justice and shame, so that the whole city teaches goodness all the time, as the whole city teaches its children to speak Greek. Nobody is the teacher of Greek, Protagoras says, because everybody is. It is a good answer. I gave it to him on purpose, and I gave it all the eloquence I had.

Then the two of them argue for hours, and by the end each has walked to the other's position. Socrates is arguing that every part of goodness is a kind of knowledge, and knowledge is the one thing that can certainly be taught. Protagoras is insisting that goodness is something other than knowledge, which would make it the hardest thing in the world to teach. Socrates says that the argument itself, if it had a voice, would laugh at them both. And the dialogue ends with nobody having changed the question into an answer.

Some readers have called this a failure of nerve, and that a philosopher who has an opinion should state it. I have an opinion. I will come to it. But I want you to see first that the reversal is not a trick. It is what actually happens to two honest people who take the question seriously for long enough. Each discovers that his own position, followed to the end, needs the other's.

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Here is the opinion. It comes near the end of the Meno, after the list and the quarrel with Anytus, when Socrates and Meno are alone again.

There are two ways of being guided rightly to a place. A man may know the road to Larissa because he has walked it. Another may never have walked it but have a true belief about which road it is. As long as the belief is true, he will arrive as surely as the first man. For the purposes of getting to Larissa, true opinion is as good a guide as knowledge.

Then where is the difference? Socrates answers with the statues of Daedalus. You will remember that the old craftsman's figures were said to be so lifelike that they moved, and that if you did not fasten them they would walk out of the house. A loose statue of Daedalus is not worth much, he says, because it will not stay. A fastened one is worth a great deal. True opinions are like this. While they stay, they do everything that knowledge does. But they do not care to stay for long, and they run away out of the human soul, until one makes them fast with causal reasoning. When they are fastened, they become knowledge, and they abide.

Now look again at Pericles. Suppose he had true opinion about how to govern Athens: true, and unfastened. He knew what to do, but he did not know why it was right. Then he could act well for thirty years and still be unable to give it to anyone, because what he had was not the kind of thing that can be handed over. You cannot hand over a belief that you cannot account for. You can only tell it, and a belief that has merely been told to someone is the loosest statue of all. Paralus would hear his father's opinions at dinner every night of his life, and they would walk out of him before morning.

That is why the Meno ends where it ends. If goodness were knowledge, it could be taught, and there would be teachers. There appear to be none. So the goodness of the good men we have seen was not knowledge. It was true opinion, and it came to them, Socrates says, by a divine dispensation, when it comes at all, without understanding. They were like the prophets and the inspired poets, who say many true things and do not know what they are saying. And then he adds one more thing, almost as an afterthought. If there were ever a statesman who could make another man a statesman, he would be among the living what Homer says Tiresias is among the dead. He alone has understanding; the rest are flitting shades.

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I have to stop here and ask myself a question, because I can hear you asking it.

In the years when I was writing these things I kept a garden outside the walls, by the grove of the hero Academus, and set up a school there. Young men came to it from all over Greece. One of them arrived when he was seventeen and stayed for twenty years. If I believed that goodness comes only by divine dispensation, what was I doing? What did I think a school was for?

I could answer by saying that I taught geometry and astronomy and dialectic, which certainly can be taught, and left goodness to the gods. That answer is false, and I will not give it. I founded the school because I hoped the Meno was wrong, or rather because I hoped that its last sentence was not a joke. Somewhere between knowledge, which would be teachable, and true opinion, which arrives by luck and leaves without notice, there might be a way of tying the statue down. The dialogue names it, and then hurries past it. The fastening is done by reasoning out the cause, and that process, Socrates says, is recollection.

Recollection is a strange word to use, and I used it on purpose. It means that the fastening is not done from outside. Nobody can tie your opinions down for you. Earlier in the same dialogue, Socrates draws a square in the dust for Meno's slave and asks him how to double it. The boy gets it wrong twice, with great confidence. Then he gets confused and admits that he does not know. Then, under questioning, with no one telling him the answer, he sees that the square drawn on the line from corner to corner is the double. Socrates insists that he taught the boy nothing. He only asked. Whether he is right that the boy was remembering something he had always known, I do not claim to know. In another place I said that a man of sense would not insist that things are exactly as I have told them. But the scene shows what the teaching of the fastening would look like, if there were such a thing. It looks like asking, and like waiting while the other person is confused, and not rescuing him from it.

In the long dialogue about the just city I put it in another way. Education is not what some people say it is. They say they can put knowledge into a soul that lacks it, like putting sight into blind eyes. But the power to learn is already there, in everyone, as the eye is. What education does is turn it. The whole soul must be turned around, away from what comes and goes, toward what is. The teacher is the one who knows how to turn it.

That was my wager. It is still the best answer I have. And now, as I should, I am going to examine it.

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Suppose the teacher is the one who turns the soul. Then the best teacher I knew must have been Socrates. Did he turn souls?

He turned mine, I would say, if anyone asked me. But I am one case, and I was willing. Consider Alcibiades. He spent more hours with Socrates than I did, in the years before I was old enough to listen. He loved him, by his own account. He sat with him at dinners and on campaign, and was questioned by him as closely as any young man in Athens. And he went on to do everything that a man of his gifts could do against his own city and against Socrates' name. Some of the jurors, I have always believed, were thinking of Alcibiades when they voted, and of Critias, who had also sat with Socrates. Corrupting the youth: that was the charge. Anytus would have said, if he had been more patient, that the list should have had a fifth name on it. Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, the best man in Athens, who questioned every young man he met and did not make them good.

I do not think this is an answer to the wager. But it is a case the wager does not cover, and an honest examiner has to say so. If turning were enough, Alcibiades would have been turned. Perhaps he was turned, for an afternoon, and turned back by the evening. Perhaps the turning is real but does not stay, like the opinions that do not stay, and needs to be done again and again for a whole life. That would explain why I wanted the school to last longer than any one teacher. It would also mean that teaching goodness is less like teaching riding and more like keeping a fire. You do not give fire to someone once. You stay and tend it, and when you go, it may go out.

Or perhaps the Meno is simply right, and it comes by a divine dispensation, when it comes, and the most a school can do is make a place where it is likelier to arrive. I have gone to Syracuse three times to find out whether a man with power could be taught to rule well, and three times I have come home with the answer no, and once I came home by way of the slave market. I learned there that a ruler can learn to talk about philosophy, quite fluently, without anything having been fastened at all. That is a third kind of thing, worse than opinion. It is words without either belief or knowledge under them, and they stay in the soul for years, because there is nothing in them that wants to leave.

So I will tell you honestly where we have got to. We know that goodness is not taught as riding is taught, by a master who shows and a pupil who copies. The list of the sons proves at least that much. We know that true opinion is not enough, because it will not pass from father to son, and does not stay. We think, and I think, that what is needed is the fastening, and that the fastening must be done by the learner, under questions, and not by any master's telling. And we do not know whether anyone can make another person do that, or only ask, and wait, and hope.

That is less than an answer. It is more than Anytus had. He knew what the sophists were without having met them, and he knew who taught goodness without having asked.

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At the very end of the Meno, Socrates has to leave; it is time for him to go. He says to Meno: you are convinced now of these things yourself; go and persuade our friend Anytus, so that he may be gentler, and if you persuade him you will do the Athenians a service too.

Meno did not persuade him. I knew, as I wrote that sentence, that he had not, and so did everyone who read it. It is the last line of the dialogue and the only one in it that I could not make come true.

I think sometimes of the boy Cleophantus, upright on the horse's back, with the crowd watching. He did not learn that in a day. Somebody held the bridle while he fell off, and stood there while he climbed back up, and held it again. His father paid for all of that, gladly, because he could see what was being learned. He could see the boy's knees bend to the horse's stride. What he could not see, and could not have paid for, was whatever it was that he himself had stood on, all his life, without knowing how he kept his balance.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem tertium Īdūs Octōbrēs (13 October 2026), ā Platōne Athēniēnsī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Plato, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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