MARK MOESserves Plato’s purpose of getting readers involved in salutary intellectual gym-
nastic exercises. Halperin says something like this about the Phaedrus and Sym-
posium (“Plato and the Erotics of Narrativity,” 120– 29). And I make a similar
point about the Philebus in my Plato’s Dialogue Form, 159– 60. Hermeneutical
antinomies can be invitations to higher kinds of systematic thinking, or they
can be pointers to mysteries—truths in which simplicity and vast complexity
coincide—that must for the time being escape our full grasp. See Plass, “Philo-
sophic Anonymity and Irony”; and Frede, “Plato’s Arguments and the Dialogue
Form,” 214 – 19. In “the Good” there is a coincidentia oppositorum: a mutual in-
terpenetration and unity of perfections (the interweaving of the Forms?) that
are ostensibly inconsistent with one another and cannot appear on the natural
plane except in mutual separation.
- Perhaps Plato dramatizes his brothers’ faults so richly in this dialogue
because he understands his brothers well. Or perhaps they mirror for him his
own youthful political ambitions. Perhaps he wants to show that biological kin-
ship does not necessarily bring with it ethical kinship. Perhaps Plato wants to
rejoice in the fact that they, who like Charmides and Critias were members of
Plato’s family, escaped a tragic fate through the intervention of Socrates. At
any rate, an examination of the depictions of Plato’s relatives in the dialogues
shows that Plato usually puts their faults on display through these depictions.
Plato’s relations with his own family were fraught with many of the same kinds
of problems that existed between Socrates and his motley group of adherents.
In the Charmides Charmides and Critias, the former Plato’s maternal uncle and
the latter his mother’s cousin, are drawn as persons on their way to becoming
members of the Thirty Tyrants. Plato’s brother Glaucon (or a symbolic stand-in
for him) and his half brother Antiphon are both given unfl attering depictions
at the beginning of the Parmenides. See the discussion of Plato’s depictions of
his relatives in the dialogues in Jonathan Ketchum, “The Structure of the Plato
Dialogue” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1981), 425– 31. - It is important, I think, that the Thirty Tyrants were a pro-Spartan aristo-
cratic junta, for the “ideal povli~” of books 2– 5 has many Spartan elements. See
Rutherford, Art of Plato, 93– 94. See also G. R. F. Ferrari, introduction to Plato:
The Republic, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. xiv ff. - Ranasinghe, Soul of Socrates, 2, 5.
- For a brief defi nition of developmentalist ways of interpreting Plato,
see Francisco J. Gonzalez, ed., The Third Way: New Directions in Platonic Studies
(Lanham: Rowman and Littlefi eld, 1995). - See Blondell, Play of Character, 165 – 99. For a related view, see C. D. C.
Reeve, Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato’s Republic (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988), 33– 41. On this view Socrates practices what Frede calls
“didactic” dialectic with Glaucon. I do not want to deny that Plato’s characters
ever function as Plato’s “mouthpieces.” - Many ancient readers of the Republic did not take the political propos-
als of the dialogue to be endorsed by Plato. See Julia Annas, “The Inner City: