111111Homeric Mevqodo~ in
Plato’s Socratic Dialogues
Bernard Freydberg
Does Socrates have a method? Does Plato have a method in the deploy-
ment of his “Socrates become beautiful and new”?^1 These are urgent
questions not only to those of us who are concerned about how the
names of these founders of our philosophical enterprise have become
misapplied, used in a context they clearly would have found appalling—
in training lawyers, for instance. “The Socratic method” has become a
cliché that refers to hard-hitting question-and-answer exchanges quite
apart from the concerns with truth and justice that animated Socrates.
Further, even the elenctic activity of Socrates comprised only one of
the ways he practiced philosophy, and often not the predominant one.
For example, the Republic, although it recounts a conversation in which
there occurred much question and answer, is a very long narration cul-
minating in a great myth. For another, the Theaetetus i nclude s m a ny long
speeches. Further, the Parmenides fi nds Socrates on the other end of the
exchanges. Surely not least, the Timaeus and the Sophist fi nd Socrates
making signifi cant remarks at the beginning, then falling silent.
Can any of these properly be called “methods” in the modern
sense of the word? In other words, does the very word “method” do vio-
lence to both the letter and the spirit of the dialogues? Indeed, Socrates
uses the word mevqodo~ on very few occasions and never, or perhaps only
obliquely, in reference to his own practice. ‘Elegco~ is never called a
mevqodo~. There are, however, many casual references: at Phaedrus 269d6–
8 Socrates says, “But insofar as there is an art of rhetoric, it does seems
apparent to me that the mevqodo~ for acquiring it is not to be found in
the manner that Lysias and Thrasymachus have pursued it.” The only
mevqodo~ by which the art of rhetoric can be genuinely acquired is that
by which one comes to know “the nature of the whole” (270c2), whereby
both the souls and the bodies of others would be known.^2 This knowl-
edge is impressive indeed: