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INTRODUCTION
nosis of human life, enabling men of future ages to recognize recurrent
ethico-political maladies by their symptoms. He treated political ways of
life, such as Spartan authoritarianism and Athenian liberalism, under
the medical rubric of regimens, and left to the political philosopher the
task of constructing, on the basis of prognoses, more adequate systems
of social therapeutics. He composed the speeches for his History as part
of an attempt to do semeiology and prognosis on the political practices
of his day. He wanted to determine such classifi cations or formulations
(ta eide ̄) as would raise history from mere chronicle to something more
“scientifi c,” as many doctors wanted to transform medicine from a mere
empirical knack into a techne ̄.
In chapter 4, “Know Thyself: Socrates as Storyteller,” Anne-Marie
Bowery examines Socrates’ role as a narrator in the fi ve Platonic dia-
logues he narrates: Charmides, Euthydemus, Protagoras, Lysis, and Repub-
lic. Bowery argues that a complete portrait of Socrates must include his
role as a narrator in these fi ve dialogues. In focusing on Socrates’ nar-
rative commentary, Plato’s portrayal of Socrates is cast in a new light.
For example, Socrates is often taken to be the paradigm of the rational
philosopher, the philosopher who chastises Apollodorus and his other
friends for weeping and lamenting like women on the day Socrates will
die (Phaedo 117d). Martha Nussbaum typifi es this view. Simply put, she
and many other scholars overemphasize the aspects of his philosophical
search, which involves rational certainty and discounts his interest in
emotional and spiritual experience. The essay makes clear how care-
ful attention to the philosopher’s narrative commentary reveals that
Socrates is acutely aware of his psychological state and is quite swayed
by his emotions in many instances (Charmides 154b, Republic 336d, Eu-
thydemus 283d– e). When viewed through the lens of his narrative com-
mentaries, Socrates emerges as a model of how a philosopher should
employ all the dimensions of the human psyche—the emotional, the
physical, the spiritual, and the rational—in the service of philosophy. By
attending to the ways in which Plato presents Socrates as a narrator in
the dialogues, we come to see Socratic self-examination as an ongoing
interplay of ethos, pathos, and logos.
Chapter 5 might be subtitled “Plato’s Use and Abuse of the
Poets” because the essay focuses on Plato’s use of Homer, a “use” that
sometimes quotes Homer accurately and sometimes not. In “Homeric
Mevq odo~ in Plato’s Socratic Dialogues,” Bernard Freydberg argues that
this device constitutes a kind of method for Plato, if we understand the
term “method” correctly as “pursuit of knowledge” or “following after
knowledge.” In this study he argues that Plato uses Homer as he does to