“TO SAY WHAT IS MOST NECESSARY”lesson that judgments differ as to events or the nature of things. They
offer a lesson in the value those different judgments offer to philosophi-
cal, ethical, and historical inquiry. One might fear that if one abandons
the hope that the best account will emerge as true and subdue all rivals,
one relegates all accounts to the status of exercises in persuasion. Such a
fear forgets that we have no other way to recognize an account as “true”
except it persuade us. Both Thucydides and Plato offer important and
subtle lessons about the ultimate use and frailty of persuasion, and un-
fold potent critical possibilities for competing accounts.
Like Thucydides, Socrates most often insists on inquiring by
means of at least two, and two opposed, accounts. Socrates, like Thucy-
dides, recognizes that even the most careful inquiry into the way things
are will be inevitably incomplete and unceasingly hard work. To under-
stand as fully as is humanly possible is to do so partially, provisionally,
contingently, and repeatedly. Both insist that inhabiting more than one
account in no way hinders, but rather enriches, understanding; whereas
the decision for one exclusive account necessarily curtails understand-
ing. The Sophist offers a particularly interesting example since it sets
up its inquiry into the nature of the sophist as a rather mechanical
diairevsi~, a division of the matter into a branching oppositional struc-
ture. In each of the several attempts, a different branch is followed, and
in each case the result is incomplete and fails to “hunt down” the entity
sought for. It becomes clear that what is sought will never be found if it
is sought exclusively within one or the other of the opposed pairs. But
it is also clear that the repeated effort has helped them to more richly
understand their quarry.
The Symposium makes much the same point, both in whole and
in Diotima’s speech explaining the inability of simple oppositions to
tell the whole story. Rather than merely present an argument against
Agathon, as those who preceded him in the conversation did with their
predecessors, Socrates crafts an antilogy between himself and his fi c-
tional character, Diotima. Socrates frequently invents interlocutors and
places arguments into their mouths designed to engage and mirror his
auditors in complex ways, and his practice in this regard is a strong echo
of Thucydides’ practice in the History. In this case, Agathon and the
other guests are encouraged by his technique to encounter both his and
their own positions in a more balanced way through the ironic distance
that at the same time brings them into a more direct relation to their
own words. The dialogue between Diotima and Socrates engages and
opposes the logoi of the other speakers who have preceded him in ways
that, much like the speeches in the History, play upon and subvert the
auditors’ prejudices, expectations, and values.^36
To accomplish the subtler and richer understanding that both Di-