10 - Corrupting the Youth in Plato’s Menexenus

Summary

Compared to other extant examples, Plato’s Menexenus presents an unusual funeral speech: an oration delivered by Socrates, embedded within a Platonic dialogue and supposedly written by Pericles’ lover, Aspasia, whom Socrates claims as his own tutor in rhetoric. Nicole Loraux’s The Invention of Athens convinced almost all of the necessity of reading this speech alongside the others, without, however, investigating Plato’s own political and philosophical aims. Building on others, this chapter reopens the question of the dialogue’s tone. Is the fictional Socratic funeral speech ironic or serious, or somehow both? In order to approach this question, it is necessary, first, to examine the speech’s intertextual relations with Pericles’ funeral speech in Thucydides. Then, with the gender politics of this speech in mind, it will be possible to grasp the largely neglected significance of Aspasia, both as a woman and a foreigner. These considerations lead to the conclusion that Plato had both a critical and a constructive purpose: critical, in challenging the Periclean presentation of democratic courage, and constructive, in providing a kind of political therapy for democratic citizens, who stood, albeit unwittingly, in need of a healthier and more coherent self-understanding.