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Menexenus—son of Socrates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Lesley Dean-Jones
Lesley Dean-Jones
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
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Extract

The Menexenus is also known as Plato's Epitaphios or Funeral Oration. The body of the work is a fictional funeral oration, composed as an example of what should be said at a public funeral for Athenians who have fallen in war. The oration is framed by an encounter between Socrates and a certain Menexenus, an eager young man who thinks he has reached the end of education and philosophy, but who is still rather young to take an active party in the city's affairs. Nevertheless, he is anxious to follow in the tradition of his family, which (Socrates tells us) has always provided someone to look after the Athenians (τινα μν πιμελητν). Menexenus' interest in public affairs has led him to attend a meeting of the Council at which a speaker was to be chosen to compose and deliver the funeral oration at the imminent public funeral. However, no final decision was reached at the meeting, and Menexenus remarks that by the time the choice is made, the speaker will have almost to improvise his speech. Socrates gently mocks Menexenus' respect for public orators, saying that speeches about a dead person follow a predictable pattern; a speaker exaggerates all a dead person's good points and minimizes all the bad, so that one who has died appears a paragon of virtue even if he was not really good for much. Socrates claims that listening to such public orations, when not only individuals but also the state is eulogized, always makes him feel that in living in Athens he is living in the Islands of the Blessed.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , May 1995 , pp. 51 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1995

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References

1 Plato's reasons for using the term πιμελητς rather than ἄρχων here will be discussed below.

2 See Méridier, L., Platon, vol. 5, pt. 1 (Paris, 1964), pp. 69–70Google Scholar; Clavaud, R., Le Ménexène de Platon et la rhétorique de son temps (Paris, 1980)Google Scholar.

3 Or. 151. The claim may not be true, but the important point is that Cicero thought it could be.

4 For a full survey of historical distortions and inaccuracies see Henderson, M. M., ‘Plato's Menexenus and the Distortion of History,’ ACD 18 (1975), 25–46Google Scholar.

5 Clavaud, , Le Ménexène, pp. 37–77Google Scholar, gives a useful survey of modern criticism on the dialogue. Given that stylometric analysis leaves the date of the composition of the dialogue uncertain, but does not disqualify it as a genuine work of Plato (see below n. 12), arguments for or against its authenticity must hang from the plausibility of explanations for Plato's purpose in writing such a work and the perceived coherence with the rest of his corpus. Since this is so, my paper stands as an argument for Platonic authorship and I do not intend to review the various opinions in this debate further.

6 Bloedow, E. F., ‘Aspasia and the “Mystery” of the Menexenos,’ Wiener Studien, N.F. 9 (1975), 46–7Google Scholar.

7 Highet, G., Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, 1962), p. 137Google Scholar.

8 Henderson, ‘Plato's Menexenus,’ n. 2.

9 My conclusions on the significance of the anachronism were reached independently of those of Stern, H. S., ‘Plato's Funeral Oration,’ The New Scholasticism 48 (1974), 503–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Stern recognizes that the oration vacillates between being Plato's oration for Socrates and Socrates' oration on a morally bankrupt Athens, but his short article does not explore all the ramifications, and he believes that Menexenus is Menexenus the cousin of Lysis (n. 2).

10 E.g., Coventry, L., ‘Philosophy and Rhetoric in the Menexenus,’ JHS 109 (1989), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 See Dodds, E. R., Plato: Gorgias (Oxford, 1959), pp. 17–18Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., pp. 23–4. Ledger, G. R., Re-counting Plato: Computer Analysis of Plato's Style (Oxford, 1989), pp. 210–12Google Scholar, states that there is nothing in the dialogue to discount an early dating, but that the nature of Mx. makes stylometric analysis inconclusive.

13 Diodorus in scholia to Mx. 235E.

14 RE Band 15.1, 858, 32–4.

15 My efforts to discover whether the careers of Archinus and Dion could have spanned the period from the Peloponnesian War to the King's Peace (making this remark, too, ambiguous) have proved inconclusive. Archinus' dated events belong to the period 405–403 B.C.; the undated items may be earlier or later. There is no one particular famous Dion of this period, and the sheer number of attestations to the name Dion in the relevant time frame is so large as to make the probability of correct identification very low. I am grateful to professor John Traill for sharing with me his expertise and the database of his forthcoming prosopography Athenians.

16 Mx. 246C, trans. Bury, R. G., Plato IX (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge MA, 1929)Google Scholar.

17 Le Ménexène, pp. 210–14.

18 In this connection, Socrates' death is in marked contrast to other Athenian soldiers. They died in battle and he in prison. They have a costly funeral at state expense and he washes himself before death to cause as little fuss as possible after his death. The Athenian dead are honoured by the elaborate, prepared speech of a ‘wise man’; Socrates performs his own funeral oration in the impromptu discussion on the immortality of the soul in the Phd.

19 E.g., of the true statesman, Plt. 275E–276E; of the stewards of the Isles of the Blessed, Grg. 523B7; of the superintendents of specific areas, particularly education, in the Laws, passim. See Coventry, ‘Philosophy and Rhetoric,’ n. 3.

20 It is interesting to note that of the four dialogues which Aristotle wrote that had the same title as a Platonic dialogue only one bears the name of an individual, the Menexenus (the others are the Politicus, Sophistes and Symposium). Perhaps Menexenus was the most, or least, philosophically inclined of Socrates' sons and as such attracted the concern of his father's disciples.

21 Socrates is also a Teiresias-like figure in the Sophistic Hades of the Prt. Plato explicitly likens Protagoras to Orpheus, a visitor to Hades, and introduces Hippias and Prodicus with the words used at Od. 11.601 & 582 to introduce the shades of Heracles and Tantalus. The only shade who had kept his wits in Od. 11 was Teiresias, and Socrates is shown as the only true philosopher in Callias' house. I am grateful to Steven Pollard for pointing this out to me.

22 After Jowett, Benjamin, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Hamilton, Edith and Cairns, Huntington, eds. (Princeton, 1961), p. 435Google Scholar.

23 At Phd. 64B Socrates remarks that there is some truth in the common perception of philosophers as ‘half-dead’ (θανατσι), but that most people do not understand in what sense this is so. At Grg. 493A and Cra. 400C he introduces the concept of σμα σμα as a Pythagorean or Orphic doctrine, but it is obviously a concept that fits his view of knowledge and the true aim of the philosophic life admirably; cf. Phdr. 248C–E.

24 Pohlenz, Wilamowitz, Ehlers and Thurow (see Bloedow, , ‘Aspasia,’ 43–8Google Scholar) believe Plato chose Aspasia because he wished to correct Aeschines' literary picture of Aspasia as a member of the Socratic circle. Bloedow argues that Plato does not imbue other literary portraits with enough significance to refute them, and believes that Plato meant to criticize the historical Aspasia. However, it is doubtful that the historical Aspasia could have had so much influence on Sophistic rhetoric as to arouse Plato's ire. Aeschines' literary portrait and the connections of the historical Aspasia to Pericles may have suggested to Plato that he use the dead Aspasia as a Persephone-figure to heighten the dead/living reversal.