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XENOPHON AND PRODICUS' CHOICE OF HERACLES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2015

David Sansone
David Sansone*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
*
dsansone@illinois.edu
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Extract

In an article in an earlier issue of this journal Vivienne Gray sought to challenge my claim that Xenophon's account of Prodicus' narrative concerning the Choice of Heracles (Mem. 2.1.21–34) represents ‘a very close approximation to Prodicus’ actual wording'. Since that time, Gray's article has been cited approvingly by Louis-André Dorion and David Wolfsdorf, both of whom consider that Gray has settled the matter, at least as far as the linguistic aspect of my argument is concerned. In view of this, I feel it necessary to point out that Gray's argument is fundamentally flawed. In addition, I should like to take this opportunity to show that the arguments of Dorion and Wolfsdorf, which are aimed at other aspects of the case that I made for Xenophon's faithfulness to Prodicus' text, are likewise invalid.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , May 2015 , pp. 371 - 377
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2015 

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References

1 Gray, V., ‘The linguistic philosophies of Prodicus in Xenophon's “Choice of Heracles”?’, CQ 56 (2006), 426–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sansone, D., ‘Heracles at the Y’, JHS 124 (2004), 125–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In what follows these two articles will be referred to by author's name alone. The quotation in the text is from Gray 426, citing Sansone 134.

2 Dorion, L.-A., ‘Héraklès entre Prodicos et Xénophon’, Philosophie Antique 8 (2008), 85–114Google Scholar; Wolfsdorf, D., ‘Prodicus on the correctness of names: the case of τέρψις, χαρά and εὐφροσύνη’, JHS 131 (2011), 131–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Wolfsdorf (above), 143 (‘Vivienne Gray has, in my view, rightly rejected Sansone's argument’); Dorion (above), 88 n. 5 (‘Pour une réfutation en règle de la position de Sansone … je renvoie le lecteur à la remarquable étude de Gray’); cf. also Dorion (above), 92 and in Bandini, M. and Dorion, L.-A. (edd.), Xénophon: Mémorables, vol. 2.1 (Paris, 2011), 152–3Google Scholar, 158. Mayhew, R., Prodicus the Sophist: Texts, Translations, and Commentary (Oxford, 2011), 203–4Google Scholar is more sympathetic to the point of view expressed in my 2004 article.

3 Πιθανός: Oec. 13.9, 13.10, Cyr. 2.2.10, 6.4.5, Eq. mag. 6.6; ποθεινός: Oec. 5.10, Symp. 2.3, Ap. 7, Lac. 1.5; ἐράσμιος: Symp. 8.36.

4 Gautier, L., La langue de Xénophon (Geneva, 1911), 105–8.Google Scholar

5 Gray devotes another section of her paper (pp. 432–4) to a categorization of Xenophon's ‘very frequent use of synonyms’. This is all well and good. But given that Prodicus' claim to fame in antiquity was his care in distinguishing among near-synonyms and given that several of the very same terms that Plato and other witnesses tell us Prodicus distinguished occur in the Choice of Heracles, the presumption remains strong that Prodicus is the source of the ‘profusion of near-synonyms’ that I identified in my earlier article (pp. 134–5) as occurring in this passage.

6 Wolfsdorf (n. 2), 133–6, translating Hermias' commentary on Pl. Phdr. 267a–c = Couvreur, P. (ed.), Hermiae Alexandrini in Platonis Phaedrum scholia (Paris, 1901)Google Scholar, 238.13–239.24 = Lucarini, C.M. and Moreschini, C. (edd.), Hermias Alexandrinus: in Platonis Phaedrum scholia (Berlin, 2012), 250.15–252.2Google Scholar. The testimony regarding Prodicus (238.22–239.4 Couvreur = 250.24–251.3 Lucarini and Moreschini) had already been partially translated into Italian by Untersteiner, M. (ed.), Sofisti: testimonianze e frammenti, vol. 2 (Florence, 1961 2)Google Scholar, 175 and appears now in English in Mayhew ([n. 2], 25).

7 The MSS read δι' ὤτων ἀκοήν, an obvious error corrected by Hermann, C.F. (ed.), Platonis dialogi, vol. 6 (Leipzig, 1870)Google Scholar, xxxii, 274, apparently following a correction in the fourteenth-century MS L (Laurent. Conv. Soppr. 103).

8 Compare e.g. Hermias on Phdr. 238c (= 53.28–9 Couvreur = 57.23 L–M) πτέρωτα αὐτὸν καλῶν παρὰ τὸ πτεροῦν, on 253e (= 197.2 C. = 205.28–9 L–M) θέρμην γὰρ καλεῖ τὴν ἀναγωγὸν δύναμιν, on 258e (= 212.17 C. = 222.19–20 L–M) τὰς ἐκ προλυπήσεως δὲ καλεῖ ἡδονὰς τὰς δι' ἁφῆς καὶ γεύσεως and on 265a (= 232.24–5 C. = 244.16–17 L–M) διεῖλε τὴν μανίαν εἰς δύο, τὴν μὲν ἀνθρωπίνην, τὴν δὲ θείαν καλῶν; cf. Pl. Prt. 341b ἐρωτᾷ (sc. Πρόδικος) εἰ οὐκ αἰσχύνομαι τἀγαθὰ δεινὰ καλῶν. Mayhew's translation ([n. 2], 25) is similar to Wolfsdorf's: ‘the pleasure that comes from hearing what is beautiful’. In his more recent study (Pleasure in Ancient Greek Philosophy [Cambridge, 2013]Google Scholar, 12), Wolfsdorf departs even farther from the Greek, translating: ‘for example, with regard to the difference between terpsis, chara, and euphrosynê, [he said that] terpsis is pleasure of fine things . . .’ ‘With regard to’ is not in the Greek; διαφοράν can only be construed as standing in illustrative apposition to ἀκρίβειαν.

9 Untersteiner (n. 6) correctly renders, ‘il piacere ottenuto per mezzo delle orecchie’; similarly Denyer, N. (ed.), Plato: Protagoras (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar, 195, ad Prt. 358a7: ‘According to Hermias …, his distinction was that τέρψις is pleasure in hearing something, while χαρά is pleasure of the soul.’

10 That is, assuming that Hermann's emendation (n. 7) is correct, which Couvreur, Lucarini and Moreschini, Wolfsdorf, Mayhew and Untersteiner all accept.

11 This is, of course, further support for the claim that Xenophon's wording closely represents that of Prodicus' original.

12 Wolfsdorf refers here ([n. 2], 143) to Xen. Mem. 2.1.24 (τέρπεσθαι, εὐφραίνεσθαι) and 2.1.33 (χαίρειν).

13 Wackernagel, J., Vorlesungen über Syntax, vol. 2 (Basel, 1924)Google Scholar, 122 = Lectures on Syntax, ed. and trans. Langslow, D. (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar, 551 had earlier noted a ‘striking’ (‘auffällig’) instance of this when Vice improperly uses a form of ποῖος (ἀποροῦντα ποίαν ὁδὸν ἐπὶ τὸν βίον τράπῃ, 2.1.23) in contrast to the narrator's more correct πότερος (ἀποροῦντα ποτέραν τῶν ὁδῶν τράπηται, 2.1.21). Compare Pl. Symp. 193e, where Aristophanes ‘corrects himself with a precision worthy of Prodicus’ (Bury ad loc.) by saying ἀκούσωμεν τί ἕκαστος ἐρεῖ, μᾶλλον δὲ τί ἑκάτερος· Ἀγάθων γὰρ καὶ Σωκράτης λοιποί. Plato portrays both Agathon and Socrates as avid followers of Prodicus (Pl. Prt. 315d, 341a, Meno 96d), and Aristophanes' ostentatious self-correction seems designed to advertise his awareness of his fellow symposiasts' linguistic interests. The stylistic difference between Vice on the one hand and Virtue and the frame-narrative on the other is noted by Kurke, L., Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (Princeton, 2011)Google Scholar, who observes that ‘the two allegorical females themselves speak in somewhat different styles’ (272).

14 Dorion (n. 2 [2008]), 105; similarly Dorion (n. 2 [2011]), 153 and Johnson, D.M., ‘Aristippus at the crossroads: the politics of pleasure in Xenophon's Memorabilia’, Polis 26 (2009), 204–22Google Scholar, at 211–13. By ‘Socrates’ Dorion does not mean the man who drank hemlock in 399 b.c., since the ethical and other positions held by that man can no longer be recovered; see his ‘The rise and fall of the Socratic problem’, in Morrison, D.R. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Socrates (Cambridge, 2011), 1–23.Google Scholar

15 Ambrose, Z.P., ‘Socrates and Prodicus in the Clouds’, in Anton, J.P. and Preus, A. (edd.), Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy, vol. 2 (Albany, NY, 1983), 129–44Google Scholar, followed by Harbach, A., Die Wahl des Lebens in der antiken Literatur (Heidelberg, 2010), 109–16Google Scholar. Not enough is known about the Horai of Aristophanes (frr. 577–89 K–A) or Cratinus (frr. 269–98 K–A) to tell whether those plays are indebted to the Horai of Prodicus, the work from which the Choice of Heracles is an excerpt (see below, n. 18).

16 Dorion's treatment is not without its flaws. For example, the correspondence he notes (p. 109; similarly Harbach [n. 15], 46) between the attitude of Aristippus (ῥᾷστά τε καὶ ἥδιστα βιοτεύειν, 2.1.9) and that of Vice (τὴν ἡδίστην τε καὶ ῥᾴστην ὁδόν, 2.1.23) ignores Oec. 6.9, where Xen. puts the same language into the mouth of Socrates who, referring to farming (!), says μαθεῖν τε ῥᾴστη ἐδόκει εἶναι καὶ ἡδίστη ἐργάζεσθαι.

17 Dorion, L.-A., ‘Plato and Enkrateia’, in Bobonich, C. and Destrée, P. (edd.), Akrasia in Greek Philosophy: From Socrates to Plotinus (Leiden, 2007), 119–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Xen. Mem. 2.1.21 ἐν τῷ συγγράμματι τῷ περὶ Ἡρακλέους; Pl. Smp. 177b Ἡρακλέους μὲν καὶ ἄλλων ἐπαίνους καταλογάδην συγγράφειν, ὥσπερ ὁ βέλτιστος Πρόδικος; schol. Ar. Nub. 361a Προδίκου βιβλίον ἐπιγραφόμενον Ὧραι, ἐν ᾧ πεποίηκε τὸν Ἡρακλέα τῇ Ἀρετῇ καὶ τῇ Κακίᾳ συντυγχάνοντα.

19 At Mem. 2.1.21 and Symp. 4.62. Plato's Socrates goes so far as to call him πάσσοφος … καὶ θεῖος (Prt. 315e), although the possibility of irony cannot be discounted.