Five-minute digest
Charmides, Lysis and Laches
Summary
This volume gathers three short dialogues in which Socrates asks what a single virtue is and ends without a definition that survives examination. Each is set among real Athenians whose later lives give the questions an edge Plato's first readers would have felt. In the Charmides, Socrates has just come home from the bloody fighting at Potidaea (432 BC) and goes to the wrestling school of Taureas. Critias introduces his ward and cousin Charmides, the most admired youth in Athens, who has been complaining of morning headaches. Socrates poses as a doctor who knows a leaf for the headache, but says the cure is useless without a charm he learned from a Thracian physician of the god-king Zamolxis: the body cannot be healed without the soul, and the charm consists of fair words that implant sophrosyne, rendered by Jowett as temperance. To learn whether Charmides already has it, Socrates asks him to say what it is. Charmides proposes quietness, then modesty, then 'doing one's own business', a phrase he has borrowed from Critias. Critias takes over and reshapes the definition into self-knowledge, linking it to the Delphic inscription 'Know thyself', and finally into a knowledge of knowledge and of ignorance. Socrates doubts that such a knowledge is possible and, granting it, asks what good it would do; the only knowledge that makes life go well, he says, is the knowledge of good and evil. The inquiry fails, yet Charmides resolves to be charmed by Socrates daily. Readers knew that Critias and Charmides would later be among the oligarchs of 404-403 BC. In the Lysis, Socrates is drawn into a new palaestra by Hippothales, who is embarrassing himself with songs in praise of the boy Lysis. Socrates shows him how to speak to a beloved by gently humbling Lysis, whose parents do not trust him with the mule-cart because he does not yet know how. He then asks Lysis and his friend Menexenus what a friend is. Is the lover or the beloved the friend? Is like the friend of like, or opposite of opposite? Socrates tries the thesis that what is neither good nor bad loves the good because of the presence of evil, as the sick body loves medicine for the sake of health, and then pursues a 'first friend' for whose sake all else is loved. The boys' tutors break up the party before any answer holds. In the Laches, two undistinguished sons of famous fathers, Lysimachus and Melesias, ask the generals Nicias and Laches whether their boys should learn to fight in armour. The generals disagree, and Socrates turns the question to what courage is. Laches calls it standing firm, then endurance of the soul; Nicias, borrowing a Socratic saying, calls it knowledge of what is to be feared and hoped. Both accounts collapse, and Socrates proposes that the old men go back to school alongside their sons.
Top Lessons
The Thracian charm: no cure for the part without the whole
Socrates' opening fiction makes a serious claim: as eyes cannot be treated apart from the head, the body cannot be healed apart from the soul, and the soul is treated by words that implant self-command. The rest of the Charmides tests whether anyone knows what that self-command is. Students can see that Plato's interest in medicine is not decoration; it supplies the model of philosophy as care of the soul.
Knowing what you know, and knowing what is good
Critias wants temperance to be a master knowledge that knows what every other art knows and does not know. Socrates grants the dream of a city run by real experts, then asks whether such a city would be happy. Only a knowledge of good and evil, he concludes, makes the other arts beneficial. The argument separates technical competence from wisdom about how to use it.
Friendship needs a first beloved
The Lysis tests easy formulas (like loves like, opposites attract) and finds that none explains why we love. Its most fruitful suggestion is that we love many things for the sake of something else, as a father values wine because it might save a son who has drunk hemlock, and that the chain must end in a 'first friend' loved for itself. Christian readers from Augustine onward recognised in this question the problem of ordering loves toward a final good, though Plato does not name that good here.
Words and deeds in harmony
Laches says he loves a speaker on virtue only when the man's life matches his words, in the Dorian mode of music; he has seen Socrates hold firm at Delium, so he will listen to him. The dialogue then shows Laches failing to define the courage he plainly has. Students learn both that example carries authority and that possessing a virtue is not the same as being able to explain it.
Is courage endurance or knowledge?
Laches' endurance and Nicias' knowledge each capture something: courage holds firm, and courage judges what is worth fearing. Socrates' examples (the physician who refuses a fevered patient drink, the soldier who stays because he knows he has the advantage) show that neither alone suffices, and Nicias' account, pushed further, swallows the whole of virtue. The dialogue leaves students with the question of how the virtues are united.
Verified Quotes
“the part can never be well unless the whole is well”
“is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the soul from the body”
“And the cure, my dear youth, has to be effected by the use of certain charms, and these charms are fair words; and by them temperance is implanted in the soul”
“But whether by acting according to knowledge we shall act well and be happy, my dear Critias,--this is a point which we have not yet been able to determine”
“And yet, my dear Critias, none of these things will be well or beneficially done, if the science of the good be wanting”
“I have a passion for friends; and I would rather have a good friend than the best cock or quail in the world”
“the healthy man has no love of the physician, because he is in health”
“how ridiculous that you two boys, and I, an old boy, who would fain be one of you, should imagine ourselves to be friends”
“for truly he has in his own life a harmony of words and deeds arranged, not in the Ionian, or in the Phrygian mode, nor yet in the Lydian, but in the true Hellenic mode, which is the Dorian, and no other”
“I should say that courage is a sort of endurance of the soul”
“We too must endure and persevere in the enquiry, and then courage will not laugh at our faint-heartedness in searching for courage”
“Do you imagine, Laches, that the physician knows whether health or disease is the more terrible to a man”
“Let us then, regardless of what may be said of us, make the education of the youths our own education”
Medical Lens
The opening of the Charmides is one of the earliest Greek statements that bodily illness cannot be treated apart from the soul, and that words (the 'charm', Greek epode) can work as therapy. Historians of medicine cite it for the prehistory of psychosomatic thinking and of 'the therapy of the word'; it should be read as Socrates' framing device for a dialogue about self-control, not as a report of Thracian clinical practice. The Lysis uses the patient's attachment to the physician as its model of why we love what we lack, and imagines a father valuing wine as an antidote to hemlock. The Laches supplies two medical cases: a physician who refuses a patient with lung inflammation the food or drink he begs for, and Nicias' argument that a physician knows the course of disease but not whether death would be better for the sick man, a passage relevant to discussions of the limits of medical judgment at the end of life.
- Charmides (Stephanus 155b-157c)
Critias arranges for Charmides, troubled by morning headaches, to consult Socrates as a physician; Socrates describes a leaf and a charm, and the Thracian doctrine of treating the whole person.
- Charmides (Stephanus 170e-171c)
Socrates argues that only someone who knows medicine, not a possessor of a general 'knowledge of knowledge', can tell a true physician from a pretender.
- Lysis (Stephanus 210a)
Lysis' father would let a knowledgeable person open his son's sore eyes and sprinkle ashes in them, because he believes that person understands medicine.
- Lysis (Stephanus 217a-219a)
The healthy have no need of the physician; the body, neither good nor bad, befriends medicine because of disease and for the sake of health.
- Lysis (Stephanus 219d-220a)
A father who prizes his son values wine, and even the vessel holding it, if he believes it will save a son who has drunk hemlock.
- Laches (Stephanus 192e)
Socrates asks whether a physician who firmly refuses food or drink to a patient with inflammation of the lungs shows courage.
- Laches (Stephanus 195c-196a)
Nicias argues that doctors know health and disease but not whether death is better for a given patient, and that only the courageous know what is truly to be feared.