Euthydemus

Summary

Euthydemus is Plato's broadest comedy of argument. Socrates tells his old friend Crito about a scene at the Lyceum the day before, where two elderly brothers from Chios by way of Thurii, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, had put on a public exhibition. They once taught fighting in armour and courtroom pleading; now, they announce, they teach virtue, faster and better than anyone. Socrates asks them to prove it on Cleinias, a handsome boy of the family of Alcibiades, by persuading him to love wisdom. What follows alternates between two ways of talking to the young. The brothers ask Cleinias whether those who learn are the wise or the ignorant, and refute him whichever way he answers, while their disciples laugh and cheer like a trained chorus. Socrates steps in to explain the trick (the word 'learn' has two senses) and then shows what an exhortation to philosophy should look like. Everyone wants to fare well; we think that wealth, health, beauty, birth, power and the virtues make us happy; but such goods help only when used, and used rightly, and right use comes from knowledge. Wisdom, he concludes with the boy, is the only good and ignorance the only evil, and so a young man should seek wisdom from anyone who can give it. The brothers resume, and the sophisms grow wilder. To wish Cleinias to become wise is to wish him to be what he is not, and so to perish. Falsehood is impossible, since to speak is to say what is. Contradiction is impossible. Socrates' father is not a father, Ctesippus' dog is his father, and a sick man should drink a cartload of hellebore if medicine is good. Ctesippus, Cleinias' hot-tempered admirer, begins by protesting and ends by beating the brothers at their own game. In a second protreptic Socrates and Cleinias look for the knowledge that both makes and uses its products and find themselves in a labyrinth when they reach the kingly art: it is supposed to make men good, yet they cannot say good at what. Socrates closes the exhibition with ironic praise of an art that sews up every mouth, its own included. In the frame, Crito reports a speech-writer who scorned the whole business and philosophy with it. Socrates answers that such men, standing between philosophy and politics, fall short of both, and he urges Crito not to judge philosophy by its worst practitioners but to examine philosophy herself. Many readers have taken the unnamed critic as a glance at Isocrates, though the text does not name him. The dialogue is often called the oldest treatise on logic in comic dress, and several of its fallacies reappear in Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations. Its deeper contrast is moral. The brothers treat the boy as material for a performance; Socrates treats him as a soul to be turned toward wisdom, and he does so with patience, humour and visible affection.

Plot or Argument

• Crito asks about the strangers (271a-272d)

  Crito saw Socrates surrounded by a crowd at the Lyceum and asks who the strangers were. Socrates describes the brothers as all-round fighters who have added verbal combat to fighting in armour and legal pleading, and jokes that he means to enrol as their pupil despite his age.

• Virtue for sale (272e-275c)

  The brothers announce that teaching virtue is now their main business. Socrates asks them to show it by persuading Cleinias, son of Axiochus, that he ought to pursue wisdom and virtue.

• First fall: the wise or the ignorant? (275d-277c)

  Euthydemus and Dionysodorus trap Cleinias with questions about who learns and whether one learns what one knows. Each answer is refuted, and their followers laugh and applaud at each throw.

• Socrates' model exhortation (277d-282e)

  Socrates likens the brothers' tricks to the dancing that precedes a Corybantic initiation, explains the double sense of 'learning', and then questions Cleinias himself. They agree that goods profit only when rightly used, that wisdom brings good fortune, and that wisdom is the only good and ignorance the only evil.

• Perishing, lying and contradicting (283a-288b)

  Dionysodorus argues that to wish Cleinias wise is to wish him dead. Euthydemus argues that no one can speak falsely, and Dionysodorus that no one can contradict. Ctesippus grows angry; Socrates jokes that he will offer his old body to be boiled like Medea's victims if only they make him good, and calls the brothers Protean enchanters who must be held until they show their true form.

• The labyrinth of the kingly art (288d-293a)

  Socrates and Cleinias seek a knowledge that uses what it makes. Speech-writing, generalship and the hunting sciences are ruled out; the kingly or political art seems to qualify, but they cannot say what good it produces except more people who make others good. Crito, hearing the boy's reported answers, doubts that Cleinias really said them.

• Fathers, dogs and hellebore (293b-303a)

  The brothers argue that Socrates knows everything, that Socrates has no father and Ctesippus' dog is his father, that a sick man should drink as much medicine as possible, and that Socrates may sell his ancestral gods. Ctesippus now imitates them, and the crowd applauds until the columns ring.

• Ironic praise and the critic of philosophy (303b-307c)

  Socrates praises the brothers' art for being learnable in moments and for silencing every speaker. Crito relates a speech-writer's contempt for philosophy; Socrates analyses such half-philosophers as worse than either philosophers or statesmen and tells Crito to examine philosophy itself, not its teachers, before deciding about his sons.

Characters

• Socrates, narrator and questioner

  Recounts the scene to Crito with mock admiration for the brothers, protects Cleinias from discouragement, and gives two sincere exhortations to pursue wisdom.

• Crito, frame interlocutor

  Socrates' old friend and a wealthy farmer, anxious about the education of his son Critobulus and doubtful about every teacher on offer.

• Euthydemus, eristic sophist

  The younger brother, who opens the attack on Cleinias and specialises in arguments that turn on the ambiguity of words like 'learn' and 'know'.

• Dionysodorus, eristic sophist

  The elder brother, who whispers to Socrates that the boy will be refuted whatever he answers and produces some of the most outrageous paradoxes.

• Cleinias, young answerer

  Son of Axiochus and kinsman of Alcibiades; modest and willing, he is bewildered by the brothers but follows Socrates' questioning to sound conclusions.

• Ctesippus of Paeania, Cleinias' admirer

  Well-born and quick-tempered, he defends his friend with indignation and then learns to beat the brothers with their own methods.

Lessons

• Naming the trick: ambiguity and equivocation

  The brothers' first argument depends on two senses of 'learn': acquiring knowledge one lacks, and understanding what one already knows. Socrates explains the trick to Cleinias in plain terms. Students who can identify the shifting word in each sophism (learn, know, father, good, is) are practising the first discipline of logic, which is attention to what words mean in each premise.

  • In the argument that Ctesippus' dog is his father, which word changes meaning, and where?
  • Why does Socrates take time to explain the brothers' trick to Cleinias instead of simply refuting them?
  • Find an advertisement or political slogan that depends on an ambiguous word. How would you expose it?

• Wisdom as the right use of every other good

  Socrates' first exhortation (278e-282d) argues that wealth, health, beauty and power are not good in themselves but become a benefit or an injury depending on whether wisdom directs their use. Under ignorance they are greater evils than their opposites. The argument reorders a young person's ambitions: before asking how to get more goods, ask how to become someone who can use them well.

  • Do you agree that a foolish rich man is worse off than a foolish poor man? Why does Socrates think so?
  • Is health really neither good nor bad in itself?
  • How does this argument compare with the teaching that it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world and lose his soul?

• Refuting to win, questioning to teach

  Both the brothers and Socrates ask questions, and both lead Cleinias to admit things he had not expected. The difference lies in purpose and manner. The brothers want applause and pupils; they do not care whether their conclusions are true. Socrates encourages the boy, explains his errors, and aims at his good. The dialogue invites students to examine their own motives in debate.

  • What signs in the narrative show that the brothers care more about the audience than about Cleinias?
  • Ctesippus learns to beat the brothers at their own game. Is that a victory?
  • When you argue with a friend, how can you tell whether you are trying to find the truth or trying to win?

• The kingly art and the puzzle of political goodness

  Socrates and Cleinias decide that the knowledge they want must both make and use, and they settle on the kingly or political art. But if that art makes citizens good only so that they may make others good, the search runs in a circle. The dialogue leaves the puzzle unsolved, which is itself instructive: it shows that political power cannot be justified without some account of what goodness is.

  • Why does the search for the kingly art end in a labyrinth?
  • What would have to be added to escape the circle Socrates describes?
  • Can a government make its citizens good? What would it have to know to try?

• Judge philosophy by its best, not its worst

  Crito is ready to give up on philosophy because its teachers seem absurd. Socrates replies that in every art, from gymnastics to generalship, the incompetent outnumber the good, and no one abandons medicine because of bad doctors. The closing exhortation asks Crito to examine philosophy herself and to follow her with his household if she proves to be what Socrates believes.

  • Is Socrates' argument against judging a pursuit by its worst practitioners fair?
  • How might the same reasoning apply to judging the Christian faith by the conduct of hypocrites?
  • What would it mean, practically, for Crito to examine philosophy herself?

Context

Athens in the late fifth century hosted many travelling teachers who charged fees for instruction in speaking, argument and success in public life. Eristic, the art of verbal contest for victory, was one specialty. The dialogue is set at the Lyceum, a gymnasium outside the city walls, and its characters are real Athenians: Crito, Socrates' friend and later the dialogue-partner of the Crito; Cleinias, son of Axiochus and cousin of Alcibiades; and Ctesippus, who also appears in the Lysis and is named among those present at Socrates' death in the Phaedo. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus are mentioned elsewhere in Greek literature, though little is known of them beyond Plato.

Composition

The Euthydemus is generally placed after the early Socratic dialogues and near the Meno, perhaps in the 380s BC; there is no secure date. Its dramatic date falls in the later years of Socrates' life. Many scholars identify the unnamed speech-writer of the frame as Isocrates, whose school of rhetoric competed with Plato's Academy, but this is a reading, not something the text states. The library's text is Benjamin Jowett's translation (third edition, 1892), which lacks Stephanus numbers; locations here follow standard editions.

Reception

Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations catalogues several of the same fallacies, and Jowett's introduction calls the Euthydemus perhaps the oldest treatise on logic. Ancient and modern readers have prized it as Plato's funniest dialogue. Its protreptic passages, arguing that wisdom is the only unconditional good, influenced Stoic ethics and later exhortations to philosophy, including Aristotle's lost Protrepticus as reconstructed by scholars.

Comparisons

• Protagoras

  Protagoras is a serious and respected sophist who claims to teach civic virtue through long speeches and myth; Euthydemus and Dionysodorus are clowns who claim to teach virtue through traps. Both dialogues ask whether virtue can be taught and by whom, but the Protagoras treats the sophistic claim as worth a full debate, while the Euthydemus reduces it to a parody.

• The Last Days of Socrates

  In the Apology Socrates insists that he never taught for money and that his questioning served the god by exposing false wisdom. The Euthydemus dramatises the difference he claims there, setting his patient care for Cleinias beside the brothers' fee-seeking display, and Crito, who appears in both, worries about his children here as he worries about Socrates' there.

• On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Topics and Sophistical Refutations

  Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations, part of the Organon, classifies fallacies of equivocation, amphiboly, composition and accident, and several of its examples come directly from the Euthydemus. Reading the two together turns Plato's comedy into a working exercise in naming fallacies.

• Meno

  Meno's paradox, that one cannot search for what one does not know, is a close relative of the brothers' argument that the learner must either know or not know what he learns. The Meno answers with recollection and true opinion; the Euthydemus answers with ridicule and a distinction between senses of 'learn'.

• Sophist

  The Sophist tries to define the sophist and confronts the same puzzle about falsehood that Euthydemus exploits: if to speak is to say what is, how can anyone say what is not? The later dialogue gives the patient metaphysical answer that the Euthydemus only gestures toward.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine appears in the Euthydemus as an example rather than a subject. Socrates uses the wise physician to show that knowledge, not luck, brings good fortune in danger (279e-280a), and he lists medicine among the arts that make something without knowing how to use it (289a), as well as citing health as the product of medicine when asking what the kingly art produces (291e). The brothers' sophism that a sick man should drink as much medicine as possible, a cartload of hellebore (299b), is a joke that depends on the Greek knowledge that hellebore, a standard purgative also used against madness, was dangerous in excess; the dialogue does not describe its effects. Socrates' playful offer to let the brothers boil him like Medea's victims (285c) alludes to a myth of rejuvenation, not to medical practice.

• 279e-280a

  Cleinias agrees that in dangerous illness one would rather have a wise physician than an ignorant one, as part of the argument that wisdom is good fortune.

  Physicians Doctors
• 289a

  Medicine is listed with money-making among arts that know how to make but not how to use their product.

  Physicians Doctors
• 299a-c

  Euthydemus argues that if medicine is good, a sick man should drink as much as possible, a cartload of hellebore; Ctesippus mocks the idea.

  Pharmacology Poisons

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Choose five of the brothers' arguments (who learns, perishing, no falsehood, the dog-father, the hellebore) and for each write the premise where the trick occurs and a one-sentence explanation of the fallacy.

• Dialogue

  Write a scene in which a modern pair of online debate coaches try to persuade a younger student that winning arguments is the same as being wise, and a third character responds in the manner of Socrates.

• Essay

  Socrates argues that wealth and health are neither good nor bad in themselves but depend on wise use. Write an essay testing this claim against one example from history or from a novel you have read.

• Fiction

  Retell the day at the Lyceum from Cleinias' point of view, showing what he felt when the brothers refuted him and when Socrates questioned him.

Further Reading

• Sophistical Refutations, Aristotle

  The first systematic catalogue of fallacies, drawing on examples from the Euthydemus.

• Protagoras, Plato

  A more serious encounter between Socrates and a famous sophist over whether virtue can be taught.

• Meno, Plato

  Contains the learner's paradox and a parallel argument that knowledge directs the right use of other goods.

• Antidosis, Isocrates

  Isocrates' defence of his own education in speech and practical wisdom, useful for weighing the identification of Plato's unnamed critic.

• The Sophists, W. K. C. Guthrie

  Standard account of the travelling teachers of fifth-century Greece.