THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 157

PLATO'S PHAEDRUS
R. HACKFORTH: Plato's Phaedrus. Translated with Introduction and
Commentary. Pp. vii+172. Cambridge: University Press, 1952.
Cloth, 18s. net.
M R . HACKFORTH'S presentation of the Phaedrus follows much the same plan as
his earlier work on the Philebus and deserves as warm a welcome. He divides
the dialogue into twenty-six sections, each preceded by a synopsis and followed
by stimulating and instructive discussions. The translation combines fidelity
with elegance, and is scrupulously free from embroidery. The introduction
places the Phaedrus in the period between Rep. and Soph. Hackforth takes the
view that the ascription of 'some degree of philosophy' to Isocrates is intended
as amends for Rep. 500 b ; it is 'a generous recognition of Isocrates's merits'.
The word 'generous' may give one pause; but one must agree that Plato's
main target among the rhetoricians is not Isocrates but Lysias. He also makes
some good points in favour of the view that the speech here assigned to Lysias
is not Lysias' work but a parody.
The translation is based on Burnet's text. Among small inadvertent omissions
the following make some difference to the sense: 252 e 2, elvai, 253 a 5, en . . .
aycuTwoi, 270 a 2, Hoiitev. At 265 c 9 the text translated is not Burnet's. Among
renderings which are open to question the following deserve mention: 232 c 4,
•navra is 'everything' rather than 'the whole affair'; 242 c 1, the translation of
dei as 'always' creates the impression that Socrates never did anything at all;
248 a, 'sucked down', for inrofipvxt-cu, rather spoils the picture; 249 c, vrrepiSovaa
might be better rendered 'ignoring' than 'looking down upon', since the soul's
gaze is directed to the things above. I have noted one misprint; it is of the
elusive variety: 'care' for 'cure', p. 59, 1. 31.
Hackforth rightly defends the unity of the dialogue; it is held together by its
main purpose 'to vindicate the pursuit of philosophy' by contrast with the claims
of rhetoric. I should like to push this principle of interpretation further. It
seems to me that the message to Lysias, Homer, and Solon (278 c, d), on the
preeminence of philosophy, ought to govern our attitude towards other pas-
sages besides 258 and 261 to which Hackforth considers it relevant. Does it not
also require us to revise our notions of the value of 'inspired' prophecy and
poetry (244-5) a n d the complacent treatment of Pericles (269 e) ? Hackforth
will not even admit diat the divinely mad prophets and poets (244-5) l a t e r
receive a deservedly low grade in the 'scale of lives' (248 d, e). In this 'order
of merit' he finds a scale of decreasing worth to society. I take it rather as an
application of the principle that the intrinsic worth and well-being of the soul
diminish in proportion to its distance from the vision of Being. The context
seems not to encourage the social interpretation. And to find 'unqualified
commendation' (p. 61) of poetic madness in Phaedrus seems to play some havoc
with the contention that the dialogue owes its unity to the principle enunciated
in 278 c, d.
To generalize this criticism, Hackforth's interpretation of the dialogue is, to
my thinking, excessively horizontal. He tends to treat all Socrates' deliverances
as on the same level, and is not prepared to allow for revisions and restatements
as Socrates progresses to greater heights or greater clarity. The breaking-up of
the dialogue into sections seems to have unduly encouraged this tendency.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. INSEAD, on 01 Dec 2018 at 00:38:40, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009840X00166193
 158 T H E CLASSICAL REVIEW
One problem, for example, is obscured by the division at 248 e 3, where the
comment is that 'socially' the sophist and the tyrant are 'positively harmful'.
But the next section begins with the statement that 'in all these incarnations'—
imitative poet, tyrant, and the rest—'he who lives righteously has a better lot'.
The implication that even the tyrant is capable of righteousness illustrates the
strange tolerance exhibited by the 'inspired' Socrates here and elsewhere
towards the inferior kinds of life. The problem does not seem to exist for
Hackforth. I regard this tolerance as part of the open-mindedness—the accept-
ance of current beliefs, practices, locutions—from which Socrates progresses to
his final uncompromising pronouncement in favour of the life of the philosopher
as sui generis.
Admittedly in discussing aiu<f>poovv7) in Socrates' first discourse Hackforth finds
it to be the popular, and not the Platonic, virtue of that name. But in my view
it is nothing even so exalted as a popular virtue. It is just the current name for
a sane state of mind as opposed to voaos and ixavla. At 241 a 3, b 1, I should
therefore prefer 'sense and sanity', not (as Hackforth) 'wisdom and temper-
ance'. The use of Carqs a t 2 45 c 7 causes a difficulty (not mentioned by Hack-
forth) which again arises, in my opinion, from the fact that the word is taken
over from loose and popular usage. How can that which owes its motion to an
external source be said to cease from life, since life is precisely what it never
possessed unless it was also capable of self-motion? The statement is corrected
in 246 c, which indicates that the 'life' of 245 c 7 refers to the apparent life of the
body in the body-soul composite. (The difficulty may be illustrated by Robin's
curious rendering 'existence', and by the introduction of the words 'if it is a
£coov' into Hackforth's analysis of the sentence.) A similar looseness goes
unremarked at 249 b, where it is said, according to Hackforth's translation and
commentary, that a soul which once dwelt in a man may at its second incarna-
tion pass from beast to man. But 248 c, d expressly states that such a soul
cannot enter into a beast at its first birth. How then since it has never yet dwelt
in a beast can it be said to pass from beast to man? But perhaps this contradic-
tion is not really in Plato's text; it depends on the meaning ofevOa at 249 b 3.
The presence of such vaguenesses makes the argument from 'the logic of the
passage as a whole' (by which the reading aeu<lvrp-ov at 245 c 5 is vigorously
defended) not quite convincing enough.
'Plato does not write treatises; he dramatises arguments as they might con-
ceivably be developed by persons actually conversing' (p. 9). This is a sound
observation; but, as what I have already written indicates, I should like to
add that the development is not always or necessarily a matter of mere
argumentative strategy but may be intended to represent a real progress of
thought. Hackforth writes (p. 134): 'the conception of pavla as the genus of
epcas was present in Plato's mind from the outset of the dialogue'. I submit that
our primary concern is not with Plato's mind but with his picture of the mental
process through which Socrates is seen passing. Now Socrates' is not in conscious
possession of the generic form of madness at the outset. He begins with the
agreed 'hypothesis' that love is a mental disease (236 a 1, b 1), on which,
together with a short survey (I should say 'collection') of instances, he bases a
useful but inadequate definition of love (238 c, d, 265 d). Then, warned by his
divine sign, he remembers the right-hand division of madness which his first
discourse ignored. This right-hand division is established by what I should
again call a collection of instances (244-5, m a n ascending order of impor-

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. INSEAD, on 01 Dec 2018 at 00:38:40, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009840X00166193
 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 159
tance, though the horizontal view ignores such ascents). Only then has he
explicitly grasped the generic form (the 'something adequate', I should sug-
gest, of Phaedo 101 e,—adequate at least for the elucidation of love), in the
light of which he discards his first definition as an abandoned stepping-stone.
Looking back over this process of thought (265-6) he describes it as an ex-
ample of the joint method of Collection and Division to which he has long been
addicted. This means that Socrates' two discourses are offered by Plato as
illustrations of certain essentials of the dialectic of the 'Socratic' dialogues.
Hackforth rejects this view in favour of the notion, for which I find no evidence,
that the passage on Collection and Division (266 b) is Plato's 'first announce-
ment of a new discovery' (p. 134). I suppose that here we have the cause of
what seems an obvious mistranslation of/caAco juexpt rovSe, which does not mean
'for the present I call' but 'up to now I have been calling' dialecticians those
capable of practising this method; and Socrates proposes to go on doing so
unless the rhetoricians can persuade him to do otherwise. Similarly Hackforth
insists that 'there is no question of dvcupeiv ras vnoOeoeis or of viroOiaeis at all in
the Phaedrus dialectic'. But can it be right to ignore xmoriOeaOai. (236 b 1),
echoed in Befievoi opov (237 d 1)?
But in spite of such fundamental differences in interpretation I am glad to
acknowledge that I have learned a great deal from this book.
University of Sheffield J. TATE

LATIN TRANSLATIONS OF ARISTOTLE

Aristoteles Latinus, iv. 2 : Analytica Posteriory translatio anonyma. E d .
LAURENTIUS MINIO-PALUELLO. xxxiii: De Arte Poetica, Guillelmo de
Moerbeke interprete. Ed. ERSE VALGIMIGLI, reviserunt AETIUS
FRANCESCHINI et LAURENTIUS MINIO-PALUELLO. Pp. xiv-f-111; x i x + 7 7 .
Bruges and Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1953. Paper.
T H E enterprise of publishing the Corpus of medieval Latin translations of
Aristotle is a vast one. It was initiated some years before the Second World
War under the auspices of the International Union of Academies as part of
a still vaster Corpus Philosophorum Medii Aevi, and was heralded in 1939 by the
publication, by the late Georges Lacombe, of volume i of the preliminary
catalogue of manuscripts of the Latin Aristotle (the appearance of volume ii
is now announced, under the care of Dr. Minio-Paluello).
We have before us two instalments which augur well for the quality of what
is to come, an anonymous translation of the Posterior Analytics edited by Dr.
Minio-Paluello, and William of Moerbeke's translation of the Poetics, the
authorship of which has been established by Dr. Minio-Paluello. In each case
we have a critical introduction, text with two apparatus, a Latin and a Greek,
and two indexes, Latin-Greek and Greek-Latin.
The former of these translations is the less interesting, and textually the less
important, of the two. There is little to be learned about it: apart from a few
marginal notes in one manuscript in Paris and another in London it exists
in one manuscript only, Toletanus Bibl. Capit. 17. 14, of the early thirteenth
century, as against the 180 copies known of the earlier version of the Posterior

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. INSEAD, on 01 Dec 2018 at 00:38:40, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009840X00166193