Homeric offenses against the gods: the statement by one of the suitors in the Odyssey that gods travel among men in disguise (Resp. 381d), the “falsehoods about Proteus and Thetis,” and the false dream sent by Zeus to Agamemnon in the Iliad (Resp. 383a).7 These passages imply three problems: that the gods deceive men, are mutable, and are somehow responsible for evil. Socrates and Adeimantus agree that the most perfect form of anything cannot admit change and alteration. Even the gods cannot alter themselves. After disparaging the poets for lying about Proteus, Socrates turns on mothers who scare their children by speaking evil of the gods in nursery tales. Finally Socrates says: “May we suppose that while the gods themselves are incapable of change they cause us to fancy that they appear in many shapes deceiving and practicing magic upon us?”8 In book 3 of the Republic, Socrates continues his critique and censures Homer for concealing himself behind his characters, Chryses for example, by imitating another in speech and manner (ἢ κατὰ φωνὴν ἢ κατὰ σχῆμα).9 Socrates’ criticism is directed against Homer’s use of prosopopoeia, that is, the adoption of different mimetic figurative prosopa or personae for speeches in his diegetic tale. Socrates’ focus on the imitation of speech and figure reveals how his critique of Homer extends more broadly into poetry’s realm of performative and theatrical imitation. At its best, the ability to imitate another’s voice and appearance is the work of a Protean poet capable of personifying all, from shameful drunks to the gods themselves.10 Yet one does not need to stray from this way of thinking to see how one can direct the same criticism at Plato’s own personifications and polyphonic dialogues. The Athenian philosopher’s dialogic imitations are therefore in public competition with other forms of education.
The Gorgias’s narrative framework clearly shows how Plato publicly stages an agonistic competition between Socrates’ philosophy and Gorgias’s rhetoric. The fearsome and formidable Callicles brings this clash of disciplines to life by embodying the rhetorician’s use of epic poetry, tragedy, and even philosophy to make his speech:
It is a good thing to engage in philosophy just so far as it is an aid to education, and it is no disgrace for a youth to study it, but when a man who is now growing older still studies philosophy, the situation becomes ridiculous, Socrates, and I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child. When I see a little child, for whom it is still proper enough (πρέπον) to speak in this way, lisping and playing, I like it and it seems to me pretty and ingenuous and appropriate to the child’s age, and when I hear it talking with precision, it seems to me disagreeable and it vexes my ears and appears to me more fitting for a slave, but when one hears a grown man lisping and sees him playing the child, it looks ridiculous and unmanly and worthy of a beating. I feel exactly the same too about students of philosophy. When I see a youth engaged in it, I admire it and it seems to me natural and I consider such a man ingenuous, and the man who does not pursue it I regard as illiberal and one who will never aspire to any fine and noble deed, but when I see an older man still studying philosophy and not deserting it, that man, Socrates, is actually asking for a whipping…. Now I am quite friendly disposed toward you, Socrates, and I suppose I feel much as Zethus, whom I mentioned, felt toward Amphion in Euripides. For I am moved to say to you the same kind of thing as he said to his brother, “You neglect, Socrates, what you most ought to care for, and pervert a naturally noble spirit by putting on a childlike semblance, and you could neither contribute a useful word in the councils of justice nor seize upon what is plausible and convincing, nor offer any brilliant advice on another’s behalf.”11
In this passage Callicles, claiming that Socrates will be like a child unable to defend himself, speaks proleptically about Socrates’ looming trial in Athens. Yet even more than a personal reference to Socrates’ fate, Callicles’ argument seeks to establish philosophy’s proper boundaries within the polis’ conventions and decorum (πρέπον). Its pedagogical curriculum should reinforce these boundaries, not transgress them. Old philosophers, he relates, in their ridiculous insistence on playing the part of children break decorum and invert their own nature. To make his case before the crowd, Callicles draws on what were probably commonplace anecdotes. First, a reference to Phoenix’s reproving speech to his former ward Achilles (Iliad 9.441) for his childish brooding and for his tendency to isolate himself from the other troops reinforces Callicles’ argument about decorum: that one earns distinction among the company of men with the business of politics in the agora, rather than secluded away in contemplation. One hears echoes of this debate in Socrates’ courtroom defence against the accusations of Meletus and the general slander of public opinion when Socrates compares his willingness to die for his just way of life to Achilles’ fearless choice to avenge Patroclus and face death.12
Second, the quotation from Euripides’ lost Antiope casts Socrates in the role of Amphion and Callicles in the role of Zethus once more in order to reinforce Callicles’ agon between philosophical leisure (ἀπραγμοσύνη) and political activity (πολυπραγμοσύνη). The two brothers from Euripides’ Antiope came to represent for the ancients the contest of disciplines, with Zethus standing for the practical life of business and politics and Amphion for the contemplative life of music and philosophy.13 In the fifteenth century the Gorgias’s staging of the myth of Amphion as a dramatic contest between the contemplative life of Socrates and the active life of the busybody politician fascinated Marsilio Ficino, who recast the two brothers as personifications for Renaissance debates between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. He compared, for instance, Amphion’s philosophical music to Orpheus, the Dionysiac poet Arion, the lyre-playing Pythagoras, Empedocles, and even the aged Socrates, and he was also in the habit of calling his friend Cristoforo Landino (1424–98), the Platonically inspired poet, humanist, scholar, and philosopher, by the name Amphion.14
The Gorgias also stages an agon between dialogue and theater as forms of public education. Far from failing to realize that Socrates’ criticism of poetry’s prosopopoeic abilities in the Republic could be turned on his own dialogue form, Plato must have been acutely aware of the imitative and figurative implications of his dialogic personifications. Socrates often relates, as he does in the Gorgias, for example, that he would be useless in the public assembly—unlike the roars of the roaming lions Thrasymachus and Callicles or the frightful magic of Gorgias—since he is incapable of adopting the various rhetorical personae used to deliver different long speeches in courts and the agora. Philosophy, it seems, fails to meet the exigencies of varying public circumstances. In fact, such speeches, Plato warns semi-playfully in the Symposium, are capable of stealing the capacity of speech from others. Faced with the task of following Agathon’s speech in praise of love, Socrates compares his fellow symposiast to Gorgias: “For his speech so reminded me of Gorgias that I was exactly in the plight described by Homer: I feared that Agathon in his final phrases would confront me with the eloquent Gorgias’ head, and by opposing his speech to mine would turn me thus dumbfounded into stone.”15 With his playful pun on Gorgias/Gorgon, and more precisely in comparing Gorgias’s speech to the Gorgon’s face, Plato invokes the semantic range of the masks of the Gorgon and the mormolukeion. In seeing a likeness between Agathon’s speech and Gorgias’s rhetorical style, which he reinforces in producing word associations between head and peroration, Socrates in effect tells his audience that Agathon is covering himself with Gorgias’s prosopon (mask-face) to deliver his praise of love. So forceful is his delivery, Socrates jests, that he is almost dumbfounded into silence and petrified into stone.
Like Perseus cutting off the head of Medusa, however, and just like the inversion of the mask of the mormolukeion in the Phaedo, Socrates’ discourse, which includes a long prosopopoeic personification of Diotima, overturns Agathon’s speech. In alluding to Gorgias/Gorgon in the Symposium Plato deploys rhetorical synaesthesia; Gorgias’s art is sonorous, reverberating the oral pronunciation of gorgos, but the force of the Gorgon’s face as a source of petrification and death is visual. The Gorgon is something visible that is not permitted to be seen, only heard. In speaking Agathon places the persona of Gorgias before the symposiasts’ eyes. The end result of the synesthesia of Gorgias/Gorgon
