Fordham (2021) h/b 192pp £44 (ISBN 9780823294244)
‘Berger subverts the usual interpretations of Plato’s kalos kagathos, showing Socrates to be trapped in a double ventriloquism, tethered to his interlocutors’ speech acts even as they are tethered to his.’ So states the blurb to this short but dense book and if you are already confused then you have plenty more of the same to look forward to. B. died this year at the age of 96 and clearly was (as his obituary notice tells us) ‘the trickster, guilty of multilingual puns and wordplay galore’. The style of the book is rich, allusive and does not give of its secrets easily: so much so that I soon discovered that I had to reread Plato to understand B. rather than the other way round.
The book’s title (as explained in the introduction by Jill Frank) is drawn from Republic 372e, where Socrates (somewhat patronisingly) outlines the lives of the workers in a state practising division of labour and Glaucon suggests that the workers should ‘recline on couches (κλινῶν)’ and enjoy their food in a civilised manner. This book uses the ‘couch’ as a symbol of ‘the desire for more honor, money, power and pleasure’ (p.1). In discussing the famous myth in the Protagoras, B. neatly shows that Protagoras is characterised as a man who practises what he preaches (and vice versa), and so his skill with words is as vital for the sophist as the claws and jaw of the lion. For B., Protagoras is the advocate of the ‘couch-city’ over against Socrates’ ‘do-no-harm ethics’, but he acknowledges that Socrates is also happy to play with hedonic calculus (351b-358d) and B. argues that the dialogue foregrounds the ethics of its namesake, giving Protagoras enough space to expound his ideas in all their persuasive force in a series of powerful speeches—somewhat like the famous speech of Callicles in the Gorgias. In B.’s account Socrates cannot win: his very engaging with the weaponised virtue and eristic force of his opponent commits him to a Protagorean urge to defeat his opponent. By the end of the dialogue Protagoras and Socrates have (B. urges) changed sides, with Socrates accepting that as virtue is knowledge then it must be teachable, and with Protagoras unable to refute the unity of virtues (Protagoras 361). Both men end up being ‘absurd’.
Plato’s use of Simonides is at the heart of this book. The poet features in Republic (331) where the use of a line of his poetry (‘It is right to give back to anyone what you owe them’) to summarise justice is taken apart forensically by Socrates, and the misuse of poetry as a form of charismatic authority is challenged there and in Protagoras as yet another example of the dangers posed by flashy answers to big questions. The analysis of Simonides’ poem in Protagoras (338e4-342a5) leads to a dispute over the inconsistent use of the assertion ‘becoming good is hard for man’ and is usually read as a slightly playful version of the sort of linguistic jiggery-pokery enjoyed and sold by sophists and the poem as transmitted in the text has indeed occasioned much discussion seeking to iron out what it is actually saying: it is a pity that B. has not made more use of the abundant secondary literature on this elusive text. In B.’s account, Socrates uses the ambiguities and puzzles of the poem to trip up the overconfident sophist in his tracks: he takes on the sophist at his own game and ends up (as usual) turning everything on its head to the amusement of himself and the discomfort of his interlocutor. B. spends a lot of time poring over the details of the discussion and comes to the conclusion that ‘when [Socrates] stages the strained attempt to convert Simonides’ words into a vehicle for expressing his own belief, he also stages the failure of the attempt by driving the vehicle off in the wrong direction and letting himself be dragged along with it’ (p.105).
B. is himself quite a sophist in his mannered style and in his urge to push lines of argument beyond normal limits. He argues in chapter 1, for instance, that what he calls the ‘klinopolis’ section of Republic 2 is a portrait of ‘the new agathoi—members of rich families but not of the Eupatridai’ although no evidence is produced to justify this socio-political reading. B. summarises Republic 586a-b as suggesting that these people are ‘always in danger of becoming what they eat’ and seems fixated on a puritanical reading of Plato which would reduce pleasures to addiction and which makes the philosopher sound like a hell-fire preacher condemning the sins of the flesh, when in fact the passage in question is simply (and lucidly) analysing the degree to which happiness and pleasure are (and are not) co-extensive. B. enjoys his metaphors and his abundant neologisms (‘etceteration’, ‘snippetotomy’ etc), and sometimes takes this beyond comprehensible limits.
The book as a whole is (perhaps appropriately) a puzzling one to read. The Table of Contents tells us that Part 1 of the book will discuss ‘The Republic’ and Part II will discuss Protagoras: but in fact Part 1 only spends 11 pages on Republic before launching straight into Protagoras. The strangest feature of this book is the overabundant referencing of the Greek text in English transliteration: see e.g. pp.37-8 where the text of Simonides’ poem is reproduced in English transliteration rather than in Greek script—surprising since anyone with enough Greek to make sense of this text will presumably know the alphabet and Greek fonts are not hard to reproduce these days. Greek words and phrases are scattered all over the book without explanation, and there is no glossary of key terms for the Greekless reader to refer to, or even a bibliography. Readers on page 166, for example, are expected to know that phrear means a ‘well’ just as earlier (p.78) they had to make sense of: ‘the deos this account solicits is exacerbated by the example of horsemanship...’. The Greek is not even rendered accurately on occasion: on p.7 Plato’s word diple (διπλῆ) is mistransliterated as diplou. The word triclinium is Latin for a ‘dining room’ and not a Greek word for a banqueting couch (13). tryphon could never agree with the feminine noun polis (p.14). There is no Greek word klinopolis listed in LSJ, and κλίνη means ‘bed’ at least as often as it means ‘couch’ (pace p. 13). The Greek quoted on p. 15 which he renders ‘doing one’s own’ is misprinted without the essential aspirates (auton di’ hauton and not auton di’ auton) which are needed to make the text make sense. All that in a couple of pages: the impression given throughout is that B. is trying to impress his readers with his philological authority but ends up making the book almost useless for students with no Greek, while the parade of scholarship is too riddled with avoidable errors to be impressive to those who know enough Greek to have benefited from it.
John Godwin