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How Philosophy Became Socratic
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C5246.indb ii 4/8/10 10:44:19 AM

GH
How Philosophy Became Socratic
EF
A Study of Plato’s
Protagoras, Charmides, and Republic
laurence lampert
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago & London
C5246.indb iii 4/8/10 10:44:19 AM

Laurence Lampert is professor emeritus of philosophy at Indiana University–Purdue
University Indianapolis and the author of Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, also published by
the University of Chicago Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2010 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2010
Printed in the United States of America
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5
isbn-13: 978-0-226-47096-2 (cloth)
isbn-10: 0-226-47096-2 (cloth)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lampert, Laurence, 1941–
How philosophy became socratic : a study of Plato’s Protagoras, Charmides, and
Republic / Laurence Lampert.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-226-47096-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-47096-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Socrates. 2. Socrates—
Political and social views. 3. Plato. Protagoras. 4. Plato. Republic. 5. Plato.
Charmides. 6. Philosophy, Ancient—History. 7. Philosophy, Ancient—Political
aspects. 8. Political science—Philosophy. I. Title.
b317.l335 2010
184—dc22
2009052793
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.
C5246.indb iv 4/8/10 10:44:19 AM

[ contents ]
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
part one
Philosophy in a Time of Splendor: Socrates
in Periclean Athens before the War, c. 433
chapter 1. Protagoras: Socrates and the Greek Enlightenment 19
Prologue: Great Protagoras 19
1. First Words 21
2. The Frame Conversation 24
3. Socrates with a Young Athenian 28
4. Socrates in Hades 34
5. Protagoras Introduces Himself 37
6. Socrates’ Challenge and Invitation:
Can the Political Art Be Taught?
43
7. Protagoras’s Display Speech:
Why the Political Art Is Teachable
50
8. Socrates’ Display Speech, Part I:
The Wise Must Teach That Virtue Is Unitary
70
9. Socrates Stages a Crisis 79
10. Socrates’ Display Speech, Part II:
A Wiser Stance toward the Wise
85
11. Alcibiades Presides 98
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12. Socrates’ Display Speech, Part III:
A Wiser Stance toward the Many
102
13. The Final Tribunal: Courage and Wisdom 117
14. Socrates the Victor 121
15. Last Words 124
16. Socrates’ Politics for Philosophy in 433 130
Note on the Dramatic Date of Protagoras and Alcibiades I 141
part two
Philosophy in a Time of Crisis: Socrates’ Return to War-Ravaged,
Plague-Ravaged Athens, Late Spring 429
chapter 2. Charmides: Socrates’ Philosophy and
Its Transmission
147
Prologue: The Return of Socrates 147
1. First Words 148
2. Socrates’ Intentions 153
3. The Spectacle of Charmides’ Entrance 157
4. Critias Scripts a Play but Socrates Takes It Over 162
5. Stripping Charmides’ Soul 169
6. What Critias Took from Socrates and What That
Riddler Had in Mind
178
7. Should Each of the Beings Become Clearly Apparent
Just As It Is?
194
8. The Final Deﬁ nition of Sôphrosunê, Socrates’ Deﬁ nition 199
9. The Possibility of Socrates’ Sôphrosunê 203
10. The Beneﬁ t of Socrates’ Sôphrosunê 213
11. Socrates Judges the Inquiry 226
12. Last Words 230
13. Who Might the Auditor of Plato’s Charmides Be? 235
Note on the Dramatic Date of Charmides 237
chapter 3. The Republic: The Birth of Platonism 241
Prologue: Socrates’ Great Politics 241
vi Contents
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One: The World to Which Socrates Goes Down 243
1. First Words 243
2. The Compelled and the Voluntary 247
3. Learning from Cephalus 248
4. Polemarchus and Socratic Justice 253
5. Gentling Thrasymachus 257
6. The State of the Young in Athens 271
Two: Socrates’ New Beginning 279
7. New Gods 279
8. New Philosophers 289
9. New Justice in a New Soul 293
10. Compulsion and Another Beginning 306
11. The Center of the Republic: The Philosopher Ruler 312
12. Glaucon, Ally of the Philosopher’s Rule 320
13. Platonism: Philosophy’s Political Defense and
Introduction to Philosophy
329
14. Public Speakers for Philosophy 337
15. Images of the Greatest Study: Sun, Line, Cave 348
Three: The Last Act of the Returned Odysseus 375
16. Love and Reverence for Homer 375
17. Homer’s Deed 377
18. Homer’s Children 382
19. Rewards and Prizes for Socrates’ Children 389
20. Replacing Homer’s Hades 394
21. Last Words 403
Note on the Dramatic Date of the Republic 405
Epilogue 413
Works Cited 419
Index 425
Contents vii
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C5246.indb viii 4/8/10 10:44:20 AM

[ acknowledgments ]
I am grateful to George Dunn for the help he has given me with this book. His
acute insights, exegetically grounded and far reaching, illumined many passages
of Plato for me, and he generously permitted me to incorporate them as I saw ﬁ t.
In addition, the two readers for the Press did me the great service of providing de-
tailed criticisms from deeply informed perspectives; their work greatly improved
the ﬁ nished version of this book.
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[ introduction ]
Plato spread his dialogues across the temporal span of Socrates’ life, set-
ting some earlier, some later, inducing their engaged reader to wonder:
Does that span map a temporal development in Socrates’ thought? Did
Plato show Socrates becoming Socrates? Yes, this book answers, the dra-
matic dates Plato gave his dialogues invite his reader to follow a now little-
used route into the true mansion of Socrates’ thought. Following that
route, the reader accompanies Socrates as he breaks with the century-old
tradition of philosophy, turns to his own path of investigation, and enters,
over time, the deepest understanding of nature, and then, gradually again,
learns the proper way to shelter and transmit that understanding in face
of the threats to philosophy that Plato made so prominent. The plan of
Plato’s dialogues shows Socrates becoming Socrates, “the one turning point
and vortex”
1
of the history of philosophy—and of the history of political
philosophy, philosophy’s quasi-philosophical means of sheltering and
advancing philosophy. Plato’s chronological record of Socrates becoming
who he was has a signiﬁ cance far transcending philosophy’s existence
in Socrates’ or Plato’s time, for it is the enduring record of philosophy
becoming Socratic, taking the shape that came to dominate the spiritual
life of the West. A study of Plato’s dialogues that pays close attention to
their chronology and settings sees one of the roots of our civilization be-
ing formed, over time, in the mind and actions of a wise man in imperial
Athens, a man intending that his wise thoughts and actions colonize the
wider world from there.
1. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, ¶15.
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2 Introduction
The question of how Socrates became Socrates arises late in a study
of Plato’s writings and is meant to arise late: only after Socrates has actu-
ally won in Plato’s reader a portion of the admiration due him does that
question arise. “How did Socrates become himself?” is a question asked
by those whom the dialogues have already drawn to that seemingly most
public of philosophers. Wanting with some urgency to know just how
their own special teacher became himself, such readers will interrogate
their primary source on Socrates and only then begin to discover just how
Plato wove into his dialogues the answer to a question they were crafted
to generate.
Plato’s Socrates in Time and Place
Plato assigned most of his dialogues a speciﬁ c dramatic date, showing
Socrates conversing at a particular time and place with a particular person
or persons. Platonic scholarship of the last century and a half has paid
relatively little attention to these dramatic dates compared with the
effort expended on determining composition dates, the time at which
Plato might have written them. Scholars assign composition dates on the
basis of some theory of Plato’s development; Plato assigned dramatic dates
pointing to stages in Socrates’ development. By inquiring into the latent
signiﬁ cance of the patent dramatic dates, we can reconstruct Plato’s ac-
count of how Socrates became himself, for Plato did not describe Socrates’
development in any straightforward way but instead communicated it in-
directly through the dramatic dates. He indicated thereby that Socrates’
development did not occur in a vacuum—it was not simply a movement
of thought; instead, it was a series of conscious gains by a mind that, in its
devotion to thinking, came to recognize the situatedness of thinking in
a person in space and time. Plato’s dialogues show Socrates to be a most
remarkable man in a most remarkable place and time, for Plato set his
life history of Socrates against the background of the larger life history
of Athens, the city in which Socrates spent his life, whose wars he fought,
whose festivals he celebrated, whose young he counseled, whose history
and politics he measured, whose laws he obeyed until ﬁ nally submitting,
at age seventy, to its death sentence even though his oldest friend offered
him easy escape from prison the day before the sacred ship returned from
Delos, releasing his city from sacred restraint and freeing it to kill him.
Plato’s dialogues, written in the ﬁ fty years after Socrates’ death in 399,
all reach back to the past. With the possible exception of the Laws and
Epinomis they all look back to the life of Socrates, a life begun in 469 and
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Introduction 3
lived out in a most memorable, spectacular setting: Athens, the dynamic
imperial city at the center of Greek civilization, a wealthy democracy led
during Socrates’ youth and early maturity by its ﬁ rst citizen, Pericles. It was
a city made glorious by Pericles’ unprecedented public building program
of magniﬁ cent temples rising atop the acropolis at its center and visible
for miles around; a conﬁ dent, even arrogant city with impregnable defen-
sive walls running ﬁ ve miles down to the sea, where the mightiest ﬂ eet in
the Mediterranean was housed in luxurious ship sheds; a city still living
in conscious exultation of victory over the invincible Persians a decade
before Socrates was born; a city of festivals to its gods, including the fes-
tivals to Dionysos that produced the unique Attic spectacles of tragedy
and comedy witnessed by all male citizens and in at least one of which
Socrates was the leading character; a politically experimental city of rea-
soned public talk, with a one-hundred-year-old tradition of deciding all
major matters of policy through public debate and secret vote and of de-
ciding all important judicial cases before huge juries of citizens drawn by
lot and voting only after hearing the best case put forward by both sides.
Finally, it was a city aware of itself as the center of the Greek enlighten-
ment, which had sprung forth in the eastern and western extremities of
greater Greece but now ﬂ ourished, as nowhere else, in the imperial center,
which drew to itself the best minds from all over Greece, with whom Plato
showed Socrates in conversation. This was the city aglow with glory and
grandeur that suffered, for the last half of Socrates’ life, a twenty-seven-
year war with Sparta that ended in defeat and civil war. The longer-term
consequences of the civil war arguably cost Socrates his life, partly because
of suspicions aroused even before the war broke out by his active pursuit
of the two talented youths who matured into Athens’ two greatest crimi-
nals, Alcibiades and Critias.
How could the life of the Athenian philosopher Socrates not be placed
against this background? It was the actual background of his life, and by
alluding to it Plato gave Socrates’ life a setting that had every chance of
remaining memorable not only in its marble buildings but in the written
record of its tragedies and comedies and in particular in a writing that re-
corded the history of the war and was written explicitly to be “a possession
for all time,” Thucydides’ history. Against the background of that particu-
lar possession for all time, the historical settings for Plato’s dialogues win
color and focus, for he seems to have had Thucydides in mind when mak-
ing many spare remarks to locate Socrates’ conversations in Athenian his-
tory. Another permanent possession of historical writing, Herodotus’s his-
tory of the war with the Persians—his account in fact of Greekness, of the
C5246.indb 3 4/8/10 10:44:21 AM

4 Introduction
way of the Greeks—had been published in Athens during the ﬁ rst decade
of the war with Sparta and itself presented a lesson in what is timeless in
history and what was uniquely Greek, and it too proves illuminating for
Plato’s historical settings.
When attention is paid to the timely setting of the dialogues via the
chronological arrangement Plato gave them, another historic event be-
gins to emerge, an event that would make the time in which they are set
all the more memorable because all the more catastrophic. As a time of
splendor that passed into a time of decay and loss, the time in which Plato
set his dialogues suffered what could be thought the ultimate loss, the
unprecedented, once-for-all-time death of the gods of Homer and Hesiod.
That dying would be slow—when gods die, men play with their shad-
ows in caves for centuries, said Nietzsche the philosopher of the death
of our God
2
—but the essential events in the death of the Homeric gods
occurred during Socrates’ lifetime. It was not only the war and the plague
that cost the young men of Athens their belief in its gods, it was the Greek
enlightenment as well, for it actively schooled the best Athenian young
in a lightly veiled skepticism about the gods while mocking ancestral or
paternal submission to them and counseling its students on just how to
make the best use of the piety of others. How does Plato’s Socrates stand
to Homer and Hesiod, the poets who, Herodotus said, “created for the
Greeks their theogeny, gave to the gods the special names for their de-
scent from their ancestors and divided among them their honors, their
arts, and their shapes”?
3
A chronological study of the dialogues shows that
question rising to singular importance for Socrates in his public presenta-
tion of philosophy.
By tying the life of Socrates to the life of Athens, Plato did the opposite
of tying the timeless things of philosophy to the merely ephemeral. Instead,
he displayed the life of a wise man thinking and acting within a paradigm
time of human attainment and human crisis—and responding with para-
digm wisdom. Plato set his dialogues in a time and place that would last if
human things were to last at all, for he set them at the turning of an age as
the Homeric passed to something yet to be named because just being born,
just being set aﬂ oat on the river of time through the thoughts and deeds of
a post-Homeric wise man schooled by Homer. Plato’s dialogues were writ-
ten as a possession for all time because they are set within a particular time
2. Nietzsche, Gay Science, ¶344.
3. Herodotus 2.53.2.
C5246.indb 4 4/8/10 10:44:21 AM

Introduction 5
and present the thoughts and deeds of a particular man as he grew into
what seemed the only adequate response to the crisis of his time.
Philosophy in Plato’s Chronological
Arrangement of the Dialogues
Plato gave his dialogues a structural or taxonomic feature that adds
complexity to their settings: he made nine of them narrations by a speaker
to some audience, while the others are simply performed like plays set before
the reader with no intervention by a narrator. Each of the performed
dialogues occurs at a single point in Socrates’ life, and their dates can be de-
termined with more or less exactitude from the historical cues Plato chose
to give them: Euthyphro occurred on the day of the preliminary hearing
on Meletus’s charges; the Hippias dialogues occurred during the diplo-
matic congress called by Alcibiades in the summer of 420. The narrated
dialogues, however, have two temporal settings, the time of the narration
and the time of the conversation narrated. The separation between the
two settings can be as brief as that of Protagoras, a few minutes or hours, or
as long as that of Parmenides, six decades.
The nine narrated dialogues are split by a noteworthy feature: Socrates
narrates six,
4
while Phaedo narrates Phaedo, Cephalus Parmenides, and
Apollodorus the Symposium, all three of these narrators being, in their
various ways, devoted followers of Socrates. These three dialogues, excep-
tional in form as narrations by others, are exceptional too with respect
to the question of Socrates becoming Socrates: all three contain retro-
spective recoveries of a philosophic turning point in the life of a young
Socrates, younger than the Socrates of all the other dialogues, which begin
with Socrates mounting the stage, so to speak, in Protagoras around 433
when he was about thirty-six. It cannot be an accident that Plato made a
younger Socrates accessible only in retrospective reports passed on much
later by devotees and in all three dialogues narrated by devotees.
5
Readers
4. Protagoras, Euthydemus, Lovers, Lysis, Charmides, Republic. Two of these, Protagoras and Eu-
thydemus, have frames introducing a core discussion; the other four are narrated by Socrates from
beginning to end. Theaetetus is an interesting variant: it has a frame and a core, but its core discus-
sion is not narrated but read as a text that Socrates ﬁ rst narrated to Euclides to write down; its
frame discussion between Euclides and Terpsion introduces a reading, long after Socrates’ death,
of Euclides’ writing of Socrates’ narration.
5. Plato’s Apology of Socrates contains an important addition to these three accounts of a
younger Socrates; there, in the only speech Socrates ever gave to the collected “men of Athens,”
C5246.indb 5 4/8/10 10:44:21 AM

6 Introduction
who notice this feature discover that the three reports fall easily into their
proper sequence: the youngest Socrates of all is available through Phae-
do’s report of Socrates’ last day—Plato so arranged things that the oldest
possible Socrates, hours before his end and as an introduction to the last
argument of his life, tells of his earliest beginnings in philosophy. Chrono-
logically next comes the young Socrates reported by Cephalus, a Socrates
avid to challenge old Parmenides and his student Zeno during their visit
to Athens in 450 with his own new theory of ideas. That event allows the
philosophic biography of the young Socrates to be dated: he was about
nineteen in 450, and his new theory must have been devised after the im-
passioned pursuit of the investigation of nature he reported in Phaedo—so
the report in Phaedo is of a teenager absorbing the whole century of Greek
philosophy preceding him and already setting out on what he later called
his “second sailing,” his turn to the speeches or logoi, the turn that led him
to the ideas.
6
In the third dialogue narrated by another, Apollodorus’s re-
port in the Symposium, Socrates relates to a most sophisticated audience
an event of learning in which a wise woman named God’s-honor, Diotima,
led him to the truth about the deepest things, surely the greatest philo-
sophical event of his life, an event that perhaps occurred around 441 when
Socrates was about twenty-eight.
The three dialogues narrated by devotees report the essential steps in
Socrates’ entry into Socratic philosophy—they show Socrates developing
his views on the questions of being and knowing fundamental to philosophy
itself. Plato gave one of these, Cephalus’s report on the conversation of the
nineteen-year-old Socrates with Zeno and Parmenides, a most remarkable
introduction. It shows that a record of that conversation exists now for
one reason alone: certain men of Clazomenae, having heard a rumor of
such a conversation, sailed across the Aegean to Athens in order to hunt
down the one man alive who might still have memory of it and be able
to relate it to them. Plato makes their zeal particularly arresting by con-
trasting it with the indifference of certain Athenians: it is perhaps ten
years after Socrates’ death, and when they arrive in the Athenian agora
they chance to run into certain former associates of Socrates well known
a Socrates soon to die frees himself to speak mythically and provides the Athenian public with a
way for them to think of the most important “turn” in his life (Apology 21b). But a turn to the kind
of philosophy the public would recognize as his, a turn based on the reason he gives, implies a pre-
“Socratic” wisdom: the sole grounds on which the Delphic oracle could acknowledge that no one
was wiser than Socrates was a wisdom prior to the turn described in the Apology, a wisdom about
which Socrates chose to remain silent in his public speech while pointing to it this way.
6. Phaedo 99d.
C5246.indb 6 4/8/10 10:44:21 AM

Introduction 7
indeed to Plato’s readers: Adeimantus and Glaucon. Encountering them
simpliﬁ es matters for the men of Clazomenae because the man they seek
happens to be their half-brother, Antiphon. Adeimantus and Glaucon lead
them to their brother’s house to see if Antiphon can remember the con-
versation told to him by an old lover and now some sixty years distant in
the past. He can remember despite his loss of interest in anything it con-
tains, but he has to be persuaded because at ﬁ rst he balks, saying it is a lot
of work. That travelers from Clazomenae must persuade a reluctant Anti-
phon to tell the tale he alone remembers is a little revelation: why haven’t
Adeimantus and Glaucon seen to the preservation of this tale, which they
know their brother practiced thoroughly when he was a boy? Saved by the
efforts of anonymous men of Clazomenae, Antiphon’s memorized tale
would have died with him for all Adeimantus and Glaucon cared—they
couldn’t be bothered to ask their own brother to tell them the story of a
life-altering experience of the young Socrates.
An ancient commentator speaks of Plato, “even at the age of eighty,
never letting off combing and curling his dialogues, never letting off
re-plaiting them,”
7
and the dialogues give every evidence of constant
care. The way Plato opened Parmenides, stunningly by contrasting the
anonymity and zeal of travelers from Clazomenae with the indifference
of Adeimantus and Glaucon of all people, cannot be incidental. Instead,
his opening seems paradigmatic for the whole question of recovering the
young Socrates or learning how Socrates entered Socratic philosophy: his
opening suggests that the question of Socrates’ entry into philosophy is
truly of interest only to anonymous latecomers, travelers from afar bent
on recovering what familiars would let fall; they may initially act on mere
rumor, and the sequence of transmission may pass through questionable
hands, but if they expend the necessary effort they may discover something
of the highest interest to them. Those willing to let it fall include those
privileged to have heard Socrates that night in the Piraeus unfold the Re-
public to them. And rightly so: those charmed as Adeimantus and Glaucon
were charmed by the Socrates of the Republic quite ﬁ ttingly feel no need to
inquire further. But a tale of his beginnings was saved by anonymous men
of Clazomenae. And how did it come down to us? Through a talking head,
a kephalê, through written spoken words preserved not by Antiphon or Ad-
eimantus or Glaucon but by another brother, a talking head indeed, who
cared enough to learn what he could about Socrates young and old and to
make his words continue to speak. Plato preserved what he teaches some
7. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, “On Literary Composition,” Critical Essays, 2:225.
C5246.indb 7 4/8/10 10:44:21 AM

8 Introduction
to care about, preserved it in a way that keeps preserving it for nameless
future travelers.
And political philosophy? Cicero credited Socrates with being the
inventor of that second and indispensable aspect of philosophy, the public
shape it would have to take if it was ever to ﬂ ourish in human culture.
8

Plato showed Socrates entering that too by the chronological arrangement
he gave his dialogues, entering it later, of course, than philosophy proper.
But the opening of Parmenides suggests to me the ﬁ tting way to treat
Plato’s chronology of Socrates’ life: consider ﬁ rst the public Socrates and
only then trace the way back to a Socrates both younger and more private,
the Socrates to whom Plato gave access only through the three dialogues
narrated by devotees. Accordingly, I will consider ﬁ rst Socrates’ mature
attainment of an adequate political philosophy and only then his prior en-
try into philosophy itself, into that permanent possession and its ongoing
investigations around which a politic shelter had to be constructed. The
three dialogues I treat in this book, Protagoras, Charmides, and the Republic,
all deal with Socrates’ concern for the public appearance of philosophy.
They presuppose but do not discuss a nonpublic Socrates whose primary
concern is the investigations basic to philosophy, of nature and human na-
ture. To treat the political philosopher before the philosopher seems to
me to accord with Plato’s chronological arrangement of his dialogues and
his assignment of narrators, and to accord as well with what seems to be
the principle that structures the chronology and narrations, namely, that
politic philosophy be visible and powerful before that other, deeper, per-
haps impolitic philosophy is suspected at all—or that the impolitic in phi-
losophy always only be accessible through the politic. Phaedo, Parmenides,
and the Symposium, the dialogues that lead back to a younger Socrates con-
cerned most directly with nature and the possibility of humans coming to
know nature, I will treat in a second book, How Socrates Became Socrates .
Parmenides himself suggests the two different tasks separated into the
two books of my two-part work. Having just destroyed the view that the
young Socrates presented so aggressively—that there are “ideas of the be-
ings” and that one must “distinguish each form on its own” (135a)
9
—he de-
scribes how the advocate of such a view might react to its refutation: he
could “hit a dead end and argue that these things are not” or, if they are, are
necessarily unknown to human nature. But he pictures a different reaction
possible for “a naturally gifted man”; he “could learn that there is a cer-
8. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.4.10.
9. Translations by Albert Keith Whitaker, Plato’s Parmenides.
C5246.indb 8 4/8/10 10:44:22 AM

Introduction 9
tain kind and beinghood, in itself, for each thing.” And above and beyond
even such learning, Parmenides points to a still higher attainment: “Only
a prodigy more remarkable still will discover all these things and be able
to teach someone else to judge them clearly and sufﬁ ciently for himself”
(135b). At age nineteen, suffering the demolition of his vaunted solution,
high-reaching Socrates hears the great Parmenides goad him with the
peak of possible attainment for a thinker, the peak of discovery and teach-
ing that Plato will show him actually attaining. This book, How Philosophy
Became Socratic, aims to show how Plato’s chronological arrangement of his
dialogues portrays the remarkable prodigy Socrates, having discovered all
these things, learning to teach someone else how to judge them clearly for
himself. The second book, How Socrates Became Socrates, aims to show how
Plato’s chronological arrangement of his dialogues portrays the naturally
gifted Socrates learning that there is a certain kind and beinghood for each
thing.
Political Philosophy in Plato’s Chronological
Arrangement of the Dialogues
I begin this book then with the chronologically ﬁ rst of Plato’s dialogues,
where ﬁ rst refers to the dramatic setting of the dialogue or of the frame that
opens it. Viewed this way, Protagoras is the chronologically ﬁ rst dialogue,
set around 433.
10
A dialogue narrated by Socrates, it displays Socrates set-
ting out to win a certain public name for himself, for he takes the trouble
to tell an audience not all that interested in intellectual matters (as will be
seen) a conversation among the wise that just took place in private behind
closed doors in which he whipped in argument the man his audience
thinks is the wisest man in Greece. How ﬁ tting that Protagoras be chrono-
logically ﬁ rst: it is the dialogue in which Socrates mounts the public stage
bent on winning a reputation for himself in Athens as the ﬁ rst man ever to
defeat the great Protagoras in argument. Winning a reputation for himself
means winning a reputation for what he represents: by going public with
his victory over Protagoras, he aims to give philosophy a Socratic public
face that will eclipse its Protagorean public face. Protagoras leads naturally
10. This date and others asserted in this section are not free of controversy. Warrant for
the dramatic dates here simply announced is supplied in two ways. First, within the exegesis of
each of the dialogues I emphasize the particular historical cues that Plato offers his readers for
determining just when they occurred. Second, I append a “Note” to the end of the discussions of
Protagoras, Charmides, and the Republic dealing in more detail with the dramatic date of each.
C5246.indb 9 4/8/10 10:44:22 AM

10 Introduction
(as will be seen) to Alcibiades I, a performed dialogue with no introduction
but a dialogue closely related to Protagoras chronologically and in theme.
It shows that Socrates’ politics for philosophy around 433 has a related
and apparently more overtly political aim: private guidance of the politi-
cally most gifted and ambitious young Athenian. Part One of this book,
“Philosophy in a Time of Splendor,” deals with Protagoras and Alcibiades I
as Socrates’ initial way of establishing a responsible public presence for
philosophy.
By setting Protagoras and Alcibiades I around 433, Plato set them shortly
before both Socrates and Alcibiades left Athens with the army that even-
tually besieged Potidaea. This northern city on the isthmus of Pallene
in Chalcidice was a tribute-paying member of Athens’ empire that had
been led to revolt by Corinthians bent on kindling war between Athens
and Sparta, the war that broke out in earnest while Socrates was away
with the army. He was away for two and a half or three years, returning to
Athens only after the Athenian defeat near Potidaea in the spring of 429.
When he ﬁ nally returned, it was to a city enduring its second season of
devastating plague and just learning about its defeat at Potidaea after years
of siege.
Plato set Charmides—a dialogue Socrates narrates to a nameless
“friend”—on the day after Socrates’ return to Athens from Potidaea: it is
late May 429. That date of return announces, by itself, that Socrates re-
turned to a city transformed by war and plague, and he says in Charmides
that he returns transformed himself, having learned something of high
importance while he was away. The transformed Socrates in transformed
Athens begins the conversation of Charmides by saying he wants to learn
something about “things here”—he wants to discover the state of philos-
ophy in Athens and whether any of the young have grown beautiful and
wise during his absence. He fully satisﬁ es himself in both respects, and
that means, primarily and with respect to the ﬁ rst matter, that Socrates
learns what Critias did with his philosophy in his absence—Critias, his
prewar associate glimpsed in Protagoras; Critias, the man who will become
famous as a sophist and, much later, notorious as one of the Thirty Ty-
rants; Critias, the young man along with Alcibiades for whose corruption
Socrates was most blamed right down to his trial and execution. Charmides,
with ﬁ tting restraint, shows Socrates learning that in his absence Critias
turned philosophy into an instrument that justiﬁ ed and advanced his own
passion to rule. Socrates learns in Charmides that the way he transmit-
ted his philosophy to Critias requires of him new modes of transmission
entirely.
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Introduction 11
Plato made the dramatic date of Charmides prominent by placing in
its ﬁ rst sentence information from which its date can be inferred if other
information, offered later, is added. Plato treated the dramatic date of
the Republic in a similar way: announcing in its ﬁ rst sentence that it oc-
curred on the day Athenians introduced the goddess into Athens, he has
Thrasymachus state at the end of his conversation with Socrates that that
goddess is Thracian Bendis. The dramatic date of the Republic, then, is
early June 429. Plato set the Republic a few weeks after Charmides and in-
dicated the dates of each in the same way, prominently but incompletely
in the ﬁ rst sentence of each. Plato seems to want his reader to discover
what he refused to say explicitly: Charmides and the Republic are twinned
dialogues with Charmides serving as a kind of introduction to the Republic.
The Republic too, then, is a dialogue of the returned Socrates, homecom-
ing after a long absence at war, having learned something signiﬁ cant in his
absence, and returning now to a city become different.
The dramatic dates Plato gave his dialogues leads to the conclusion
that the origin of Platonic political philosophy is itself a Platonic theme:
by placing a gap between Protagoras and the Republic Plato shows Socrates
learning that he will have to undertake a far more radical defense of phi-
losophy than the one he gave in Protagoras. The Republic will repeat on a
grander scale all the themes of Protagoras, and a great sophist will be there
to take it all in and be reformed by it, young men of political ambition will
be there to be transformed by it, and it will all be narrated to an Athenian
audience who will be led to think well of philosophy by it. In all essentials,
the returned and different Socrates of Charmides and the Republic is the
Socrates who from that point on, publicly at least, remained the same till
the end, “always saying the same things about the same things.”
11
Part Two
of this book, “Philosophy in a Time of Crisis,” will deal with Charmides and
the Republic.
Chronology and Exegesis
The chronological arrangement Plato gave his dialogues is prominent in
the following chapters partly because it has been neglected but mostly
because it serves as one of many tools for a more adequate exegesis of the
dialogues, an exegesis that better recovers what Plato placed in them. But
if the chronology serves the exegesis, the contrary is also true: the exege-
sis, in its persuasiveness, its capacity to display Plato’s purpose, serves to
11. Gorgias 490e.
C5246.indb 11 4/8/10 10:44:22 AM

12 Introduction
conﬁ rm the importance of the chronology and even the accuracy of par-
ticular chronological claims. That the exegesis can support the chronol-
ogy means more for us than it would for Plato’s contemporaries, because
chronological cues that sufﬁ ced for them are often no longer enough.
Plato secured the dramatic date of Protagoras for all interested contempo-
raries by setting it at that moment in Athenian history when three famous
sophists were in Athens, a year after a certain comedy by Pherecrates was
performed at the Lenaia festival. Exactly when that was may now be im-
possible to determine—“around 433” may have to sufﬁ ce for us, whereas
Plato’s contemporaries could be sure they knew the exact date. But even if
the exact date of Protagoras is irrecoverable for us, the most important fact
about its date is secure: it is set shortly before the war. And exegesis of Pro-
tagoras can conﬁ rm its prewar setting, because exegesis shows a Socrates
setting out to instruct Protagoras and lure Alcibiades—and his manner
of proceeding in both tasks ﬁ ts the times, a time of splendor and promise
that nevertheless carries with it shadows of what is to come. Exegesis can
show that the measures Socrates takes in Protagoras for the protection and
advancement of philosophy are insufﬁ cient for the coming crises, half-
measures that will have to be supplanted by more adequate measures that
become visible in the ﬁ rst dialogues set in the crisis years.
The chronology of Plato’s dialogues serves the exegesis of the dialogues.
Exegesis is the sustained effort to pursue every detail of the text with a
view to a reasoned recovery of everything Plato intended to communicate.
Exegesis is what Leo Strauss, its master practitioner and teacher, said it
was, “the very long, never easy, but always pleasant work”
12
of studying a
great thinker’s text in order to advance a reader’s conversation with its
author, a conversation driven forward by a reader’s expectation that the
author’s generosity has not yet granted everything it wants to grant. By
giving his dialogues a chronological order, Plato allows the true magni-
tude of Socrates’ teaching and Socrates’ task to rise before his reader’s
eyes without his having to put it into explicit words; he communicates just
who Socrates became by showing him becoming himself. “Become who
you are”—Nietzsche used Pindar’s words as a sign for his own becoming
who he was, a philosopher who gained insight into the fundamental way
of all beings and found a mighty task thrust on him.
13
Just so, the chronol-
ogy Plato gave his dialogues allows him to show Socrates becoming who
he was, a philosopher and a political philosopher, a thinker who gained
12. Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 37.
13. Pindar, Pythian Odes 2.73; Nietzsche, Gay Science, ¶270; Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is.
C5246.indb 12 4/8/10 10:44:22 AM

Introduction 13
insight into the fundamental way of all beings and subsequently discov-
ered just what fell to him, the task of ensuring that that insight be carried
forward on the river of time.
A Nietzschean History of Philosophy
This book too then is an installment in the new history of philosophy made
possible by Friedrich Nietzsche.
14
My Nietzsche and Modern Times showed
how Bacon and Descartes were genuine philosophers in Nietzsche’s sense;
this book—it might have been called Nietzsche and Ancient Times—shows
how Plato is a genuine philosopher in Nietzsche’s sense. These books take
Nietzsche to be the great event in recent philosophy partly because he
opened a fruitful and true perspective for our study of the greatest philos-
ophers: they were “commanders and legislators,” philosopher rulers who
said to their age, “We have to go that way,” a different way, an untrod way.
15

Nietzsche shows that philosophic rule is no Platonic dream; it’s a Platonic
reality made actual again and again by the series of great Platonic political
philosophers among whom it is fair to number Nietzsche the latest and
Plato the ﬁ rst. Plato came to rule, my book hopes to show, in precisely
the way he knew Homer ruled, Homer, “the educator of Greece.”
16
The
Plato of my book is the Plato Nietzsche recovered, the founding educa-
tor of Western civilization, a Platonic civilization whose long, slow rise
Nietzsche charted as culminating in those “Platonism[s] for the people”
that are Christianity and Christianity’s nontheistic extension, modern
times, and whose long, slow demise Nietzsche traced in his vivisection of
modern nihilism, his “history of the next two centuries,”
17
and whose post-
Platonic possible successor Nietzsche had his Zarathustra glimpse from a
long way off.
A Nietzschean history of philosophy recovers in Plato what is funda-
mental to all the greatest philosophers, what ultimately moves or moti-
vates them. Most fundamental are two passions or loves. Philosophy is
the passion to understand the whole rationally, the love of wisdom that
is, Socrates indicated in the Symposium, the highest eros of a whole that
can be understood as eros and nothing besides. Political philosophy, the
acts of communication and legislation undertaken on behalf of that pri-
14. Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times, 1–13.
15. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ¶¶211–12; see Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task, 196–203.
16. Republic 606e.
17. Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe 13.11 [411].
C5246.indb 13 4/8/10 10:44:23 AM

14 Introduction
mary passion, is driven by love of the human, philanthropy, as Socrates
indicated in Phaedo where Plato has him pause at the center to state that
the greatest evil facing humanity is misology, hatred of logos or reason that
entails misanthropy and stems from reason’s inability to prove that the
world is what the heart most desires it to be. The fundamental connec-
tion between these two passions, love of wisdom and love of the human,
can be demonstrated exegetically in Plato only through detailed study of
the Symposium and Phaedo, the study to be undertaken in the book to fol-
low this one. The present book concerns Plato’s presentation of Socrates’
philanthropy. Philanthropy, a now common word, has an uncommon sense
in the philosophers, for it denotes action on behalf of the human in its
highest reach, its reach for understanding. A Nietzschean history of politi-
cal philosophy studies the actions undertaken by the greatest thinkers to
further the human through the advancement of philosophy. The history of
political philosophy, whose opening chapter this book chronicles, is ulti-
mately the history of philosophic philanthropy, philosophic rule on behalf
of philosophy.
18
A Nietzschean history of philosophy explicitly exposes another indis-
pensable element in philosophy: the distinction between exoteric and
esoteric known to all philosophers before the modern Enlightenment.
19

When Nietzsche said, “I’m a complete skeptic about Plato” and added,
“he’s so moralistic,”
20
he offered a key to understanding Plato: Plato’s
moralism is exoteric, a salutary teaching that must be read skeptically as
Plato’s instrument to edify or ennoble society and shelter it from philos-
ophy’s conclusions, which Plato knew (in Nietzsche’s words) were “true
but deadly.”
21
In all three dialogues discussed in this book the esoteri-
cism of the wise emerges as a primary theme. In Protagoras, at the open-
ing of his public teaching as Plato presents it, Socrates set out to school
Protagoras in a more effective esotericism than the one he was proud of
inventing—Protagoras whose very ﬁ rst speeches trumpet his novel solu-
tion to the necessity that a wise man speak artfully in order to allay the sus-
picions he unavoidably triggers. Protagoras and Socrates both know that
esotericism—salutary opinions sheltering less than salutary truths—is
18. The theme of philanthropy as the fundamental motive of political philosophy is basic
to my previous books. See especially Nietzsche and Modern Times, 126–37 (Plato), 137–41 (Bacon),
196, 204–5, 259–71 (Descartes); Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, 18, 122–23, 159–61; Nietzsche’s Task, 71–75,
127–28, 176–79, 301–3.
19. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ¶30.
20. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “What I Owe to the Ancients,” ¶2.
21. Nietzsche, On the Use and Disadvantage of History, ¶9.
C5246.indb 14 4/8/10 10:44:23 AM

Introduction 15
necessary not only because of persecution: it is dictated above all by “the
fundamental requirements of the city,” in Leo Strauss’s phrase. “Socratic
rhetoric is meant to be an indispensable instrument of philosophy. Its
purpose is to lead potential philosophers to philosophy both by training
them and by liberating them from the charms which obstruct the philo-
sophic effort, as well as to prevent the access to philosophy of those who
are not ﬁ t for it.” This dual function of leading and preventing makes So-
cratic esotericism “emphatically just. It is animated by the spirit of social
responsibility.”
22
For a Nietzschean history of philosophy Leo Strauss is a virtually indis-
pensable resource: he is the ﬁ rst thinker in the long history of esotericism
to set out explicitly the reasons why esotericism is inescapable, to list ex-
plicitly the many devices of esoteric practice, and to write commentaries
on esoteric writings like those of Plato that demonstrate the difference
between the exoteric lines and the esoteric sense between them. Strauss’s
writings—particularly on Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes but includ-
ing his whole body of writings—were indispensable for my book. Also im-
portant were the many commentators on Plato who recognize in Strauss a
singular teacher; of these by far the richest and most authoritative is Seth
22. Strauss, On Tyranny, 6. In Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues, Catherine
Zuckert argues that a chronological reading of Plato’s dialogues provides new insights into Plato’s
philosophy; she offers an interpretation of all the dialogues to prove that thesis and show its inter-
pretive worth. I share Zuckert’s thesis, but our approaches diverge in important ways. For me, the
single most important gain from studying the dialogues chronologically is insight into Socrates
becoming Socrates and philosophy becoming Socratic. For Zuckert, the most important gain is
indicated by her title, Plato’s Philosophers: the chronology of the dialogues, she argues, allows Plato
to show how Socrates stands to Plato’s four other philosophers, the Athenian Stranger of the
Laws, the Parmenides of Parmenides, the Timaeus of Timaeus-Critias, and the Eleatic Stranger of
the Sophist and the Statesman. Our books also diverge on the dramatic dates themselves as Zuckert
exhibits an unexpected casualness in assigning dramatic dates to some of the dialogues, often
accepting consensus views on inadequate grounds; as a result she misdates many dialogues (e.g.,
Republic, Timaeus-Critias, the Hippias dialogues) and misses the signiﬁ cance of their chronological
settings. But the greatest divergence in our accounts and by far the most important is just who
the Socrates is who emerges from a chronological reading of Plato. Hers is a Socrates without
irony and therefore without esoteric intent, having no need to shelter a less than salutary true
teaching within a salutary exoteric mask. Zuckert reads the words of Plato’s Socrates with a
relentless literalism that combines close attention to detail with loyalty to ﬁ rst impressions as if
they were all that Socrates’ exact words imply, as if his words did not also trigger second and third
impressions that are co-implied, implied by puzzles or oddities that induce wonder. Because she
does not pursue Socrates’ esoteric intent into his true radicalism, Zuckert can place Plato’s other
philosophers on a level with Socrates; she loses Socrates’ singularity and fascination by judging
him merely a moralist. Still, Zuckert’s book (which was published after my book was complete) is
an observant, instructive account of the dialogues that offers many new insights from a chrono-
logical perspective.
C5246.indb 15 4/8/10 10:44:23 AM

16 Introduction
Benardete, who wrote commentaries on Plato but also extended the range
of “Platonic” political philosophy back to Homer: his The Bow and the Lyre:
A Platonic Reading of the “Odyssey” shows Odysseus to be the ancestor of
Plato’s Socrates in ways that bring to light an unimagined community of
kin among the Greek wise made hard to recover by Plato’s recognition
of his need to break Homer’s hold.
Nietzsche is omnipresent in this book if infrequently named on its
pages. He properly measured Plato’s sway over Western civilization and
just what was needed in the cultural catastrophe superﬁ cially named “the
death of God” but actually the death of Platonism. What was needed was
philosophic rule of Platonic dimension and anti-Platonic intent to break
Platonism’s hold while bringing into the open what Plato believed had to
be kept hidden, philosophy’s genuine understanding of the way of all be-
ings as eros. A Nietzschean history of philosophy serves the Nietzschean
goal for the human future by displaying the kinship of the great Western
philosophers, the Platonic-Nietzschean character of their legislative as-
piration to rule for the well-being of reason in the world and then, pri-
marily, the Platonic/Nietzschean understanding of what that legislation
advanced, insight into the way of all beings as eros or will to power.
C5246.indb 16 4/8/10 10:44:23 AM

part one
(
Philosophy in a Time of Splendor:
Socrates in Periclean Athens
before the War,
c. 433
C5246.indb 17 4/8/10 10:44:23 AM

C5246.indb 18 4/8/10 10:44:23 AM

[ chapter 1 ]
Protagoras:
Socrates and the Greek Enlightenment
Prologue:
Great Protagoras
Historical research plus an act of imagination is now necessary for Plato’s
Protagoras to have its proper shock: Protagoras, widely held by his contem-
poraries to be the wisest man in Greece, honored and trusted enough to
have been invited by Pericles himself to draft the laws of the pan-Hellenic
colony of Thurii, old enough now to be father of anyone present at Plato’s
Protagoras, appealing enough to be the main attraction to ambitious young
Athenians drawn that day to the house of the richest man in Athens to
hear him—that fabled man is defeated in argument by a relatively young
Athenian and defeated so soundly that he is reduced at the end to pro-
claiming his victor his proper successor.
The unrivaled success of Plato’s dialogues has transformed Protagoras’s
word of praise, sophist, into a term of abuse and made Socrates philoso-
phy’s hero—now everyone expects Protagoras to lose and Socrates to
win. And the loss of Protagoras’s books, the reduction of his life’s work
to a few sentences, makes him defenseless before Plato’s presentation of
Socrates and allows every reader to feel superior to Protagoras in every
respect: in moral decency, for Protagoras is now thought morally disrepu-
table even though “virtually everything known of Protagoras suggests
that ethically he was a conservative and a traditionalist”;
1
in intellectual
1. Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos, 107. Among the many accounts of Protagoras, Schiappa’s is
most effective in showing that Protagoras’s high reputation had legitimate grounds; for indica-
C5246.indb 19 4/8/10 10:44:23 AM

20 Chapter One
acuity, for Protagoras is now imagined to be an intellectual lightweight
even though he was the chief founder of the Greek enlightenment, li-
onized in his own time and long after honored with statues placing him
alongside Plato, Heraclitus, and Thales;
2
in the power to attract ambitious
young men, even though Protagoras itself opens with a young man wanting
to use Socrates for nothing more than to introduce him to Protagoras.
Protagoras is the chief founder of the Greek enlightenment, though
its roots lie in the investigation of nature that began in Ionian Greece
almost a century before Protagoras opened his public career around 460.
Although he had precursors, Protagoras was the ﬁ rst to systematically
apply the principles of rational or scientiﬁ c investigation to the natural
phenomena of human nature and human culture. He wrote the books that
ﬁ rst interpreted humans as that part of nature naturally inclined to de-
velop unnatural or supernatural misunderstandings of nature. Those books
spread enlightenment to a wider public beginning to become literate.
He was the ﬁ rst to openly call himself a sophist and to travel to the leading
cities of greater Greece, setting a pattern for spreading the enlightenment
to young men wealthy and ambitious enough to pay for his mentoring. His
success generated younger rivals who strove to outdo his books and lec-
tures by producing their own, creating thereby the larger movement of
enlightenment out of what started with one man from Abdera.
Plato indicated the singular importance of Protagoras by his chrono-
logical ordering of the dialogues. He put Socrates’ debate with Protagoras
ﬁ rst, at the very opening of his public career, and he put it last as well:
Theaetetus has a frame set in 369 to introduce the reading of a written dia-
logue dictated by a Socrates now long dead. Within that dialogue Socrates
calls Protagoras back from the dead to defend his views better than his fol-
lowers can. Socrates debates Protagoras from the beginning of his career
to its end; and in written form the debate is perpetual, stretching out into
the future as Socratics debate Protagoreans.
3
tions of just how great Protagoras’s stature and fame were, see 3–19. With respect to Protagoras’s
reputation for decency, Walter Burkert, the leading modern authority on Greek religion, com-
ments on his being made the lawgiver of Thurii by Pericles: “Clearly Protagoras’ morality was
above suspicion” (Greek Religion, 312).
2. Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos, 15; Schiappa’s recovery of Protagoras’s reputation includes
his reputation as a thinker: his work “was as ‘philosophical’ (truth-seeking) as it was rhetorical
(success-seeking)” (40).
3. Nietzsche enters the debate on the side of Protagoras and states Protagoras’s continued
importance for the enlightenment: “the Greek culture of the sophists grew out of all the Greek
instincts [as that of Plato did not] . . . and it has ultimately shown itself to be right . . . our way of
thinking today is to a high degree heraclitean, democritean and protagorean . . . it sufﬁ ces to say
C5246.indb 20 4/8/10 10:44:24 AM

Protagoras 21
Only after recovering the greatness of this historic ﬁ gure in the rational
approach to human nature can Plato’s Protagoras have its proper shock:
Socrates is greater still. But in what does Socrates’ superior greatness con-
sist? The following account of Protagoras pursues that question.
The dramatic date of Protagoras places it before the war between Ath-
ens and Sparta broke out in 431. For reasons that the details of the dialogue
make plausible, that date is uncontroversially set around 433.
4
Thucydides
shows that by 433 attentive Athenians could know that war was inevitable,
for the Corcyraean ambassadors say so explicitly.
5
Plato set Protagoras in
prewar Athens with Socrates about thirty-six and Protagoras in his mid-
sixties. Hippocrates is about seventeen, as is Callias; Alcibiades is not yet
twenty, and Critias somewhat older at twenty-seven; Prodicus and Hip-
pias are both about Socrates’ age.
1. First Words
“From where, Socrates, are you appearing?”
6
The Platonic corpus opens
with the appropriate question. It is put by a nameless Athenian, a “com-
rade,” like a shipmate or messmate—not friend.
7
The nameless questioner
leaps to the answer he believes he already knows: “Or isn’t it plain that it’s
from the hunt for the vernal beauty of Alcibiades?” This question and this
answer, both made so prominent as the chronologically ﬁ rst question and
answer put to Plato’s Socrates, appear as the question and answer Athe-
nians in general would naturally have in 433 about their odd countryman
and the attentions he so evidently and for such a long time paid to their
most spectacular offspring.
8
They are, in a way, also the last question and
answer Athenians had about Socrates, the fatal question and answer about
Socrates’ corruption of Alcibiades and other young Athenians, which they
that it is protagorean because Protagoras took both pieces, Heraclitus and Democritus, together
into himself.” KSA 13:14 [116]; Will to Power ¶428.
4. See below, “Note on the Dramatic Date of Protagoras and Alcibiades I.”
5. Thucydides 1.31–36; see below, 48–49.
6. I have beneﬁ ted greatly from a privately printed translation of Protagoras by Leon Craig;
it is rigorous in being “as literal as possible consistent with grammatical English and intelligibil-
ity” (1); it is superior to all the existing English translations I know. I have modiﬁ ed it slightly on
occasion.
7. The list of characters calls him hetairos (comrade, companion, fellow, mate); Socrates calls
him makarios (309c), “blessed, happy, fortunate,” a member of the upper classes.
8. Alcibiades I opens stating that Socrates consistently and openly observed Alcibiades from
the time of his earliest youth without actually addressing him until the occasion of that dialogue
itself.
C5246.indb 21 4/8/10 10:44:24 AM

22 Chapter One
acted on by indicting, convicting, and executing him some thirty-four
years later.
But the question itself, allowed to stand alone, freed from the rush to
the common answer and instead put slowly as a true interrogative asked
by those made friends of Socrates by Plato’s dialogues—that question is
the essential question: from where did Socrates, that singularity in the his-
tory of Greek philosophy, appear? Out of what did he arise, or what was
the occasion of his arising and growing into himself ? The question asks,
further, how did Socrates, having become himself, appear or let himself
be seen? Posed this way, the question that opens Protagoras and the whole
Platonic corpus does not lead immediately to his hunt for Alcibiades. Its
ﬁ rst word—From where? (Pothen)—leads backward to the Socrates who has
already become himself before the Platonic dialogues begin: by posing
that question on behalf of their devoted readers, Plato’s dialogues open on
a question to which the dialogues themselves will offer a different answer
from that of his Athenian contemporary, one that readers can recover only
retrospectively, by looking backward through the dialogues themselves
into what they offer about Socrates’ true origins as a philosopher.
As for the second part of the question—from where are you appearing?—
Protagoras, both in its frame and in its core conversation, urges a differ-
ent answer on the questioner from the one he so automatically supplied.
Socrates actively diverts his questioner’s attention away from his pursuit
of Alcibiades to ﬁ x it on a different pursuit, a contest he ignited between
himself and Protagoras, who the questioner thinks is the wisest man of
their time. Socrates makes that contest originate in his concern about the
education of another young Athenian, Hippocrates, whom Socrates intro-
duces uninvited into his narration of the conversation from which he is ap-
pearing. He makes it appear that he is appearing from a contest that serves
a civic purpose: sheltering young Athenians from the whole set of sus-
pected corrupters, foreign sophists eager to attract Athenian young. When
Socrates ﬁ rst appears, Protagoras suggests, he looks to his appearance.
Before Socrates says a word, his questioner adds the accusation of his
second question; while playful enough and merely a question, it carries an
undercurrent of menace as a harbinger of the accusation for which Socrates
will be executed: “And he certainly did appear to me still a beautiful man
when I saw him the day before yesterday, but a man for all that, Socrates,
strictly between ourselves, and already sprouting a beard.” Having sprouted
a beard, Alcibiades is beyond the age during which Athenian custom per-
mitted older males decently to pursue adolescent males: Socrates’ pursuit
of Alcibiades borders on the criminal or at least the disreputable.
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Protagoras 23
Socrates’ very ﬁ rst words are also a question that leads to a further
question. “What of that?” he asks ﬁ rst, a response of mild deﬁ ance that
puts a question to Athenian custom. But if this question too is allowed to
stand alone, it too seems deﬁ nitive, wholly appropriate as Socrates’ ﬁ rst
words. Here is the interrogating attitude with which Socrates approached
everything he encountered; here is the refusal to take as settled even the
settled things of customary practice and conviction. His next question im-
plies that he follows a higher authority than Athenian custom: “Are you not
then a praiser of Homer who said that youth has the highest grace in him
with the ﬁ rst down upon his lip, which Alcibiades has now?” This judgment
by Homer appears in each of his poems and each time describes Hermes
in disguise coming to the aid of an older man undertaking a harrowing
task, Priam in the Iliad (24.348) and Odysseus in the Odyssey (10.279). It is
Hermes in the Odyssey, Hermes with Odysseus that adds startling gravity
to Socrates’ ﬁ rst words.
9
For the event in the Odyssey to which Socrates
refers in his ﬁ rst speech in the Platonic corpus provides an uncanny por-
trait of just who Socrates himself is at this point and what his purpose is.
Hermes with the ﬁ rst down upon his lip appears to Odysseus just after
Odysseus made his decision to come to the aid of his men, a decision that
followed the disaster with the Laestrygonians in which he lost eleven of
his twelve ships and their crews because of what must be judged his “crimi-
nal negligence.”
10
Circe’s drug has transformed half of Odysseus’s remain-
ing men into swine with human minds, and Odysseus is on his way to help
them somehow when Hermes appears suddenly and gives him the one
gift that will enable him to resist Circe’s enchantment. It is perhaps the
single most important moment in Odysseus’s odyssey to wisdom when, re-
solved to help his men, he is favored by Hermes who shows him the nature
( physis, appearing only here in the Homeric corpus) of a plant “black in its
root and its ﬂ ower like milk; the gods call it moly, but it is hard for mortal
men to dig up, but the gods can do everything.”
11
Armed now with what is
hard to dig up, a knowledge of nature, immunized, that is, against the en-
chantment before which his men have no defense, Odysseus succeeds in
delivering them from Circe’s drug. Who is Socrates at the opening of the
9. Segvic, “Homer in Plato’s Protagoras,” 247–51, also interprets Socrates’ words as referring to
the events in the Odyssey and not to Hermes’ appearance in the Iliad, though for slightly different
reasons.
10. See Benardete, Bow and the Lyre, 114; see 84–89 on Hermes’ gift to Odysseus. Benardete’s
guidance to the Odyssey is indispensable in bringing to light Homer’s oblique and profound
teaching.
11. Odyssey 10.304–6.
C5246.indb 23 4/8/10 10:44:24 AM

24 Chapter One
Platonic corpus? He is a praiser of Homer who is like Homer’s Odysseus in
having been favored with a knowledge of nature. And what is Socrates do-
ing at the opening of the Platonic corpus? He is resolutely turning to an act
of rescue that he alone, because of his knowledge of nature, can perform.
Can all that actually be intended by Plato in a citation from Homer?
Plato never let off combing and curling his dialogues, paying special atten-
tion to their openings, and this is the chronological opening of his whole
corpus. When the ﬁ rst words of other dialogues are studied, their art of al-
lusion helps conﬁ rm the importance of this allusion—as does Plato’s treat-
ment of Homer in the three dialogues studied in this book: Plato comes to
light as “a praiser of Homer” like no other. While it need not be fully cred-
ited at the beginning, there it stands, glorious, in Socrates’ ﬁ rst speech in
the Platonic corpus, a claim to the most supreme achievements of knowl-
edge and rescue attained by Homer’s Odysseus. A more awesome opening
to the Platonic corpus is scarcely imaginable. From where, Socrates, are
you appearing? From an understanding of nature on the way to delivering
my people from enchantment.
2. The Frame Conversation (309a–310a)
The frame conversation opens Protagoras with a brief performed dialogue
12

that sets the conditions under which the long core conversation—a
narrated dialogue—is spoken and establishes to whom it is spoken: the
nameless questioner and others not identiﬁ ed in any way. After both the
questioner and Socrates have made their initial speeches, the questioner
responds to Socrates’ invocation of Homer’s authority by yielding entirely:
having just referred to Alcibiades twice as a man (anêr), he now calls him a
youth (neanias, 309b). Still, he speaks like an inquisitor, insistently putting
three questions to Socrates: “How are things now? Are you in fact just ap-
pearing from him? And how is the youth disposed toward you?” Socrates
answers all three questions but puts his answer to the central question
last: “Well disposed, it seemed to me, and not least on this very day, for
he spoke up a lot as my ally, coming to my aid, and in fact I only just left
him” (309b). It is that last fact that Socrates addresses, beginning to cast
doubt on his questioner’s insinuation that he’s coming from a hunt for Al-
12. See Republic 392d–394d where Socrates uses the opening of the Iliad to explain to Adeiman-
tus the difference between a narrative that is simple and one that is produced by imitation or by
both together (392d). On those terms, Protagoras is like the Iliad in beginning with simple narra-
tive and switching to imitation.
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Protagoras 25
cibiades. He wants to tell him “something rather strange”: even though
Alcibiades was present, “I not only paid him no attention, several times I
quite forgot about him.” His questioner can hardly believe it but assumes
that if Socrates forgot about beautiful Alcibiades, it could only be because
of the presence of someone more beautiful. Through his insistent ques-
tions he learns that there is someone, some foreigner from Abdera, more
beautiful even than Kleinias’s son because “how could the greatest wisdom
not appear more beautiful?” (309c). Bafﬂ ed by Socrates’ drawn-out with-
holding of the name of the competing beauty, the questioner asks: “So it’s
having just met someone wise that you’re present with us then, Socrates?”
Socrates employs the superlative, “the wisest of any now living, it may be,”
but he adds a conditional: “if, that is, it seems to you that the wisest is—
Protagoras.” Having ﬁ nally heard the beauty’s name, the questioner asks:
“What are you saying? Protagoras has come to town?”
The questioner learns only now that Protagoras is in town, Protago-
ras, the most famous wise man in the Greek world, a former resident of
Athens, visiting now after many years’ absence and staying at the home of
the richest man in town along with other famous, younger wise men. The
questioner has betrayed a truth about himself: he cannot belong to the
intellectual circles of Athens and so not to Socrates’ circle. Not only does
Socrates know how long Protagoras has been in Athens, he knows where
he’s staying, who’s with him (314b–c), and that he spends most of his time
there (311a).
13
Two salient features of the anonymous audience to whom
Socrates narrates the core conversation of Protagoras thus come to light:
limited interest in intellectual matters coupled with considerable interest
in Socrates’ love affairs.
14
Plato’s indications about Socrates’ audience take on their appropri-
ate weight only as Socrates’ narration advances, for both Protagoras and
Socrates state that there is a problematic relation between the wise and
the public to which the wisest have devoted considerable thought. That
relation becomes one of the great themes of the chronologically ﬁ rst dia-
13. When Hippocrates doesn’t know that Protagoras is in town Socrates expresses surprise:
“You’ve only just found out?” (310b), and Hippocrates has to explain that he has been away from
Athens proper hunting down a runaway slave. Protagoras was likely in Athens last in 443 when,
at Pericles’ direction, he developed the laws of Thurii, a panhellenic colony in Italy (Diogenes
Laertius 9.50; see also Ehrenberg, “Foundation of Thurii”; and Muir, “Protagoras and Education
at Thurii.”
14. For a chronological study of the dialogues it is important that the interests of the frame
audience of Protagoras are similar to those of the frame audience supplied twice in the Symposium:
from the beginning to the end of Socrates’ career he faced publics more interested in his love
affairs and his practices than in philosophy.
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26 Chapter One
logue, and it focuses on the calculations the wise must make in allowing
their wisdom to become public—the exotericism of the wise, their studied,
cosmetic appearance. But then the whole of Socrates’ narration falls under
a very precise suspicion: Is Socrates’ narration itself an example of how he
thinks the wise should make their private words and deeds public? After
Socrates’ indications about esotericism become visible, the only reason-
able answer is Yes. Plato opens his corpus ﬁ ttingly: a narration presenting
itself as an open report to the public on private events that happened be-
hind locked doors has its own ways of locking up its private contents.
But Socrates’ questioner was right—he is just coming from Alcibiades.
The very ﬁ rst words (“From where, Socrates, are you appearing?”) dove-
tail with the very last words of Socrates’ narration—“Saying and hearing
these things, we departed.” Plato makes the whole dialogue seem to cycle
back on itself, its opening and closing words making it appear as a closed
circle consisting of a private event and its immediate public retelling. Be-
fore that retelling Socrates redirects his questioner’s attention away from
Alcibiades and on to Protagoras, that allegedly wisest man of his time.
“And it’s from being with that one that you now come?” the questioner
asks (309d). “Yes indeed, having said and heard much,” Socrates answers,
using the same verbs he will use to end his narration. Socrates thus creates
the impression that yes, he’s just come from Protagoras rather than from
Alcibiades, and that he has a greater interest in the more beautiful Pro-
tagoras than in Alcibiades.
The questioner seems in fact to regard Protagoras as the wisest of any
then living, for he is interested enough in what Socrates said and heard
with Protagoras to ask him to “narrate to us the being-together—if noth-
ing prevents you” (310a). Nothing prevents him for he does what his ques-
tioner told him to do: make the questioner’s slave boy give up his sitting
place and sit there himself. It is from the seat of the questioner’s slave that
Socrates narrates the whole conversation: Socrates seems to have been
placed under a kind of compulsion to obey what the slave’s master asked
of him. Is Socrates’ narration of what he said and heard compelled or vol-
untary? It seems he wanted to narrate it, given the inducements he offered
his questioner about the beauty of the wisest man now living; it seems he
wanted to be compelled. His whole narration from the slave’s seat will in-
dicate that Socrates narrates under self-compulsion, for he brings to light
just what it was that forced him, a private man, to go public.
Nothing prevents Socrates from narrating the whole conversation. If
his auditors listen at all attentively they will notice that twice in his nar-
ration, at its center and at its end, Socrates states that he has business to
C5246.indb 26 4/8/10 10:44:25 AM

Protagoras 27
attend to and must leave the gathering: if they listen attentively they learn
that Socrates misled that earlier audience because nothing prevents his
relating the whole conversation to them. The frame audience might also
notice that Socrates misled his questioner: he tells Hippocrates that he
does not think Protagoras is wise, so he can hardly think him more beauti-
ful than Alcibiades—the reason he gave his questioner for forgetting Al-
cibiades does not hold up. As for Socrates forgetting, he reports the whole
conversation, and when once he alleges forgetfulness (334c–d) Alcibiades
assures everyone that Socrates has not forgotten (336d).
15
By leading his
audience to think he forgot Alcibiades, he leads them to forget Alcibiades.
He never forgets Alcibiades, and his narration, heard with attention to Al-
cibiades, proves the questioner right: Socrates was returning from a hunt
for Alcibiades. It proves too that Alcibiades is a quarry worthy of a hunt,
for although he is not yet twenty, he listens better than anyone else and
reacts with a conﬁ dence that allows him to take charge.
Chronologically Plato’s dialogues begin with Socrates mounting the
stage to report to a wider Athenian audience events that just transpired
in private, events of great public interest showing the next generation of
Athenian leadership eagerly seeking out foreign teachers about whom
Athenians had naturally grown suspicious. Plato begins with a ﬁ tting act
for the Athenian philosopher who became famous for being open and
public: he narrates for an Athenian public a private conversation display-
ing the gripping, intensely important relation between foreign sophists
and potentially powerful young Athenians. And Socrates? He mounts the
Platonic stage to betray that privacy and to show publicly that he faced
down the great man of the Greek enlightenment and defeated him in the
presence of the best Athenian young. He ﬂ aunts his victory to a public
that began by expressing suspicions about his pursuit of the most gifted of
the Athenian young. In Protagoras Socrates mounts the stage to win Athe-
nians over to him; his ﬁ rst public narration in the Platonic dialogues, like
his last, is an apology, a public defense of himself and philosophy.
In the ﬁ nal exchange of the frame Socrates says he “will be grateful if you
[all] listen”; his gratitude is understandable given the necessity of allaying
their suspicion about his pursuit of Alcibiades. His questioner states that
15. Other instances of forgetting occur in the dialogue. Alcibiades accuses all but Socrates
of forgetting (336d). Protagoras accuses Simonides of forgetting his point in a poem Socrates
defends as consistent (339d). Hippocrates forgot to tell Socrates that he left town in pursuit of
his slave Satyrus (310c). The actions of Epimetheus involve forgetting (321b–c, 361c–d), and the
actions of Prometheus seem not to.
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28 Chapter One
they will be grateful if he speaks; their gratitude is understandable because
their interest in his pursuit of Alcibiades has become an interest in learning
how the wisdom of the wisest can be more beautiful than Alcibiades. Each
is grateful to the other at the start; each will be satisﬁ ed with the other
at the end, Socrates satisﬁ ed that he allayed their suspicion, his audience
satisﬁ ed that their original suspicion has been replaced by the salutary
opinion that Socrates defends Athenian youths against foreign wise men.
Each will be able to be grateful to the other at the end because obedient
Socrates in fact takes command from the slave’s seat: “But now listen.”
3. Socrates with a Young Athenian (310a–314c)
Wholly on his own initiative and before telling the frame audience any-
thing he promised them, Socrates takes them into the privacy of his own
bedroom before dawn that morning to tell them how he dealt with an am-
bitious young Athenian eager to be taught by Protagoras. He thus takes an
audience suspicious of his hunt for Alcibiades into what they could think
his deepest privacy, in bed in the dark, alone with a young follower feeling
around for him.
16
And they hear him speak in an edifying way, warning
the young Athenian to be wary of what he may buy from a foreign soph-
ist unknowingly, possibly taking evils into his soul that may harm it. Hip-
pocrates is unknown to the frame audience, for Socrates has to identify
him not only by his patronym, as the son of Apollodoros, but also by his
brother’s name.
17
Unknown Hippocrates comes vividly to life in the events
and speeches Socrates narrates about him—making it all the more puz-
zling that he disappears after Socrates introduces him to Protagoras ex-
cept for a single early mention (327d).
Hippocrates hammers at Socrates’ door before dawn and when he is
let in rushes to Socrates’ room demanding in a loud voice if he is awake
or asleep. Groping in the dark for Socrates’ bed, he sits down by his feet
to relate his tale. He was away from Athens chasing down his runaway
slave, and when he returned and his brother told him Protagoras was in
town, he rushed off immediately toward Socrates’ house even though he
had been getting reading for bed. He wanted Socrates to introduce him to
Protagoras—he is no more loath to use Socrates for his ends with Protago-
16. Cf. Symposium 219b–d.
17. An Apollodoros narrates the Symposium and is present at Socrates’ trial (Apology 38b) and at
the discussion narrated in Phaedo (59b, 117d). Debra Nails, People of Plato, 169f., presents evidence
for Hippocrates’ being the nephew of Pericles, but this clashes with his evident obscurity.
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Protagoras 29
ras than he would be to use his friends’ money to pay Protagoras (310e).
He restrained himself last night because he was tired (310c), not because
it was an inappropriate time to visit either Socrates or Protagoras. So he
slept brieﬂ y before rushing to Socrates before dawn, and dawn comes early
on a summer day in Athens. Socrates identiﬁ es him as courageous and ve-
hement (310d): his vehemence or excitability seems to be the ground of his
courage. Socrates knows Hippocrates well enough to recognize his voice in
the dark (310b), and he asks the natural question at being so rudely awak-
ened: is anything wrong? He neither rebukes Hippocrates nor dismisses
him when told his reason for being there so early. Instead, he asks what
Protagoras’s presence in Athens has to do with him: “Has Protagoras done
you some injustice?” Hippocrates responds with a laugh and a little joke:
“Yes, by the gods, Socrates. Because he alone is wise, but is not making
me so.” Hippocrates’ laugh is the ﬁ rst of three reactions Socrates reports,
and the three mark the changes in Hippocrates as Socrates’ questioning
subtracts his outrageous self-indulgence and ﬁ ts him to listen to Socrates’
instruction.
18
“Let’s go!” Hippocrates says, after informing Socrates of how he intends
to use him. Socrates restrains him, for not only does he know that Protag-
oras is staying at Callias’s house, he knows as well that they will likely ﬁ nd
Protagoras at home for he usually stays indoors. Instead of leaving in the
predawn darkness, Socrates suggests they stroll around in the courtyard
until it is light and then go. He informs the frame audience but not Hip-
pocrates of his intention in examining Hippocrates: “to test the strength
of Hippocrates’ resolve” (311b)—his resolve and not his competence, for
Socrates seems to know that already. His examination of Hippocrates is
chronologically the ﬁ rst Socratic examination in the Platonic corpus; in-
troduced wholly on Socrates’ initiative, it is a paradigm examination even
if Hippocrates is not a paradigm student.
Socrates presses a twofold question: Hippocrates will pay Protagoras a
fee “in his capacity as a what?” and “in order to become what?” (311b). The
18. These opening events of the ﬁ rst day of Socrates’ public life as recorded by Plato resemble
events that opened one of the last days Plato records of Socrates’ life: when Crito turns up before
dawn in Socrates’ cell, he too gropes for the end of Socrates’ bed. Both dialogues show Socrates in
complete privacy speaking to a countryman, one young, one old, and both show Socrates speaking
as a loyal citizen, giving lessons of loyalty to one’s own. From start to ﬁ nish of Plato’s record of
Socrates’ public life in Athens, he shows him speaking in private of public loyalty. On similarities
between the scene with Hippocrates and the opening of Crito, see Strauss, “Plato’s Apology of
Socrates and Crito,” Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 54–55; and Landy, “Virtue, Art, and the
Good Life in Plato’s Protagoras,” 303–4.
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30 Chapter One
questions seem impossibly hard for Hippocrates who, for all his impetu-
ous action, is slow to answer simple questions. To clarify his twofold ques-
tion Socrates has to supply three examples, beginning with Hippocrates’
renowned namesake from Cos, the founder of Greek scientiﬁ c medicine.
In the course of his questioning, Socrates invents a “someone” to pose the
questions, a device that allows him to become Hippocrates’ ally, uniting
the two of them in face of a common adversary with hard questions, a
device Socrates will employ with Protagoras. Socrates pictures them going
to Protagoras to pay him—and being willing to spend their friends’ money
as well—and his “someone” asks them together (311d): “you are intend-
ing to spend money on Protagoras in his capacity as a what?” Laborious
prompting is still necessary before Hippocrates answers: “ ‘Well,’ he said,
‘a sophist is what they call the man, Socrates.’ ” Finally. The “someone” can
now pose the second part of the question in the singular: “You are going to
Protagoras with a view to becoming what?” The answer almost dictated by
the previous examples is obvious even to Hippocrates, but before Socrates
reports his answer he tells the frame audience the second of Hippocrates’
three reactions to his questioning: “And he said blushing—for enough of
the day was dawning that he became fully visible.” It is this blush, this sign
of Hippocrates’ shame, that Socrates emphasizes in his response, though
he well knows that Hippocrates has no intention of becoming anything
so unmanly as a sophist and is embarrassed even to think of it: “But in the
name of the gods!”
19
he says, “wouldn’t you be ashamed to present yourself
to the Greeks as a sophist?” “Yes, by Zeus, Socrates,” Hippocrates says, “if
I must say what I think!” And the sophist Protagoras? He is the only other
person in Protagoras said to be ashamed (348c), but he does not blush—
does he say what he thinks? He indicates that he says only what he thinks
is necessary. Socrates’ question was narrow: the shame is “presenting your-
self to the Greeks as a sophist.” Greeks regard sophistry as shameful and
Hippocrates shares that sense, but Protagoras is proud to present himself
as the founder of sophism, having given himself that name and applied it
to others. Still, he knows what the Greeks think and that he cannot simply
say what he thinks.
Socrates gives Hippocrates a way out of the shameful thought, suggest-
ing that Hippocrates is going to Protagoras for the kind of learning he
19. Socrates utters his only two oaths in their exchange in connection with Hippocrates’ ﬁ rst
two reactions, ﬁ rst, “by Zeus” and here “by the gods.” See Coby, Socrates and the Sophistic Enlighten-
ment, 28–29. Coby’s commentary on Protagoras has something useful to say on almost every aspect
of the dialogue.
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Protagoras 31
received from his writing teacher or athletic trainer: he did not learn from
them how to practice their technai but learned the education beﬁ tting a
layman and a free man (312b). Hippocrates welcomes this escape only to
be faced with another question. Socrates describes what Hippocrates is
about to do: “place your own soul in the care of a man who is, as you de-
clare, a sophist, yet I’d be ﬁ lled with wonder if you knew just what a soph-
ist is. And yet, if you don’t know that, you don’t know whether the busi-
ness to which you have entrusted your soul is good or bad.” Socrates said
that he was testing Hippocrates’ resolve, and Hippocrates shows he can
still be resolute: “I think I do know,” he says, unwittingly betraying that
worst of all conditions, thinking he knows what he doesn’t know.
20
“A l l
right, tell me,” Socrates says. Poor Hippocrates. It’s inevitable now that his
ignorance come into the open. Still, he does his resolute best to defend his
claimed knowledge. His ﬁ rst stab merely shufﬂ es the letters of “sophist”:
“one who’s knowledgeable about the sophôn”—the wise things. “One could
say as much of painters and carpenters,” Socrates says, but again he takes
Hippocrates’ side, calling in that “someone” to question them both about
the claim Hippocrates alone made. Socrates even answers his invented
questioner, leading Hippocrates to answers he is unable to muster on his
own: they should tell their questioner that painters are knowledgeable
about “the production of images, and so on with the others.” But what a
sophist is knowledgeable about Socrates leaves to Hippocrates, while giv-
ing him considerable prompting: “But what if someone were to ask, ‘As for
the sophist, what are his wise things?’ What would we answer him? Knowl-
edgeable for making what product?” Hippocrates is tentative and answers
questioningly with his last positive contribution: “What should we say,
Socrates, except that he knows how to make one clever at speaking?” Here
is what he’s rushing off to Protagoras to receive, as Socrates knew. His re-
sponse is gracious: “Likely what we would say is true,” but he adds that it
is not sufﬁ cient for it raises the further question “as to what the sophist
makes one clever at speaking about” (312d). Socrates’ prompting now gives
Hippocrates all the words and he can say only “Yes” and “Likely” to the
suggestions. Finally Socrates puts the question directly: “But what is this
about which, being knowledgeable himself, the sophist makes his student
knowledgeable as well?” Resolute Hippocrates is ﬁ nished: “By Zeus, I have
nothing left to say to you!” The question should be simple enough for a
young man bent on becoming notable in the city (316c); he should be able
to examine himself and give a simple answer to what he so passionately
20. Apology 21d.
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32 Chapter One
wants from Protagoras. But he is speechless; his resolute insistence that
he knew has been exposed as actual ignorance.
With Hippocrates’ surrender, Socrates can speak didactically; he is se-
vere in chastising him for risking the care of his soul to “this foreigner
who has just arrived” (313a–b). Socrates derides a foreigner while elevating
the familial and the local: he’s not reluctant, for Hippocrates’ sake and for
the sake of his Athenian auditors, to appeal to the common prejudice in
favor of one’s own and against the foreign, though he can hardly share that
prejudice as the measure of a teacher’s worth. Socrates’ rebuke becomes
a tongue-lashing, relentless in picking up every item of their exchange
and throwing it back at Hippocrates in accusation (313b–c). He does so
now and not then, back in his room in the dark, for Hippocrates was not
ready to attend to it. Can Hippocrates beneﬁ t? His response is meek: “So
it seems, Socrates, from what you’ve been saying.” Far more telling than
his yielding words is Socrates’ preface to them, his third and ﬁ nal report on
Hippocrates’ reactions: “And he, listening, replied.” Hippocrates laughed.
Then he blushed. Finally he listened.
21
The paradigm sequence of responses
sets a pattern, for Socrates will lead Protagoras himself through these
stages. Protagoras’s resolve will be greater; he will offer incomparably bet-
ter resistance for he is a man of extreme competence with a reputation to
defend—and he is not betrayed by a blush. Still, Socrates moves him too
from an initial self-conﬁ dence, through shame, to a position of listening
achieved only at the very end.
Socrates’ instruction now becomes explicit as he asks a Hippocrates
who knows he does not know just what a sophist is: “some sort of merchant
or dealer in wares by which the soul is nourished?” Hippocrates responds
perfectly, with the last words he is to utter in the dialogue, unattributed
words that ask of Socrates what can best be asked of him: “But a soul is
nourished, Socrates, by what?” Hippocrates is not a model learner, being
far too slow on the uptake, but here he models the appropriate learning
and asks Socrates a Socratic question, a “What is . . . ?” question, the kind
of question he has heard Socrates asking from the beginning that morning.
In response to a now listening Hippocrates, Socrates becomes the teacher
21. Plato’s exact words for these three events indicate that they belong together. Each begins
a sentence with kai (and), each follows with the demonstrative pronoun hos (that one or he), and
each adds an aorist participle describing Hippocrates’ reaction. The “and” binds the reaction
to what preceded; the “he” makes it emphatically Hippocrates’ action; the participles state the
decisive progress in Socrates’ examination.
C5246.indb 32 4/8/10 10:44:26 AM

Protagoras 33
Hippocrates did not seek out. But instead of saying what nourishes the
soul, Socrates says what a sophist is. His lesson is based on a simple but
memorable analogy distinguishing those who sell wares that nourish the
body and those who sell wares that nourish the soul: like the former, soph-
ists are merchants and hucksters who do not know which of the wares
they peddle is useful and which is worthless; they praise everything they
sell, and the buyer needs to be guided by someone who does know, some
“doctor of the soul,” for the sophist’s wares are carried away in the very
soul of the hearer. He ends his speech uniting with Hippocrates, “let’s
examine these matters further with our elders,” alleging that they are both
“still rather young to exercise discretion over such an important matter.”
“Let’s go, just as we started to do.” But now that he has shown the danger,
why would Socrates expose Hippocrates to it? Because exposing his soul
to Protagoras’s soul-damaging wares leads to exposing it to a soul doctor
who knows what is useful for it: Socrates takes Hippocrates to Protagoras
to hear what Socrates has to sell.
The chronologically ﬁ rst Socratic examination in the Platonic corpus
is a model of Socratic success. Yet it ends atypically on a didactic speech
in which he tells his listener what to learn. Perhaps this feature can be ac-
counted for by another difference, the presence of an audience suspicious
of Socrates’ pursuit of Alcibiades. “Listen,” Socrates told them just before
giving them privileged access to his privacy, and they hear Socrates warn a
young Athenian of the dangers of consulting foreigners rather than family
and countrymen. Socrates’ gratitude for their listening must stem at least
in part from his felt need to alter their view of him.
“Let’s go,” Socrates says to Hippocrates, and he mentions others who
are there: Hippias of Elis, and “Prodicus of Ceos too, I think—and many
others, also wise” (314c). Knowing this much about who’s there, Socrates
certainly knows that other young Athenians will gather at Callias’s house,
as eager as Hippocrates to learn from the greatest wise men of Greece.
He may even know that that young Athenian will be there who complains
at the opening of their very ﬁ rst conversation together that Socrates has
always taken “such trouble to be present wherever I happen to be,”
22
the
young Athenian whom Socrates is suspected of hunting down at the open-
ing of Protagoras. “Let’s go”—could Socrates’ own eagerness to go be partly
because he’s on a hunt for the vernal beauty of Alcibiades?
22. Alcibiades I 104d.
C5246.indb 33 4/8/10 10:44:26 AM

34 Chapter One
4. Socrates in Hades (314c–316b)
When Socrates and Hippocrates arrive at Callias’s house, Socrates reports,
they do not enter immediately but stop in the doorway to complete an ar-
gument they began on the way. He does not say what the argument was,
but he does speculate on its effect: he thinks Callias’s doorkeeper must
have overheard it and concluded that they were sophists wanting to see
Callias. The doorkeeper forcibly slams the door in their faces and locks it
against them, only reluctantly granting them admission after being told
that they are not sophists and have come to see Protagoras. Socrates seems
indistinguishable from a sophist; and the discussions he will report to the
frame audience take place behind closed doors. The difﬁ culties they face
in entering contribute to what Socrates will suggest is happening: they are
entering Hades, whose entryway is guarded by Cerberus.
Entering Callias’s house, they pass into what must be a magniﬁ cent
courtyard beﬁ tting the wealthiest family of the richest city in Greece—an
interior familiar to Socrates, for he knows that Callias’s father used to use
as a storeroom the room in which Prodicus reclines (315d). He describes
the strikingly different stations and stances of the three sophists: Pro-
tagoras strides up and down the portico with three followers on each side
and more behind, all streaming in choreographed precision; Hippias is
seated in the opposite portico, his followers sitting in front of him asking
questions he answers from on high; Prodicus is reclining under blankets
in a room off to the side, discussing with followers reclining beside him.
Protagoras speaks to worshipful listeners, and Socrates says he is “like
Orpheus” in bringing order to those he enchants; Hippias authoritatively
answers questions about nature and the things aloft; Prodicus, protected
under blankets, is protected as well in what he says, for the deep resonance
of his voice echoes in the chamber, making his words indecipherable by
one “standing outside” (315e)—a signiﬁ cant detail given what Socrates
later says about the need for the wise to shelter their words. Perhaps that
is part of the reason Socrates singles Prodicus out: “he seems to me to be a
very wise man and divine” (315a).
After describing Protagoras, Socrates names Homer again and quotes
phrases that make him Odysseus in Hades. “ ‘After him I beheld,’ as Homer
says”
23
(315b)—Homer’s Odysseus says this when he beholds the last of
the twenty-six shades he names in Hades, Heracles, or rather his image,
23. Odyssey 11.601.
C5246.indb 34 4/8/10 10:44:26 AM

Protagoras 35
as Heracles himself is on Olympus. Protagoras would then be the twenty-
ﬁ fth, Sisyphus, the wise man punished by the gods for scorning them.
24

“Tantylus then I espied”
25
(315c)—Socrates uses Odysseus’s words to make
Prodicus the twenty-fourth shade seen by Odysseus. He thus links the
three sophists with all three Odysseus saw last in Hades. Socrates’ ﬁ rst
words quoted Homer and suggested that he likened himself to Odysseus;
his ﬁ nal naming of Homer will suggest that he assumes the role of Odys-
seus (348d); and here he likens himself to Odysseus in Hades. In the chron-
ologically ﬁ rst dialogue, as in Charmides and the Republic, Odysseus is the
paradigm ﬁ gure Plato evokes as a means for measuring Socrates in both his
nature and his ambition.
26
Present with the three sophists in this underworld of instruction is the
cream of Athenian aristocratic youth mixed with foreigners who have al-
ready been made followers of sophists. The list of young Athenians pres-
ent will interest the auditors because it names the offspring of some of
the oldest and most powerful Athenian families. In the two lines of three
marching alongside Protagoras are Callias, their host, his maternal half-
brother Paralus, one of the two sons of Pericles,
27
and Charmides, Plato’s
uncle, a mere boy now but a young man grown beautiful when Socrates
returns from Potidaea in Charmides. The other line includes Pericles’ other
son, Xanthippus, and Philippides, scion of a wealthy Athenian family. The
Athenians seated in front of Hippias are Eryximachus and Phaedrus, who
appear together again in the Symposium, and Andron, a future member
of the oligarchy of the Four Hundred in 411. Those Socrates names as
reclining beside Prodicus are all Athenians: Pausanias and Agathon, who
are again paired in the Symposium,
28
and “the two Adeimantuses,” one of
whom, the son of Cepis, is otherwise unknown, whereas the other, the son
of Leucolophides, became an Athenian general late in the war.
29
24. At the end of his ﬁ nal speech in Plato’s Apology, Socrates names Sisyphus last (after Odys-
seus) among those he would examine in Hades; examining them, he says, would be “immeasurable
happiness” (41c).
25. Odyssey 11.582.
26. Planinc, Plato through Homer, 13: “The Odyssey is not the only source text used in composing
[Plato’s] dialogues, but it is by far the most important.”
27. The younger son of Pericles and Xanthippus, named after Pericles’ father. The sons’
mother later married Hipponicus and bore him Callias. See Nails, People of Plato, 224, “The
Stemma of Pericles.”
28. None of the Athenians around Protagoras appear in the Symposium.
29. It is noteworthy that many of these young Athenians are included in the lists of those sus-
pected of the two great religious crimes of 415, the profaning of the Mysteries and the mutilation
of the Herms. See Andocides, “On the Mysteries,” 101–40.
C5246.indb 35 4/8/10 10:44:26 AM

36 Chapter One
But where is Alcibiades? The frame audience expressed great interest in
him, and Plato’s readers will share that interest. Nothing about him in this
dialogue is incidental, including the way he enters. “We”—Socrates and
Hippocrates—“had only just come in when behind us came Alcibiades, the
beautiful, as you say, and I am persuaded, and Critias son of Callaeschrus”
(316a).
30
For the only time in his narration Socrates directly addresses his
auditor—“you” in the singular—acknowledging his great interest in Alcibi-
ades. And those already present in Callias’s house? From their perspec-
tive the entry of these two young men just after Socrates’ entry with Hip-
pocrates would look like the arrival of a fourth group of teacher and pupils,
a local group, arriving late with Socrates leading three young Athenians,
Alcibiades, Critias, and Hippocrates. Socrates’ report on the entry of Al-
cibiades and Critias contains a small ambiguity: he has just used we (hêmeis)
to designate himself and Hippocrates, and he uses we again after stating
that Alcibiades and Critias had just come in: “We had entered then, and
having paused over some small matters and examined them, then went
up to Protagoras.” Is this we still just Socrates and Hippocrates, or does
it include the two whose arrival he has just inserted? Socrates quietly re-
solves what he made ambiguous after the ﬁ rst exchange with Protagoras,
for he describes how all three groups came together: the group around
Protagoras including himself and Hippocrates decides they will gather the
others, and “Callias and Alcibiades came bringing Prodicus” and his group
(317e). Callias had been with Protagoras, and it seems that the only reason
for mentioning Alcibiades with Callias is to indicate that he had also been
with the group around Protagoras. The we who paused over “small mat-
ters” before going to Protagoras therefore included Alcibiades—he was
present at the ﬁ rst, critically important conversation with Protagoras,
present when Socrates spoke of matters bound to excite and goad him.
By making it possible to infer the presence of Alcibiades at the ﬁ rst
conversation with Protagoras—and by making it necessary to merely infer
it—Socrates offers an early sign of a whole array of coming signs: the ser-
30. Plato thus places together at the chronological beginning of his dialogues the two as-
sociates of Socrates who later became famous Athenian criminals and did Socrates the greatest
damage. In his Memorabilia Xenophon also introduces Alcibiades and Critias as a pair, the only
two “the accuser” names in the second charge against Socrates, his corruption of the young:
“Critias was the most thievish, violent, and murderous of all in the oligarchy, and Alcibiades the
most incontinent, insolent, and violent of all in the democracy” (1.2.12). Xenophon prepares his
defense by describing them together as “by nature the most honor-loving [or ambitious] of all
the Athenians. They wished that all affairs might be conducted through themselves and that they
might become the most renowned of all” (1.2.14).
C5246.indb 36 4/8/10 10:44:26 AM

Protagoras 37
vice Socrates ostensibly performs for foolish young Hippocrates he in fact
performs for a young Athenian of far greater promise to whom Protago-
ras’s wares are a far greater threat both to himself and to Athens. Socrates’
vagueness about his association with Alcibiades conﬁ rms what he sug-
gested by his frame conversation: he is chary about making his interest in
Alcibiades evident to an audience unlikely to appreciate its character.
5. Protagoras Introduces Himself (316b–318a)
Because he knows Protagoras from previous meetings, Socrates does not
need to introduce himself, just the one he’s representing: “Protagoras,
this Hippocrates here and I have come to see you” (316b). Protagoras’s
ﬁ rst words of the dialogue seem out of keeping with the portrait Socrates
just painted of an entrancing speaker leading a charmed band of follow-
ers: “Which would you prefer, to discuss with me alone or with the oth-
ers too?” He leaves the decision on privacy to them, but Socrates hands
it back—“For us it makes no difference”—and invites him to decide “after
you’ve heard why we’ve come.” Privacy, made so prominent by being their
ﬁ rst decision and by being handed back and forth, is a theme of Protagoras
but, as is ﬁ tting, in a way that is secret and retired, out of the main fo-
cus of their discussion though haunting it at every point. A second mat-
ter is evident in this ﬁ rst little exchange, a tactical maneuvering between
Protagoras and Socrates. From the beginning Protagoras is bent on gain-
ing conversational advantage, here ceding to them the choice of how to
conduct the conversation, as if it were a matter of indifference to him, as
if he can adapt to all circumstances and under the way chosen by others
still provide a winning performance. But Socrates will prove the superior
tactician.
Socrates states why they’ve come by describing what Hippocrates is
(he’s an aristocratic youth from a great and prosperous family); how he
seems (he “seems to be by nature a match for those his age”); how he seems
to Socrates (“it seems to me he desires to become notable in the city”); and
what Hippocrates thinks (“he thinks he would most likely become [notable]
by consorting with you”) (316c). Socrates makes Hippocrates of interest to
Protagoras as a paying customer while making himself seem a friendly pro-
curer for Protagoras. Protagoras responds to this gesture with gratitude:
“Rightly, Socrates, are you forethoughtful [promêthêi] on my behalf”—he
compliments Socrates on being “promethean,” on thinking ahead, think-
ing strategically, but his compliment is a little exercise in forethought, for it
prepares his report on his own lifelong strategy of exercising forethought,
C5246.indb 37 4/8/10 10:44:27 AM

38 Chapter One
and that in turn prepares what must be his oft-told tale of Forethought
himself, Prometheus. Protagoras thus initiates a contest of forethought-
fulness: who will prove the more promethean as a wise bringer of gifts to
humans?
In order to ground his preference for a public exchange, Protagoras
makes a speech that outlines ﬁ rst the dangerous situation the wise face:
when a foreign man visits great cities and in those cities persuades the
best of their youths to forsake meeting with others, whether family or
outsiders, old or young, and to be together with him, through this meeting
to become better, the one doing these things must take precautions. For
no little envy arises about him and other ill will and even plots. (316c–d)
The wise need to take precautions—what is Protagoras’s precaution?
He seems to come forth candid, lavishing his candor on a privileged few:
here, among ourselves, behind closed doors in Callias’s house, I can openly
state the difﬁ culty that I and all the wise have faced. He outlines concisely
what he himself does in the face of an animosity he fully understands: “I
myself however declare the sophistical art to be ancient.” His art is not
an innovation, he asserts, it belongs to the long and famous tradition of
wisdom of which Greeks are so rightfully proud; he is simply the latest
ﬁ gure in that proud tradition. He isolates its shared feature: “those an-
cient men who pursued [this ancient art], fearful of its offensiveness, fash-
ioned a cloak [an outward ornament] and put a veil over themselves [as
women do]”—the ancient wise all practiced timid concealment, hiding
themselves out of servile fear; courage evidently marks him off from all his
predecessors. He lists four types of fearful concealment and names nine
concealers, and his list is anything but haphazard for it includes the chief
elements of Greek education—poetry, religion, gymnastics, and music—
and some of the most honored names. “For some [the veil] was poetry,”
poetry being the “greatest part of education,” he will maintain (338e). His
examples are Homer and Hesiod, the highest possible examples, the most
honored poet-founders of Greekness, plus Simonides, a poet of more re-
cent times who died around the time Protagoras was beginning his public
career—the sophists of the whole poetic tradition are guilty of fearful con-
cealment. “[F]or others in turn [the veil] was mystery rites and prophecies,
such as Orpheus and Musaeus and those around them.” Sophists were thus
responsible for “the most radical transformation of Greek religion,”
31
Or-
31. Burkert, Greek Religion, 296.
C5246.indb 38 4/8/10 10:44:27 AM

Protagoras 39
phism or the mystery cults that had become popular and powerful, like the
one at Eleusis that claimed Orpheus as its founder and played a central role
in Athenian religious practice. Protagoras then claims that the uniquely
Greek practice of gymnastics, naked athletics, was part of the wise tradi-
tion of sophists, and he names two, one a contemporary who “is as able a
sophist as any.” He ends with music and names teachers well known in Ath-
ens, “your own Agathocles, who made music his veil” and was the teacher
of Damon,
32
and “Pythocleides of Ceos” who, like Damon, was a teacher of
Pericles
33
—Protagoras himself being famously a teacher of Pericles. He
ends his list saying, “and many others,” and summarizing what all these
sophists share: “All these as I say fearing the envy made use of these arts
as curtains.”
Protagoras thus applies the label he gave himself to the whole tradi-
tion of Greek wisdom while indicting all its members. He is different:
“But I don’t concur with any of them in this,” for not only were they timid
concealers, they failed, “they did not pass undetected by those who have
power in the cities, for whose sake they put up these cloaks” (317a). The
wise all thought that it was the powerful (or the capable—dunamenous)
34

they had to fool, but, Protagoras charges, the wise were not wise enough to
do it, not wise enough to overcome the suspicion with which the powerful
viewed the wise. He is different, he inaugurated a way for the wise and the
powerful to coexist by being useful to one another—and in 433 in Athens
it was apparent that wise Protagoras had been useful to powerful Pericles
in ways helpful to both.
35
Protagoras’s claim to success in harmonizing the interests of the wise
and the powerful depends on understanding an element of the city that
he mentions next, the Many. He has understood them: they differ from
the powerful because “the Many notice, so to speak, nothing, but merely
repeat whatever these leaders proclaim” (317a). His sole remark on the
Many is almost parenthetical, a mere aside, it seems, tossed in before he
moves to his main lesson about the failure of the wise with the powerful.
In fact, however, his little remark indicates that he knows where he is: in
32. Laches 180d.
33. Alcibiades I 118c.
34. See Morgan, Myth and Philosophy, 137 on this ambiguity in dunamenous and the care with
which Protagoras uses it here and at 319a
1. He will exploit its ambiguity in his long speech as well.
35. Not only for projects as important as writing the founding laws for a new city but for mat-
ters as comprehensive as instructing Pericles on the uses of civil religion, see below, section 7,
“Protagoras’s Display Speech.” On the relationship between Protagoras and Pericles as one of
“mutual inﬂ uence” see Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos, 176–89.
C5246.indb 39 4/8/10 10:44:27 AM

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PSALM CXI.
Hallelujah.
1 א I will thank Jehovah with my whole heart,
ב In the council of the upright and in the congregation.
2 ג Great are the works of Jehovah,
ד Inquired into by all who delight in them.
3 ה Honour and majesty is His working,
ו And His righteousness stands fast for aye.
4 ז He has made a memorial for His wonders,
ח Gracious and compassionate is Jehovah.
5 ט Food has He given to those who fear Him,
י He remembers His covenant for ever.
6 כ The power of His works has He showed to His people,
ל In giving them the inheritance of the nations.
7 מ The works of His hands are truth and judgment
נ Trustworthy are all His commandments;
8 ס Established for aye and for ever,
ע Done in truth and uprightness.
9 פ Redemption has He sent to His people,
צ He has ordained His covenant for ever,
ק Holy and dread is His name.
10 ר The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of wisdom,
ש Good understanding [belongs] to all who do them;
ת His praise stands fast for aye.
Another series of psalms headed with Hallelujah begins here, and
includes the two following psalms. The prefix apparently indicates
liturgical use. The present psalm is closely allied to the next. Both
are acrostic, and correspond verse to verse, as will appear in the
exposition. Together they represent God and the godly, this psalm
magnifying the Divine character and acts, the other painting the

ideal godly man as, in some real fashion, an "imitator of God as a
beloved child." Both are gnomic, and built up by accumulation of
slightly connected particulars, rather than flowing continuously in a
sequence which springs from one pregnant thought. Both have
allusions to other psalms and to the Book of Proverbs, and share
with many of the psalms of Book V. the character of being mainly
working over of old materials.
The Psalmist begins by a vow to thank Jehovah with his whole heart,
and immediately proceeds to carry it out. "The upright" is by some
understood as a national designation, and "council" taken as
equivalent to "congregation." But it is more in accordance with
usage to regard the psalmist as referring first to a narrower circle of
like-minded lovers of good, to whose congenial ears he rejoices to
sing. There was an Israel within Israel, who would sympathise with
his song. The "congregation" is then either the wider audience of the
gathered people, or, as Delitzsch takes it, equivalent to "their
congregation"—i.e., of the upright.
The theme of thanksgiving is, as ever, God's works for Israel; and
the first characteristic of these which the psalmist sings is their
greatness. He will come closer presently, and discern more delicate
features, but now, the magnitude of these colossal manifestations
chiefly animates his song. Far-stretching in their mass and in their
consequences, deep-rooted in God's own character, His great deeds
draw the eager search of "those who delight in them." These are the
same sympathetic auditors to whom the song is primarily addressed.
There were indolent beholders in Israel, before whom the works of
God were passed without exciting the faintest desire to know more
of their depth. Such careless onlookers, who see and see not, are
rife in all ages. God shines out in His deeds, and they will not give
one glance of sharpened interest. But the test of caring for His
doings is the effort to comprehend their greatness, and plunge
oneself into their depths. The more one gazes, the more one sees.
What was at first but dimly apprehended as great resolves itself, as
we look; and, first, "Honour and majesty," the splendour of His

reflected character, shine out from His deeds, and then, when still
more deeply they are pondered, the central fact of their
righteousness, their conformity to the highest standard of rectitude,
becomes patent. Greatness and majesty, divorced from
righteousness, would be no theme for praise. Such greatness is
littleness, such splendour is phosphorescent corruption.
These general contemplations are followed in vv. 4-6 by references
to Israel's history as the greatest example of God's working. "He has
made a memorial for His wonders." Some find here a reference to
the Passover and other feasts commemorative of the deliverance
from Egypt. But it is better to think of Israel itself as the "memorial,"
or of the deeds themselves, in their remembrance by men, as being,
as it were, a monument of His power. The men whom God has
blessed are standing evidences of His wonders. "Ye are My
witnesses, saith the Lord." And the great attribute, which is
commemorated by that "memorial," is Jehovah's gracious
compassion. The psalmist presses steadily towards the centre of the
Divine nature. God's works become eloquent of more and more
precious truth as he listens to their voice. They spoke of greatness,
honour, majesty, righteousness, but tenderer qualities are revealed
to the loving and patient gazer. The two standing proofs of Divine
kindness are the miraculous provision of food in the desert and the
possession of the promised land. But to the psalmist these are not
past deeds to be remembered only, but continually repeated
operations. "He remembers His covenant for ever," and so the
experiences of the fathers are lived over again by the children, and
to-day is as full of God as yesterday was. Still He feeds us, still He
gives us our heritage.
From ver. 7 onwards a new thought comes in. God has spoken as
well as wrought. His very works carry messages of "truth and
judgment," and they are interpreted further by articulate precepts,
which are at once a revelation of what He is and a law for what we
should be. His law stands as fast as His righteousness (vv. 3, 8). A
man may utterly trust His commandments. They abide eternally, for

Duty is ever Duty, and His Law, while it has a surface of temporary
ceremonial, has a core of immutable requirement. His
commandments are done—i.e., appointed by Him—"in truth and
uprightness." They are tokens of His grace and revelations of His
character.
The two closing verses have three clauses each, partly from the
exigencies of the acrostic structure, and partly to secure a more
impressive ending. Ver. 9 sums up all God's works in the two chief
manifestations of His goodness which should ever live in Israel's
thanks, His sending redemption and His establishing His everlasting
covenant—the two facts which are as fresh to-day, under new and
better forms, as when long ago this unknown psalmist sang. And he
gathers up the total impression which God's dealings should leave, in
the great saying, "Holy and dread is His name." In ver. 10 he
somewhat passes the limits of his theme, and trenches on the
territory of the next psalm, which is already beginning to shape itself
in his mind. The designation of the fear of the Jehovah as "the
beginning of wisdom" is from Prov. i. 7, ix. 10. "Beginning" may
rather mean "principal part" (Prov. iv. 7, "principal thing"). The
"them" of ver. 10b is best referred, though the expression is
awkward, to "commandments" in ver. 7. Less probably it is taken to
allude to the "fear" and "wisdom" of the previous clause. The two
clauses of this verse descriptive of the godly correspond in structure
to a and b of ver. 9, and the last clause corresponds to the last of
that verse, expressing the continual praise which should rise to that
holy and dread Name. Note that the perpetual duration, which has
been predicated of God's attributes, precepts, and covenant (vv. 3,
5, 8, 9), is here ascribed to His praise. Man's songs cannot fall
dumb, so long as God pours out Himself in such deeds. As long as
that Sun streams across the desert, stony lips will part in music to
hail its beams.

PSALM CXII.
Hallelujah.
1 א Happy the man who fears Jehovah,
ב [Who] delights exceedingly in His commandments.
2 ג Mighty on the earth shall his seed be,
ד The generation of the upright shall be blessed.
3 ה Wealth and riches are in his house,
ו And his righteousness stands fast for aye.
4 ז There riseth in the darkness light to the upright,—
ח Gracious and pitiful and righteous is he.
5 ט Well is the man who pities and lends,
י He shall maintain his causes in [the] judgment.
6 כ For he shall not be moved for ever,
ל In everlasting remembrance shall the righteous be held.
7 מ Of evil tidings he shall not be afraid,
נ Steadfast is his heart, trusting in Jehovah.
8 ס Established is his heart, he shall not fear,
ע Until he looks on his adversaries.
9 פ He has scattered abroad, he has given to the poor,
צ His righteousness stands fast for aye,
ק His horn shall be exalted with glory.
10 ר The wicked man shall see it and be grieved,
ש He shall gnash his teeth and melt away,
ת The desire of wicked men shall perish.
"Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect," might be
inscribed on this picture of a godly man, which, in structure and
substance, reflects the contemplation of God's character and works
contained in the preceding psalm. The idea that the godly man is, in
some real sense, an image of God runs through the whole, and
comes out strongly, at several points, in the repetition of the same

expressions in reference to both. The portrait of the ideal good man,
outlined in this psalm, may be compared with those in Psalms xv.
and xxiv. Its most characteristic feature is the prominence given to
beneficence, which is regarded as eminently a reflection of God's.
The foundation of righteousness is laid in ver. 1, in devout awe and
inward delight in the commandments. But the bulk of the psalm
describes the blessed consequences, rather than the essential
characteristics, of godliness.
The basis of righteousness and beneficence to men must be laid in
reverence and conformity of will towards God. Therefore the psalm
begins with proclaiming that, apart from all external consequences,
these dispositions carry blessedness in themselves. The close of the
preceding psalm had somewhat overpassed its limits, when it
declared that "the fear of Jehovah" was the beginning of wisdom
and that to do His commandments was sound discretion.
This psalm echoes these sayings, and so links itself to the former
one. It deepens them by pointing out that the fear of Jehovah is a
fountain of joy as well as of wisdom, and that inward delight in the
Law must precede outward doing of it. The familiar blessing
attached in the Old Testament to godliness, namely, prosperous
posterity, is the first of the consequences of righteousness which the
psalm holds out. That promise belongs to another order of things
from that of the New Testament; but the essence of it is true still,
namely, that the only secure foundation for permanent prosperity is
in the fear of Jehovah. "The generation of the upright" (ver. 2) does
not merely mean the natural descendants of a good man—"It is a
moral rather than a genealogical term" (Hupfeld)—as is usually the
case with the word "generation." Another result of righteousness is
declared to be "wealth and riches" (ver. 3), which, again, must be
taken as applying more fully to the Old Testament system of
Providence than to that of the New.
A parallelism of the most striking character between God and the
godly emerges in ver. 3b, where the same words are applied to the
latter as were used of the former, in the corresponding verse of

Psalm cxi. It would be giving too great evangelical definiteness to
the psalmist's words, to read into them the Christian teaching that
man's righteousness is God's gift through Christ, but it
unwarrantably eviscerates them of their meaning, if we go to the
other extreme, and, with Hupfeld, suppose that the psalmist put in
the clause under stress of the exigencies of the acrostic structure,
and regard it as a "makeshift" and "stop-gap." The psalmist has a
very definite and noble thought. Man's righteousness is the reflection
of God's; and has in it some kindred with its original, which
guarantees stability not all unlike the eternity of that source. Since
ver. 3b thus brings into prominence the ruling thought of the two
psalms, possibly we may venture to see a fainter utterance of that
thought, in the first clause of the verse, in which the "wealth and
riches" in the righteous man's house may correspond to the "honour
and majesty" attendant on God's works (cxi. 3a).
Ver. 4 blends consequences of righteousness and characterisation of
it, in a remarkable way. The construction is doubtful. In a, "upright"
is in the plural, and the adjectives in b are in the singular number.
They are appended abruptly to the preceding clause; and the loose
structure has occasioned difficulty to expositors, which has been
increased by the scruples of some, who have not given due weight
to the leading thought of correspondence between the human and
Divine, and have hesitated to regard ver. 4b as referring to the
righteous man, seeing that in Psalm cxi. 4b it refers to God. Hence
efforts have been made to find other renderings. Delitzsch would
refer the clause to God, whom he takes to be meant by "light" in the
previous clause, while Hitzig, followed by Baethgen, would translate,
"As a light, he (the righteous) rises in darkness for the upright," and
would then consider "gracious," etc., as in apposition with "light,"
and descriptive of the righteous man's character as such. But the
very fact that the words are applied to God in the corresponding
verse of the previous psalm suggests their application here to the
godly man, and the sudden change of number is not so harsh as to
require the ordinary translation to be abandoned. However dark may

be a good man's road, the very midnight blackness is a prophecy of
sunrise; or, to use another figure,
"If winter comes, can spring be far behind?"
(Compare Psalm xcvii. 11.) The fountain of pity in human hearts
must be fed from the great source of compassion in God's, if it is to
gush out unremittingly and bless the deserts of sorrow and misery.
He who has received "grace" will surely exercise grace. "Be ye
merciful, even as your Father is merciful" (Luke vi. 36).
Ver. 5 blends characteristics and consequences of goodness in
reverse order from that in ver. 4. The compassionate man of ver. 4b
does not let pity evaporate, but is moved by it to act and to lend
(primarily money, but secondarily) any needful help or solace.
Benevolence which is not translated into beneficence is a poor affair.
There is no blessing in it or for it; but it is well with the man who
turns emotions into deeds. Lazy compassion hurts him who indulges
in it, but that which "lends" gets joy in the act of bestowing aid. The
result of such active compassion is stated in ver. 5b as being that
such a one will "maintain his causes in judgment," by which seems
to be meant the judgment of earthly tribunals. If compassion and
charity guide a life, it will have few disputes, and will contain nothing
for which a judge can condemn. He who obeys the higher law will
not break the lower.
Vv. 6-8 dwell mainly on one consequence of righteousness, namely,
the stability which it imparts. While such a man lives, he shall be
unmoved by shocks, and after he dies, his memory will live, like a
summer evening's glow which lingers in the west till a new morning
dawns. In ver. 7 the resemblance of the godly to God comes very
beautifully to the surface. Psalm cxi. 7 deals with God's
commandments as "trustworthy." The human parallel is an
established heart. He who has learned to lean upon Jehovah (for
such is the literal force of "trusting" here), and has proved the
commandments utterly reliable as basis for his life, will have his
heart steadfast. The same idea is repeated in ver. 8 with direct

quotation of the corresponding verse of Psalm cxi. In both the word
for "established" is the same. The heart that delights in God's
established commandments is established by them, and, sooner or
later, will look in calm security on the fading away of all evil things
and men, while it rests indeed, because it rests in God. He who
builds his transient life on and into the Rock of Ages wins rocklike
steadfastness, and some share in the perpetuity of his Refuge. Lives
rooted in God are never uprooted.
The two final verses are elongated, like the corresponding ones in
Psalm cxi. Again, beneficence is put in the forefront, as a kind of
shorthand summing up of all virtues. And, again, in ver. 9 the
analogy is drawn out between God and the godly. "He has sent
redemption to His people"; and they, in their degree, are to be
communicative of the gifts of which they have been made recipient.
Little can they give, compared with what they have received; but
what they have they hold in trust for those who need it, and the
sure test of having obtained "redemption" is a "heart open as day to
melting charity." In the former psalm, ver. 9b declared that God has
"ordained His covenant for ever"; and here the corresponding clause
re-affirms that the good man's righteousness endures for ever. The
final clauses of both verses also correspond, in so far as, in the
former psalm, God's Name is represented as "holy and dread"—i.e.,
the total impression made by His deeds exalts Him—and in the latter,
the righteous man's "horn" is represented as "exalted in glory" or
honour—i.e., the total impression made by his deeds exalts him.
Paul quotes the two former clauses of ver. 9 in 2 Cor. ix. 9 as
involving the truth that Christian giving does not impoverish. The
exercise of a disposition strengthens it; and God takes care that the
means of beneficence shall not be wanting to him who has the spirit
of it. The later Jewish use of "righteousness" as a synonym for
almsgiving has probably been influenced by this psalm, in which
beneficence is the principal trait in the righteous man's character, but
there is no reason for supposing that the psalmist uses the word in
that restricted sense.

Ver. 10 is not parallel with the last verse of Psalm cxi., which stands,
as we have seen, somewhat beyond the scope of the rest of that
psalm. It gives one brief glimpse of the fate of the evil-doer, in
opposition to the loving picture of the blessedness of the righteous.
Thus it too is rather beyond the immediate object of the psalm of
which it forms part. The wicked sees, in contrast with the righteous
man's seeing in ver. 8. The one looks with peace on the short
duration of antagonistic power, and rejoices that there is a God of
recompenses; the other grinds his teeth in envious rage, as he
beholds the perpetuity of the righteous. He "shall melt away," i.e., in
jealousy or despair. Opposition to goodness, since it is enmity
towards God, is self-condemned to impotence and final failure.
Desires turned for satisfaction elsewhere than to God are sure to
perish. The sharp contrast between the righteousness of the good
man, which endures for ever, in his steadfast because trustful heart,
and the crumbling schemes and disappointed hopes which gnaw the
life of the man whose aims go athwart God's will, solemnly proclaims
an eternal truth. This psalm, like Psalm i., touches the two poles of
possible human experience, in its first and last words, beginning with
"happy the man" and ending with "shall perish."

PSALM CXIII.
Hallelujah.
1 Praise, ye servants of Jehovah,
Praise the name of Jehovah.
2 Be the name of Jehovah blessed
From henceforth and for evermore!
3 From the rising of the sun to its going down,
Praised be the name of Jehovah.
4 High above all nations is Jehovah,
Above the heavens His glory.
5 Who is like Jehovah our God?
Who sits enthroned on high,
6 Who looks far below
On the heavens and on the earth;
7 Who raises the helpless from the dust,
From the rubbish-heap He lifts the needy,
8 To seat him with nobles,
With the nobles of His people;
9 Who seats the barren [woman] in a house,
—A glad mother of her children.
This pure burst of praise is the first of the psalms composing the
Hallel, which was sung at the three great feasts (Passover,
Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles), as well as at the festival of
Dedication and at the new moons. "In the domestic celebration of
the Passover night 'the Hallel' is divided into two parts; the one half,
Psalms cxiii., cxiv., being sung before the repast, before the
emptying of the second festal cup, and the other half, Psalms cxv.-
cxviii., after the repast, after the filling of the fourth cup, to which

the 'having sung an hymn' in Matt. xxvi. 30, Mark xiv. 26, ... may
refer" (Delitzsch, in loc.).
Three strophes of three verses each may be recognised, of which
the first summons Israel to praise Jehovah, and reaches out through
all time and over all space, in longing that God's name may be
known and praised. The second strophe (vv. 4-6) magnifies God's
exalted greatness; while the third (vv. 7-9) adores His
condescension, manifested in His stooping to lift the lowly. The
second and third of these strophes, however, overlap in the song, as
the facts which they celebrate do. God's loftiness can never be
adequately measured, unless His condescension is taken into
account; and His condescension never sufficiently wondered at,
unless His loftiness is felt.
The call to praise is addressed to Israel, whose designation "servants
of Jehovah" recalls Isaiah II.'s characteristic use of that name in the
singular number for the nation. With strong emphasis, the name of
Jehovah is declared as the theme of praise. God's revelation of His
character by deed and word must precede man's thanksgiving. They,
to whom that Name has been entrusted, by their reception of His
mercies are bound to ring it out to all the world. And in the Name
itself, there lies enshrined the certainty that through all ages it shall
be blessed, and in every spot lit by the sun shall shine as a brighter
light, and be hailed with praises. The psalmist has learned the world-
wide significance of Israel's position as the depository of the Name,
and the fair vision of a universal adoration of it fills his heart. Ver. 3b
may be rendered "worthy to be praised is the name," but the
context seems to suggest the rendering above.
The infinite exaltation of Jehovah above all dwellers on this low
earth and above the very heavens does not lift Him too high for
man's praise, for it is wedded to condescension as infinite.
Incomparable is He; but still adoration can reach Him, and men do
not clasp mist, but solid substance, when they grasp His Name. That
incomparable uniqueness of Jehovah is celebrated in ver. 5a in
strains borrowed from Exod. xv. 11, while the striking description of

loftiness combined with condescension in vv. 5b and 6 resembles
Isa. lvii. 15. The literal rendering of vv. 5b and 6a is, "Who makes
high to sit, Who makes low to behold," which is best understood as
above. It may be questioned whether "On the heavens and on the
earth" designates the objects on which His gaze is said to be turned;
or whether, as some understand the construction, it is to be taken
with "Who is like Jehovah our God?" the intervening clauses being
parenthetical; or whether, as others prefer, "in heaven" points back
to "enthroned on high," and "on earth" to "looks far below." But the
construction which regards the totality of created things,
represented by the familiar phrase "the heavens and the earth," as
being the objects on which Jehovah looks down from His
inconceivable loftiness, accords best with the context and yields an
altogether worthy meaning. Transcendent elevation, condescension,
and omniscience are blended in the poet's thought. So high is
Jehovah that the highest heavens are far beneath Him, and, unless
His gaze were all-discerning, would be but a dim speck. That He
should enter into relations with creatures, and that there should be
creatures for Him to enter into relations with, are due to His
stooping graciousness. These far-darting looks are looks of
tenderness, and signify care as well as knowledge. Since all things
lie in His sight, all receive from His hand.
The third strophe pursues the thought of the Divine condescension
as especially shown in stooping to the dejected and helpless and
lifting them. The effect of the descent of One so high must be to
raise the lowliness to which He bends. The words in vv. 7, 8, are
quoted from Hannah's song (1 Sam. ii. 8). Probably the singer has in
his mind Israel's restoration from exile, that great act in which
Jehovah had shown His condescending loftiness, and had lifted His
helpless people as from the ash-heap, where they lay as outcasts.
The same event seems to be referred to in ver. 9, under a metaphor
suggested by the story of Hannah, whose words have just been
quoted. The "barren" is Israel (comp. Isa. liv. 1). The expression in
the original is somewhat obscure. It stands literally "the barren of
the house," and is susceptible of different explanations; but probably

the simplest is to regard it as a contracted expression for the
unfruitful wife in a house, "a housewife, but yet not a mother. Such
an one has in her husband's house no sure position.... If God
bestows children upon her, He by that very fact makes her for the
first time thoroughly at home and rooted in her husband's house"
(Delitzsch, in loc.). The joy of motherhood is tenderly touched in the
closing line, in which the definite article is irregularly prefixed to
"sons," as if the poet "points with his finger to the children with
whom God blesses her" (Delitzsch, u.s.). Thus Israel, with her
restored children about her, is secure in her home. That restoration
was the signal instance of Jehovah's condescension and delight in
raising the lowly. It was therefore the great occasion for world-wide
and age-long praise.
The singer did not know how far it would be transcended by a more
wonderful, more heart-touching manifestation of stooping love,
when "The Word became flesh." How much more exultant and
world-filling should be the praises from the lips of those who do
know how low that Word has stooped, how high He has risen, and
how surely all who hold His hand will be lifted from any ash-heap
and set on His throne, sharers in the royalty of Him who has been
partaker of their weakness!

PSALM CXIV.
1 When Israel went forth from Egypt,
The house of Jacob from a stammering people,
2 Judah became His sanctuary,
Israel His dominion.
3 The sea beheld and fled,
Jordan turned back.
4 The mountains leaped like rams,
The hills like the sons of a flock.
5 What ails thee, Sea, that thou fleest?
Jordan, that thou art turned back?
6 Mountains, that ye leap like rams?
Hills, like the sons of a flock?
7 At the presence of the Lord, writhe in pangs, O earth,
At the presence of the God of Jacob,
8 Who turns the rock into a pool of water,
The flint into a fountain of waters.
It is possible that in this psalm Israel, restored from Babylon, is
looking back to the earlier Exodus, and thrilling with the great
thought that that old past lives again in the present. Such a
historical parallel would minister courage and hope. But the eyes of
psalmists were ever turning to the great days when a nation was
born, and there are no data in this psalm which connect it with a
special period, except certain peculiarities in the form of the words
"turns" and "fountain" in ver. 8, both of which have a vowel
appended (i in the former, o in the latter word), which is probably an
archaism, used by a late poet for ornament's sake. The same
peculiarity is found in Psalm cxiii. 5-9, where it occurs five times.

A familiar theme is treated here with singular force and lyric fervour.
The singer does not heap details together, but grasps one great
thought. To him there are but two outstanding characteristics of the
Exodus one, its place and purpose as the beginning of Israel's
prerogative, and another, its apocalypse of the Majesty of Jehovah,
the Ruler of Nature in its mightiest forms. These he hymns, and then
leaves them to make their own impression. He has no word of
"moral," no application, counsel, warning, or encouragement to give.
Whoso will can draw these. Enough for him to lift his soaring song,
and to check it into silence in the midst of its full music. He would be
a consummate artist, if he were not something much better. The
limpid clearness, the eloquent brevity of the psalm are not more
obvious than its masterly structure. Its four pairs of verses, each
laden with one thought, the dramatic vividness of the sudden
questions in the third pair, the skilful suppression of the Divine name
till the close, where it is pealed out in full tones of triumph, make
this little psalm a gem.
In vv. 1, 2, the slighting glance at the land left by the ransomed
people is striking. The Egyptians are to this singer "a stammering
people," talking a language which sounded to him barely articulate.
The word carries a similar contempt to that in the Greek "barbarian,"
which imitates the unmeaning babble of a foreign tongue. To such
insignificance in the psalmist's mind had the once dreaded
oppressors sunk! The great fact about the Exodus was that it was
the birthday of the Nation, the beginning of its entrance on its high
prerogatives. If the consecration of Judah as "His sanctuary" took
place when Israel went forth from Egypt, there can be no reference
to the later erection of the material sanctuary in Jerusalem, and the
names of Judah and Israel must both apply to the people, not to the
land, which it would be an anachronism to introduce here. That
deliverance from Egypt was in order to God's dwelling in Israel, and
thereby sanctifying or setting it apart to Himself, "a kingdom of
priests and an holy nation." Dwelling in the midst of them, He
wrought wonders for them, as the psalm goes on to hymn; but this
is the grand foundation fact, that Israel was brought out of bondage

to be God's temple and kingdom. The higher deliverance of which
that Exodus is a foreshadowing is, in like manner, intended to effect
a still more wonderful and intimate indwelling of God in His Church.
Redeemed humanity is meant to be God's temple and realm.
The historical substratum for vv. 3, 4, is the twin miracles of drying
up the Red Sea and the Jordan, which began and closed the Exodus,
and the "quaking" of Sinai at the Theophany accompanying the
giving of the Law. These physical facts are imaginatively conceived
as the effects of panic produced by some dread vision; and the
psalmist heightens his representation by leaving unnamed the sight
which dried the sea, and shook the steadfast granite cliffs. In the
third pair of verses he changes his point of view from that of
narrator to that of a wondering spectator, and asks what terrible
thing, unseen by him, strikes such awe? All is silent now, and the
wonders long since past. The sea rolls its waters again over the
place where Pharaoh's host lie. Jordan rushes down its steep valley
as of old, the savage peaks of Sinai know no tremors;—but these
momentary wonders proclaimed an eternal truth.
So the psalmist answers his own question, and goes beyond it in
summoning the whole earth to tremble, as sea, river, and mountain
had done, for the same Vision before which they had shrunk is
present to all Nature. Now the psalmist can peal forth the Name of
Him, the sight of whom wrought these wonders. It is "the Lord," the
Sovereign Ruler, whose omnipotence and plastic power over all
creatures were shown when His touch made rock and flint forget
their solidity and become fluid, even as His will made the waves solid
as a wall, and His presence shook Sinai. He is still Lord of Nature.
And, more blessed still, the Lord of Nature is the God of Jacob. Both
these names were magnified in the two miracles (which, like those
named in ver. 3, are a pair) of giving drink to the thirsty pilgrims.
With that thought of omnipotence blended with gracious care, the
singer ceases. He has said enough to breed faith and hearten
courage, and he drops his harp without a formal close. The effect is
all the greater, though some critics prosaically insist that the text is

defective and put a row or two of asterisks at the end of ver. 8,
"since it is not discernible what purpose the representation [i.e., the
whole psalm] is to serve" (Graetz)!

PSALM CXV.
1 Not to us, not to us, Jehovah,
But to Thy name give glory,
For the sake of Thy lovingkindness, for the sake of Thy troth.
2 Why should the nations say,
"Where, then, is their God?"
3 But our God is in the heavens,
Whatsoever He willed, He has done.
4 Their idols are silver and gold,
The work of the hands of men.
5 A mouth is theirs—and they cannot speak,
Eyes are theirs—and they cannot see,
6 Ears are theirs—and they cannot hear,
A nose is theirs—and they cannot smell.
7 Their hands—[with them] they cannot handle
Their feet—[with them] they cannot walk,
Not a sound can they utter with their throat.
8 Like them shall those who make them be,
[Even] every one that trusts in them.
9 Israel, trust thou in Jehovah,
Their help and shield is He.
10 House of Aaron, trust in Jehovah,
Their help and shield is He.
11 Ye who fear Jehovah, trust in Jehovah,
Their help and shield is He.
12 Jehovah has remembered us—He will bless,
He will bless the house of Israel,
He will bless the house of Aaron,
13 He will bless those who fear Jehovah,

The small as well as the great.
14 Jehovah will add to you,
To you and to your children.
15 Blessed be ye of Jehovah,
Who made heaven and earth!
16 The heavens are Jehovah's heavens,
But the earth He has given to the children of men.
17 It is not the dead who praise Jehovah,
Neither all they who descend into silence.
18 But we—we will bless Jehovah,
From henceforth and for evermore.
Hallelujah.
Israel is in straits from heathen enemies, and cries to Jehovah to
vindicate His own Name by delivering it. Strengthened by faith,
which has been stung into action by taunts aimed at both the nation
and its Protector, the psalmist triumphantly contrasts Jehovah in the
heavens, moving all things according to His will, with idols which had
the semblance of powers the reality of which was not theirs.
Sarcastic contempt, indignation, and profound insight into the effect
of idolatry in assimilating the worshipper to his god, unite in the
picture (vv. 3-8). The tone swiftly changes into a summons to
withdraw trust from such vanities, and set it on Jehovah, who can
and will bless His servants (vv. 9-15); and the psalm closes with
recognition of Jehovah's exaltation and beneficence, and with the
vow to return blessing to Him for the blessings, already
apprehended by faith, which He bestows on Israel.
Obviously the psalm is intended for temple worship, and was meant
to be sung by various voices. The distribution of its parts may be
doubtful. Ewald would regard vv. 1-11 as the voice of the
congregation while the sacrifice was being offered; vv. 12-15 as that
of the priest announcing its acceptance; and vv. 16-18 as again the
song of the congregation. But there is plainly a change of singer at
ver. 9; and the threefold summons to trust in Jehovah in the first

clauses of vv. 9, 10, 11, may with some probability be allotted to a
ministering official, while the refrain, in the second clause of each of
these verses, may be regarded as pealed out with choral force. The
solo voice next pronounces the benediction on the same three
classes to whom it had addressed the call to trust. And the
congregation, thus receiving Jehovah's blessing, sends back its
praise, as sunshine from a mirror, in vv. 16-18.
The circumstances presupposed in the psalm suit many periods of
Israel's history. But probably this, like the neighbouring psalms, is a
product of the early days after the return from Babylon, when the
feeble settlers were ringed round by scoffing foes, and had brought
back from exile a more intimate knowledge and contemptuous
aversion for idols and idolatry than had before been felt in Israel.
Cheyne takes the psalm to be Maccabean, but acknowledges that
there is nothing in it to fix that date, which he seeks to establish for
the whole group mainly because he is sure of it for one member of
the group, namely, Psalm cxviii. (Orig. of Psalt., 18 sq.).
The prayer in vv. 1, 2, beautifully blends profound consciousness of
demerit and confidence that, unworthy as Israel is, its welfare is
inextricably interwoven with Jehovah's honour. It goes very deep
into the logic of supplication, even though the thing desired is but
deliverance from human foes. Men win their pleas with God, when
they sue in formâ pauperis. There must be thorough abnegation of
all claims based on self, before there can be faithful urging of the
one prevalent motive, God's care for His own fair fame. The under
side of faith is self-distrust, the upper side is affiance on Jehovah.
God has given pledges for His future by His past acts of self-
revelation, and cannot but be true to His Name. His lovingkindness is
no transient mood, but rests on the solid basis of His faithfulness,
like flowers rooted in the clefts of a rock. The taunts that had
tortured another psalmist long before (Psalm xlii. 3) have been flung
now from heathen lips, with still more bitterness, and call for
Jehovah's thunderous answer. If Israel goes down before its foes,
the heathen will have warrant to scoff.

But, from their bitter tongues and his own fears, the singer turns, in
the name of the sorely harassed congregation, to ring out the
proclamation which answers the heathen taunt, before God answers
it by deeds. "Our God is in heaven"—that is where He is; and He is
not too far away to make His hand felt on earth. He is no impotent
image; He does what He wills, executing to the last tittle His
purposes; and conversely, He wills what He does, being constrained
by no outward force, but drawing the determinations of His actions
from the depths of His being. Therefore, whatever evil has befallen
Israel is not a sign that it has lost Him, but a proof that He is near.
The brief, pregnant assertion of God's omnipotence and sovereign
freedom, which should tame the heathens' arrogance and teach the
meaning of Israel's disasters, is set in eloquent opposition to the
fiery indignation which dashes off the sarcastic picture of an idol.
The tone of the description is like that of the manufacture of an
image in Isa. xliv. 9-20. Psalm cxxxv. 15-18 repeats it verbatim. The
vehemence of scorn in these verses suggests a previous, compelled
familiarity with idolatry such as the exiles had. It corresponds with
the revolution which that familiarity produced, by extirpating for ever
the former hankering after the gods of the nations. No doubt, there
are higher weapons than sarcasm; and, no doubt, a Babylonian wise
man could have drawn distinctions between the deity and its image,
but such cobwebs are too fine-spun for rough fingers to handle, and
the idolatry both of pagans and of Christians identifies the two.
But a deeper note is struck in ver. 8, in the assertion that, as is the
god, so becomes the worshipper. The psalmist probably means
chiefly, if not exclusively, in respect to the impotence just spoken of.
So the worshipper and his idol are called by the same name (Isa.
xliv. 9, vanity), and, in the tragic summary of Israel's sins and
punishment in 2 Kings xvii. 15, it is said, that "they followed after
vanity and became vain." But the statement is true in a wider sense.
Worship is sure to breed likeness. A lustful, cruel god will make his
devotees so. Men make gods after their own image, and, when
made, the gods make men after theirs. The same principle which

degrades the idolater lifts the Christian to the likeness of Christ. The
aim and effect of adoration is assimilation.
Probably the congregation is now silent, and a single voice takes up
the song, with the call, which the hollowness of idolatry makes so
urgent and reasonable, to trust in Jehovah, not in vanities. It is
thrice repeated, being first addressed to the congregation, then to
the house of Aaron, and finally to a wider circle, those who "fear
Jehovah." These are most naturally understood as proselytes, and,
in the prominence given to them, we see the increasing
consciousness in Israel of its Divine destination to be God's witness
to the world. Exile had widened the horizon, and fair hopes that men
who were not of Israel's blood would share Israel's faith and shelter
under the wings of Israel's God stirred in many hearts. The crash of
the triple choral answer to the summons comes with magnificent
effect, in the second clauses of vv. 9, 10, 11, triumphantly telling
how safe are they who take refuge behind that strong buckler. The
same threefold division into Israel, house of Aaron, and they who
fear Jehovah occurs in Psalm cxviii. 2-4, and, with the addition of
"house of Levi," in Psalm cxxxv.
Promises of blessing occupy vv. 12-15, which may probably have
been sung by priests, or rather by Levites, the musicians of the
Temple service. In any case, these benedictions are authoritative
assurances from commissioned lips, not utterances of hopeful faith.
They are Jehovah's response to Israel's obedience to the preceding
summons; swiftly sent, as His answers ever are. Calm certainty that
He will bless comes at once into the heart that deeply feels that He
is its shield, however His manifestation of outward help may be
lovingly delayed. The blessing is parted among those who had
severally been called to trust, and had obeyed the call. Universal
blessings have special destinations. The fiery mass breaks up into
cloven tongues, and sits on each. Distinctions of position make no
difference in its reception. Small vessels are filled, and great ones
can be no more than full. Cedars and hyssop rejoice in impartial
sunshine. Israel, when blessed, increases in number, and there is an

inheritance of good from generation to generation. The seal of such
hopes is the Name of Him who blesses, "the Maker of heaven and
earth," to whose omnipotent, universal sway these impotent gods in
human form are as a foil.
Finally, we may hear the united voices of the congregation thus
blessed breaking into full-throated praise in vv. 16-18. As in ver. 3
God's dwelling in heaven symbolised His loftiness and power, so here
the thought that "the heavens are Jehovah's heavens" implies both
the worshippers' trust in His mighty help and their lowliness even in
trust. The earth is man's, but by Jehovah's gift. Therefore its
inhabitants should remember the terms of their tenure, and
thankfully recognise His giving love. But heaven and earth do not
include all the universe. There is another region, the land of silence,
whither the dead descend. No voice of praise wakes its dumb sleep.
(Comp. Isa. xxxviii. 18, 19.) That pensive contemplation, on which
the light of the New Testament assurance of Immortality has not
shone, gives keener edge to the bliss of present ability to praise
Jehovah. We who know that to die is to have a new song put into
immortal lips may still be stimulated to fill our brief lives here with
the music of thanksgiving, by the thought that, so far as our witness
for God to men is concerned, most of us will "descend into silence"
when we pass into the grave. Therefore we should shun silence, and
bless Him while we live here.

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