Plato’s Charmides
Tumblog for research into Plato’s Charmides
My colleague Chris Raymond and I are preparing a new translation and the first complete English line-by-line commentary of this dialogue. The argument reconstructions, philosophical analysis, historical references, philological explanations, textual notes, characterological assessments, literary assessment, and reception history serve scholars and students of philosophy and classical culture alike. The dialogue asks, we argue, about the pictures of knowledge and selfhood that acting well and with the range of attitudes signified by sôphrosunê require. We draw particular attention to the dialogue’s presaging of Aristotle’s arguments about perception, soul, and the value of friendship, and its reliance on late fifth-century debates about sound-mindedness, the aristocratic hauteur that goes under the name “doing one’s own thing,” and obedience to Delphic commands. The commentary acknowledges, and contributes to, the varieties of European and Anglo-American scholarship on the Charmides.
Curricular significance
When Chris visited my class in Athens, we assigned the students speaking parts (Socrates, Critias, Charmides, Chaerephon) and they acted out the entirety of our draft translation (split into 24 short acts). This served to test the vocabulary and back-and-forth flow. It also let us prove that the translations of the dialogue now in print implied physically unlikely dramatic occurrences at key moments in the dialogue. For example, in a famous scene, the admirers of Charmides, all sitting on the same bench, push against one another to make a spot next to themselves at which Charmides might sit. So hard do they push that one falls off one end, and at the other end, someone has to stand up. We showed that this would in fact happen (the video is on the Charmides tumblog, linked to above). All other translations suppose that the falling and standing up happen at the same end of the bench. We could not recreate this.
The Charmides has wonderful material for reflection on epistemology, selfhood, self-mastery, and virtue. That it’s not regularly assigned is a result, in our judgment, of bizarre translation choices (e.g., episteme as “science” in a context that does not call for this) and of inadequate apparatus to occasion the puzzles Socrates brings Critias into. An improved text would bring it favorably into ancient philosophy and history of epistemology syllabi.
Writing a commentary is a large-enough scale project to benefit significantly from help from student-researchers. Whether they be investigating ancient religion (Zalmoxis and “immortalization”), the concept of shame (aidôs), Socratic method (“negative” vs. “positive” elenchus), or Athenian democratic history (with the oligarchic coups), their work can directly inform the content and form of the interpretative apparatus.