65. +Transliteration: enêsan de ge autô autai hai doxai. E-text editor's translation: "Yet these notions were [already] implanted in him, weren't they?" Plato, Meno 85c. Source, if any.
65. +Transliteration: [enesontai autôi alêtheis doxai,] erôtêsei epegertheisai, epistêmai gignontai. E-text editor's translation: "[He holds within himself true opinions,] which a questioning process may awaken into certain knowledge." Plato, Meno 86a.
66. +Transliteration: athanatos an hê psychê eiê. Pater's translation: "The soul, then, would be immortal." Plato, Meno 86b.
70. +Transliteration: kosmos. Liddell and Scott definition: "I. 1. order; 2. good order, good behaviour, decency; 3. a set form or order: of states, government; 4. the mode or fashion of a thing; II. an ornament…; III. the world or universe, from its perfect arrangement."
71. +Transliteration: Plêmmeleia. Liddell and Scott definition: "a false note . . . error, offense."
71. +Transliteration: pleonexia. Liddell and Scott definition: "a disposition to take more than one's share."
71. +Transliteration: peras. See above, note two, page 59.
CHAPTER 4: PLATO AND SOCRATES
[75] "PLATO," we say habitually when we talk of our teacher in The Republic, the Phaedrus, cutting a knot; for Plato speaks to us indirectly only, in his Dialogues, by the voice of the Platonic Socrates, a figure most ambiguously compacted of the real Socrates and Plato himself; a purely dramatic invention, it might perhaps have been fancied, or, so to speak, an idolon theatri—Plato's self, but presented, with the reserve appropriate to his fastidious genius, in a kind of stage disguise. So we might fancy but for certain independent information we possess about Socrates, in Aristotle, and in the Memorabilia of Xenophon.
The Socrates of Xenophon is one of the simplest figures in the world. From the personal memories of that singularly limpid writer the outline of the great teacher detaches itself, as an embodiment of all that was clearest in the now adult Greek understanding, the adult Greek conscience. All that Socrates is seen to be in [76] those unaffected pages may be explained by the single desire to be useful to ordinary young men, whose business in life would be mainly with practical things; and at first sight, as delineators of their common master, Plato and Xenophon might seem scarcely reconcilable. But then, as Alcibiades alleges of him in the Symposium, Socrates had been ever in all respects a two-sided being; like some rude figure of Silenus, he suggests, by way of an outer case for the image of a god within. By a mind, of the compass Plato himself supposes, two quite different impressions may well have been made on two typically different observers. The speaker, to Xenophon so simple, almost homely, earthy, vernacular, becomes with Plato the mouth-piece of high and difficult and extraordinary thoughts. In the absence, then, of a single written word from Socrates himself, the question is forced upon us: had the true Socrates been really Socrates according to Xenophon, and all besides only a generous loan from the rich treasury of Plato's quite original and independent genius: or, had the master been indeed something larger and more many-sided than Xenophon could have thoroughly understood, presenting to his simpler disciple only what was of simpler stamp in himself, to the mystic and susceptible Plato all that far-reaching and fervid intellectuality, with which the Platonic Dialogues credit him. It is a problem about which probably no reader of [77] Plato ever quite satisfies himself:—how much precisely he must deduct from Socrates, as we find him in those Dialogues, by way of defining to himself the Socrates of fact.