Plato: Meno – Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy - 1

 

If you google ‘Plato’s Meno’ you can find there a very extensive article, from which I have taken two passages, which I subject to criticism. The first passage deals with the ‘Relations of the Meno to Other Platonic Dialogues’, the second compares Plato’s and Xenophon’s portraits of Meno. I focus my attention on the lines emphasized in bold. Passage I is discussed in this article, passage II will be discussed in my next article: ‘Plato: Meno – Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy – 2’

I am particularly interested in the dating of the Meno, and as can be seen, Glenn Rawson, the author of the article, does not want to commit himself to any specific dating. Yet the picture, which he gives us hesitantly, is given in no uncertain terms in a diagram, which one gets when one googles ‘dating of plato’s dialogues’: PLATONIC CHRONOLOGY and WRITINGS.

The diagram divides Plato’s dialogues into three periods:

399-390 First Period of Plato’s Literary activity

388-367 Second Period of Plato’s Literary activity

360-348/7 Last Period of Plato’s Literary activity

The Meno figures in the second period as the first dialog.

John Paul Adams published his diagram on May 28, 2009; in those days he presumably did not know about the passage in Diogenes Laertius’ ‘Life of Socrates’, which shows that Plato wrote the Meno prior 399, i.e. prior to Socrates’ trial and death. I discovered the passage on March 31, 2022, reported the discovery on my blog on April 1 in an article entitled ‘Socrates – Meletus and Anytus’, and informed Oxford classicists by emails. Let me quote the passage:

‘[Socrates] would take to task those who thought highly of themselves, proving them to be fools, as to be sure he treated Anytus, according to Plato’s Meno . For Anytus could not endure to be ridiculed by Socrates, and so in the first place stirred up against him Aristophanes and his friends, then afterwards he helped to persuade Meletus to indict him on a charge of impiety and corrupting the youth.’ (Diog. Laert. II. 38) 

I.        I.  Relations of the Meno to Other Platonic Dialogues. ‘We cannot be precise or certain about much in Plato’s writing career. The Meno seems to be philosophically transitional between rough groupings of dialogues that are often associated in allegedly chronological terms, though these groupings have been qualified and questioned in various ways. It is commonly thought that in the Meno we see Plato transitioning from (a) a presumably earlier group of especially “Socratic” dialogues, which defend Socrates’ ways of refuting unwarranted claims to knowledge and promoting intellectual humility, and so are largely inconclusive concerning virtue and knowledge, to (b) a presumably “middle” group of more constructively theoretical dialogues, which involve Plato’s famous metaphysics and epistemology of transcendent “Forms,” such Justice itself, Equality itself, and Beauty or Goodness itself. (However, that second group of dialogues remains rather tentative and exploratory in its theories, and there is also (c) a presumably “late” group of dialogues that seems critical of the middle-period metaphysics, adopting somewhat different logical and linguistic methods in treating similar philosophical issues.) So the Meno begins with a typically unsuccessful Socratic search for a definition, providing some lessons about good definitions and exposing someone’s arrogance in thinking that he knows much more than he really knows. All of that resembles what we see in early dialogues like the Euthyphro, Laches, Charmides, and Lysis. But the style and substance of the Meno changes somewhat with the formulation of Meno’s Paradox about the possibility of learning anything with such inquiries, which prompts Socrates to introduce the notions that the human soul is immortal, that genuine learning requires some form of innate knowledge, and that progress can be made with a kind of hypothetical method that is related to mathematical sciences. This cluster of Platonic concerns is variously developed in the Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, and Phaedrus, but in those dialogues, these concerns are combined with arguments concerning imperceptible, immaterial Forms, which are never mentioned in the Meno. Accordingly, many scholars believe that the Meno was written between those groups of dialogues, and probably about 385 B.C.E. That would be about seventeen years after the dramatic date of the dialogue, about fourteen years after the trial and execution of Socrates.

II. Meno is apparently visiting the newly restored Athenian government to request aid for his family, one of the ruling aristocracies in Thessaly, in northern Greece, that was currently facing new power struggles there. Meno’s family had previously been such help to Athens against Sparta that his grandfather (also named Meno) was granted Athenian citizenship. We do not know what resulted from Meno’s mission to Athens, but we do know that he soon left Greece to serve as a commander of mercenary troops for Cyrus of Persia—in what turned out to be Cyrus’ attempt to overthrow his brother, King Artaxerxes II. Meno was young for such a position, about twenty years old, but he was a favorite of the powerful Aristippus, a fellow aristocrat who had borrowed thousands of troops from Cyrus for those power struggles in Thessaly, and was now returning many of them. The contemporary historian Xenophon (who also wrote Socratic dialogues) survived Cyrus’ failed campaign, and he wrote an account whose description of Meno resonates with Plato’s portrait here: ambitious yet lazy for the hard work of doing things properly, and motivated by desire for wealth and power while easily forgetting friendship and justice. But Xenophon paints Meno as a thoroughly selfish and unscrupulous schemer, while Plato sketches him as a potentially dangerous, overly confident young man who has begun to tread the path of arrogance. His natural talents and his privileged but unphilosophical education are not guided by wisdom or even patience, and he prefers “good things” like money over genuine understanding and moral virtue. In this dialogue, Plato imagines Meno encountering Socrates shortly before that disastrous Persian adventure, when he has not yet proved himself to be the “scoundrel” and “tyrant” that Socrates suspects and Xenophon later confirms. According to Xenophon, when Cyrus was killed and his other commanders were quickly beheaded by the King’s men, Meno was separated and tortured at length before being killed, because of his special treachery (see Xenophon’s Anabasis II, 6)’.