6. Plato's Solution to the Ideological Crisis of the Greek Aristocracy

Abstract

If it is legitimate to see in Sophokles' Philoktetes an implicit appropriation and transformation of sophistic anthropology and edu­ cational theory, it must be acknowledged that such a reading places a heavy burden of meaning on the frame of ancient myth which consti­ tutes the poet's narrative raw material. That frame, as Sophokles has tailored it, is just a story of three men on a deserted island. This cannot be in any real sense a society, and even as a putative metaphorical im­ age of a society it is remarkably restricted-just two older men battling for the adherence of a third, younger man. There are no women, no children, no economy other than the elemental survival efforts of one of the men. The form of Greek tragedy is inextricably bound with the profoundly ambiguous and indirect communicative mode of mythic narrative. When we turn to the Republic, we find an explicit examination of not only the constitutive elements of a society but also the issue of the modes of communication. One cannot but be struck by the will of this text to be explicit, to escape from the shadow world of mythic, narra­ tive representations and spell out at last the "whole truth." We are ac­ cordingly tempted to read it on its own terms as somehow the final word. It is just the sort of text that the New Right has in mind when it celebrates the classics as monumental repositories of eternal truths. 1