Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/413

 TIIRASYMACHUS. 891 vas never propounded by Thrasymachus to any public audience in the form in which it appears in Plato. For Thrasymachua was a rhetor, who had studied the principles of his art: now wo know that these common sentiments of an audience, were pre- cisely what the rhetors best understood, and always strove to conciliate. Even from the time of Gorgias, they began the practice of composing beforehand declamations upon the general heads of morality, which were ready to be introduced into actual speeches as occasion presented itself, and in which appeal was made to the moral sentiments foreknown as common, with more or less of modification, to all the Grecian assemblies. The real Thrasymachus, addressing any audience at Athens, would never have wounded these sentiments, as the Platonic Thrasymachus is made to do in the " Republic.' Least of all would he have done this, if it be true of him, as Plato asserts of the rhetors and sophists generally, that they thought about nothing but court- ing popularity, without any sincerity of conviction. Though Plato thinks fit to bring out the opinion of Thrasy machus with accessories unnecessarily offensive, and thus to en- hance the dialectical triumph of Sokrates by the brutal manners of the adversary, he was well aware that he had not done justice to the opinion itself, much less confuted it. The proof of this is, that in the second book of the " Republic," after Thrasymachus has disappeared, the very same opinion is taken up by Glaukon and Adeimantus, and set forth by both of them, though they disclaim entertaining it as their own, as suggesting grave doubts and diffi- culties which they desire to hear solved by Sokrates. Those who read attentively the discourses of Glaukon and Adeimantus, will see that the substantive opinion ascribed to Thrasymachus, apart from the brutality with which he is made to state it, does not even countenance the charge of immoral teaching against him, much less against the sophists generally. Hardly anything in Plato's compositions is more powerful than those discourses. They present, in a perspicuous and forcible manner, some of the most serious difficulties with which ethical theory is required to grapple. And Plato can answer them only in one way, by taking society to pieces, and reconstructing it in the form of his imagin- ary republic. The speeches of Glaukon and Adeimantus form ibe immediate preface to the striking and elaborate description