Note 121 — Chapter XXIV · GORGIAS. (continued 2)

Plato, Gorgias, p. 487 C. ἐνίκα ἐς ὑμῖν τοιάδε τις δόξα, μὴ προθυμεῖσθαι εἰς τὴν ἀκριβείαν φιλοσοφεῖν, ἀλλὰ εὐλαβεῖσθαι.… ὅπως μὴ πέρα τοῦ δέοντος σοφώτεροι γενόμενοι λήσετε διαφθαρέντες.

The view here advocated by Kallikles:—That philosophy is good and useful, to be studied up to a point in the earlier years of life, in order to qualify persons for effective discharge of the duties of active citizenship, but that it ought not to be made the main occupation of mature life, nor be prosecuted up to the pitch of accurate theorising: this view, since Plato here assigns it to Kallikles, is denounced by most of the Platonic critics as if it were low and worthless. Yet it was held by many of the most respectable citizens of antiquity; and the question is, in point of fact, that which has always been in debate between the life of theoretical speculation and the life of action.

Isokrates urges the same view both in Orat. xv. De Permutatione, sect. 282-287, pp. 485-486, Bekker; and Orat. xii. Panathenaic. sect. 29-32, p. 321, Bekker. διατρίψαι μὲν οὖν περὶ τὰς παιδείας ταύτας χρόνον τινὰ συμβουλεύσαιμ’ ἂν τοῖς νεωτέροις, μὴ μέντοι περιϊδεῖν τὴν φύσιν τὴν αὐτῶν κατασκελετευθεῖσαν ἐπὶ τούτοις, &c. Cicero quotes a similar opinion put by Ennius the poet into the mouth of Neoptolemus, Tusc. D. ii. 1, 1; Aulus Gell. v. 16 — “degustandum ex philosophiâ censet, non in eam ingurgitandum”.

Tacitus, in describing the education of Agricola, who was taken by his mother in his earlier years to study at Massilia, says, c. 4:—“Memoriâ teneo, solitum ipsum narrare, se in primâ juventâ studium philosophiæ, ultra quam concessum Romano et senatori, hausisse; ni prudentia matris incensum ac flagrantem animum coercuisset”.

I have already cited this last passage, and commented upon the same point, in my notes at the end of the Euthydêmus, p. 230.