PLATO AND ARISTOPHANES ON (WANT OF) EDUCATION: SHAME AND EROS IN THEGORGIASAND IN THECLOUDS

Abstract

Plato'sGorgiasmight as well have been namedOn Shame. The word appears sixty-nine times in the course of the dialogue with a lion's share of references to shame being made by Socrates’ character. Callicles comes in second in his use of the term. Cairns notes that in the corpus of the lyric poet Theognis of Megara (sixth century BC) we have ‘the first instance of the nounaischunē.’ Cairns goes on to comment on Theognis’ use of αἰσχύνη and says that ‘[h]ere it appears in the objective sense, but later it will also be found in a subjective sense, as the reaction to or mental picture of disgrace and so as equivalent ofaidōs.’ Although it is important to differentiate αἰσχύνη and αἰδώς, the terms, as Cairns suggests, are capable of expressing interchangeable meanings. Hence, in our comparative study of shame in theGorgiasand in theClouds, we pay close attention to and examine the context in which a given term appears. The central role that shame plays in theGorgiasis the subject matter of analyses by Race, Bensen Cain, McKim, and Dodds. Race is confident that ‘of all the motifs running through the work, the most insistent is that of shame, for the word aischyne (along with verbal forms of aischynomai and the adjective aischros) occurs over 75 times.’ In line with the view that shame is central in theGorgias, we offer a further contribution, which focuses on the affinity between the treatment of shame in that dialogue and in Aristophanes’Clouds. We argue that either the ostensible subject of theGorgias, which is usually identified as rhetoric, is not the dialogue's true concern or the explicit subject matter cannot be understood without its accompanying element, which is shame. To support this thesis, we undertake a comparative analysis of the thematic, heuristic, and conceptual use of shame in theGorgiasin view of Aristophanes’ play. We argue that the characters in theCloudsportray the same perennial attitudes to life as do the interlocutors in theGorgiasand, what is more, the characters in both works evoke with more than incidental clarity certain historical figures (Alcibiades and Pericles). Thus, both works, as we claim, are commenting on and, even though theCloudsis a comedy, serve as the ground for our philosophical reflection on the political, educational, and cultural ideals of ancient Greece. Moreover, theCloudsmakes light of, instead of endorsing, such distinctions as shameful/laudable, natural/conventional, old/new, education/didacticism, and moral/prudish. We draw on the humor of theClouds, which allows us to withhold immediate judgment about these dichotomies in order to then examine these same notions which are problematized in theGorgias.