In the subsequent interchange, Socrates disarms Callicles by showing Callicles how he had misconstrued the nature of the political man when he imagined him as one who has power over others and who is free because he has that power. Callicles in his efforts to be the political man sought influence for himself in the city and empire for his city, but such influence and empire is neither power nor freedom as Socrates comes to redefine these political terms. The challenge addressed to Callicles, and the claim that Socrates makes when he defines himself as the only political man in Athens, depend crucially on the transformation of the meaning of freedom and power, not on the complex transformation of regime he tries with the founding of Callipolis. Again, space prohibits detailing the steps that lead to the disarming of Callicles, but let me briefly indicate how Socrates exercises his transformative powers, ones that may have been powerful enough to force Callicles to withdraw from his own pursuit ofpolitical power with the potential to enslave others. These interchanges enmesh Socrates in the discourse of democratic Athens; they do not enable him - as in the Republic - to escape it.
By remarking on Callicles’ love for the demos, Socrates had made Callicles appear the democrat, but in the questions that follow Socrates undermines that portrait. Callicles had passionately extolled the power of the strong to do what they want, to enslave the weak, to be free. Socrates responds by wondering who exactly ‘‘the strong’’ may be. Who are these strong and (he adds, with no objection from Callicles) ‘‘the better’’ ( ton beltio) men who rule over lesser men and who ought to have more than the paltry ones (488b)? Socrates wonders whether we can say that the many are not stronger than the one. Democrat that Socrates claimed Callicles to be in his ‘‘love for the demos,’’ Callicles concurs with Socrates on this point, only to become angered when Socrates follows through with the suggestion that then the belief held by the ‘‘strong many’’ that the just is having equal shares and that doing injustice is shameful is clearly according to nature. Now the antidemocrat in Callicles surfaces and the contradictions he harbors in his soul become apparent. ‘‘[D]o you think I am saying that, if a rabble of slaves and human beings of all sorts, worth nothing except perhaps for the exertion of bodily might, was collected together, and if these people asserted some things, these things are lawful?’’ (489c).
Socrates pushes Callicles so far that Callicles almost appears to defend the philosopher-kings of the Republic by arguing that the ‘‘just by nature is this, for one who is superior [ beltio] and more intelligent [phronimoteron] both to rule and to have more than the lowlier ones’’ (490a), and that such men are those ‘‘who are intelligent [phronimous] in regard to the affairs of the city and courageous [manly, andreious].’ These are the ones, Callicles says, for whom ‘‘it is fitting’’ that they rule the cities (491c). Socrates in the Republic had imagined the philosophers as rulers with intelligence, knowing how the people may be well governed; in this conversation with Callicles he defends democracy. Callicles does not hesitate to express his frustration with a Socrates who ‘‘always talk[s] without stopping about cobblers, cooks, and doctors, as if our speech were about these people!’’ (491a). Instead, Callicles wants to talk about those who are ‘‘not only intelligent but also courageous, being sufficient to accomplish that which they intend and not flinching through some softness of soul’’ (491b).19 So much for Callicles the democrat; so much for Callicles the lover of the demos.
Having gotten Callicles to express his clear disdain for the many, Socrates then focuses on this superior individual who rules in the city. Does he, Socrates asks, rule over himself? Baffled by this question, Callicles asks: ‘‘What do you mean, ruling himself?’’ - to which Socrates, again taking the side of the many and their beliefs, responds: ‘‘Just what the many mean: being moderate and in control of oneself, ruling the pleasures and desires’’ (491de). Callicles, who had understood power as the freedom to exercise rule over others and therefore as a means to satisfy all one's cravings, is stunned. The man who rules over himself is a fool and allows himself to become a slave. Those who are courageous and intelligent satisfy their desires. They can because they have acquired power in the city either ‘‘as sons of kings or themselves by nature sufficient to supply for themselves some rule or tyranny or dynasty [like Archelaus, we might note]’’ (492b). And for those in power there is the satisfaction of desires. As Callicles concludes one of several speeches that express amazement at Socrates’ claims, he affirms: ‘‘luxury, intemperance, and freedom [eleutheria], when they have support - this is virtue and happiness’’ (492c).
Socrates thus moves Callicles from the problem of the definition of who is ‘‘strong,'' since the democratic answer disturbs Callicles, to the question of what human good does one seek to attain with the power that one has when one is strong. Callicles, focusing on pleasure, imagines that the strong satisfy their desires in much the same way that Polus first imagines Archelaus the tyrant doing whatever he wants, and as Athens the empire does, as Pericles says, when it draws ‘‘the produce of the world into our harbor’’ (Thuc. 2.38). Callicles, like Polus, imagines that the tyrant, whether individual or city, must be happy. But Socrates, as with Polus, will not let Callicles rest satisfied with his strong, superior men satisfying their desires through rule over others. Though Callicles may consider those who control their desires and therefore need nothing as no more than stones or corpses (492e, 494a), Socrates tries to persuade Callicles that the soul of the man of immoderate desires, strong or otherwise, is like a leaky jar, never filled, always searching for more, or still more crudely he is like the man who scratches an itch. The life Callicles (and Polus) imagine for themselves is no better, Socrates proposes, than that of a ‘‘catamite.’’ As Nichols (1998: 87 n109) explains, a catamite is the man or boy who is the ‘‘passive object’’ in sexual relations.
This is hardly the vision Callicles embraces as he loftily praises the ones who are ‘‘not only intelligent but also courageous, being sufficient to accomplish what they intend and not flinching through softness of soul’’ (491b). The frustration Callicles feels as the conversation proceeds is palpable. Callicles wants to talk of great men, leaders, those who hold empires under their sway, and all Socrates does is talk of the cobblers and cooks and the desire to drink when one is thirsty or eat when one is hungry, ‘‘small and narrow things,’’ as Callicles calls them (497c). It is Socrates who expresses throughout the conversation his concern not with the great, but with the average man, the one whom Callicles is so eager to subdue and exploit. Socrates is eager to make those cobblers and cooks ‘‘better’’ and insists that Callicles take him seriously about these everyday men:
For you see that our speeches are about this - and what would a human being [anthro-pos] who had even a little intelligence [not a great deal, not the men of intelligence about whom Callicles had been so eager to speak] be more serious about than this? That is, in what way one must live, whether the life to which you urge me on, doing these things of a man [tou andros], speaking among the people and practicing rhetoric and acting in politics in this way in which you now act in politics; or this life in philosophy. (500c)
So angered and resistant does Callicles become as his arguments melt before Socratic questioning that Socrates is left to carry on the dialogue himself. Callicles no longer tries to defend his understanding of freedom and power; he is thrown into silence as the dialogue turns to the good of the soul, virtue, and the dependence of the pleasurable on the good. Socrates concludes, with Callicles’ grudging consent, that happiness comes from moderation and escape from the intemperance that leads one to seek domination over others. The potential tyrant has been tamed and perhaps finds it impossible after his encounter with Socrates to play the part of the courageous man of intelligence, ruling over the paltry and taking what he wants from them. If this is simply the life of the catamite, Callicles would want no part of it.
Socrates has undermined the meaning of power as Callicles understood it. He has shown that political power leads to the life not of the manliest of men satisfying their desires for empire, but to the life of the lowliest of the low. Along with power he has undermined meaning of freedom as enslaving others. Instead, freedom is ruling over oneself. Rhetoric, if used as Polus and Gorgias initially envision it, leads to power and freedom, in other words tyranny. No, says Socrates, it leads to one’s own slavery, not to domination over others. A man always seeking more is a slave to his passions. A polity like that of the Athenians expressing so much pride in the empire that Pericles helped them acquire only increases the slavery of its citizens. They become, because of Pericles, ‘‘corrupted... lazy, cowardly, babbling, and money lovers’’ (515e). Athens as a tyrant city has transformed its citizens into men enslaved by their passions and the desire to rule, ‘‘more savage than they were when [Pericles]
Took them over... [and] ... if more savage, then more unjust and worse’’ (516c). Rulers in a democracy who provide confections for their citizens as Pericles, Themistocles, and Cimon did, Socrates suggests, become themselves the subjects of wild and unruly citizens. In Pericles’ case, ‘‘they voted a condemnation of him for theft, and came close to sentencing him to death, clearly on the grounds that he was base’’ (516a). Callicles had urged Socrates to abandon philosophy and become a political man making speeches. He did not recognize how that would make Socrates a slave of the people, turning him into a pastry chef before a tribunal of children (e. g. 521e), just like Pericles and the other politicians in Athens.
No, thank you, says Socrates. In private or in the agora, leading the philosophic life, he rules over himselfand endeavors to educate others to rule themselves rather than seek to rule over others. Rule over the self is freedom; rule over others is slavery. The ‘ ‘power’’ of Gorgias’ art, while it may lead to the enslaving of others, does not lead to freedom for oneself. The only man in Athens who practices the true political art is the one who frees the Athenians from being tyrants over others and thus slaves to their desires. That is where Pericles and other democratic heroes had led them. In Thucydides, Pericles had told the Athenians: ‘‘For what you hold is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny; to take it perhaps was unjust, but to let it go is unsafe’’ (2.63), recognizing, as does Socrates, that the possession of a tyranny constrains rather than frees the city that cannot stop fighting lest they become the slaves of their enemies. What Pericles had described as ‘‘perhaps unjust,’’ Socrates says has made the city ‘‘swollen and festering with sores underneath.’’ Those who made Athens the tyrant of Greece ‘‘have filled up the city with harbors, dockyards, walls, tribute, and such drivel’’ (518e-519a).
The true political actor frees the city from such ‘‘drivel.’’ Freedom, Socrates teaches, is not tyranny. To the degree that he acts in the city, Socrates the busybody butting into everyone’s affairs has the potential to protect citizens from becoming themselves enslaved by a false understanding of the meaning of freedom. Thus the many might learn to protect themselves through freedom properly understood from the most dangerous of potential tyrants, themselves. At least in this dialogue, Socrates - not Pericles or Themistocles or Cimon - is the hero of the democracy preserving the freedom of its citizens from tyranny.
World History
