Harry Berger Jr. - Couch City: Socrates against Simonides

Socrates against Simonides

HARRY BERGER, JR .

Edited by Ward Risvold and J. Benjamin Fuqua

Introduction by Jill Frank

Fordham University Press

NEW YORK 2021

Copyright 2021 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021903961

Printed in the United States of America

23 22 215 4 3 2 1

First edition

to Ward Risvold

with deepest thanks for our many years of friendship

, by Jill Frank

C OUCH C ITY

Jill Frank

In the Perils of Uglytown(2015), Harry Berger, Jr., shows that the allegedly ideal city of Platos Republic, its kallipolisor beautiful city, is more truly an aischropolis, an Uglytown. Couch City: Socrates against Simonidesopens with the prehistory of Uglytown in what Berger dubs Klinopolis or Couch City, introduced in Republic2. In this luxurious, soft, and feverish city (372e), couches are associated with pleonexia, having more, wanting to have more, wanting to be superior and get the better of others, to do unto them before they do unto you. As Berger writes in Couch City, the ideaof the couch, which appears in Republic10, transcendentalizes the culture of Klinopolis, idealizing its way of life. Symbolizing the desire for more honor, money, power, and pleasure, as well as the arguments that rationalize these desires, the idea of the couch exemplifies and justifies Klinopoliss pleonectic ethics, its instrumental rhetoric, and the power politics its morality and discourses underwrite and produce.

A depiction of fifth-century BCE Athensthe Athens of the new agathoiKlinopolis is the sociopolitical backdrop of the dialogue that is the focus of Couch City, Platos Protagoras. In this dialogue, Socrates tells the story of a gathering of famous sophists, at which he and Protagoras discuss a central topic of Athenian culture and Greek philosophy, namely, aret, excellence or virtue. The stakes are high. The conversation takes place before an eager group of students and admirers, including Critias and Alcibiades, up-and-comers in Athenss political scene, as well as the young and impressionable Hippocrates, a political hopeful, who, desiring to learn from the venerable Protagoras, brings Socrates to the gathering to hold the great sage to account.

When asked by Socrates what he teaches, Protagoras answers: how to make good decisions about ones own affairs and the affairs of ones city so that one can be the most powerful in the city in both acting and speaking. With Protagorass assent, Socrates glosses this as teaching the political art [ techn] of good citizenship, or the excellence or virtue of citizens (318e319a).