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OX F OR D ST U DIE S IN A NCIEN T PHIL O S OPH Y
OX FOR D ST UDIE S
IN A NCIEN T
PHIL OSOPH Y
E DI T OR : V IC T OR CA S T ON

VOLU M E LVII

w i n t e r 2 019

1
 1
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Chapter 8 © American Catholic Philosophical Association 2006
Chapter 12 © André Laks 2006; English translation © Benjamin Morison 2019
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 CONTENTS

Preface XI

T echne and arche in Plato's R epublic Book r

MELISSA LANE

Plato on Why Human Beauty is Good for the Soul 25

GABRIEL R. LEAR

On the Digression in the Theaetetus 65

STEPHEN MENN

The Academy at Work: The Target of Dialectic in

Plato's Parmenides 121
ALEXANDER N EHAMAS

Faking Wisdom: The Expertise of Sophistic in

Plato's Sophist 153
JONATHAN BEERE

Virtue and Goals of Actions in Aristotle's Ethical Treatises 191

HENDRIK LORENZ

Practical nous in the N£comachean Ethics 219

BENJAMIN MORISON

Practical Truth in Aristotle 249

SARAH BROADIE

Becoming Bad: Aristotle on Vice a nd Moral Habi tu atio n 273

RACHEL BARNEY

Pleasure and Human Good in Epicurus

PANOS DIMAS

Cynicism: Or, Philosophy as a Way of Strife 341

CHRI STIAN WILDBERG

Jacob the Cynic: Philosophe rs and Philosophy in

Jacob Burckhardt's Griechische Cultu rgeschichte
ANDRE LAKS

Index L ocorum
 TECHNĒ AND ARCHĒ IN PLATO’S
REPUBLIC BOOK 1

melissa lane

Most accounts of Socrates’ discussion with Thrasymachus in

Republic Book 1 focus on the role played by technē, which we may
understand as craft, skill, art, or as I shall say here, following Emily
Hulme Kozey, profession.1 In this contribution, I shall argue that
the initial stretches of debate with Thrasymachus (my focus being
338 c 2–344 c 9, together with the retrospective summary offered

© Melissa Lane 2019

This essay is dedicated to the service of honouring John Cooper, who has done so
much to help me among many others to understand crucial dimensions of Plato’s
Republic; of the relationship between knowledge and rule in Plato more generally; and
of the stringent value that philosophy as a way of living demands. And it is simultane-
ously dedicated to celebrating the philia that Andrew Lovett and I have been fortu-
nate to enjoy with John and Marcia, in matters philosophical, musical, and coastal, in
Princeton, New York, Naxos, Syros, and we hope many other places to come.
Earlier versions of this paper were discussed in the form of the last of six Carlyle
Lectures, a set discussed at a workshop in Princeton before being presented at
Oxford in Hilary 2018; versions of this paper were also presented as the 2017
McCracken Lecture at Michigan State University and the 2018 Knox Lecture at
the University of St Andrews, and in seminars or related lectures in 2018 at univer-
sities in Cambridge (B Club, Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge),
Bamberg, Bergen, and Berlin (Humboldt University) and in 2019 in Chicago
(Northwestern). I am grateful to too many people to name in those various venues
as well as to other friends, colleagues, and students at Princeton and elsewhere for
their comments, to which I have attempted to do justice here, but am aware that
I have failed in this last sentence to grapple with Jill Frank’s alternative reading of
this passage as flawed precisely in failing to capture the simultaneous way in which
rulers should serve their own good as well as that of their subjects; this must remain
for further work in dialogue with her new book, Poetic Justice: Rereading Plato’s
Republic (Chicago, 2018).
1 E. Hulme Kozey, Philosophia and philotechnia: The technē Theme in the Platonic
Dialogues, [Philosophia and philotechnia] (Princeton, PhD diss., Classics, 2019). While
no translation is perfect, Hulme Kozey has persuaded me that so long as one sets aside
the connotation of the elevated social status which professionals receive (or at least
assert) from the nineteenth century onward, this one has more advantages than any
other. Compare the conception of an ‘expert’ as ‘a well-qualified specialist on whom
others may safely rely’, which is developed in P. Woodruff, ‘Plato’s Early Theory of
Knowledge’, in H. H. Benson (ed.), Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates (New York
and Oxford, 1982), 86–106 at 100, a reference which I owe to Debra Nails.

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Volume 57 First edition. Victor Caston (ed.)
This chapter © Melissa Lane 2019. First published 2019 by Oxford University Press
2 Melissa Lane
by Socrates in 345 b 8–e 1) hinge on the relationship between technē
and archē, the latter being a noun that Plato strikingly uses here to
denote an abstract and general notion of ‘rule’ (rather than, as was
more common at the time, to denote a defined constitutional office).
In deploying the notion of archē and its relationship to technē, we
find Plato focusing on the normative nature of rule itself, defining
the purpose of the ruler in terms of the role occupied, which excludes
any other goals or advantages that the natural person might seek
in some other guise. Whereas most attention has focused on how
Socrates eventually makes this point against Thrasymachus by
­separating the wage-earning technē off from others,2 in fact his
argument that ruling lies at the heart of (at least a subclass of) tech­
nai already articulates the possibility, indeed properly speaking the
necessity, that rule be non-exploitative and that the ruler qua ruler
aim only to serve the good of the ruled. The debate between
Socrates and Thrasymachus cannot be understood without atten-
tion to the key role played by archē within it.
I begin by showing that while Thrasymachus’ own interest is
focused on the case of political rulers (and the generalized observa-
tions he offers about them), it is he who first expands the examples
in play to include professionals as well. This move will eventually
prove fatal to his case, as it allows Socrates to broaden the concept
of rule in turn to be not only a comparison between political rulers
and professionals, but a common structure, at least for what I shall
call the ‘therapeutic technai’ that furnish his chosen illustrations of
the claim (as explained further below).3 At issue between them is
whether political officeholders, and rulers more generally, in fact
behave as Thrasymachus says that they actually do, or rather as
Socrates says that they conceptually must.
In reconstructing Socrates’ analysis of rule, I shall argue that
rule is conceptually a structure of subordination between individ-
uals or entities, in which the relationship is a question of ‘who
whom’—as Plato might, like Lenin, have been willing to say. Yet it
is likewise conceptually a structure of service, in which the ruler is

2 See, for example, J. Thakkar, Plato as Critical Theorist (Cambridge, Mass.,

2018), whose interest is more broadly in Plato on money-making.
3 Compare the remark by Hannah Arendt that ‘the concept of rule’ was ‘for Plato
a much more general category’, rather than as for us, ‘invariably connected with
politics’, though she is not discussing this particular part of Plato’s corpus there
(H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London, 1958) at 224).
 Technē and archē in Plato’s Republic Book 1 3
defined by hir4 purpose of providing benefit to the ruled, and in
which the perfection of the rule qua rule lies in the realization of
the ability to provide that benefit fully and precisely. Simultaneously
subordination, knowledge (or, for the sake of alliteration, sophia),
and service, Platonic rule articulates a claim about the inevitability
of subordination and obedience at the same time that it articulates
its more famous claims about the necessity of knowledge and the
imperative of service.

1. Preliminaries: the meaning of ‘rule’ and Thrasymachus’

initial political examples

When Thrasymachus first offers his definition of justice, as ‘noth-

ing other than the advantage of the stronger’ (338 c 2–3), he expounds
it by invoking a version of traditional Greek classifications of polit-
ical constitutions as common knowledge; ‘Don’t you know that
some cities are ruled by a tyranny, some by a democracy, and some
by an aristocracy?’, as Grube and Reeve translate,5 or as we might
more literally translate, ‘Don’t you know that in cities some are
tyrannical rulers, some are democratic rulers, and some are aristo-
cratic rulers?’ (338 d 6–7).6 The more literal translation reveals
Thrasymachus’ focus on the individuals or bodies of individuals
who are doing the ruling—a focus on what we might call the agents
of rule, which he then glosses and generalizes by an abstract noun
in his next question: ‘And in each city this element dominates, the
ruling body?’ (οὐκοῦν τοῦτο κρατεῖ ἐν ἑκάστῃ πόλει, τὸ ἄρχον; 338 d 9).
I translate to archon as ‘ruling body’ to bring out its abstract

4 I am experimenting in this sentence, and at certain points below, with the

­ ender-neutral pronoun ‘hir’, as it is grammatically inclusive but sounds when spoken
g
indistinguishable from the female pronoun ‘her’. The effect is, I hope, to remind us,
by means of an unexpected visual jolt, of Plato’s insistence in Republic Book 5 that
those of any gender can have the natures suitable to become philosophers and ­rulers.
Compare Derrida on the aural indistinguishability of différence and différance.
5 G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve (trans.), Plato: Republic (Indianapolis,
1992). In general, translations are my own, unless otherwise noted (as here).
6 εἶτ’ οὐκ οἶσθ’, ἔϕη, ὅτι τῶν πόλεων αἱ μὲν τυραννοῦνται, αἱ δὲ δημοκρατοῦνται, αἱ δὲ
ἀριστοκρατοῦνται. (The Greek texts, here and in what follows, are taken from the
most recent OCTs.) Strikingly, however, Socrates uses only the pejorative vocabu-
lary of tyranny to describe rule by one (αἱ τυραννοῦνται, 338 d 6; τυραννίς, 338 e 2;
τυραννικούς, 338 e 2–3), while using the notably positive vocabulary of aristocracy
for rule by the few (αἱ ἀριστοκρατοῦνται, 338 d 7).
4 Melissa Lane
hypostatization. Yet we must also note that this hypostatization is
not of rule as such (as if it were disembodied from the agents and
subjects of rule), but rather, precisely of rulers—of the agents of
rule, whether tyrannical, democratic, or aristocratic rule, over
whom to archon is introduced to generalize.7 Indeed, Thrasy­
machus, like Socrates in response to him, here is sensitive to the
way in which even the lexical sense of archē that is closest to the
abstract meaning of ‘rule’ (namely, ‘first place or power, sovereignty’—
a sense that is distinguished in the LSJ lexicon entry from that of
‘magistracy, office’) has in context still the meaning of a sovereign
body or entity rather than the purely abstract notion of rule in
general (LSJ ad loc.). In other words, he uses the noun here very
often as a kind of shorthand for ‘the ruling (or, those ruling) over
the ruled’ (bringing this use of the noun close to the substantive
use of the participle of the verb archein).
Thrasymachus then introduces a further gloss or substitution,
moving from the neuter to archon to the feminine hē archē. But
again, because each of these is introduced as a way to gloss the
threefold cases of tyrannical, democratic, and aristocratic rulers,
we must interpret hē archē too as a hypostatization of the ruling
agents, not as a bloodless notion of rule in general abstracted from
the relation of subordination between rulers and ruled.8 He then
generalizes his claim to cover all these ruling entities, again using
the feminine noun as a hypostatization of the ruling individual or
group: ‘justice is . . . in all cities the same, namely, the advantage of
the established ruling body’ (ἐν ἁπάσαις ταῖς πόλεσιν ταὐτὸν εἶναι
δίκαιον, τὸ τῆς καθεστηκυίας ἀρχῆς συμϕέρον, 338 e 6–a 2), reiterating
the referent to the feminine archē via the feminine demonstrative
pronoun hautē, in order to emphasize that his claim is about ‘the

7 Compare Otanes’ invocation of πλῆθος . . . ἄρχον in Herodotus (3. 80. 6). This
likewise is often translated as ‘the rule of the multitude’ as if ‘rule’ were the
(abstract) subject and multitude a qualification. But that is not the way the Greek of
the passage works at all (as such a misreading would require ‘rule’ to be a nomina-
tive and ‘of the multitude’ to be a subjective genitive). In fact, in Herodotus’ Greek,
‘the multitude’ is the subject and ‘ruling’ is a present active participle of the verb
ἄρχω: the phrase means ‘the ruling multitude’, not ‘the rule of the multitude’.
8 This sentence draws on but also makes more precise the discussion in M. Lane,
‘Founding as Legislating: The Figure of the Lawgiver in Plato’s Republic’, in
L. Brisson and N. Notomi (eds.), Dialogues on Plato’s Politeia (Republic), Selected
Papers from the Ninth Symposium Platonicum (Sankt Augustin, 2013), 104–14 at
105 and 108.
 Technē and archē in Plato’s Republic Book 1 5
[established ruling body] however it holds sway’ (αὕτη δέ που κρατεῖ,
339 a 2), a claim that should be interpreted in light of the preced-
ing claim about cities being ruled alternatively by tyrannical,
demo­crat­ic, or aristocratic rulers.9 And as we continue to read the
dialogue, even where the noun hē archē may in later contexts be
idiomatically best translated as ‘rule’ (notwithstanding that this
word itself does not appear in the LSJ entry for the noun in the
closest relevant sense), we do well to keep in mind that the closest
relevant lexical sense of ‘first place or power, sovereignty’ still
bears with it the idea of a being or entity holding that place or exer-
cising that power or sovereignty. Rule is for Plato (and I think in
general) always an interpersonal relationship of subordination: one
person ruling and another being ruled.

2. ‘In the precise sense’: from Thrasymachus on rulers and

professionals, to Socrates on rulers as professionals

As we have seen, Thrasymachus initially sets the agenda for treat-

ing ruling, and its ruling bodies or agents, within a relatively famil-
iar and conventional political framework of the rule by one, few, or
many, though given a particular accent by his word choices. And
Plato has Socrates too remain within that broad paradigm as he
begins to challenge the Chalcedonian on the problematic case of
rulers making mistakes: as late as 340 c 8–d 1, Socrates uses ‘the
rulers’ (τοὺς ἄρχοντας, 340 c 8) in the implicit context of political
rulers only. It is in responding to that challenge—Socrates’ argu-
ment from error, as I shall call it—that Thrasymachus makes the
first move of the dialogue to broaden the family of examples of
rule, and notably, to include professionals within them: intro­du­cing
the doctor (ὁ ἰατρός), the accountant (ὁ λογιστής), and the grammar-
ian (ὁ γραμματιστής), all invoked in a neat sequence at 340 d 6–8.10
And it is again he who first introduces the notion of defining the
figure of the ruler (τὸν ἄρχοντα, 341 b 5) in a strict or precise sense,

9 Compare the way that G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve gloss over this issue
by simply rendering ‘the established rule’, making it unclear whether this should be
understood as an entity composed of individuals (as I argue) or as a wholly abstract
idea.
10 The first two are actually introduced for the first time earlier in the same
speech, at 340 d 3 and d 4, respectively.
6 Melissa Lane
reiterating this move several times in related formulations in the
same speech (his second major speech, ridiculing and rejecting
Socrates’ argument from error)—τῷ ἀκριβεστάτῳ (341 b 8), τὸν
ἀκριβῆ λόγον (340 e 1–2), τὸ . . . ἀκριβέστατον (340 c 8)—terms that he
blends together with an appeal to the idea that a professional who
errs ‘is no professional’ (οὐκ ἔστι δημιουργός, 340 e 4), generalized to
the claim that ‘[n]o professional, expert, or ruler makes an error at
the moment when he is ruling’ (ὥστε δημιουργὸς ἢ σοϕὸς ἢ ἄρχων
οὐδεὶς ἁμαρτάνει τότε ὅταν ἄρχων ᾖ, 340 e 4–5), and summed up with
the claim that ‘the most precise answer [τὸ ἀκριβέστατον] is this. The
ruler, insofar as he is a ruler, never makes errors and unerringly
decrees what is best for himself, and this his subject must do’ (340 e
8–341 a 3, trans. Grube and Reeve, modified).11
Thrasymachus here appears simply to compare professionals,
experts, and rulers, only to revert to the case that interests him
most, that of political rulers. But I shall argue that Socrates in con-
trast identifies a kinship that links these figures, in particular, pro-
fessionals (or at least the illustrative ones he chooses), experts, and
political rulers, in identifying all of them (and not only the latter,
political rulers) as rulers. To begin, he immediately and eagerly
adopts the new ‘precise sense’ vocabulary that Thrasymachus has
proposed, speaking of ‘the doctor in the precise sense’ (ὁ τῷ ἀκριβεῖ
λόγῳ ἰατρός, 341 c 5–6) and ‘the ship’s steersman in the precise sense’
(ὁ κυβερνήτης ὁ ἀκριβής, 342 d 10). Indeed Socrates will repeatedly
remind Thrasymachus of the very methodological and conceptual
specification that the latter had himself introduced.12 By contrast,

11 τὸ δὲ ἀκριβέστατον ἐκεῖνο τυγχάνει ὄν, τὸν ἄρχοντα, καθ’ ὅσον ἄρχων ἐστίν, μὴ
ἁμαρτάνειν, μὴ ἁμαρτάνοντα δὲ τὸ αὑτῷ βέλτιστον τίθεσθαι, τοῦτο δὲ τῷ ἀρχομένῳ ποιη-
τέον. To be sure, Thrasymachus acknowledges that in common parlance people do
sometimes say that ‘a doctor is in error, or an accountant, or a grammarian’ (ὁ ἰατρὸς
ἐξήμαρτεν καὶ ὁ λογιστὴς ἐξήμαρτεν καὶ ὁ γραμματιστής, 340 d 6–8), reiterating this
point toward the end of the speech—‘everyone would say that a physician or a ruler
makes errors’ (πᾶς γ’ ἂν εἴποι ὅτι ὁ ἰατρὸς ἥμαρτεν καὶ ὁ ἄρχων ἥμαρτεν, 340 e 6–7)—
and exculpating himself from earlier self-contradiction by claiming that what he
said earlier must be understood in this way (340 e 7–8, presumably referring to the
chain of inferences that Socrates had pressed upon him at 339 b 4–e 8). But he
insists that strictly or precisely speaking, ‘[n]o professional, expert, or ruler makes
an error at the moment [τότε] when he is ruling’ (ὥστε δημιουργὸς ἢ σοϕὸς ἢ ἄρχων
οὐδεὶς ἁμαρτάνει τότε ὅταν ἄρχων ᾖ, 340 e 4–5), perhaps better translated as ‘whenever
he is ruling’.
12 Socrates: ‘to define precisely’ (ἀκριβῶς διορίζειν, 346 b 3); ‘to consider precisely’
(ἀκριβῶς σκοπεῖσθαι, 346 d 2); see also 342 b 6 and related vocabulary used by
Socrates in the course of the discussion: ‘the steersman proper’ (ὁ ὀρθῶς κυβερνήτης,
 Technē and archē in Plato’s Republic Book 1 7
Thrasymachus himself never invokes the formulation again (apart
from once confirming in passing, in reply to a Socratic query, that
he does still mean to be using it) until his third outburst—a
moment that we shall postpone for consideration until nearer the
end of this contribution.13 And if we examine not just the vocabu-
lary but the flow of logic of the subsequent examination of his
revised definition, we can understand why. For Thrasymachus’
textually marked reluctance to agree to other steps along the way
will reveal at least a budding recognition that the notion of a ruler
in the precise sense—and the development of the idea of ruling as
structuring (at least some of) the technai—will prove fatal to his
proposal.
Many people have noted the significance of this notion of a strict
or precise definition within the dialogue, and indeed it is signifi-
cant, highlighting Thrasymachus’ willingness to play the ‘what is
X’ definitional game that generally characterizes Socrates’ own
approach and so his concern with advancing a conceptual claim
and not just standing by his empirical observations.14 But fewer
have remarked upon the way in which Thrasymachus compares—
while in contrast it is Socrates who eventually connects—the con-
cept of being a professional with the concept of being a ruler.
Thrasymachus relates the cases of selected professionals to the
(political) ruler simply through comparison—still holding to the

341 c 10); ‘the true doctor’ (τὸν ὡς ἀληθῶς ἰατρόν, 345 c 2); ‘the true shepherd’ (τὸν
ὡς ἀληθῶς ποιμένα, 345 c 3); ‘the true rulers’ (τοὺς ὡς ἀληθῶς ἄρχοντας, 345 e 2); ‘to
anyone who is among the true rulers’ (τῷ ὄντι ἀληθινὸς ἄρχων, 347 d 4–5). In compar-
ing these formulations with one that Plato uses elsewhere referring to what people
generally say, the ‘so-called’ (ὡς λεγόμενον) doctor and so forth, I have benefited
from the discussion of R. Geiger, ‘ “Die jetzt so genannten Könige und Machthaber”:
Zur Kritik politischer Begriffe in den Platonischen Dialogen’, paper presented at
‘Philosophie für die Polis’, Fünfter internationaler Kongress der Gesellschaft für
antike Philosophie (Zürich, 2016).
13 Thrasymachus affirms that he meant to speak about ‘the ruler in the most
precise sense’ (τὸν τῷ ἀκριβεστάτῳ . . . λόγῳ ἄρχοντα ὄντα, 341 b 8), affirming the same
precise sense that he had shortly before introduced (340 d 2–341 a 4). He affirms
this in response to a clarifying question by Socrates that his original definition
should be taken to refer to ‘the ruler and stronger’ (τὸν ἄρχοντά τε καὶ τὸν κρείττονα)
not in ‘the ordinary sense’ (ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν) but in the ‘precise sense’ (τὸν ἀκριβεῖ λόγῳ)—
Socrates’ question, 341 b 3–7, affirmed by Thrasymachus in the line at 341 b 8
quoted above.
14 This sentence is indebted to remarks made by Jonathan Beere in discussion of
an earlier version of this paper in his seminar at the Humboldt University in Berlin
in May 2018.
8 Melissa Lane
meaning of ‘ruler’ as ‘political ruler’ only (and specifically). So he
uses the phrase quoted above (‘[n]o professional, expert, or ruler’,
340 e 4–5), following this up with the comparative formulation,
‘the doctor . . . or the ruler’ (ὁ ἰατρὸς . . . καὶ ὁ ἄρχων, 340 e 6, follow-
ing Grube and Reeve in translating καί here as ‘or’), and ending up
with the claim that matters most to him, which the discussion of
the professionals has evidently been designed to illustrate and sup-
port: ‘The ruler, insofar as he is a ruler, never makes errors and
unerringly decrees what is best for himself, and this his subject
must do’ (340 e 8–341 a 3, quoted above).15 From this he infers the
vindication of his original claim (now understood in the akribesta­
ton sense): ‘Thus, as I said from the first, it is just to do what is to
the advantage of the stronger’ (ὥστε, ὅπερ ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἔλεγον, δίκαιον
λέγω τὸ τοῦ κρείττονος ποιεῖν συμϕέρον, 341 a 3–4, trans. Grube and
Reeve, modified).
But Socrates, once having persuaded Thrasymachus to reaffirm
that he means this precision in the case of the (political) ruler,
immediately picks up on the example of the doctor that Thrasy­
machus had ventured. Invoking the doctor, and then pairing this
figure with his own example of the steersman16 (while leaving aside
Thrasymachus’ remaining examples of accountant and grammar-
ian), the crucial move comes in my view when Socrates asks: ‘What
about a ship’s steersman [κυβερνήτης]? Is the steersman proper a
ruler of sailors or a sailor?’ (341 c 10–11).17

15 Here and earlier, it would be helpful to connect this stretch of argument to the
‘function’ (ἔργον) argument made by Socrates earlier in Republic 1, in the course of
the discussion with Polemarchus at 335 b 2–335 e 7, and reiterated by him in the
course of the end of his discussion with Thrasymachus at 352 d 8–354 a 9, after the
stretch of their discussion with which my reading as a whole is concerned. This is a
suggestion that I owe to Katja Vogt but do not carry out in the present contribution.
16 The background to Socrates’ choice of examples may well be the Gorgias,
where (in the conversation with Callicles), he gives a list with doctor and steersman
on it (512 b–d), and also discusses the caretaking technai that are identified at various
moments as therapeiai; see also Ion 540 b 6–d 3, where Socrates introduces similar
examples of professionals—including, strikingly, the kubernētēs, the iatros or doctor,
and the boukolos or cowherd (who will appear in Republic 1 in what I call ‘Thrasymachus’
last stand’ below), as well as the woman weaving and the general—precisely as illus-
trations of rulers (ἄρχοντι, Ion 540 b 5, b 6, c 1). I owe these thoughts to Emily
Hulme Kozey and Alex Long, respectively, in private communications.
17 τί δὲ κυβερνήτης; ὁ ὀρθῶς κυβερνήτης ναυτῶν ἄρχων ἐστὶν ἢ ναύτης; I have modified
the Grube and Reeve translation of κυβερνήτης from ‘captain’ to ‘steersman’ with
the benefit of advice from Paul Cartledge. The related Latin noun is, of course,
gubernator.
 Technē and archē in Plato’s Republic Book 1 9
Notice that here what distinguishes the steersman from the other
sailors is his role of ruling over them, the relation of subordination
in which the steersman rules over (or commands) the sailors. It is
the sailors who are here the subjects of the steersman’s skill, in a
double sense: they are at once the objects of the steersman’s rule
and those subjected to it, its subjects—a point to which we shall
return. And while this understanding of the steersman may seem
strange to us, as we might think that the purpose of the steersman’s
skill is to navigate to an externally chosen destination (an assump-
tion made by Renford Bambrough in an influential article years
ago),18 it makes more sense if we consider that the kind of ship in
question here could well be (since the civic context is at the fore-
front) a ship staffed on behalf of the polis, that is, a warship, fight-
ing on behalf of the demos who are also (metonymically, in the
sense that a subset of whom are) the sailors who staff it. The goal
of the ship’s journey is the good of the sailors in that broader sense,
and the steersman commands them to act as sailors accordingly.
In any case, Socrates follows up his question to emphasize his
counterintuitive claim that the steersman proper should be defined
not as someone who sails but rather as someone who rules over
sailors: ‘We shouldn’t, I think, take into account the fact that he
sails in a ship, and he shouldn’t be called a sailor for that reason, for
it isn’t because of his sailing that he is called a ship’s steersman,
but because of his profession and his rule over sailors?’ (οὐδὲν οἶμαι
τοῦτο ὑπολογιστέον, ὅτι πλεῖ ἐν τῇ νηΐ, οὐδ’ ἐστὶν κλητέος ναύτης· οὐ γὰρ
κατὰ τὸ πλεῖν κυβερνήτης καλεῖται, ἀλλὰ κατὰ τὴν τέχνην καὶ τὴν τῶν
ναυτῶν ἀρχήν, 341 d 2–4; trans. Grube and Reeve, modified; here
the translation of ‘rule over sailors’ for the noun phrase is natural
in English)—both questions to which Thrasymachus is for the
moment content simply to agree. Here, for the first time in the
dialogue, the notion of rule, power or sovereignty (archē) is not
merely being compared to technē. Rather, it is being incorporated
into the very structure and meaning of a technē (the καί in the

18 See R. Bambrough, ‘Plato’s Political Analogies’, in P. Laslett (ed.), Philosophy,

Politics & Society: A Collection, 1st series (Oxford, 1956), 98–115. Note that
Bambrough’s discussion was about the famous ‘ship of state’ passage in Republic
Book 6, 488 a–489 a, which uses the noun naus for ship and nauklēros for the ship
owner, but discusses the technē of navigation or steersmanship and the role of the
‘true steersman’ (τοῦ . . . ἀληθινοῦ κυβερνήτου, 488 d 4–5).
10 Melissa Lane
phrase above being best construed as epexegetic).19 In other words,
what is now doing the work is not the notion of technē as a specific
idea, but rather, the notion of archē which gives this technē its con-
tent, animating and structuring its form of knowledge.20 Moreover,
in connecting technē to archē, Socrates too—like Thrasymachus, in
fact—focuses on the figure of a ruler (who is also a professional) as
the primary concept driving the analysis.
Socrates then restates the point more broadly, as a generalization
about professions, though one that arguably applies only to those
that are in fact structured as he describes, in terms of rule:
ἀλλὰ μήν, ὦ Θρασύμαχε, ἄρχουσί γε αἱ τέχναι καὶ κρατοῦσιν ἐκείνου οὗπέρ εἰσιν
τέχναι. (342 c 7–8)
Now, surely, Thrasymachus, the professions rule over [ἄρχουσί] and are
masters [κρατοῦσιν]21 of that of which [ἐκείνου, singular genitive masculine
or neuter adjective] they are the professions?

And it is precisely here that Thrasymachus (in the present stretch

of dialectic that began at 341b–c) is first said to concede only ‘very
reluctantly’ (μάλα μόγις, 342 c 9, trans. Grube and Reeve).22 What
is the crux here that Thrasymachus senses will prove so dangerous
to his case? It is that Socrates has for the first time made a claim

19 Compare the way in which the genos enters the definition of an eidos in
Aristotelian biology, or the genus enters the definition of each of its species in mod-
ern biology.
20 Compare also the way that the Eleatic Visitor, in the Statesman, uses the noun
archē to articulate a parallel between the statesman and the doctor, comparing the
criterion of knowledge for defining medicine with that ‘of any other sort of rule
[archēs] whatsoever’ (ἄλλης ἡστινοσοῦν ἀρχῆς, 293 c 2–3). This sentence is adapted
from M. Lane, ‘Political Expertise and Political Office in Plato’s Statesman: The
Statesman’s Rule (archein) and the Subordinate Magistracies (archai)’ [‘Political
Expertise’], in A. Havlíček et al. (eds.), Plato’s Statesman, Proceedings of the
Eighth Symposium Platonicum Pragense (Prague, 2013), 49–77 at 76.
21 I translate κρατοῦσιν as ‘are masters’ in contrast to Grube and Reeve who trans-
late it ‘are stronger than’. To be sure, the overall meaning of the verb krateō in LSJ
is ‘to be strong, powerful’, and there is a use of ‘verbs signifying to surpass, be in­fer­
ior to’ with a genitive of comparison (Smyth, §1402). However, while this use is
‘akin’ to that of the genitive with verbs of ‘ruling’ (Smyth, §1370), that latter usage
is more specific to ‘verbs signifying to rule, command, lead ’ and is the only one of the
two that gives examples for both krateō and archō . Moreover, at this point of the
dialectic, it is the notion of ruling (archein) that has been doing all the work, and so
the political sense of kratein would arguably more naturally be the one to come to a
reader’s mind in seeing the verbs paired. However, the close connection between the
two genitives will be important shortly.
22 To be sure, he has begun introducing distancing language into his agreements
from 342 b 8 onward.
 Technē and archē in Plato’s Republic Book 1 11
about the nature of ruling as such—a claim that applies to those
technai that rule over, both commanding and caring for, their
objects (or subjects), as well as to political rulers ruling over, and so
both commanding and caring for, their subjects. And the Chalcedonian
further sees that such a general and structural claim cannot be
defeated by the sort of ad hoc, intuitive (and intuitively ideological)
examples that he had offered earlier. Whether or not people are
inclined or willing to see all political rulers as thieves has no bear-
ing on the kind of general claim that Socrates has established.
Thus, the intuitive kind of argument that Thrasymachus originally
made, to the effect that all political rulers seek their own advan-
tage (before qualifying it with the ‘precise sense’ caveat), will be
excluded from having any purchase against it. The experience of
political life on which Thrasymachus had relied, whether in a spirit
of insolent ambition or of resigned world-weariness,23 has had its
relevance voided by Socrates’ newly general claim about the nature
of rule (or we might, more precisely, say ‘ruling knowledge’) in
those technai that it structures.
Immediately after Thrasymachus’ ‘very reluctant’ concession
noted above, Socrates spells out what looks like a general claim,
though one that may include indication of a limitation to its scope,
as I explain below:
οὐκ ἄρα ἐπιστήμη γε οὐδεμία τὸ τοῦ κρείττονος συμϕέρον σκοπεῖ οὐδ’ ἐπιτάττει,
ἀλλὰ τὸ τοῦ ἥττονός τε καὶ ἀρχομένου ὑπὸ ἑαυτῆς; (342 c 10–d 2)
Is it not the case then that no [kind of] knowledge considers or orders what
is to the advantage of the stronger, but what is to the advantage of that
which is weaker, [being] that which is ruled by it?24

For Socrates to mean this as a complete generalization about every

epistēmē (used here seemingly interchangeably with technē in the
surrounding argument, as Plato sometimes does) might seem incau-
tious, since his illustrations—the doctor and the steersman so far,
and the shepherd and cowherd to come, as well as political ­rulers
themselves—have all been drawn from what the practised Platonic
reader would recognize as a certain subclass of technai: what we

23 For the world-weariness reading, see S. A. White, ‘Thrasymachus the Diplomat’,

Classical Philology, 90 (1995), 307–27.
24 Grube and Reeve are unhelpfully nonliteral here: they translate ‘what is
advantageous to itself’, but the Greek says ‘the advantage of the stronger’, and the
stronger/weaker contrast is what structures Socrates’ point in the Greek.
12 Melissa Lane
may call the therapeiai, which, as Emily Hulme Kozey has observed,
are a subset of technai that are ‘by definition oriented towards some
kind of benefit for the animal or human that the practice is caretak-
ing of’: she gives the examples of medicine (Prot. 345 a, 354 a;
Gorg. 464 b, 517 e; Euthph. 13 d), physical training (Gorg. 464 b and
517 e), and horse training (Euthph. 13 a–b).25 And indeed it may be
that, in the passage quoted immediately above, he uses the particle
ge so as to limit the sense of the noun epistēmē that it follows (LSJ
γε, IV. Position: ‘γε normally follows the word which it limits’), to
indicate that the claim generalizes only to those forms of epistēmē
that are in fact ordered in terms of rule, meaning (at least, or only)
the therapeutic ones. Certainly Socrates’ claim that archē is the
structure of technē is most plausible when restricted to technai in
which the knowers act as rulers over their subjects (as opposed, say,
to technai such as arithmetic or geometry).
Even if understood to be focused implicitly on the therapeutic
technai, however, Socrates’ language of ‘stronger’ and ‘weaker’ can
be startling. For English speakers today tend to describe those
entities which technai, and forms of knowledge more generally,
engage as their objects—we might say, in the ‘strict sense’, their
‘proper objects’. Yet Socrates here speaks otherwise. Not only
political rulers have subjects for whom they must care in giving
their commands. All rulers, that is, I take it, the practitioners of
the expertise involved in all forms of knowledge characterized by
rule, have subjects of that kind.26 And Socrates claims that it is the
nature of this rule—the nature of rule as such—that it seeks the

25 In certain applications of the technē analogy, it is relevant that these are the
technai in view, rather than technē as such: for example in the Euthyphro (12 e–13 c),
where the definition of piety is in view, and is glossed as a form of therapeia, and
then stock examples of therapeiai (horse-training, herdsmanship, etc.) are used;
compare the Laches (185 c–d) and Gorgias (464 b–465 b). Note that the Eleatic
Visitor refers to a therapeia of leatherworking at Statesman 280 c 7; this is a meta-
phorical use, coming off the fact that, starting at 278 e 9, the Eleatic Visitor is com-
paring the therapeia of the king, i.e. ruling, with other technai, and thus calling all
these han­di­crafts ‘therapeiai’, but this is consistent with the term having a different
scope in other key passages of Plato’s work. I owe these observations to a private
communication from Emily Hulme Kozey, on file with the author.
26 The grammatical parallel in the Greek between the genitive case used with
verbs of ruling, commanding, and leading, and the genitive case of comparison used
with verbs of surpassing or being superior, may help in explaining why these
­connections come ready to Socrates’ hand and are accepted, albeit with marked
reluctance, by Thrasymachus. Ruling is formulated in close parallel to surpassing
or exceeding in strength, and ‘being ruled’ in close parallel to being subordinate,
 Technē and archē in Plato’s Republic Book 1 13
advantage (τὸ . . . συμϕέρον) of its weaker subject, not of itself, being
stronger.27
Of this claim that knowledge seeks the advantage of the weaker,
not of (itself) the stronger: in one sense, one might think, so far so
seemingly Thrasymachean. The stronger rules the weaker. And yet
Socrates has here sublated the original meaning of this claim that
Thrasymachus had intended. Whereas Thrasymachus had meant
this as a generalized claim about the politically strong and the
politically weak, the dominators and the dominated, Socrates has
transformed it into an assertion of the nature of rule that results in
the stronger, by their nature as rulers, exercising their rule and so
benefiting their subject, their own advantage qua rulers in the pre-
cise sense lying only in exercising their rule as completely and per-
fectly as possible.28 Ironically, it was Thrasymachus’ original choice
to introduce the technai and their practitioners as comparanda for

in­fer­ior, and weak. The hierarchy implicit in Plato’s notion of rule is also implicit in
the workings of the grammar of his language.
27 Compare the various ‘titles to authority’ (ἀξιώματα . . . τοῦ τε ἄρχειν καὶ ἄρχεσθαι,
3, 690 a 1) that are canvassed by the Athenian visitor in Plato’s Laws. The first three
are the title of parents over descendants, the high born over the low born, and the
old over the young. The fourth is that ‘slaves should be ruled, and masters rule’
(δούλους μὲν ἄρχεσθαι, δεσπότας δὲ ἄρχειν, 690 b 1–2). The fifth, stated in inverse par-
allel to the fourth is that ‘the stronger should rule and the weaker should be ruled’
(τὸ κρείττονα μὲν ἄρχειν, τὸν ἥττω δὲ ἄρχεσθαι, 690 b 4–5): as we saw above, it is in the
nature of grammar for the Greeks that ‘ruling over’ and ‘being stronger than’ are
parallel notions. And the sixth, ‘the greatest, as it seems’ (τὸ δὲ μέγιστον, ὡς ἔοικεν,
690 b 8–9), as the Athenian teasingly names it, is that ‘the ignorant should be com-
manded, and the wise lead and rule [him]’ (ἕπεσθαι μὲν τὸν ἀνεπιστήμονα κελεῦον, τὸν
δὲ ϕρονοῦντα ἡγεῖσθαί τε καὶ ἄρχειν, 690 b 9–c 1), a claim that the Athenian glosses by
correcting Pindar’s claim that the law of nature is the rule of the strong, defining
instead ‘the natural rule of law, without force, over willing subjects’ (τὴν τοῦ νόμου
ἑκόντων ἀρχὴν ἀλλ’ οὐ βίαιον πεϕυκυῖαν, 690 c 2–3). (For completion: the seventh title,
which is notably the only one based on what is generally said (λέγοντες, c 5; ϕαμεν,
c 8), being casting lots, is said to be the most just (τὸ δικαιότατον, c 7) arrangement.)
This note adapts passages in an article published in French as M. Lane, ‘Persuasion
et force dans la politique platonicienne’, D. El-Murr (trans.), in A. Brancacci et al.
(eds.), Aglaïa: autour de Platon, Mélanges offerts à Monique Dixsaut (Paris, 2010),
165–98, at 172. In n. 1 on that page, I remark on Rancière’s reading of the seventh
title.
28 Compare Alon Harel’s inversion of the usual law and economics approach to
privatization: in his view, ‘it is not that who ought to do the task depends upon who can
succeed in doing it; rather, it is that who can succeed in doing it depends upon who ought
to do it’ (A. Harel, Why Law Matters (Oxford, 2014), at 105–6, emphasis original).
I owe this reference to Chiara Cordelli in an instructive manuscript on privatization
of her own (C. Cordelli, ‘The Intrinsic Wrong of Privatization’ (manuscript on file
with author, 2017)).
14 Melissa Lane
political rulers that has now opened the door to a much more gen-
eral claim by Socrates, one serving to devastate the Chalcedonian’s
original intuitive views. For if all rulers share in the general nature
of ruling, including both political rulers and the professionals who
share the political rulers’ task of (in some fashion) caring for living
beings, then the nature of political rulers will be dictated by that
nature of rule as such rather than by the political experience that is
usually taken to delineate it.
Hence Thrasymachus’ original definition is indicted as being a
mistake not just about political rulers as they happen to be, but a
conceptual and even a metaphysical mistake, as it were, about the
nature of rule as such. Indeed, it is not only indicted; it is inverted.
Thrasymachus had originally affirmed: ‘This, my good friend, is
what I say justice is, it being in all cities the same, namely, the
advantage of the established ruling body’ (τοῦτ’ οὖν ἐστιν, ᾦ βέλτιστε,
ὃ ἐν ἁπάσαις ταῖς πόλεσιν ταὐτὸν εἶναι δίκαιον, τὸ τῆς καθεστηκυίας
ἀρχῆς συμϕέρον, 338 e 6–339 a 2), and had then claimed that ‘since
the established ruling body is surely stronger’, then ‘anyone who
reasons correctly will conclude that the just is the same everywhere,
namely, the advantage of the stronger’ (αὕτη δέ που κρατεῖ, ὥστε
συμβαίνει τῷ ὀρθῶς λογιζομένῳ πανταχοῦ εἶναι τὸ αὐτὸ δίκαιον, τὸ τοῦ
κρείττονος συμϕέρον, 339 a 2–4, trans. Grube and Reeve). In some
moves that also belong to the present stretch of text, epitomized in
Socrates’ questions, ‘And is there any advantage for each of the
professions themselves except to be as complete or perfect as pos-
sible?’ (ἆρ’ οὖν καὶ ἑκάστῃ τῶν τεχνῶν ἔστιν τι συμϕέρον ἄλλο ἢ ὅτι
μάλιστα τελέαν εἶναι; 341 d 11–12, trans. Grube and Reeve, modi-
fied), and whether or not ‘there is no flaw and no error at all in any
profession’ (οὔτε γὰρ πονηρία οὔτε ἁμαρτία οὐδεμία οὐδεμιᾷ τέχνῃ
πάρεστιν, 342 b 2–3), Socrates infers that since a profession belongs
to the professional by nature and it is hir end or purpose to practise
it, then by implication, there can be no advantage to the doctor qua
doctor in enriching hirself by malpractice, or to the political ruler
qua ruler in doing so by using hir power for corrupt ends.29 Once

29 V. Harte, ‘Knowing and Believing in Republic V’ [‘Knowing and Believing’],

in V. Harte and R. Woolf (eds.), Rereading Ancient Philosophy: Old Chestnuts and
Sacred Cows (Cambridge, 2017), 141–62 at 154, argues similarly, about a recurrence
of this line of argument in a slightly later stretch of the dialogue, that whereas
‘Thrasymachus, presumably, wanted to argue that acquisition of benefits such as
power and money and so forth is not merely a possible atypical result of ruling, but
 Technē and archē in Plato’s Republic Book 1 15
again Socrates’ chosen examples are limited to technai that are ther­
apeiai; while he does not say so, it makes most sense to construe his
claims as being implicitly (or at a minimum, most plausibly) about
this subclass, rather than as being generalizable to any and every
one of the technai as such.30
In this way, Socrates reaches the conclusion that the advantage
of any established ruling body—not only the ruling body in cities,
but the ruling body that operates respectively within the various
examples of technē and epistēmē that he has been discussing—is by
its very nature the advantage of the profession, or rule, in perfect-
ing itself, which entails serving the advantage of its subjects. And
notice that this conclusion is reached even before the wage-earning
technē has been separated off from others. That move is not needed
in order for Socrates to contend that what is the advantage of the
ruler can only be the advantage to the ruler qua ruler. Ruler and
rule, or profession, become completely identified. The human
being wielding the power drops away, in favour of the role, or as
Cicero and Hobbes will say the persona, of the ruler.
I will return to the metaphysical nature and indeed necessity
of rule below. But first, we must notice that this claim, too,
Thrasymachus is said to resist: ‘He conceded this finally, though he
tried to resist it’ (συνωμολόγησε μὲν καὶ ταῦτα τελευτῶν, ἐπεχείρει δὲ
περὶ αὐτὰ μάχεσθαι, 342 d 3–4, my translation, preserving the syn-
tactical structure of the Greek more literally than does the Grube
and Reeve translation). Socrates then drives the point home, with
respect to the case of ‘the doctor in the precise sense’ (ὁ ἀκριβὴς
ἰατρός, 342 d 7), and ‘the ship’s steersman in the precise sense’
(ὁ κυβερνήτης ὁ ἀκριβής, 342 d 10)—who is, as highlighted earlier, to
be understood as ‘a ruler of sailors, not a sailor’ (ναυτῶν ἄρχων ἀλλ’
οὐ ναύτης, 342 d 10–e 1). He then asks:

the task to which ruling is assigned and hence constitutive of its best understand-
ing’, Socrates is making the point that money may in fact be ‘a result that may be
produced by ruling’, but that this is a result for whose production ruling is not in
fact specifically tasked and which, in addition, ‘would not benefit a ruler if it were
so produced’.
30 This kind of reading was variously urged on me in a workshop at Princeton on
my original draft of the Carlyle Lectures on 1 December 2017 by Emily Hulme
Kozey, Jonny Thakkar, and Katja Vogt, and in accepting it now, I mark a change
from the Carlyle Lectures as delivered in Hilary Term 2018 of the University of
Oxford.
16 Melissa Lane
οὐκ ἄρα ὅ γε τοιοῦτος κυβερνήτης τε καὶ ἄρχων τὸ τῷ κυβερνήτῃ συμϕέρον
σκέψεταί τε καὶ προστάξει, ἀλλὰ τὸ τῷ ναύτῃ τε καὶ ἀρχομένῳ. (342 e 3–5)
Doesn’t it follow that such a person who is a steersman and [τε καί] ruler
won’t look out for and command that which is to the advantage of the
steersman, but that which is to the advantage of the [person who is a]
sailor [being the person] who is [τε καί] ruled?31

This question is meant to sum up what has preceded (τοιοῦτος,

such a person, pointing backward in this case). The steersman qua
steersman is a ruler. It is specifically qua ruler that he does not seek
out his own advantage, but the advantage of the subject whom he
rules.
Thrasymachus is once again marked as agreeing only reluctantly
(μόγις, 342 e 6). And that brings us to Socrates’ final conclusion of
this stretch of dialogue:
οὐκοῦν . . . ὦ Θρασύμαχε, οὐδὲ ἄλλος οὐδεὶς ἐν οὐδεμιᾷ ἀρχῇ, καθ’ ὅσον ἄρχων
ἐστίν, τὸ αὑτῷ συμϕέρον σκοπεῖ οὐδ’ ἐπιτάττει, ἀλλὰ τὸ τῷ ἀρχομένῳ καὶ ᾧ ἂν
αὐτὸς δημιουργῇ, καὶ πρὸς ἐκεῖνο βλέπων καὶ τὸ ἐκείνῳ συμϕέρον καὶ πρέπον, καὶ
λέγει ἃ λέγει καὶ ποιεῖ ἃ ποιεῖ ἅπαντα. (342 e 7–11)
So, then, . . . Thrasymachus, no one in any position of rule [οὐδὲ ἄλλος οὐδεὶς
ἐν οὐδεμιᾷ ἀρχῇ], insofar as he is a ruler [καθ’ ὅσον ἄρχων ἐστίν], considers or
orders what is advantageous to himself, but what is advantageous to that
which is ruled, that on which he practises his profession. It is to the ruled
and what is advantageous and proper to it that he looks, and everything he
says and does he says and does for its sake. (trans. Grube and Reeve, modi­
fied)32

Once again it is the person in a position of rule (or ruling, as we

might say) in whom Plato is interested, and once again, he is also
interested in the concomitant relationship of subordination between
the ruler and the ruled. And in drawing this conclusion, Socrates has
drawn a conclusion that is generalizable to rule—so understood—as

31 Grube and Reeve translate ‘a ship’s steersman or ruler’, which in choosing ‘or’
for the first τε καί in this sentence, precisely misses the whole flow of the argument
that has defined a steersman as a type, a subclass, of ruler (and which also fails to
give the second τε καί, joining the sailor and the person who is ruled, the same con-
strual, though this is a less decisive objection). See Smyth on this construction
(§2974), which can either connect or contrast, but rarely means ‘both . . . and’, a
point that gives support to my understanding of it as a connective identifying rather
than adding together two ideas here.
32 Note that Socrates here chooses the ‘insofar as he is a ruler’ language rather
than the ‘precise sense’ language, but we’ve seen that both interlocutors sometimes
do that.
 Technē and archē in Plato’s Republic Book 1 17
such.33 Socrates’ argument has identified rule as the architecture of
at least some kinds of knowledge—for as I noted above, while he
has put forward a general claim, he chose to illustrate it (solely)
with examples of the subclass of technai identified above as the
therapeiai. In so doing, he has laid out an ideal, normative structure
of rule and its purpose which transcends, though also encompass-
ing, the nature of political office in particular. Rule structures the
knowledge which in turn defines its own purpose. While technē
may itself be a normatively neutral term (so that one could have a
technē of piracy or perhaps even murder), those technai that are
structured in terms of archē are not normatively neutral, aiming as
they must at the good of their subjects. Readings of Republic 1 that
take it to be fixated on a neutral sense of technē overlook this crucial
role played by archē.
We might compare a remark made by the Eleatic Visitor in the
Statesman: that the constitution which is correct and ‘alone a con-
stitution’ is ‘the one in which the rulers would be found truly pos-
sessing expert knowledge, and not merely seeming to do so’ (μόνην
πολιτείαν, ἐν ᾗ τις ἂν εὑρίσκοι τοὺς ἄρχοντας ἀληθῶς ἐπιστήμονας καὶ οὐ
δοκοῦντας μόνον, 293 c 6–7).34 It bears underscoring also that state-
craft in that dialogue will ultimately be defined as belonging to a
larger kind of ‘commanding’ knowledge (ἡ ἐπιτακτική), which
involves a form of discerning that is already such as to be command-
apt, as it were.35 But whatever one makes of that comparison,
Socrates’ argument here in Republic 1 is that ruling has a normative

33 Pace scholars such as K. Lycos, Plato on Justice and Power: Reading Book I of
Plato’s Republic (Basingstoke, 1987), and R. E. Allen, ‘Introduction’, in id. (trans.),
The Republic (New Haven, 2006), who focus on the nature of technē alone as the key
to the refutation of Thrasymachus here.
34 This sentence is adapted from Lane, ‘Political Expertise’, 77.
35 I have reordered the syntax in the translation and modified C. J. Rowe’s trans-
lation of the word basilikos, which he translates as ‘an expert in kingship’ (C. J. Rowe
(trans. and ed.), Plato: Statesman (Warminster, 1995)). Now to say that a form of
knowledge is command-apt does not imply that the person possessing that know­
ledge must or will always be in a position to issue actual commands. The Eleatic
Visitor in the Statesman makes this clear when he insists that anyone in possession
of the relevant knowledge (here called ‘kingship’ or basilikē), whether happening ‘to
be a ruler or a private citizen’, will ‘in all circumstances, in virtue of his possession
of the expertise itself . . . correctly be addressed as king [basilikos]’ (ἄντε ἄρχων ἄντε
ἰδιώτης ὢν τυγχάνῃ, πάντως κατά γε τὴν τέχνην αὐτὴν βασιλικὸς ὀρθῶς προσρηθήσεται,
259 b 3–5). I borrow and adapt this point from M. Lane, ‘Plato on the Value of
Knowledge in Ruling’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. vol., 92 (2018),
49–67 at 59–60.
18 Melissa Lane
purpose not merely in an ethical sense but in a constitutive one.
The only proper rule is rule that serves the interest of the ruled.
Rulers are masters, but masters precisely in that they serve those
whom they rule. And so the fact that therapeutic pro­fes­sionals, as
we might call them, benefit the objects of their skill or craft is an
instance of the very architectonic nature of rule itself. No ruler in
the precise sense—the precise sense that Socrates adopts from and
then deploys against Thrasymachus—could do otherwise.
To be sure, that kind of conceptual argument may seem to beg the
question against the starting point from which Thrasymachus began.
For Thrasymachus is presented as being more certain of his claim that
all political rulers are exploitative than he could be of any argument
that could be deployed against it. If Socrates’ argument implies that
Xerxes was no ruler (being no ruler in the precise sense), so much the
worse, Thrasymachus might reply, for Socrates’ argument. Now
Socrates can be taken to agree with Thrasymachus that no political
rulers known in history have been rulers in the precise sense: for
Thrasymachus, because none has been error-free; for Socrates, fur-
ther, because none has aimed solely at the good of their subjects. But
Socrates holds by the possibility of rulers in the precise sense, both
within the technai and within the political domain. Thrasymachus, by
contrast, is more certain of his intuitive ground for scepticism about
whether there are or could be true political rulers in Socrates’ full
sense of the term, and he is confident that their audience can be
brought to share (or does already share) his intuition. Hence he falls
back on what he takes to be intuitively compelling, and so theoretically
invulnerable, ground: the obviously exploitative cases of shepherd
and cowherd, on the one hand, and the actual cases of political ­rulers—
his original and continuing primary interest—which he takes to be as
obviously and equally exploitative, on the other. And this brings us to
what I call ‘Thrasymachus’ last stand’ in the stretch of dialogue that
is our focus.

3. Thrasymachus’ last stand

In making his last stand, Thrasymachus drops the comparison

between political rulers and professionals such as doctors, account-
ants, and grammarians that has got him into such trouble. Returning
 Technē and archē in Plato’s Republic Book 1 19
to his core interest of the case of the political ruler, he chooses a far
more prosaic pair of examples seemingly designed to make an
in­tui­tive­ly obvious point: that shepherds and cowherds aim to fat-
ten their charges for the taste or profit of themselves, or rather, of
their masters. (Thrasymachus refers to them using familiar nouns
for their roles: τοὺς ποιμένας, τοὺς βουκόλους, 343 b 1.) But then he
swiftly leaves the shepherds and cowherds behind to return to his
original and continuing prime interest: political rulers—‘rulers in
cities—true rulers, that is’ (τοὺς ἐν ταῖς πόλεσιν ἄρχοντας, οἳ ὡς ἀληθῶς
ἄρχουσιν, b 4–5, trans. Grube and Reeve).
In so doing, the Chalcedonian offers evidence for the claim that
‘A just man always gets less than an unjust one’ (δίκαιος ἀνὴρ ἀδίκου
πανταχοῦ ἔλαττον ἔχει, 343 d 3, trans. Grube and Reeve) that he
thinks will be intuitively obvious to his listeners.36 All of this evi-
dence is confined to the domain of the political: first, that the just
are always cheated by the unjust in contracts between them; sec-
ond, that the just pay more in taxes and get less in refunds than the
unjust (some refrains never change); and third, specifically to do
with office: that ‘when each of them holds a ruling position in some
public office’ (ὅταν ἀρχήν τινα ἄρχῃ ἑκάτερος, 343 e 1–2, trans. Grube
and Reeve), a just person suffers disadvantage in the form of pos-
sible penalties, forced neglect of his own private affairs, and resent-
ment from friends and relations whom he refuses to help with
unjust favors—whereas the unjust experience the opposite in each
case and are able to profit from holding office (this being the spe-
cific framework of power in question here, as the noun archē indi-
cates in this context).
Socrates’ response is to force Thrasymachus back on to the ter-
rain of the technai and of the ruling which must animate them. He
seems (so far as we can tell) to coin a term for shepherding as a
technē, a form of expertise, referring to hē poimenikē at 345 d 1, for
which there is no prior evidence in the TLG corpus. This is not
the only moment of possible Platonic linguistic innovation in the
vocabulary of the technai: we have learned from Christopher Rowe
to appreciate the importance of the Statesman’s possible coinage of

36 He condescends to Socrates as unable to appreciate what should be obvious

common wisdom: calling him ‘my most simple Socrates’ (ὦ εὐηθέστατε Σώκρατες,
343 d 2), and using similar expressions passim.
20 Melissa Lane
politikos and the expertise-signaling of the -ikos, -ikē endings.37
Here, however, we find Plato practising the same form of linguistic
innovation on behalf of a kind of agrarian practice that was not
normally considered a candidate for being a technē proper.38
While in the Statesman, such linguistic innovations serve the
course of the Eleatic Visitor’s own constructive arguments, I sug-
gest that here in Republic 1, Socrates is coining ‘shepherding’ as a
dialectical move. Thrasymachus in his third outburst has made a
concerted effort to shift his ground, away from the terrain of the
technai (notwithstanding that he had been the one to move the dia-
lectic onto that terrain in the first place), and back to the intuitive
everyday examples that he seems to think can stand as persuasive
on their own: the experiential view of shepherd, cowherd, and
most importantly, the source of his original focus (recall ‘what
I say justice is, it being the same in all cities’ (ὃ λέγω ἐν ἁπάσαις ταῖς
πόλεσιν ταὐτὸν εἶναι δίκαιον, 338 e 6–339 a 1)), political rulers as they
exist. But Socrates returns him to the terrain of the technai (345 b ff.),
re-invoking the original meaning of the ‘precise sense’ caveat,
arguing that the original ‘precise sense’ reading of the doctor has to
be applied mutatis mutandis to the shepherd. And he returns to his
focus on the figure of the ruler, whether political ruler, profes-
sional, or even (now elevated to the ranks of professional) shep-
herd. Qua shepherd, the shepherd must care for the good of his
flock: this is inherent in the nature of his rule.
Now even though Thrasymachus is not allowed a further riposte
here, the reader is likely to cavil at this point on his behalf. For, she
may well demand, what allows Socrates to help himself to the idea
that a technē, just because it involves a structure of archē, and even
if we fill that in in terms of archē over living beings, must necessar-
ily aim at the good of the ruled and solely at their good? Consider
the gooseherd who cares for hir gaggle of geese, feeding and fatten-
ing them, but doing so for the purpose of producing foie gras from
their livers. (To simplify, suppose that the gooseherd does this not
for a wage but simply to enjoy the resultant feast.) Is Socrates

37 C. J. Rowe, ‘Introduction’, in id. (trans. and ed.), Plato: Statesman (War­m­inster,

1995), 1.
38 Part of this paragraph is adapted from Lane, ‘Political Expertise’, 55; its adap-
tation is partly indebted to a comment by Emily Hulme Kozey.
 Technē and archē in Plato’s Republic Book 1 21
en­titled simply to help himself by excluding this case from the
proper role (the archē involved in the technē) of gooseherding?39
My response on Socrates’ behalf would operate in three steps.
First, by recognizing that in terms of the dialectic with Thrasy­
machus, since the Chalcedonian has already moved the discussion
to a conceptual plane by formulating the idea of an X in the precise
sense, it is he who is not then entitled to fall back on cases of
empirical or intuitive plausibility to defeat Socrates’ rival concep-
tual proposal. Second, by acknowledging that the reader of the
dialogue may nevertheless wonder why the gooseherd-caring-for-
good-of-geese, who fattens them only to a point that is healthy in
terms of their own lives, should be conceptually privileged as the
role of gooseherd proper (in the precise sense), as against the
gooseherd-caring-for-geese-for-sake-of-foie-gras, who fattens them
to a further unhealthy point that is best for foie gras production.
Here, I think that Socrates’ best reply would be that the latter is
parasitic on the former: that is, that one must take account of the
good of the living being qua living being even if one’s chosen aim
is to privilege the good-for-others of the living being once dead.
We think of foie gras as unhealthy fattening because we have a
standard of what counts as healthy fattening.
Third and finally, we must acknowledge the limits of Republic 1’s
focus in this stretch of the discussion only on the role of ruler qua
ruler, which precisely serves to exclude any question of the mo­tiv­
ation of a natural person to assume this role (or conversely to vio-
late it for hir own exploitative purposes). The next stretch of the
dialogue with Thrasymachus will introduce the question of why
natural persons might be (un)willing to rule, and in the larger arc
of the dialogue as a whole, Socrates will argue that the only natural
persons who will in fact be safely and reliably, because unwillingly,
inclined to assume the role of political ruler will be those whose
nature is philosophical and whose education and development does
not corrupt that nature. But while that analysis will be important in
establishing the possibility of realizing the ideal rulers qua rulers,
it does not vitiate the value of considering the nature of ideal rulers

39 For formulation and discussion of this case, I am indebted to several partici-

pants in Jonathan Beere’s seminar on the Republic in May 2018 at the Humboldt
University in Berlin, though my response may not satisfy all or any of them.
22 Melissa Lane
qua rulers in themselves as Book 1 does (and indeed as the Statesman
in different but related terms does also).

4. Coda

Socrates completes the stretch of argument that has been our main
focus by offering a retrospective summary of it, that at the same
time, includes a further powerful statement of precisely what it is
that a technē does in relation to its subjects. Here he asserts:
‘Shepherding cares for nothing other than what it is directed towards
[ἐϕ’ ᾧ τέτακται], in order to provide what is best to it’ (τῇ δὲ ποιμενικῇ
οὐ δήπου ἄλλου του μέλει ἢ ἐϕ’ ᾧ τέτακται, ὅπως τούτῳ τὸ βέλτιστον
ἐκπορεῖ, 345 d 1–2).40 This extends the analysis of rule by telling us
that what rule does is to order its subjects, and to order them for
their good (‘provide what is best’).
Ordering for the good, of course, will be a fundamental element
of philosophy and the philosophers as rulers that is developed in
Republic 6. Socrates drives his point home here by contrasting the
‘provisions’ that a technē gives to its subjects, with its own lack of
need for any further ‘provision’: ‘it is itself adequately [ἱκανῶς] pro­
vided with all it needs to be at its best when it doesn’t fall short in
any way of being the profession of shepherding’ (ἐπεὶ τά γε αὐτῆς
ὥστ’ εἶναι βελτίστη ἱκανῶς δήπου ἐκπεπόρισται, ἕως γ’ ἂν μηδὲν ἐνδέῃ
τοῦ ποιμενικὴ εἶναι, 345 d 3–5, trans. Grube and Reeve). And this in
turn means that, qua exerciser of that profession, the person who

40 Thanks to Victor Caston and Nicholas Denyer for advice on the translation.
K. M. Vogt, Belief and Truth: A Skeptic Reading of Plato (New York, 2012), 63,
argues in interpreting other passages in the Republic (5, 476 e–478 e), that ἐπί plus
dative plus the verb τάσσω [the very elements found in our present passage], which
collectively Grube translates in the passages she is discussing as ‘set over’, are better
understood as ‘ “put together” so as to be directed toward’. More generally, Vogt,
here, and Harte, ‘Knowing and Believing’, both focus on the use of the ἐπί plus
dative construction by Plato in the description of powers, especially of knowledge
and opinion, but also (in Harte) of the technai (skills, in her translation) which are a
subset of powers (see 346 a 1–2 as she cites). They focus mainly on the combination
with the verb τάσσω and the normative military connotations of that verb (see the
examples in Harte and note also Apology 28 d 6–7, e 1). Both Harte and Vogt note
that sometimes ἐπί plus the dative is used in conjunction with πέϕυκεν and related
words, but both of them limit their examples of this usage to Book 5: Harte citing
477 a 11, 478 a 4–5, Vogt citing 477 b 12, 478 a 4–5, 478 a 7–8. Neither of them cite
the earlier passage in Book 1 that I discuss, and Harte’s primary interest in Book 1
picks up only from 345 d 1–3.
 Technē and archē in Plato’s Republic Book 1 23
practises it and so rules over hir proper subjects needs no provi-
sions (including but not limited, I think, to no money or wage—
anticipating the focus on wage-earning to come in the next stretch
of the discussion) to be earned from doing so.
The service of the ruler to the ruled is inherent in the identifica-
tion of the ruler with hir therapeutic profession, not a separate
normative supplement to it. And so Socrates reiterates the conclu-
sion that they had putatively agreed upon earlier: that ‘every kind
of rule, insofar as it is rule, doesn’t consider anything other than
that which is best for the thing subject to it and cared for by it, in
the case of both public and private forms of rule’ (πᾶσαν ἀρχήν, καθ’
ὅσον ἀρχή, μηδενὶ ἄλλῳ τὸ βέλτιστον σκοπεῖσθαι ἢ ἐκείνῳ, τῷ ἀρχομένῳ
τε καὶ θεραπευομένῳ, ἔν τε πολιτικῇ καὶ ἰδιωτικῇ ἀρχῇ, 345 d 6–e 1).41
As this statement shows, it is rule or archē—and not simply technē—
that is at stake between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Republic 1.
And it is a conception of archē that at once reveals Plato’s oft-
neglected, but actually frequent and astute, employment of tech­
nical Greek political and constitutional vocabulary, in this case
emphasizing that rule is always in fact an interpersonal relationship
between rulers (those ruling) and those ruled, while also his con-
ceptual and normative innovation in insisting that rule qua rule,
rule proper or in the precise sense, can and must serve the good of
the ruled alone.
Princeton University

BIBLIOGR A PH Y
Allen, R. E., ‘Introduction’, in id. (trans.), The Republic (New Haven,
2006).
Arendt, H., The Human Condition (Chicago and London, 1958).
Bambrough, R., ‘Plato’s Political Analogies’, in P. Laslett (ed.), Philosophy,
Politics & Society: A Collection, 1st series (Oxford, 1956), 98–115.
Cordelli, C., ‘The Intrinsic Wrong of Privatization’ (manuscript on file
with author, 2017).

41 Here, ‘public and private forms of rule’ makes the point that rule is a general
and very widespread phenomenon. In the Ion, as noted above, Socrates includes the
woman weaving in the household as an example of someone ruling, which is a strik-
ing way of exemplifying ‘private rule’ as compared with the male householder
whom Aristotle or Xenophon would celebrate.
24 Melissa Lane
Frank, J., Poetic Justice: Rereading Plato’s Republic (Chicago, 2018).
Geiger, R., ‘ “Die jetzt so genannten Könige und Machthaber”: Zur Kritik
politischer Begriffe in den Platonischen Dialogen’, paper presented at
‘Philosophie für die Polis’, Fünfter internationaler Kongress der
Gesellschaft für antike Philosophie (Zürich, 2016).
Grube, G. M. A. and Reeve, C. D. C. (trans.), Plato: Republic (Indianapolis,
1992).
Harel, A., Why Law Matters (Oxford, 2014).
Harte, V., ‘Knowing and Believing in Republic V’ [‘Knowing and Believing’],
in V. Harte and R. Woolf (eds.), Rereading Ancient Philosophy: Old
Chestnuts and Sacred Cows (Cambridge, 2017), 141–62.
Hulme Kozey, E., Philosophia and philotechnia: The technē Theme in the
Platonic Dialogues, [Philosophia and philotechnia] (Princeton, PhD diss.,
Classics, 2019).
Lane, M., ‘Persuasion et force dans la politique platonicienne’, D. El-Murr
(trans.), in A. Brancacci, D. El-Murr, and D. P. Taormina (eds.), Aglaïa:
autour de Platon, Mélanges offerts à Monique Dixsaut (Paris, 2010),
­165–98.
Lane, M., ‘Founding as Legislating: The Figure of the Lawgiver in Plato’s
Republic’, in L. Brisson and N. Notomi (eds.), Dialogues on Plato’s
Politeia (Republic), Selected Papers from the Ninth Symposium
Platonicum (Sankt Augustin, 2013), 104–14.
Lane, M., ‘Political Expertise and Political Office in Plato’s Statesman:
The Statesman’s Rule (archein) and the Subordinate Magistracies
(archai)’ [‘Political Expertise’], in A. Havlíček, J. Jirsa, and K. Thein
(eds.), Plato’s Statesman, Proceedings of the Eighth Symposium
Platonicum Pragense (Prague, 2013), 49–77.
Lane, M., ‘Plato on the Value of Knowledge in Ruling’, Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, Suppl. vol., 92 (2018), 49–67.
Lycos, K., Plato on Justice and Power: Reading Book I of Plato’s Republic
(Basingstoke, 1987).
Rowe, C. J., ‘Introduction’, in id. (trans. and ed.), Plato: Statesman
(Warminster, 1995).
Smyth, H. W., Greek Grammar (Cambridge, Mass., 1956).
Thakkar, J., Plato as Critical Theorist (Cambridge, Mass., 2018).
Vogt, K. M., Belief and Truth: A Skeptic Reading of Plato (New York,
2012).
White, S. A., ‘Thrasymachus the Diplomat’, Classical Philology, 90 (1995),
307–27.
Woodruff, P., ‘Plato’s Early Theory of Knowledge’, in H. H. Benson (ed.),
Essays on the Philosophy of Socrates (New York and Oxford, 1982),
86–106.
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Francis
Parkman
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Francis Parkman

Publisher: Brown and Company Little

Release date: August 25, 2017 [eBook #55424]

Most recently updated: January 2, 2021

Language: English

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRANCIS

PARKMAN ***
 FRANCIS PARKMAN

BOSTON:
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
1896.

Copyright, 1896,
by Little, Brown, and Co.
 University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U. S. A.
 Francis Parkman.
"One of the convincing tests of genius is the choice of a theme,
and no greater felicity can befall it than to find one both familiar and
fresh. All the better if tradition, however attenuated, have made it
already friendly with our fancy. In the instinct that led him straight to
subjects that seemed waiting for him so long, Mr. Parkman gave no
uncertain proof of his fitness for an adequate treatment of them."—
James Russell Lowell.

The greatest of all American historians was indeed exceptionately

fortunate in his choice of a subject. Writing as he did of the
colonization of North America from the landing of Champlain, and of
the warfare between France and England for the control of the
American continent, his theme is so closely allied to his own
countrymen that it must always have a special interest for them and
for the people of Canada, upon the early history and settlement of
which country he has thrown so much light, and in regard to which
he has aroused such great attention. Notwithstanding physical
infirmities, he lived to complete his work, and to bring his series of
historical narratives down to the year 1760, when Canada passed
with the death of Montcalm from the hands of the French to be ruled
by the nation that had fought more than half a century for its
possession.
The remarkable series of histories grouped under the general title
of "France and England in North America" may truly be termed the
life work of their gifted author. He was but a youth of eighteen at
Harvard College when he conceived the plan of writing a history of
the French and Indian Wars, and his vacations at that time were
passed adventurously and in a way which familiarized him with
scenes in which the actors in his historical drama had moved. In the
year 1846 he made with a friend his notable journey across the
continent, to the desert plains and mountains and the Indian camps
of the far West. "I went," says the author in the preface to the
fourth edition of "The Oregon Trail," "as a student, to prepare for a
literary undertaking of which the plan was already formed. My
business was observation, and I was willing to pay dearly for the
opportunity of exercising it." He camped among the Sioux Indians,
listened to Indian legends, and studied Indian customs, but paid
dearly indeed for the opportunity, for he became through the
exposure an invalid for life.
"The Oregon Trail," an autobiographical narrative of the journey,
was first published in 1847 in the Knickerbocker Magazine; and four
years later the author gave to the world his first historical work, "The
Conspiracy of Pontiac," pronounced by the eminent historian, Dr.
John Fiske, "one of the most brilliant and fascinating books that has
ever been written by any historian since the days of Herodotus."
From that year until the completion of his work with the publication
of "A Half Century of Conflict" in 1892, he occupied himself with the
preparation of his series of historical narratives, "France and England
in North America," laboriously searching through the French archives
and elsewhere for his authorities, and dictating to an amanuensis at
such times as the condition of his health would permit. The
authorities he collected from the large number of documents and
letters examined fill seventy folio volumes of manuscript, and are in
the possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The wealth of
material was selected from immense accumulations in France,
England, and America, mostly unpublished and in manuscript.
Personal visits had to be made to the Archives de la Marine et des
Colonies, the Archives de la Guerre, and the Archives Nationals at
Paris, and the Public Record Office and the British Museum in
London, to obtain manuscript copies, it being necessary to have the
authorities constantly at hand. The colonial records of
Massachusetts, New York, and other States were also carefully
examined.
The initial volume of the series, "Pioneers of France in the New
World," was published in 1865. It is divided into two parts. I. The
Huguenots in Florida. II. Champlain and his Associates. He described
the subject of the proposed series as the attempt of Feudalism,
Monarchy, and Rome to dominate the American continent, the rise
and growth of North America, and the conflict of nations, races, and
principles for its mastery. He had for the scenes of his great
historical pictures the whole United States and Canada, from Quebec
to Florida and Louisiana, and from Massachusetts to the Western
Frontier. In the preface to "Pioneers of France in the New World"
Parkman epitomized his purpose in a passage which was given a
place of honor in Edmund Clarence Stedman's "Library of American
Literature." He said:—

"New France was all head. Under king, noble, and Jesuit,
the lank, lean body would not thrive. Even commerce wore
the sword, decked itself with badges of nobility, aspired to
forest seignories and hordes of savage retainers. Along the
borders of the sea an adverse power was strengthening and
widening, with slow but steadfast growth, full of blood and
muscle,—a body without a head. Each had its strength, each
its weakness, each its own modes of vigorous life: but the
one was fruitful, the other barren; the one instinct with hope,
the other darkening with shadows of despair. By name, local
position, and character, one of these communities of freemen
stands forth as the most conspicuous representative of this
antagonism,—Liberty and Absolutism, New England and New
France.… The expansion of New France was the achievement
of a gigantic ambition striving to grasp a continent. It was a
vain attempt.… Borne down by numbers from without,
wasted by corruption from within, New France fell at last; and
out of her fall grew revolutions whose influence to this hour is
felt through every nation of the civilized world. The French
dominion is a memory of the past; and when we evoke its
departed shades they rise upon us from their graves in
strange, romantic guise. Again their ghostly campfires seem
to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal
and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage
 warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A
boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast
wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep;
river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling
with the sky. Stick was the domain which France conquered
for civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its
forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of
ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique learning, pale with
the close breath of the cloister, here spent the noon and
evening of their lives, ruled savage hordes with a mild,
parental sway, and stood serene before the direst shapes of
death. Men of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a far-
reaching ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put
to shame the boldest sons of toil."

Mr. Parkman did not at once achieve popularity, but his "Pioneers
of France" received cordial appreciation and even aroused
enthusiasm among writers and critics. The tributes to this and
subsequent works are not surpassed if equalled by those accorded
to any previous writer. "In vigor and pointedness of description, Mr.
Parkman may be counted superior to Irving," said the New York
Tribune. The London Athenæum accorded him "a place alongside of
the greatest historians whose works are English classics." The late
George William Curtis referred to his theme as "a subject which Mr.
Parkman has made as much his own as Motley the 'Dutch Republic,'
or Macaulay the 'English Revolution.'" "He has taken," said The
Spectator, "musty records, skeletons of facts, dry bones of barest
history, and breathed on them that they might live." His books have
been pronounced "as fascinating as any of Scott's novels;" he has
been termed "Easily the first of living historians;" his descriptions of
Indian life have been described as unsurpassed, and his sketches of
lake and forest scenery praised as "of exquisite beauty."
"Pioneers of France in the New World" was followed in 1867 by
"The Jesuits in North America." "Few passages of history," said the
author, "are more striking than those which record the efforts of the
earlier French Jesuits to convert the Indians. Full as they are of
dramatic and philosophic interest, bearing strongly on the political
destinies of America, and closely involved with the history of its
native population, it is wonderful that they have been left so long in
obscurity."
The historian, in this as in all his works, endeavored to write with
the utmost fairness, basing all his conclusions on authorities and
documents. In the preface to a later work, "A Half Century of
Conflict," he says: "The statements of secondary writers have been
accepted only when found to conform to the evidence of
contemporaries whose writings have been sifted with the greatest
care. As extremists on each side have charged me with favoring the
other, I hope I have been unfair to neither."
The third volume in the series, "La Salle and the Discovery of the
Great West," appeared in 1869, and embodied the exploits and
adventures of the first European explorers of the Valley of the
Mississippi, the efforts of the French to secure the whole interior of
the Continent, the attempt of La Salle to find a westward passage to
India, his colony on the Illinois, his scheme of invading Mexico, his
contest with the Jesuits, and his assassination by his own followers.
The leading personages in this remarkable narrative are the intrepid
Cavelier de la Salle, Henri de Tonty, his lieutenant, Hennepin, the
historian of the expedition, Joliet and Marquette, the explorers of the
Mississippi, etc. This volume is of especial value and interest to the
people of the Northwest, giving, as it does, the early history of their
own homes.
Five years elapsed before the author was able to complete the
fourth volume of the series, "The Old Régime in Canada," which was
published in 1874. In the preface he quotes De Tocqueville, who
said: "The physiognomy of a government can best be judged by its
colonies, for there its characteristic traits usually appear larger and
more distinct. When I wish to judge of the spirit and the faults of the
administration of Louis XIV., I must go to Canada. Its deformity is
there seen as through a microscope." Mr. Parkman, in "The Old
Régime in Canada," portrayed the attempt of the monarchical
administration of France to make good its hold on the North
American continent. "The means of knowing the Canada of the
past," wrote Mr. Parkman, "are ample. The pen was always busy in
this outpost of the old monarchy. The king and the minister
demanded to know everything; and officials of high and low degree,
soldiers and civilians, friends and foes, poured letters, despatches,
and memorials, on both sides of every question, into the lap of the
government." Among the strikingly important events treated of in
this work are the Jesuit Missions to Onondaga, the Holy Wars of
Montreal, the heroic death of Dollard and his companions at Long
Saut, the foundation of the Laval Seminary, the chastisement of the
Mohawks, the importation of wives for the Canada emigrants, the
transplantation of feudalism into Canada, the development of trade
and industry in New France, etc.
An entire volume of the series is devoted to the Life of Count
Frontenac, the great French governor of Canada. "Count Frontenac
and New France under Louis XIV." was issued in 1877. Parkman
describes him in the preface as "the most remarkable man who ever
represented the crown of France in the New World. He grew with
every emergency and rose equal to every crisis. Under the rule of
Frontenac occurred the first serious collision of the great rival
Powers.… The present volume will show how valiantly, and for a
time how successfully, New France battled against a fate which her
own organic fault made inevitable. Her history is a great and
significant drama, enacted among untamed forests, with a distant
gleam of courtly splendor and the regal pomp of Versailles." A large
portion of the volume is devoted to the warfare between the French
and English, including the Iroquois Invasion, the attack on
Schenectady, the unsuccessful Massachusetts attack on Quebec
under Sir William Phips, the border warfare against New England,
and the war in Acadia.
With the possibility that he might not live to complete his design,
Mr. Parkman passed over the period between 1700 and 1748, and
for seven years devoted himself to the preparation of Montcalm and
Wolfe, the longest of his works, issued in two volumes, in 1884. His
popularity had been, since the publication of "Pioneers of France,"
constantly increasing, but "Montcalm and Wolfe" at once directed
universal attention to his writings, and gave him a greater reputation
than he had achieved by all the previous volumes of the series. The
subject, a great one, had never before received the study and
research given to it by Parkman. He visited and examined every spot
where events of any importance in connection with the contest took
place, examined documents in the archives and libraries of France
and England, great numbers of autograph letters, diaries, etc., had
access through the permission of the present Marquis de Montcalm
to all the letters written by General Montcalm to members of his
family in France, searched the voluminous records of the colonial
history of New York and Pennsylvania, and used in the preparation
of the work a large amount of unpublished material, the papers
copied in France alone exceeding six thousand folio pages of
manuscript. He began the work with sketches of the condition of
England and France and the Colonies in the eighteenth century
(1745), treated of the conflict for the West, the conflict for Acadia,
the colony of Virginia under Dinwiddie, and the defeat of Washington
at Fort Necessity, the death of Braddock, the removal of the
Acadians, the expedition against Crown Point, Shirley and the Border
War in 1755-1756, and the arrival of Montcalm, the first volume
concluding with chapters on the massacre at Fort William Henry.
The second volume opened with a description of the events in the
years 1757-1758, sketched the character of Intendant Bigot,
discussed Pitt and Newcastle, described the Siege of Louisbourg, the
destruction of Gaspé by Wolfe, the death of Howe at Ticonderoga,
the expedition of Bradstreet against Ticonderoga, the evacuation of
Fort Duquesne, and Governor Vaudreuil's jealousy of Montcalm.
More than half of the volume is devoted to the expedition against
Quebec under Wolfe, the capture of the Heights of Abraham, the
death of Montcalm and Wolfe, the fall of Quebec, and the description
of the ruins of the town, the volume closing with chapters on the Fall
of Canada and the Peace of Paris.
 The work was reviewed in the United States, in Canada, and in
England as a masterpiece of military history and the first authentic,
full, sustained, and worthy narrative of these momentous events and
extraordinary men.
The author's physical condition greatly retarded the completion of
his labor; but in 1892, fifty years after he had planned his history, he
was able to finish his task with the sixth part of the series, "A Half
Century of Conflict," in two volumes, the preparation of which had
been put aside, as previously stated, in order that he might write the
work which he considered of the utmost importance to his design,
"Montcalm and Wolfe." "A Half Century of Conflict" covers the years
1700 to 1748, and makes the series form a continuous history of the
efforts of France to occupy and control the American Continent. The
importance of the at one time almost unhoped for completion of this
great literary enterprise received due attention on all sides.
"The completion of this history," said the New York Times, "is an
event that should awaken interest wherever historical genius can be
appreciated. Since Prescott, Motley, and Bancroft, Francis Parkman
alone has thoroughly sustained American reputation in this field. He
has not only sustained, but has measurably increased that
reputation, for his work ranks with the most brilliant and lasting
historical undertakings that have marked the past fifty years. The
charm of his narrative is not greater than his scholarship, the rare
importance of his theme not greater than the sustained interest with
which he has carried it forward to completion."
"We doubt not," said the Atlantic Monthly, "that we express the
feeling of the whole English-speaking world of literature when we
congratulate the author upon the completion of the imperishable
monument which commemorates his own noble endeavor and the
glory of the race to which he belongs. It is rare indeed that a literary
project conceived in youth is so comprehensive in its character, and
is pursued so steadfastly to its final achievement after nearly fifty
years of toil, under discouragements of physical privation induced by
the very devotion which led the young author at the outset to turn
his back upon civilized life, and to cast in his lot for a time with the
race whose ancestors bore so conspicuous a part in the history
which he was to unfold."
The Century Magazine, in commemoration of the event, published
a "Note on the Completion of Mr. Parkman's Work," by Edward
Eggleston, and an Essay, "Francis Parkman," by James Russell
Lowell, undertaken by him at the request of the Editor of the
Magazine, and left unfinished at his death. It was the last piece of
writing prepared by Mr. Lowell for publication. "It is a great merit in
Mr. Parkman," wrote Lowell, "that he has sedulously culled from his
ample store of documents every warranted piece of evidence that
could fortify or enliven his narrative, so that we at least come to
know the actors in his various dramas as well as the events in which
they shared. And thus the curiosity of the imagination and that of
the understanding are altogether satisfied. We follow the casualties
of battle with the intense interest of one who has friends or
acquaintance there. Mr. Parkman's familiarity also with the scenery
of his narratives is so intimate, his memory of the eye is so vivid, as
almost to persuade us that ourselves have seen what he describes.
We forget ourselves, to swim in the canoe down rivers that flow out
of one primeval silence to lose themselves in another, or to thread
those expectant solitudes of forest (insuetum nemus) that seem
listening with stayed breath for the inevitable axe, and then launch
our birchen egg-shells again on lakes that stretch beyond vision into
the fairyland of conjecture. The world into which we are led touches
the imagination with pathetic interest. It is mainly a world of silence
and of expectation, awaiting the masters who are to subdue it and
to fill it with the tumult of human life, and of almost more than
human energy."
Mr. Eggleston, in his Century Magazine article, said: "It is possible
that the historian of the last quarter of the nineteenth century in
America will find few events more notable than the completion of
the work of Mr. Francis Parkman,—that series of historical narratives,
now at last grown to one whole, in which the romantic story of the
rise, the marvellous expansion, and the ill-fated ending of the French
power in North America is for the first time adequately told. Since its
charms have been set before us in Mr. Parkman's picturesque pages,
it is easy to understand that it is one of the finest themes that ever
engaged the pen of a historian. But before a creative spirit had
brooded upon it, while it yet lay formless and void, none but a man
of original genius could have discovered a theme fit for a master in
the history of a remote and provincial failure. And yet in no episode
of human history is the nature of man seen in more varied action
than in this story of the struggles of France and England in the new
world.… I do not believe that the literature of America can show any
historical composition at once so valuable and so delightful as the
two volumes entitled 'Montcalm and Wolfe,' with which the whole
work culminates."
The Nation, reviewing "A Half Century of Conflict," termed the
work "the completion of a memorable undertaking. The task was
one of the most important to which an American historian could
devote his pen. Mr. Parkman's painstaking research has earned him
a permanent place in the front rank of American writers of history,
while the brilliancy of the style in which his thought is clothed
imparts a charm to his narrative unsurpassed by that of Prescott or
Motley. He may well look back with satisfaction on the stately series
of volumes in which he has narrated the great attempt to plant on
American soil the civilization and institutions of royal France,—a
drama heroic and tragic enough to claim the admiration of those
who most sincerely rejoice that it ended in essential failure."
"If we have objected to nothing in these histories," wrote Mr.
W. D. Howells, in a review of Parkman's finished works, "it is
because we have no fault to find with them. They appear to us the
fruit of an altogether admirable motive directing indefatigable
industry, and they present the evidence of thorough research and
thoughtful philosophization.… Whatever may be added to his labors,
they will remain undisturbed as thorough, beautiful, and true."
Constantly engaged as Mr. Parkman was in the examination of
documents, letters, and archives bearing on the subject of his works,
new material not at hand when the histories were first penned was
at various times discovered, necessitating new editions of several of
his works with important revisions and additions.
The new edition of "The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War
after the Conquest of Canada," published in 1870, was enlarged to
two volumes, a large amount of additional material having come to
light, notably the Bouquet and Haldimand papers added to the
manuscript collections of the British Museum. Although originally
published prior to "France and England in North America," this work
forms a sequel to that series.
The edition of "Pioneers of France in the New World" published in
1885 included the results of new documentary evidence, and a more
exact knowledge of the localities connected with the French
occupation of Florida, acquired from a special visit made by Mr.
Parkman to that region.
A new edition of "La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West"
appeared in 1878 with very important additions, derived from the
Margry collection of documents relating to La Salle and the narrative
of his companion Joutel. Although the new material confirmed nearly
every statement made in the first edition, it added new facts and
threw new light on the character of La Salle, so that the author
found it desirable to rewrite the work and to add a map of the
country traversed by the explorers.
A revised edition of "The Old Régime in Canada" was published in
1893. When this work was first written, the author was unable to
obtain access to indispensable papers relating to the rival claimants
of Acadia, La Tour and D'Aunay, and therefore deferred treating the
subject. These papers afterwards came to hand, and the missing
chapters, embracing fifty pages, were written and included in the
new edition under the title of "The Feudal Chiefs of Acadia." This
edition also contains other additional matter.
Mr. Parkman's death occurred Nov. 8, 1893, a little more than a
year after the completion of his work. It is a matter of congratulation
that not only did he live to finish his undertaking, but that he was
able to revise or rewrite such of his earlier works as required it
because of the discovery of new material.
At a special meeting held shortly after Mr. Parkman's death by the
Massachusetts Historical Society, to which he gave his manuscripts
and autobiography, the latter afterwards printed in The Harvard
Graduates' Magazine, the following minute was adopted:—

"The members of the Massachusetts Historical Society

would relieve the sadness with which they enter upon their
records the loss by death of their honored and eminent
associate, Francis Parkman, by assigning to him the highest
awards of ability, fidelity, and signal success as an American
historian. He had won at home and abroad that place of
chiefest honor. The work which he has wrought was one of
freshness, reserved, because it had been seeking and waiting
for him. And it came to him with all its attractions and
exactions, finding in him the most rare and richly combined
qualities of genius, aptitude, taste, and unique sympathetic
fitness, to turn its romances, heroisms, and enterprises, with
the enrichments of character and grace, into history. Nor
would we fail to express our respectful and admiring estimate
of the impressiveness of his character, of his noble manliness,
his gentle mien and ways, and the patient perseverance of his
spirit in its triumphing over physical infirmities."

At the memorial services held at Sanders Theatre, Cambridge,

Dec. 7, 1893, President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard University spoke
as follows:—

"How remarkable is his work when we consider that he had

only a few moments each day that he could devote to study!
We draw from his life the same lesson as from that of Darwin.
Not more than twenty minutes at a time could Darwin devote
himself to his work, and rarely more than twice each day; yet
see the store of knowledge he has opened up to us. With
 Parkman it was the same. Rarely could he study over half an
hour at a time, yet left us a great monument.
"His ideal manhood was the highest and purest. It was this
that made the tone of his writing so ennobling and uplifting.
Above all things he abhorred fanaticism and intolerance, and
very naturally, after depicting the physical and moral
sufferings in the new world.
"His life was a noble lesson to students, particularly in the
steadfast sticking to duty to the very last. He never appeared
in public. He did not love prominence. His influence was quiet
and subtle. But his name will remain long in human memory."

Among the speakers was Dr. John Fiske, who said,—

"Some thirty years ago, there appeared a history of

Pontiac. It at once attracted attention because it made real
men of the Indians and gave a true insight into their real
character and importance in history. It was because Parkman
showed a full knowledge of them that he first got hold of the
world. He was more powerful than Prescott because he was
true to life.
"He was a great historian because coupled with his
knowledge were a philosophic insight and a poetic instinct.
We can be thankful to heaven for sending us such a scholar,
artist, and genius before it was too late.
"Parkman is the most American of all our historians
because he deals with purely American history, but at the
same time he is a historian for all mankind and all time, one
of the greatest that ever lived."

The Harvard Graduates' Magazine, March, 1894, contained an

appreciative article on Francis Parkman by James Schouler, the
prominent law-writer, and author of "A Constitutional History of the
United States." Mr. Schouler said,—
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