Persuading a City to Do Evil
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Socrates — ὁ ῥητορικὸς ἀγνοῶν ἀγαθὸν καὶ κακόν… μὴ περὶ ὄνου σκιᾶς ὡς ἵππου… ἀλλὰ περὶ κακοῦ ὡς ἀγαθοῦ… δόξας πλήθους μεμελετηκὼς πείσῃ κακὰ πράττειν ἀντʼ ἀγαθῶν.
Socrates now lifts the donkey joke into a register that stops being funny. The earlier example was, as the Greeks would say, 'about a donkey's shadow' — peri onou skias, a proverb for a trivial, laughable dispute over nothing. But suppose, he says, the same structure of ignorance persuading ignorance operates not on a private buyer but on a whole city, and not over an animal but over the gravest thing there is: good and bad. A rhetorician who does not himself know good from evil takes hold of a city equally in the dark; he has 'studied,' memeletēkōs, the opinions of the crowd — mastered mass belief like a craftsman his craft — and he uses that mastery to praise 'a bad thing as if it were good,' peri kakou hōs agathou, until he 'persuades it to do evils instead of goods.' The clause hangs unfinished, and the missing end is the whole point: what will such an art harvest? A city talked into its own ruin, believing all the while that it chose the good.
Socrates raises the stakes from comedy to catastrophe. The donkey mistaken for a horse was a private folly; now imagine the same error in politics. When a rhetorician who does not know good from bad gets hold of a city just as ignorant, and — no longer praising a mere donkey's shadow as a horse, but a bad thing as a good one — has so mastered the opinions of the crowd that he persuades it to do evil instead of good, what, Socrates asks, will rhetoric reap then?
This is the moment the discussion of rhetoric reveals what is really at stake in it, and it is not a scholar's quarrel about a technique. Plato lived through the consequences he is describing. Athens in his lifetime was a democracy in which everything — war, peace, the fate of whole populations — was decided by persuading the assembled crowd, and he had watched brilliant speakers persuade that crowd into disasters: the calamitous expedition to Sicily that destroyed a generation, the vengeful decrees, and, not least, the trial at which a jury was talked into executing Socrates. So when he imagines a rhetorician 'ignorant of good and bad' who has 'studied the opinions of the crowd' and can lead a city to 'do evil instead of good,' he is not inventing a bogey; he is naming the demagogue, and diagnosing the specific way persuasion becomes lethal at scale. Two details carry the diagnosis. First is the word for the danger's method: the rhetorician has memeletēkōs, 'studied,' 'practiced,' mass opinion — the same verb one would use of a musician mastering an instrument. This is the sinister truth Plato keeps insisting on: manipulating appearances is a real and teachable skill, and a person can become genuinely expert at it while knowing nothing of the good. Expertise in seeming is not a small thing; it is exactly what makes the demagogue effective. Second is the deepening from the donkey to good-and-evil. The comic example was harmless because a horse and a donkey are things you could eventually check against reality — ride the beast to war and you will learn your error, painfully but plainly. Good and evil are not so easily checked; a city persuaded that a bad course is good may march a long way into ruin before, if ever, the truth catches up. And notice the shadow, skia, sitting in the proverb — 'a donkey's shadow.' It is the same word Plato uses for the images on the wall of the Cave, the appearances that prisoners mistake for reality. Rhetoric without knowledge is the art of governing people by shadows, and here Socrates shows the shadows falling not on a single foolish buyer but across a whole polis. The stakes of the dialogue's abstract-sounding thesis — that speaking well requires knowing the truth — turn out to be nothing less than whether a community can be talked out of its own destruction.
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