Playing, While Knowing the Truth
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Socrates — τὼ λόγω ἔχοντέ παράδειγμα… ὁ εἰδὼς τὸ ἀληθὲς προσπαίζων ἐν λόγοις παράγοι τοὺς ἀκούοντας.
Socrates now claims that the answer he wants is already lying in front of them, embodied rather than argued. The two speeches, he says, 'contain an example' — a paradeigma — 'of how one who knows the truth, playing in speeches, could lead his hearers astray.' Two words in that sentence do enormous work. The first is paradeigma, 'example' or 'pattern,' one of Plato's weightiest terms — the same word he uses for the Forms themselves, the eternal patterns after which the world is copied; here it means a worked model to be studied, but it hums with that larger sense of a pattern one keeps in view. The second is prospaizōn, 'playing.' The competent speaker, the one who really knows, does not labor grimly; he plays — sports lightly in his speeches, and can lead an audience wherever he likes precisely because he knows the ground. And then, with the mock-humility that is Socratic irony in its purest form, he refuses all credit for the beautiful speeches he has just given: they must be gifts of the local gods, or of the cicadas singing overhead, the Muses' prophets — surely he himself has no art of speaking. Then, dropping the joke: 'Read me the beginning of Lysias's speech.'
Socrates says the two speeches already before them contain an example of the very thing he has been describing: how a person who knows the truth, playing in his speeches, can lead his listeners wherever he likes. With characteristic irony he credits their own fine speeches to the local gods and to the cicadas overhead — the Muses' prophets — disclaiming any art of his own. Then he turns to the text: 'Read me the beginning of Lysias's speech.'
The word to dwell on is 'playing,' because it names something essential about how Plato understands both this dialogue and philosophy itself. Socrates says the knower of truth can lead his hearers astray while prospaizōn, playing — and the claim is double-edged in a way that turns out to be the whole point. On one side, it completes the argument about deception: the person who knows the truth can, if he chooses, mislead others playfully and effortlessly, sliding them across resemblances toward whatever conclusion he pleases, because he holds the map they lack. Knowledge is what makes the play possible; the ignorant man cannot even play well, because he keeps stumbling into real boundaries he cannot see. But on the other side, 'play' names the spirit of the good use of speech, not just the deceptive one. The whole first half of the dialogue — the myth of the soul, the palinode, the teasing of Lysias, the cicadas — was play of exactly this kind: high, serious play, light in touch and profound in aim, the sport of a mind that knows enough to be graceful. Plato is signaling that philosophy at its best is not solemn. The person who truly knows can afford lightness, because his play is anchored and cannot lose its way; it is the ignorant who must be pompously earnest to hide that they are lost. This theme of serious play, paidia, will return with great force at the dialogue's end, where Socrates argues that a wise man writes only 'in play,' for delight and as a reminder, while reserving his serious work for the living conversation of teaching. And notice the exquisite irony of the frame here. Socrates disclaims any art of speech and hands the credit to gods and cicadas — this from the man who has just delivered two of the most dazzling speeches in Greek literature. The disclaimer is itself a piece of play, and a piece of truth: for Socrates really does hold that the best speech comes as a kind of inspiration, a gift breathed in from above, and that the philosopher's wisdom consists partly in knowing how little of it he owns. Having said all this lightly, he turns, with perfect timing, to the hard analytic work: read me the text. The play and the rigor are the same activity.
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