The Shrines of Verbal Jargon
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Socrates — τὰ Πώλου μουσεῖα λόγων…
Phaedrus — Πρωταγόρεια…
Socrates — ὀρθοέπειά καὶ ἄλλα πολλὰ καὶ καλά.
The catalogue dissolves into pure verbal comedy. Socrates asks how they should even describe ta Pōlou mouseia logōn — literally 'Polus's shrines of the Muses of speech,' a mock-grand phrase for the pupil of Gorgias's collection of coined terms: 'doubling' (saying a thing twice for effect), 'maxim-mongering,' 'image-making,' and the rest, plus the fancy vocabulary his teacher Licymnius gave him 'for the production of fine diction.' Phaedrus tops it: weren't there also 'the Protagorean arts,' Prōtagoreia — the doctrines of the greatest sophist of all? Yes, says Socrates: 'correctness of diction,' orthoepeia, 'and many other fine things.' The passage is a heap of Greek compound-nouns invented by rhetoric-teachers to name their tricks, piled up until the jargon collapses under its own weight. To call this bag of coinages a mouseion, a shrine of the Muses, is the joke sharpened to a point: the sacred name of the arts draped over a catalogue of gimmicks.
The demolition reaches its comic peak in a shower of coined jargon. How, Socrates asks, shall we describe Polus's 'shrines of the Muses of speech' — his fancy terms like 'doubling,' 'maxim-making,' 'image-making'? And Protagoras's 'correctness of diction,' and much else besides. He runs the sophists' invented vocabulary together into a single absurd heap, and Phaedrus keeps supplying the names.
This passage is the reductio of the whole handbook tradition, and Plato lets it play almost entirely as farce — a rapid patter of proper names and invented technical terms tumbling over one another. But the comedy has an exact target, and it is the same one throughout: the confusion of a vocabulary with a science. Each of these sophists has done the same thing — noticed some real feature of effective speech and given it an impressive Greek name, as if naming it amounted to mastering it. Polus catalogues figures of style; Protagoras codifies correct usage; Licymnius supplies a lexicon of pretty words; and the sum of it all is presented, with a straight face, as the art of rhetoric. Plato's irony in calling this a mouseion, a shrine of the Muses, cuts deep precisely because the Muses have already appeared in this dialogue as something real and high — the cicadas sang to Calliope and Urania, and philosophy itself was named the greatest music. Against that genuine sacredness, Polus's 'shrine of speech' is exposed as a tawdry counterfeit: a temple built of terminology, housing no god. And the deeper diagnosis is the one the whole second half has been developing. A real art has few principles and vast reach, because it is grounded in knowledge of causes; a pseudo-art has endless terminology and no reach, because it has only surface observations dressed in names. The proliferation is the symptom. When you find a field that has a special word for saying things twice ('doubling') and another for using similes ('image-making') and another for correct grammar ('correctness of diction'), and calls the collection an art, you are looking at knowledge's imitation, not knowledge — machinery, as with the word-Daedalus, standing in for an engine. Plato is not saying figures and diction do not matter; in the hands of someone who knows the truth and the soul, they are useful tools. He is saying that the tools are not the art, and that a discipline which consists of nothing but its tools, each with a shrine of its own, is a discipline that has mistaken its instruments for its purpose. Having buried the handbooks under their own jargon, Socrates is now free to build the real thing — and the contrast could not be sharper: on one side, a heap of named gimmicks calling itself a museum of the Muses; on the other, the single, austere method of dialectic, collection and division, grounded in the knowledge of what is.
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