Pericles and Anaxagoras
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Socrates — Περικλῆς… Ἀναξαγόρᾳ μετεωρολογίας… φύσιν νοῦ… εἵλκυσεν τὴν λόγων τέχνην.
Now Socrates names the missing ingredient and tells the story of how Pericles got it. The 'something more' the great arts require is 'high speculation about nature,' meteōrologia physeōs — cosmology, natural philosophy, inquiry into the largest things. From that, he says, comes 'this high-mindedness,' to hypsēlonoun, and the 'all-round effectiveness' that marks a master. And this is precisely what Pericles acquired: beyond being naturally gifted, euphyēs, he 'fell in with Anaxagoras,' the philosopher who taught that Mind, Nous, orders the whole cosmos. Filled with cosmic speculation and having 'arrived at the nature of Mind,' epi physin nou, Pericles 'drew from there,' Socrates says, 'onto the art of speeches, what was useful to it.' The picture is exact and revolutionary: the greatest orator's eloquence was a downstream effect of his philosophy. He did not become great by studying rhetoric harder; he became great by studying the cosmos and the Mind that governs it, and bringing that elevation back to the art of speech.
Socrates names the 'something more' that the great arts require: high speculation about nature. That loftiness of mind and all-around effectiveness comes, he says, from somewhere up there — and this is exactly what Pericles acquired. Beyond his natural gifts, Pericles fell in with Anaxagoras, was filled with cosmic speculation, reached an understanding of the nature of Mind itself, and drew from that philosophy whatever was useful for the art of speech.
This is Plato's most direct statement of what would become one of his deepest convictions: that rhetoric, to be a real art, must be a branch of philosophy — must draw its power from the knowledge of the highest things. The word at the center, meteōrologia, is chosen with daring. It means 'talk about the things on high,' the study of the heavens and of nature, and in ordinary Athenian usage it was a term of suspicion and mockery: the natural philosophers were caricatured as useless cloud-gazers, and the charge of 'studying the things aloft' was part of the old slander that helped condemn Socrates himself. Anaxagoras, the very philosopher named here, had been prosecuted for impiety for teaching that the sun was a glowing stone rather than a god. So for Socrates to say that this suspect, head-in-the-clouds speculation is exactly what made Pericles the most perfect of orators is a pointed reversal of popular contempt. What the crowd dismisses as impractical star-gazing is, Plato claims, the hidden source of the highest practical excellence. Why should cosmology make a better orator? Because, the passage suggests, contemplating the vast order of nature and the Mind that governs it enlarges the soul — gives it the hypsēlonoun, the 'high-mindedness,' and the breadth of vision that let a speaker see human affairs whole and speak to them with authority. The specific content matters too: Anaxagoras taught that Nous, Mind, is the ordering principle of the cosmos, and Pericles 'arrived at the nature of Mind.' An orator who has grasped the nature of mind in the cosmos is exactly equipped to understand mind, and soul, in his audience — which is the very knowledge the next lines will make the foundation of true rhetoric. The philosophy of nature and the psychology of persuasion turn out to meet: to know what Mind is, is to know what you are working on when you work on souls. And so Pericles becomes the bridge between the two halves of the whole argument. The demolition showed that handbook rhetoric fails for lack of knowledge; Pericles shows what rhetoric grounded in knowledge looks like. The road to eloquence, Plato insists, does not run through a fatter manual of tricks but straight up through philosophy — through the study of nature, mind, and truth — and then back down, elevated, to the art of moving human souls with words.
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