A Cunningly Hidden Art
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Socrates — ψεύδεσθαι ἐπιχειρῶν… δεινῶς ἀποκεκρυμμένην τέχνην ἀνευρεῖν Τεισίας.
Socrates rounds off the example and drops his mask of neutrality into irony. The cowardly victim, he notes, 'will not state his own cowardice,' and so, 'trying to lie about something else,' pseudesthai epicheirōn, will likely blunder and 'hand his opponent an opening for refutation.' Such, he says drily, are 'the things taught as art,' ta technēi legomena. Then the sarcasm surfaces fully: 'Ah, how terribly cleverly,' deinōs, 'Tisias — or whoever he happens to be and wherever he likes to be called from — seems to have discovered a cunningly hidden art,' apokekrymmenēn technēn aneurein. The barbs are precise. The dismissive 'whoever he is, wherever he's from' mocks the self-importance of the celebrity rhetorician. And 'hidden art,' apokekrymmenēn, echoes the charge made a page earlier that the handbook-writers 'conceal,' apokryptontai, their real knowledge of the soul: Tisias's art is 'hidden' in the sense of being a shabby trick tricked out as a deep secret. Having presented the wolf's case at full strength and let it undo itself on the reversibility of probability, Socrates now stands over it and asks, with a hint of relish, whether they should bother to say anything to Tisias at all — the setup for the courteous but devastating word he is about to address to him.
Socrates finishes Tisias's example — the brave man clinching it with 'how would I, being such, attack a man like that?', while the cowardly victim, refusing to confess his cowardice, is driven to lie about something else and so hands his opponent an opening. Such, Socrates says, are the things taught as 'art.' Then, with mock awe, he salutes Tisias — or whoever he is, wherever he likes to be from — for discovering so cunningly hidden an art. And he pauses: shall we say something to him, or not?
The irony in this passage is doing real philosophical work, and its edge is the word deinos, 'terribly clever.' Deinos is one of the great double-edged words in Greek: it means both 'clever, formidable, skilled' and 'terrible, dreadful, dangerous' — the same word that describes a brilliant orator and a fearsome monster. When Socrates says Tisias has 'terribly cleverly' discovered his art, both edges are live. Yes, the trick is clever — the probability argument is genuinely ingenious, and Plato is too honest to pretend otherwise. But it is also 'terrible' in the darker sense: an art whose whole content is teaching men to lie plausibly in court, to conceal cowardice, to defeat true accounts with manufactured probabilities, is a dangerous thing, a cleverness that works against justice. The single word holds Plato's whole ambivalence toward rhetorical skill: its power is real, and its power is precisely what makes it dangerous when cut loose from truth and goodness. And the description of the art as 'hidden,' apokekrymmenē, lands the final diagnosis. Twice now Plato has used the language of concealment for the sophists — they 'conceal' their soul-knowledge, and their art is 'hidden.' The implication is that the whole mystique of the rhetorical handbooks is a kind of confidence trick: a small stock of tricks dressed up as an esoteric science, a 'hidden art' whose hiddenness is mostly a marketing pose. There is nothing deep being concealed; the concealment is the con. Compare this with the genuine hiddenness of philosophical truth, which is hard to reach not because anyone is hiding it but because reality is deep; the sophist's 'hidden art' is hidden the way a card trick's secret is hidden, and looks like wisdom only until you are shown the mechanism. Socrates has now shown the mechanism — the reversible probability argument — and the trick, exposed, looks like what it is. The dismissive aside about Tisias, 'whoever he is, wherever he's from,' completes the deflation: the great authority whose book Phaedrus has 'trodden thoroughly' is reduced to an anonymous purveyor of a self-cancelling gimmick. And the pause at the end — 'shall we say something to him, or not?' — is the gracious executioner's hesitation. Socrates has beaten the wolf's argument on its own ground; now he will turn and address the wolf directly, not to gloat but to offer, even to Tisias, the one thing that could turn his knack into a real art: the truth he told his pupils to bid farewell.
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