To Please the Gods, Not Fellow-Slaves
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Socrates — εἴδη διαιρεῖσθαι ἰδέᾳ… πραγματείας… θεοῖς κεχαρισμένα… ὁμοδούλοις.
Socrates restates the full requirement of the art and then turns it, unexpectedly, toward heaven. To be genuinely skilled with speeches, one must be able to 'number off the natures' of one's hearers, 'to divide beings according to their kinds,' kat' eidē diaireisthai ta onta, and 'to grasp each single thing under one form,' miāi ideāi — the whole apparatus of dialectic, collection and division, applied to souls. This, he says, no one will ever acquire 'without much labor,' aneu pollēs pragmateias. And then the surprising elevation. The sensible person, the sōphrōn, should undertake this labor 'not for the sake of speaking and acting toward human beings,' but 'to be able to say what is pleasing to the gods,' theois kecharismena, 'and to act pleasingly in everything, so far as he can.' The wiser ones tell us, Socrates says, that one ought not to toil to gratify 'fellow-slaves,' homodoulois — one's fellow human beings — 'except as a byproduct,' but to gratify 'good masters,' the gods. The whole demanding science of rhetoric is suddenly reframed as an act of piety: the point of learning to lead souls truly is not to win over other people but to please the divine.
Socrates states the full condition of the art and then lifts it into an unexpected key. No one will ever be truly skilled with speeches, he says, who cannot number off the natures of his hearers, divide beings according to their kinds, and grasp each under a single form — and this can only be won by much hard labor. But that labor, he adds, the sensible man should undertake not in order to speak and act well toward his fellow human beings, but in order to say and do what is pleasing to the gods.
This is one of the most quietly astonishing turns in the dialogue, and it recasts the entire discussion of rhetoric in a religious light that few readers see coming. Everything Socrates has demanded of the true orator — the science of the soul, the mastery of dialectic, the years of labor — could be understood as a program for becoming a more effective persuader of people, a better player of the human game. Now, in a single sentence, he says that is not the reason to do it at all. The sōphrōn, the person of sound mind and self-control, does not undertake this vast labor to get on with his fellow humans, whom Socrates startlingly calls homodouloi, 'fellow-slaves.' He undertakes it to please the gods. The image of human beings as fellow-slaves is jarring and deliberate. It places all of us together in a condition of servitude — not to one another, but to the divine masters above us; and it implies that to spend one's deepest effort courting the favor of one's fellow-slaves, angling for their applause and votes, is to mistake the whole hierarchy of things. Your fellow-slaves cannot free you or reward you with anything that finally matters; only the good masters can. So the ultimate aim of even so worldly-seeming an art as rhetoric should be reoriented upward: learn to lead souls truly, yes, but for the sake of a life ordered toward the divine, not for the sake of dominating the human crowd. This turn does two things. First, it completes the moral transformation of rhetoric that the whole second half has been working. The sophist's rhetoric was pure homodoulos-pleasing — the flattery of the crowd for the crowd's votes and fees, souls manipulating souls at the same servile level. Plato's true rhetoric is God-pleasing: it leads souls, including one's own, upward toward the truth and the good, and its standard of success is not human applause but divine approval. Second, it reconnects the dry science of the soul back to the soaring vision of the palinode. There the soul's whole health lay in its ascent toward the divine, toward the Forms glimpsed in the train of the gods. Here the labor of learning to lead souls is placed in the service of that same ascent — done 'for the gods,' as a way of aligning oneself and others with the divine order. The two halves of the dialogue, the myth of love and the science of rhetoric, meet in this piety: both are, finally, about turning the soul toward what is above it. And it casts a last light on the difference between the philosopher and the sophist. The sophist works to please his fellow-slaves and is rewarded, as the earlier passage said, 'like a king' — with money and status from other slaves. The philosopher works to please the masters, and his reward, if he has one, is of a wholly different order: not the applause of the crowd but a life lived, so far as a human can, in a manner pleasing to the gods. Rhetoric, at its summit, turns out to be a form of devotion.
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