A Varied Music for a Varied Soul
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Socrates — … τιθῇ καὶ διακοσμῇ τὸν λόγον, ποικίλῃ μὲν ποικίλους ψυχῇ καὶ παναρμονίους διδοὺς λόγους, ἁπλοῦς δὲ ἁπλῇ, οὐ πρότερον δυνατὸν τέχνῃ ἔσεσθαι… τὸ λόγων γένος, οὔτε… πρὸς τὸ διδάξαι οὔτε… πρὸς τὸ πεῖσαι.
This is the last clause of Socrates's recipe for a genuine art of speech, and it is cast entirely in the language of music. Having found the form of speech that fits each nature, the true rhetorician 'sets down and arranges the speech' — giving 'complex and many-moded speeches (poikilous kai panarmonious logous) to a complex soul, and simple ones to a simple soul.' Not before all this is done, Socrates insists, can the whole kind of speech-making be handled with art (technē) 'so far as its nature allows,' whether the aim is to teach or to persuade. The word for the diverse speech, panarmonios, is a technical musical term — 'using every mode' — so the sentence pictures the soul as an instrument and the rhetorician as a musician who must know which music each instrument can take.
Socrates recites the conditions for a true art of speech, the summary of the whole second half: know the truth of each thing, divide it into kinds by dialectic, grasp the nature of the soul and its types — and then fit the form of speech to each kind of soul. Only such a speaker composes with art. Here is the last, musical clause of that recipe.
Everything the second half of the dialogue has built is compressed into this one conditional, and it amounts to a quiet redefinition of rhetoric. A real art of speech, Socrates has said, requires four things: knowing the truth of the subject; dividing it into its natural kinds by dialectic, cutting 'at the joints' down to the indivisible; grasping the nature of the soul and its types with the same rigor; and then matching the form of speech to the form of soul before you. That last step is <em>psychagōgia</em>, the 'leading of souls' Socrates named earlier as the true definition of rhetoric — and it turns the discipline into an applied science of persons. The musical vocabulary is doing real work. <em>Poikilos</em> means dappled, many-colored, intricate; <em>panarmonios</em> means pitched in every mode at once; <em>haplous</em> means single, unmixed, plain. In the <em>Republic</em> Plato treats the musical modes as shaping character, and bans the <em>panarmonion</em>, the many-moded instrument, from his city as too seductive and complex — so it is striking to find the same word here made a mark of the accomplished speaker, who must be able to sound every mode because the souls he addresses are not all simple. Rhetoric, on this account, is not the knack of flattery that the <em>Gorgias</em> exposed; it is dialectic plus a psychology of types, a philosopher's command of both the truth and the range of human souls that can receive it. This is Plato's constructive answer to the whole sophistic tradition: there can be a true art of persuasion, but only for someone who has first become a philosopher — and only, the guarded phrase adds, 'so far as its nature allows,' since souls are not machines and no art masters them completely.
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