80a-81e Socrates as stingray. Meno: how can you look for something if you don’t know what it is? Socrates on priests, poetry and Persephone: no pain, no gain. And: learning is recollection.

80

M: Socrates, even before I met you, I heard others talk about how you are always completely perplexed about everything, and how you drag everyone else down into the same pit of perplexity. Now I think you have been bewitching and bewildering me. You’ve cast some spell over me, so now I’m completely at a loss. In fact, if you don’t mind me turning the whole business into a bit of a joke, on the inside you’re like one of those stingrays that paralyzes everything it touches; you look a bit like one, too – broad and flat. Anyway, now you’ve done it to me; both my mind and my tongue are completely numb. I’ve got no answer to give you. And yet I must have made a thousand speeches about virtue before now – in front of large audiences, too; but now I cannot even say what it is. I think you are wise not to sail away from Athens to live in some foreign city. Because if you behaved like this, as a stranger in a strange land, you would be driven out of town as an evil enchanter.

S: You are an unscrupulous rogue, Meno, and you nearly tricked me there.

M: How is that, Socrates?

S: I know why you drew a picture of me.

M: Why do you think?

S: So that I would draw a picture of you in return. I know that all handsome men love to see pictures of themselves. They come off best that way – and I think images of beautiful people are beautiful, too; but, all the same, I won’t draw you a picture. And as to this stingray – if it paralyzes itself, while paralyzing everyone else, then I resemble it; otherwise, not. For I myself don’t have the answer when I reduce others to perplexity. I’m more perplexed than anyone, when I make everyone perplexed. So now I do not know what virtue is; perhaps once upon a time you knew, before you met me, but now you certainly look like someone who is ignorant. Nevertheless, I want to put my head together with yours, Meno, so that we can figure out what this thing is.

M: How will you look for it, Socrates, when you don’t have the slightest idea what it is? How can you go around looking for something when you don’t know what you are looking for? Even if it’s right in front of your nose, how will you know that’s the thing you didn’t know?

S: Just look how it flops about, this fishy argument you have landed! I can see where this line will end! You are arguing that a man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know. He cannot search for what he knows since he knows it; there isn’t any need to look for what’s not lost. Nor can he search for what he does not know; for then he does not know what to look for.

81

M: Doesn’t that seem like a fine argument to you, Socrates?

S: Not to me.

M: Can you tell me why not?

S: I can. I have heard wise men and women talk about divine matters –

M: – What did they say?

S: Something that was – so it seemed to me – at once true and beautiful.

M: What was it, and who was it you heard?

S: The speakers were some of those priests and priestesses who take care to be able to give an account of their practices. Pindar says the same as they did, I might add, and many other divine ones among our poets. What they say is this; see whether you think they speak truth. They say the human soul is immortal; at times it comes to an end – a thing called dying; at times it is reborn, but it is never destroyed, and therefore one must live one’s life as piously as possible:

Persephone sends up to the sun above the souls
On whom she will visit punishment for ancient woe,
When nine years have passed,
and from these seeds men will grow,
noble kings, mighty in strength and greatest in wisdom, and for the rest of time men will call them sacred heroes.

As the soul is immortal – as it has been reborn, time and again, and has seen both the things of this world and those of the underworld, and all matters – there is nothing it has not learned. So it is in no way surprising that it can recollect that which it knew before, about virtue and other things. As everything in Nature is akin, and the soul has learned all, nothing prevents a man who has recalled one single thing - a process men call ‘learning’ – from discovering everything else; nothing, that is, if he is brave and does not weary of the search; for searching and learning are entirely recollection. We must, therefore, not credit your debater’s quibble. It would make us lazy, and is music to the ears of spineless men; whereas my argument will make them enthusiastic and keen searchers. I trust that this is true, and so I want to inquire along with you into the nature of virtue.

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