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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2021
A significant strand of the ethical psychology, aesthetics and politics of Plato's Republic revolves around the concept of poikilia, ‘fascinating variety’. Plato uses the concept to caution against harmful appetitive pleasures purveyed by democracy and such artistic or cultural practices as mimetic poetry. His aim, this article shows, is to contest a prominent conceptual connection between poikilia and beauty (kallos, to kalon). Exploiting tensions in the archaic and classical Greek concept, Plato associates poikilia with dangerous pleasures to redirect admiration toward a distinctly philosophical pursuit of the nature of beauty. This is to displace a prominent and problematic cultural sensibility—the aesthetics of poikilia—not to deny that fascinating variety, even in mimetic poetry, may be beautiful. Rather, Plato's cultural critique lays bare an epistemological problem in the ethical psychology of beauty: since they cannot be distinguished from what seems beautiful, how should one respond to fascinating yet dangerous attractions?
I would like to extend sincere thanks to Wolfgang Mann, Lydia Goehr, Pauline LeVen, Nickolas Pappas, Elizabeth Scharffenberger and an anonymous referee for CQ for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and to Laura Martin for reminders of its contemporary importance.
1 Though it is uncontroversial to treat kallos as analogous to the concept of beauty, it remains standard to construe to kalon as primarily the fine, admirable or noble and only derivatively the beautiful for lexical reasons discussed by Woodruff, P., Plato Hippias Major (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar and Konstan, D., Beauty: The Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea (New York, 2014)Google Scholar. Yet beauty is, like the kalon, an aesthetic and an ethical concept. More specifically, Plato's treatment of poikilia is unintelligible without emphasis on the aesthetic dimensions of the kalon in ethical motivation and evaluation.
2 A widespread view: Moss, J., ‘What is imitative poetry and why is it bad?’, in Ferrari, G.R.F. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic (Cambridge, 2007), 415–44Google Scholar, at 426, 435–7; Petraki, Z., The Poetics of Philosophical Language: Plato, Poets and Presocratics in the Republic (Berlin, 2011), 64–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 181–5, 235–50; Liebert, R.S., ‘Apian imagery and the critique of poetic sweetness in Plato's Republic’, TAPhA 140 (2010), 97–115Google Scholar and ead., Tragic Pleasure from Homer to Plato (Cambridge, 2017), 134–55; also Rosenstock, B., ‘Athena's cloak: Plato's critique of the democratic city in the Republic’, Political Theory 22 (1994), 363–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Halliwell, S., The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, 2002), 93–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 325; R.W. Wallace, ‘Plato, poikilia, and New Music in Athens’, in E. Berardi, F. Lisi and D. Micalella (edd.), Poikilia. Variazioni sul tema (Acireale, 2009), 201–13; J.I. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge, 2010), 86–7; A. Grand-Clément, ‘Poikilia’, in P. Destrée and P. Murray (edd.), A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics (Malden, MA and Oxford, 2015), 406–21, at 415–16, though recognizing the need for reappraisal at ead., La fabrique des couleurs: histoire du paysage sensible des Grecs anciens (Paris, 2011), 488 n. 436.
3 Cf. Ti. 39d2–40a9, Phd. 110b5–d7, on which see A. Nightingale, ‘The aesthetics of vision in Plato's Phaedo and Timaeus’, in A. Kampakoglou and A. Novokhatko (edd.), Gaze, Vision, and Visuality in Ancient Greek Literature (Berlin, 2018), 331–53. Leg. 665c2–6, Menex. 234c4–235c4, Phdr. 277b5–c6 attest the pedagogical value of poikilos speech and song, on which see M. Tulli, ‘Una Spaltung: Platone, la poikilia e il sapere’, in E. Berardi, F. Lisi and D. Micalella (edd.), Poikilia: variazioni sul tema (Acireale, 2009), 227–38. Prior to questions of development across dialogues is the question of how Socrates can, and why he does, admit the beauty of poikilia within the dialogue that criticizes it most severely.
4 Grand-Clément (n. 2 [2011]), 418–88 provides a comprehensive lexical survey.
5 So Fowler, B.H., ‘The archaic aesthetic’, AJPh 105 (1984), 119–49Google Scholar, at 119.
6 Hymn. Hom. Ven. 5.84–90. Translations throughout are my own, based on the text of standard editions.
7 Gift exchange: e.g. Od. 15.104–8, 125–7, 205–7; 18.292–6 (collocated with περικαλλέα); Sappho, fr. 44.8–10 Voigt.
8 Horse: Pind. Pyth. 2.8; leopard: Aesop 12 Perry; snake: Pind. Pyth. 4.249, 10.46, 8.46; Alcm. fr. 1.66 PMGF; Thgn. 1.602; bird: Pind. Pyth. 4.214–16; Alcm. fr. 345.2.
9 Cf. R. Neer, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (Chicago, 2010), 59, 67, 113.
10 For the alternate rendering, see Porter (n. 2), 447, following R. Prier, Thauma Idesthai: The Phenomenology of Sight and Appearance in Archaic Greek (Gainesville, FL, 1989), 32.
11 This is the sole use, to my knowledge, of poikilos for prey. It seems less an outlier than an inversion of typical associations of animal poikilia with predatory or defensive tactics.
12 See M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant (transl. J. Lloyd), Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (Chicago, 1991), 18–44.
13 Thus it will fall to Socrates to show that an unjust person, secretly like Archilochus’ crafty fox (ποικίλην, Resp. 365c5–6), should not be admired and emulated, despite his reputation for justice. Tellingly, this first use of poikilos in the Republic comes in Adeimantus’ challenge to Socrates to defend justice for its own sake against the poetic tradition.
14 M. Mueller, Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy (Chicago, 2016), 55–6 shows that poikilia here relates the beauty and status of the tapestries to Clytemnestra's clever verbal tactics. For poikilia as feminized erotic charm, cf. Pind. Pyth. 4.212–16; Eur. Med. 1159; Sappho, fr. 1.1–2 Voigt.
15 Il. 11.482; Od. 3.163, 13.293; Eur. IA 526.
16 See further N. Worman, The Cast of Character: Style in Greek Literature (Austin, 2002), 108–92. Pindar similarly praises his odes as poikiloi (Ol. 3.8–9, 4.2–3, 6.87; Pyth. 9.77; Nem. 4.14, 5.41–2), yet could caution against the ‘intricate’ but false tales of other poets (δεδαιδαλμένοι ψεύδεσι ποικίλοις … μῦθοι, Ol. 1.29).
17 L. Kurke, ‘The politics of ἁβροσύνη in archaic Greece’, ClAnt 11 (1992), 91–120. Grand-Clément (n. 2 [2011]), 328–38, 480–8 traces the broader lexical changes.
18 So Grand-Clément (n. 2 [2015]), 416; LeVen, P., ‘The colours of sound: poikilia and its aesthetic contexts’, GRMS 1 (2013), 229–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 241. While these and related lexical changes may reflect changes in thought and sensibility, Neer (n. 9) shows that the concept of poikilia continues to regulate production and reception of classical sculpture and, in his Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting (Cambridge, 2002), Attic red-figure.
19 Cf. e.g. PMG 708.5–10: Pratinas’ satyr-chorus elevates their ‘swanlike song of variegated wing’ (οἷά τε κύκνον ἄγοντα ποικιλόπτερον μέλος) above ‘the spotted toad breath’ (τὸν φρυνέου ποικίλου πνοάν) of the aulos. This denies and at the same time appropriates the claim of aulos-players to artistic superiority, made under the banner of poikilia.
20 A specific case of ‘like encouraging like’ (Resp. 425c1–2), this assumption lies behind the scheme of acculturation through beauty at Resp. Books 2–3 (401b1–402a6). Cf. 500c7–9 for its metaphysical expression, with section III below.
21 Cf. Villacèque, N., ‘De la bigarrure en politique (Platon, République, VIII, 557c4 sqq)’, JHS 130 (2010), 137–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 143.
22 So Rosenstock (n. 2), 377; emphasis added. Compare Moss (n. 2), 426; Petraki (n. 2), 15 n. 28, 242–3; Grand-Clément (n. 2 [2015]), 415–16. S. Monoson, Plato's Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy (Princeton, 2000), 170–1 captures the evaluative nuance.
23 This charm is soon characterized by poikilia (Resp. 604e–605a, on which see below), but skiagraphia is implicitly linked to poikilia by 365c3–6: like a crafty (poikilos) fox, the unjust person disguises injustice by a ‘façade of virtue’, σκιαγραφίαν ἀρετῆς.
24 So too the tyrant's ‘tragic vestige may be seen stripped off’ in private (γυμνὸς ἂν ὀφθείη τῆς τραγικῆς σκευῆς, Resp. 577b1). His bodyguard is, like himself, ‘beautiful and numerous and various (poikilon) and never the same as itself’ (568d6–7). Note here, too, the thick socio-political associations of poikilia: the guard consists of foreign mercenaries (567e1).
25 The fascinating quality of poikilia has not been taken to complicate Socrates’ attitude toward mimetic poetry, though it has been taken to complicate his attitude toward democracy. For Monoson (n. 22), Socrates admires democracy in so far as it provides philosophy a home and models of human psychology (at 166–9, 223–6). Her case, however, seems strained to compare παραδείγματα at Resp. 557d8 with 529d8–9. More promising is the observation of R. Blondell, The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues (Cambridge, 2002), 67, 111, 142–61 that Socrates is characterized by a democratic ideal of versatility.
26 So Seager, R. in his ‘Review of N. Loraux, L'invention d'Athenes: histoire de l'oraison funèbre dans la “cité classique” (Paris, 1981)’, JHS 102 (1982), 267–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 268. J. Ober, The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory (Princeton, 1996), 155 applies the point to the present passage.
27 Cf. Thuc. 2.41.1 with B.M.W. Knox, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964), 121–2: ‘the democratic viewpoint … is Odyssean – an ideal of versatility, adaptability, diplomatic skill, and intellectual curiosity’.
28 To my knowledge, this allusion has not yet been observed.
29 On political functions of poikilia on sympotic vases, see Neer (n. 9). ‘Theognis’ as persona of disaffected aristocrat: L. Kurke, ‘Archaic Greek poetry’, in H.A. Shapiro (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece (Cambridge, 2007), 141–68, at 144–9.
30 Cf. Resp. 400d9–402a4, especially the primacy of beauty in tuning and rhythm (401d3–e1), discussed carefully by A.-E. Peponi, Frontiers of Pleasure: Models of Aesthetic Response in Archaic and Classical Greek Thought (Oxford, 2012), 144–53.
31 See further E. Csapo, ‘The politics of the New Music’, in P. Murray and P. Wilson (edd.), Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousikē in the Classical Athenian City (Oxford, 2004), 207–48 with the observation of P. Leven, The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry (Cambridge, 2014), 101–3 that musicians politicized their music through the vocabulary of poikilia. Aulos as locus of anxieties: e.g. P. Wilson, ‘The aulos in Athens’, in S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (edd.), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge, 1999), 58–95; R. Martin, ‘The pipes are brawling: conceptualizing musical performance in Athens’, in C. Dougherty and L. Kurke (edd.), The Cultures within Ancient Greek Culture: Contact, Conflict, Collaboration (Cambridge, 2003), 153–80.
32 Here I am indebted to Burnyeat, M.F., ‘Culture and society in Plato's Republic’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 20 (1999), 215–324Google Scholar, at 230–6. P.W. Ludwig, ‘Eros in the Republic’, in G.R.F. Ferrari (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic (Cambridge, 2007), 202–31 attends to spirit in this connection (at 225–6), though he takes the passage as evidence that spirited motivation should be eliminated.
33 Reading καὶ τὴν ποικιλίαν (373a8) with most manuscripts; cf. 401a2. It may refer not only to embroidery if counted among πάντα τὰ τοιαῦτα. For the aristocratic basis, cf. the lists of conventional kala at Hip. mai. 289d8–290b8, 298a1–5.
34 I take φαίνεται καλόν to underscore how value shows up to someone on account of her acculturation, reflecting the concern that mimetic poetry reinforces false values of the sort that Resp. Books 2–3 argues it instils. Here I cannot agree with Moss (n. 2), 424, for whom the force is ontological: ‘value does not appear’. V. Harte, ‘Republic 10 and the role of the audience in art’, OSAPh 38 (2010), 69–96 notes how the audience contributes to the identification of mimetic poetry.
35 English translations reflect uncertainty whether poikilos is a quality of mimēsis (Grube, rev. Reeve: ‘many multicolored imitations’), a quantity (Jowett: ‘a great variety of materials for imitation’; Shorey: ‘many and varied occasions for imitation’) or both (Griffith: ‘highly susceptible to all sorts of varied imitation’). ‘Very intricate [complicated, etc.]’ is possible, if unlikely, taking καί intensively rather than copulatively.
36 Cf. Resp. 411b3–c3, with P. Destrée, ‘Poetry, thumos, and pity in the Republic’, in P. Destrée and F.-G. Herrmann (edd.), Plato and the Poets (Leiden, 2011), 267–81.
37 F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, §14 in K. Ansell Pearson and D. Large (edd.), The Nietzsche Reader (Malden, MA and Oxford, [1872] 2006), 67. Compare Halliwell (n. 2), 98–117, whose discussion of ‘the tragic worldview’ seems more appropriate to the present passage than an emphasis on the ‘heterogeneity’ of imagination (at 94); cf. Liebert (n. 2 [2017]), 145–6.
38 So Moss (n. 2), 435.
39 S. Halliwell, Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus (Oxford, 2011), 179–207.
40 Mimetic poetry is personified as a hetaira, on which see Peponi (n. 30), 131–5.
41 Cf. Phd. 77e3–9 for a partially parallel incantation against fear of death.
42 This contrast is best developed by Moss (n. 2), 427, 436.
43 Cf. Menex. 234c5–235b2: funeral orators praise the war-dead ‘so beautifully (οὕτως καλῶς) that they enchant (γοητεύουσιν) our souls, embellishing somehow in most beautiful words (κάλλιστά πως τοῖς ὀνόμασι ποικίλλοντες) praise each man deserves and praise he does not’; so ‘charmed’ (κηλούμενος) is Socrates that for the three days he feels ‘greater, nobler and more beautiful’. It does not disturb the conceptual point that Socrates may be mocking orators, audiences and himself.
44 Phdr. 250d3–e1 suggests the ontological basis of this point: Beauty is most self-disclosive (ἐκφανέστατον, 250d7). See the penetrating remarks of A. Kosman, ‘Beauty and the good: situating the kalon’, CPh 105 (2010), 341–57.
45 I discuss this point, and how beauty for Plato comes apart from the good, in the context of erotic desire in ‘The guise of the beautiful: Symposium 204d ff.’, Phronesis 65 (2019), 129–52.
46 The controlling premise is that, whereas the Beautiful Itself is completely or purely (τὸ παντελῶς ὄν, Resp. 477a3; τοῦ εἰλικρινῶς ὄντος: 477a6, 478d4–5, 479d5), sensible beauty is beautiful relative to some time, place, person, respect or comparison class; cf. Symp. 211a1–b5. The temporal condition is here forefront. The crucial move in the question-and-answer exchange is whether the many beautiful ‘things’ (objects or properties) will seem somehow ugly (φανήσεται, 479a8). Future tense is needed, because a lover is less likely to grant that a beloved now seems ugly than that beauty will fade. This is particularly so in the context of paiderasteia, which prefaces the argument: Socrates notes that lovers manage to admire any putative facial flaw of their beloveds (474d2–475a3).
47 The few scholars who connect the argument to the poikilia motif do so by relating the ontological deficiency of the sensible world to the multiplicity of poikilia: Petraki (n. 2); Liebert (n. 2 [2017]), 136 n. 45; Moss (n. 2), 426–8, 437, citing (at n. 35) Ti. 50d5: becoming as such is ποικίλου πάσας ποικιλίας. It is true that poikilia connotes multiplicity and that lovers of sights and sounds are comparable to, if not members of, audiences of mimetic poetry (cf. Resp. 601a5–b2, 604e1–605a6). However, the concept does not appear in this passage and never refers in the Republic to precisely the ontological deficiency of the sensible world. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to clarify this point.
48 Cf. Resp. 484d1 τὰ νόμιμα καλῶν τε πέρι καὶ δικαίων καὶ ἀγαθῶν, ‘norms about beautiful [noble, admirable], just and good things’.
49 See LSJ s.v. φιλήκοος; cf. Resp. 535d5, 548e5.
50 An impression furthered by labelling the lovers of sights and sounds derogatorily ‘aesthetes’; e.g. Sedley, D., ‘Philosophy, the forms, and the art of ruling’, in Ferrari, G.R.F. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic (Cambridge, 2007), 256–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 257–9. The obverse assumption, also common, is that the (sensible) kalon is here ‘purely aesthetic’ and non-ethical. Yet the kalon comes along with the just and the good, as elsewhere, and interest in learning at Athenian theatre extends beyond artistic technique to ethical and political matters, contra R. Gosling, ‘Republic Book V: τὰ πολλὰ καλά, etc.’, Phronesis 5 (1960), 116–28, at 121–2. For sensitive attention to these points, see Meinwald, C., ‘Who are the philotheamones and what are they thinking? Ta polla kala in Republic V’, AncPhil 37 (2017), 39–57Google Scholar. At Ap. 22c3, πολλὰ καὶ καλά describes insights into human life and the divine; at Symp. 209e2, virtuous deeds.
51 We are surely to recall the opening of the dialogue: Socrates went down to the Piraeus to observe the inaugural festival of Bendis and found the processions beautiful (Resp. 327a3–4). Nightingale, A.W., Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context (Cambridge, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar analyses this appropriation of the practice of theōria.
52 See Grand-Clément (n. 2 [2011]), 548–52 for this archaic trope, echoed also at Phd. 110b5–d7.
53 As does the singularly sensitive treatment of Tulli (n. 3), e.g. at 235: ‘Platone practica la Spaltung di matrice arcaica, divide. La poikilia negativa della produzione poetica non è certo la poikilia positiva.’
54 See N. Pappas, The Philosopher's New Clothes: The Theaetetus, the Academy, and Philosophy's Turn Against Fashion (New York, 2017), from whom I borrow the contrast of metonym and metaphor; and particularly in this connection, Gonzalez, F., ‘The power and ambivalence of a beautiful image in Plato and the poets’, in Destrée, P. and Edmonds, R.G. III (edd.), Plato and the Power of Images (Boston, 2017), 47–65Google Scholar.