The Sacrifice of Socrates: Athens, Plato, Girard

Notes

151 Notes Introduction 1. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. John Rutherford (New York: Penguin, 2003), 166. 2. René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 2–4, where mimetic desire is called triangular desire; René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 145–147; René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 282–298; Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2007), 54–61; Richard J. Golsan, René Girard and Myth: An Introduction (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), 1–13; Michael Kirwan, Discovering Girard (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 2005), 14–23. 3. Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, 167. 4. Girard, Things Hidden, 15. 5. Harry Sidebottom, Ancient Warfare: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 56. 6. For Clytemnestra’s sexuality, see Wm. Blake Tyrrell, Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 97–100. 7. For the contest system as a zero-sum game, see Alvin W. Gouldner, Enter Plato: 152 Notes Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 45–51. 8. This is the “shame culture” of the Homeric hero. See E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 17–18; W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1960), 48–49; Walter Donlan, The Aristocratic Ideal in Ancient Greece: Attitudes of Superiority from Homer to the End of the Fifth Century b.c. (Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1980), 1–24. 9. Donlan, Aristocratic Ideal, 15–18. 10. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 57. 11. Wm. Blake Tyrrell, “The Unity of Sophocles’ Ajax,” Arethusa 16 (1985): 155–185; Frieda S. Brown, Athenian Myths and Institutions: Words in Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 65–72. 12. The elenchus involves refutation, which creates the danger of its descending into a game and an eristic to win the argument rather than attain truth (Plato, Republic 539bc); Richard Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 84–85. 13. For example, W. D. Woodhead, “Gorgias,” in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 240, offers “after uttering and listening to such abusive language” adequate but concealing the voice of the participle. 14. Cesáreo Bandera, The Sacred Game: The Role of the Sacred in the Genesis of Modern Literary Fiction (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 62. Bandera points out that “since the poets are ambiguous creatures, living, as they do, in proximity of the sacred, they should be expelled in properly sacrificial manner. First, you consecrate them—anoint them with myrrh and place on their head a garland of wool, as was traditionally done with the sacred victim—then you expel them to protect the community from ambiguous sacred contamination. It was only half a joke.” 15. John Wilson, “‘The Customary Meanings of Words Were Changed’—Or Were They? A Note on Thucydides 3.82.4,” Classical Quarterly 32 (1982): 18–20. Wilson corrects the misunderstanding that Thucydides (3.82.4) says that the meanings of words changed. Wilson contends that Thucydides meant that “descriptions which in themselves implied moral blame or some other kind of reprobation—were replaced by ‘good,’ and vice versa” (18). 16. Polycrates, teacher of rhetoric, published a treatise, Accusation of Socrates (Isocrates, Busiris 4), around 394 bce, within the range of the years accepted for the dating of Plato’s Gorgias. The question arose whether Gorgias was written as a response to the Accusation and its contention of Socrates as misodemos (hating the demos) or provoked the Accusation. As usual, enough is known to create the question and not enough to secure a conclusion. The relative chronology of the two works cannot be fixed, and the question remains open. See Dodds, Greeks and the Irrational, 28–30. 17. See above, note 2. Notes 153 18. Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 160. 19. Ibid., 162. 20. On date of composition of the Apology of Socrates, see W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 4, Plato—The Man and His Dialogues: Earlier Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University...