André Laks, “Socrates in Plato’s Laws”

When Don Morrison invited me to give an ISSS colloquium, he suggested that I say something about the inclusion of a Socrates chapter in the Loeb collection that G.W. Most and I put together in 2016. I shall say something about this, but I shall do so after a rather long but, I hope, legitimate detour through Plato’s Laws. One so to speak meta-question that makes the Laws relevant to the question of Socrates’ appearance in our collection is: what does it mean “to be included in”? Aren’t there various modes in which Socrates is neither the main interlocutor nor a listener, an absence that has sometimes been dramatized, most notably by F.M. Cornford in his “Plato’s Commonwealth”? But there is more than one way to claim that Socrates is very much present in the Laws and that it may not have only been a slip of the tongue on Aristotle’s part when he referred to the Athenian Stranger, in his criticism of the Laws in Politics 2.6, as “Socrates”. I shall place the emphasis on the preamble against impiety in Book 10 of the Laws. The criticism of sophistical physics and its theo-teleological argumentation that it develops will bring us back first to the relevant chapters in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, then to Aristophanes’ Clouds, and finally to our editorial decision to include Socrates in the aforementioned collection.