SOURCE: "Socrates's Rejection of Retaliation," in Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, Cornell University Press, 1991, pp. 179-99.

[In the following excerpt from a lecture originally delivered in 1986, Vlastos describes the aspects of ancient Greek morality related to retaliation and the concept that harming one's enemy or social inferior is acceptable. He traces Greek attitudes toward enemies through ancient mythology and literature in order to demonstrate the significance of Socrates's view that we should never do an injustice, specifically in retaliation for an injustice done to us. Vlastos goes on to delineate and discuss the five Socratic principles related to injustice.]

If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.

(Matt. 6:23)

In the last and most famous of his Theses on Feuerbach Marx observes: "The philosophers have done no more than interpret the world. The point, however, is to change it." Substitute "morality" for "world" and the observation would be true of almost all the leading philosophers of the West. Moralists as powerfully innovative as are Aristotle, Hume, and Kant take the morality into which they are born for granted. The task they set themselves is only to excogitate its rationale. It does not occur to them to subject its content to critical scrutiny, prepared to question norms ensconced in it which do not measure up to their rational standards. But there have been exceptions, unnoticed by Marx, and of these Socrates is the greatest. Proceeding entirely from within the morality of his own time and place, he nevertheless finds reason to stigmatize as unjust one of its most venerable, best established, rules of justice.

By the morality of a society I understand those norms of right and wrong, rules of conduct or excellences of character, publicly acknowledged within it, whose function it is to foster human well-being. The sense of justice centers in the concern that those norms be applied impartially. So if in a given society we were to find them habitually observed in a discriminatory way—applied strictly for the benefit of some and loosely, if at all, for that of others—we would know that to this extent the morality of the society is defective. When we scrutinize the morality of ancient Greece with this in mind two large areas of such deficiency come into view. (1) The application of its moral norms is grossly discriminatory in conduct towards personal enemies. (2) It is no less so, though for different reasons and in different ways, in the conduct of citizens towards their social inferiors—women, aliens, slaves. Coming to Scorates' practical moral teaching with this in mind we can see in good perspective the most strikingly new thing about it: its root-and-branch rejection of that first form of discrimination. And we can also see the limits of its innovative thrust: it has nothing to say against the second. Revolutionary on the first, it is conformist on the second.

To assess justly Socrates' contribution to the Greek sense of justice we must treat it impartially, recognizing its achievement without disguising its failure. Accordingly, though in this book I speak only of the former, I shall not lend it a false grandeur by concealing the latter. There is no evidence that Socrates' moral vision was exempt from that blindspot in the Athenian civic conscience which made it possible for Demosthenes, addressing a lot-selected court, to put compassion at the forefront of his city's ethos,² yet no less possible for his contemporary, Lycurgus, addressing a similar court, to declare that it is "most just and democratic …"to make it mandatory that court evidence by slaves should be given under torture.³ To subject citizens to such treatment would be unthinkable in the Athenian judicial system.⁴ Nowhere in our sources is there the slightest indication that this and other forms of grossly discriminatory conduct towards slaves, sanctioned by the prevailing moral code, drew any protest from Socrates. His critique of the code leaves institutional morality untouched. It is directed solely to that area of conduct which falls entirely within the limits of the habitual expectations sustained by the institutional framework.

I

Harming one's enemy to the full extent permitted by public law is not only tolerated, but glorified, in Greek moralizing. The sentiment is ubiquitous.⁵ Solon (fr. I Diehl), aspiring to "good repute among all men," prays that that he may be "sweet to friends, bitter to enemies." Medea, scorning the role of feminine weakling, determined to be as strong as any male, vows that she will be "harsh to foes, gracious to friends, for such are they whose life is most glorious."⁶ In Plato's Meno Socrates' interlocutor builds it into the formula meant to capture the essence of manly excellence:

TI Plato, M. 71E: "Socrates, if you want to know what manly virtue is, it is this: to be able to conduct the city's affairs doing good to friends and evil to enemies, while taking care not to be harmed oneself,"

Isocrates, mouthing traditional commonplaces, counsels Demonicus:

T2 Isocrates, To Dem. 26: Consider it as disgraceful to be outdone by enemies in inflicting harm, as by friends in conferring benefits.

If one is nurtured in this norm, what constraints on harming a foe would one accept? The authorities which recommend it lay down none. Consider Pindar, golden voice of conventional wisdom:

T3 Pindar, 2 Pyth. 83-5: Let me love him who loves me, / But on a foe as foe I will descend, wolf-like, / In ever varying ways by crooked paths.⁸

The image—wolflike, stealthy, crooked attack—conveys the thought that underhanded malice, normally contemptible, would be in order here. If you were to deceive your enemy, corrupt his slave, seduce his wife, ruin his reputation by slander, you would not be ashamed of it, you could be proud of it. Are there then no limits to be observed in deviating from decent conduct at your foe's expense? So long as you keep the public law, traditional morality lays down none,⁸ except those set by the lex talionis, the ancient doctrine of retaliation.

The metaphor through which this notion grips the moral imagination of the Greeks is the repayment of a debt: verbs for "paying" … and "paying back" … are the ones regularly used to express it. The idea is that if you do someone a wrong or a harm, you have thereby incurred a debt and must discharge it by suffering the same sort of evil yourself—a wrong or harm "such as" (tale, hence talio⁹) to repay what you did to him. At first blush this extension of the money-debt resists generalization. If you had stolen one of your neighbor's sheep, and he were then to steal it back, his action could be plausibly pictured as making you repay a surreptitious loan you had previously extracted from him. But what if you had killed one of his sheep, and he were now to retaliate by spitefully killing one of yours? What semblance of reason would there be in thinking that he thereby secures repayment? Does he get back his sheep by killing one of yours, leaving its carcass on the hillside to be picked off by jackals? But this is not to say that he gets nothing from the retaliatory act: he may get something he prizes much more than a sheep.¹⁰ The passionate desire for revenge—i.e. to harm another person for no reason other than that he or she harmed one in the first place—is as blind to calculations of utility as to every other rational consideration. One may get all the greater satisfaction from an act of pure revenge, freed completely from concern for restitution. And this, precisely, is the raison d'etre of the lex talionis. it aims to put a lid on the extravagance of passion by stipulating that for any given harm no greater may be inflicted in return.

T4 Exodus 21:24-5: … eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

If someone has knocked out one of your eyes you might well feel like knocking out both of his—or more, if he had more.¹¹ The rule says: Only one.

This constraint on revenge by a limit of equivalences so commends the talio to the moral sense of the Greeks that when their first philosophers come to think of the natural universe as an ordered world, a cosmos,¹² they project on it their idea of justice by picturing the grand periodicities of nature as enacting cycles of retaliatory retribution. In Anaximander's famous fragment (T5), the hot and the dry, encroaching upon the cold and wet in the summer, must "pay" for their "injustice" by suffering in return the like fate in the winter, when the cold and wet make converse aggression upon the erstwhile aggressors, completing one retaliatory cycle, to start another in endless succession:

T5 Anaximander, fr. I (Diels-Kranz): For they render justice and repayment to one another in accordance with the ordering of time.

So too the first recorded definition of "justice" identifies it with to antipeponthos, whose literal force, "to suffer in return," is lost in the unavoidably lame translation, "reciprocity":

T6 Aristotle, Nic. Eth. 1132b21-7: Some believe that reciprocity … simply is justice. So the Pythagoreans thought. For they defined "justice" as "reciprocity."

Ascribing this archaic formula to Pythagorean philosophers, Aristotle does not accept it as an adequate definition of "justice." But he concurs with its sentiment,¹³ citing Hesiod in its support:

T7 Hesiod, fr. 174 Rzach: For if one suffered what one did, straight justice would be done.…

From the many testimonies to the currency of this notion I pick one from the Oresteia.

T8 Aeschylus, Choephoroi 309-14: "'For hostile word let hostile word / Be fulfilled …, 'Justice cries aloud / As she collects the debt.… / 'Let homicidal blow the homicidal / Blow repay.… Let him who did suffer in return…,' / The thrice-venerable tale declares."

Aeschylus reaffirms the hallowed tradition of his people that to satisfy justice the wrongdoer must be made to suffer in return the evil he or she has done another. But as the action moves on, it becomes apparent that the maxim leaves the poet gravely troubled. As Orestes drags his mother offstage to kill her the poet makes him say:

T9 Aeschylus, Choephoroi 930: "Since you killed whom you ought not, now suffer what you ought not.…¹⁴

Why so? If the talio is quintessentially just, why should not Orestes be saying instead, "Since you killed whom you ought not, now suffer what you ought?" Orestes is in a bind. Instructed by Apollo that Clytemnestra should be made to pay with her own blood for the family blood she had spilled, he is still unable to shake off the horror of matricide.

In the Electra of Euripides we see him in the same bind. He remonstrates with Electra: "How shall I kill her who bore me and brought me up?" When she retorts, "Just as she killed your father and mine," he goes along but without conviction, railing against the "folly" of Apollo, "who prophesied that I should kill a mother, whom I ought not to kill."¹⁵

For further evidence that the rule of just repayment elicits less than full conviction from the conscience of those who invoke it, consider Euripides' Medea. Though her object is to extract from Jason "just repayment with God's help," she nonetheless reflects that "she has dared a most impious deed." The modern reader cannot but wonder how she could have brought herself to believe that the grisly crimes by which she retaliates against Jason are "just repayment" for his infidelity. By what stretch of the imagination could the murder of their two children along with that of his new bride qualify as wrongs "such as" his wrong to her? Yet neither the Chorus nor any of the principals—Medea herself, or Jason, or Creon—take the least notice of the grotesque disproportion of what she does to what she suffered. To anyone who protested the mismatch she would doubtless say that the pain Jason had caused her was as great as the one she is bent on causing him. Euripides makes us see that when revenge is accepted as just in principle the limit of just equivalences turns out in practice to be an all-too-flexible fiction.

We see more of the same when we turn from myth in the tragedians to tragic history in Thucydides. The people who filled the theatre to see the Medea in 431 B.C. reassemble on the Pnyx four years later to debate a more infamous proposal than any ever previously moved in the Athenian Assembly:¹⁹ that rebellious Mytilene, now subdued, should be exterminated, all its adult males executed without trial, and all its women and children sold into slavery. In the speech for the proposal Cleon invokes justice on its behalf²⁰ and, as we might expect, it is the justice of the talio:

TIO Thucydides 3.40.7: "Coming as close as possible²¹ in thought to what you felt when they made you suffer, when you would have given anything to crush them, now pay them back.… "²²

To justice so debased Diodotus, the spokesman for decency, makes no appeal. He lets Cleon have it all to himself, turning to cool expediency instead. Conceding that the Athenians have been wronged, Diodotus wastes no words haggling over what would or would not be an equivalent return.²³ He asks them to reflect instead that they have more to lose than gain by an action which would bear down as harshly on the Mytilenean demos as on its oligarchic masters, prime movers of the revolt. He argues that such indiscriminate terror will lose Athens her best asset in the war—the sympathy of the democrats in each of her subject cities. He does come around to justice near the end of his address, warning the Athenians that if they were to destroy the demos who had forced the city's surrender when arms were put into its hands, "they would wrong their benefactors" (3.47.3). But this is not the justice of the talio. As to that, he implies, the Athenians would be better off as its victims than as its executors:

TI I Thucydides 3.47.5: "I think it more conducive to the maintenance of our empire to allow ourselves to suffer wrong … rather than destroy, however justly …, those whom we ought not to destroy."²⁴

The flaw in the justice of the talio shows up with startling clarity in the lightning flash of a crisis in which sane moral counsel is most desperately needed.

The sense of justice—which should have been the best resource of decent Athenians in their resistance to the promptings of blind, unreasoning, hatred—here strengthens the very force they seek to contain. Instead of giving Diodotus the backing he needs, the justice of the talio is a bludgeon in Cleon's hand.²⁵

How was it then that the lalio had won and kept so long its commanding place in the moral code? Because it had been confused with one or more of three closely related, though entirely distinct, concepts: restitution, self-defense, punishment. The most widespread and, superficially, the most plausible of the three confusions is the one with restitution. If retaliation were restitution in principle, it would be paradigmatically just: what could be more just than the repayment of a debt? As for self-defense, at first blush it looks like a far cry from retaliation, but it will not if we notice that amuein, antamunein, "to ward off from oneself," "to defend oneself were also used to mean "to retaliate," and reflect that when retaliation is the expected response to unjust aggression, failure to retaliate will be construed as weakness, inviting further assaults. By easy extension the preemptive strike becomes acceptable as righteous self-defense: those who see themselves as likely objects of attack feel justified in cracking down before the anticipated aggression has occurred.

In the case of punishment the linguistic bond is still more potent. It is positively tyrannical throughout the archaic period. Down to the last third of the fifth century, timoria, whose original and always primary sense is "vengeance," is the word for "punishment." The specialized word for the latter, … ("chastening," "disciplining"—with no collateral use for "taking vengeance"), does not acquire currency until we reach the prose of Thucydides and Antiphon. Earlier, as for example in Herodotus,²⁷ language traps one into using "vengeance" …, even when "punishment" is exactly what one means.²⁸ What is the difference? Rightly understood punishment is the application of a penalty …, that is to say, of a norm-mandated sanction of norms. As such, it differs from revenge in three closely connected ways.²⁹

1. While inflicting a harm on the wrongdoer is common to punishment and revenge, doing him a wrong is not: to punish a wrongdoer is not to wrong him. To the return of wrong for wrong, which is normal in revenge, punishment gives absolutely no quarter: those who apply the penalty are not licensed wrongdoers, but instruments of norm-enforcement, agents of justice.
2. To give relief to the resentful feelings of victims is not, as in revenge, the dominant motivation of punishment, whose principal aim is not to do evil to the evildoer but to implement the community's concern that its norms should be observed and hence that norm-violators should be called to account by being made to suffer the lawful penalty.
3. Hatred for the wrongdoer, the core-sentiment in revenge, need not be present in punishment; those who apply the penalty to him should be impelled not by malice, but by a sense of duty in loyalty to the norms which he has breached and by fellow-feeling for the victims of wrongful harm. This motivation is entirely consistent with fellow-feeling for the wrongdoer himself: since he has alienated himself from his fellows by violating the common norms, it is for his own good, no less than that of others, that he be reunited with the community by submitting to the pain the community mandates for norm-violators.

The distinction of punishment from revenge must be regarded as one of the most momentous of the conceptual discoveries ever made by humanity in the course of its slow, tortuous, precarious, emergence from barbaric tribalism. With characteristic impartiality Plato assigns the discovery not to his personal hero, but to Protagoras, Socrates' arch-rival. We see it in the Great Speech Plato gives the sophist in the debate with Socrates in the Protagoras.³⁰ In support of his thesis that virtue is teachable, Protagoras in that speech propounds a comprehensive theory of the origins of culture which views all cultural institutions, including morality, as inventions through which men win the struggle for existence against wild beasts. He constructs a consequentionalist argument for the universal distribution of the "political art": all men must have been endowed with sensitiveness to moral norms ("share in shame and justice") else humanity would have lost that struggle: it would not have survived. Viewing punishment in this light, he explains it as a device designed to promote deterrence from wrongdoing:

T12 Plato, Pr. 324A-B: "No one punishes …³² wrongdoers putting his mind on what they did and for the sake of this-that they did wrong—not unless he is taking mindless vengeance …, like a savage brute. One who undertakes to punish rationally does not do so for the sake of the wrongdoing, which is now in the past—for what has been done cannot be undone—but for the sake of the future, that the wrongdoing shall not be repeated, either by him or by the others who see him punished.… One punishes … for the sake of deterrence.…"

Assuming³⁴ that this is a fair, if harshly abbreviated, statement of the Protagorean view, we must admit that the theory on which it predicates its analysis of the rationale of punishment is indefensibly lopsided. It invokes only deterrence to justify the practice. And this is clearly wrong. For while the reference of a penalty is indeed strongly prospective—to discourage recurrence of the offense—it must be also no less strongly retrospective, if it is to be just: it must apply to the offender the harm which he deserves to suffer under the norms because of what he did. We punish a man justly for a given breach of the rules only if we have reason to believe that he is guilty of it—that it is he, and no one else, who did commit just that offense. To visit that punishment on a surrogate who could serve as well its exemplary purpose would be the height of injustice, though the deterrent effect could be as great if the false accusation were well concealed. So pace Protagoras we do, and should, punish a wrongdoer "for the sake of what he did": our theory must recognize the retributive nature of the practice which we accept for the sake of its deterrent effect. Hence Protagoras' theory of the social function of punishment is unacceptable. It cites, correctly enough, deterrence as the raison d'etre of the institution, but fails to see that the institution itself is unavoidably retributive.

But even so, though working with a defective theory, Protagoras succeeds brilliantly in sorting out punishment from revenge—he distinguishes perfectly the rational application of a penalty, designed to reinforce compliance with norms aiming at the common benefit, from the indulgence of anarchic vengeful passion. He disentangles what had been hopelessly jumbled for millennia in the past and was to remain entangled in popular thought for millennia to come. A leading Victorian jurist, James FitzJames Stephen, was still declaring, in 1883, that criminal justice is legally sanctioned revenge: "the criminal law," he claimed, "stands to the passion of revenge in much the same relation as marriage to the sexual instinct."³⁵ This articulates what many people believed at the time, and still believe today. That punishment is institutionalized revenge is still a popular view, voiced even by some philosophers,³⁶ and not without support from the dictionary: for "revenge" the O.E.D. gives "inflict punishment or exact retribution."

But after giving Protagoras full credit for having been two and a half millennia ahead of his time, we must still observe that neither does he undertake to give revenge its long overdue come-uppance. It is one thing to distinguish it clearly from punishment, quite another to discern that when thus distinguished revenge is morally repugnant. The first step by no means assures the second, as we can see in Aristotle. He draws the distinction in a way which leaves the moral acceptability of revenge untouched.³⁷ He still puts harming enemies morally on a par with helping friends:

T13 Arist. Top. 113a2-3: Doing good to friends and evil to enemies are not contraries: for both are choiceworthy and belong to the same disposition.…

He still exalts retaliation as "just and noble":

T14 Arist. Rhet. 1367al9-20: It is noble… to avenge oneself on one's enemies and not to come to terms with them: for retaliation … is just. … and the just is noble, and not to put up with defeat is courage.

Worse yet, Aristotle takes the desire for revenge to be a constant in human nature, as deep-seated and ineradicable in the psyche as is the emotion of anger. Defining "anger" as "desire to inflict retaliatory pain,"³⁸ he identifies the emotion of anger with vengeful impulse, strangely overlooking the absurd consequences of the supposed identity: what sense would it make to hold that when one is angry at oneself (a common enough occurrence) one desires to be revenged on oneself and that when one is angry at one's child (also common) one desires to be revenged on it?

Admittedly T13 and T14 do not come from Aristotle's ethical writings and do not express original moral insights of his own. But they do show that his creative moral thought does not transcend the traditional sentiment in which the justice of the lalio is enshrined. Great moralist though he is, Aristotle has not yet got it through his head that if someone has done a nasty thing to me this does not give me the slightest moral justification for doing the same nasty thing, or any nasty thing, to him. So far as we know, the first Greek to grasp in full generality this simple and absolutely fundamental moral truth is Socrates.

II

Innovations in history don't come out of the blue. Somewhere or other in earlier or contemporary Greek literature we might expect anticipations of Socrates' rejection of the talio or at least approximations to it. Let me put before you some of the best approximations I could find and you can judge for yourself if Socrates' originality suffers by comparison.

In the Oresteia Aeschylus confronts the futility and horror of the intrafamilial blood-feud and makes the trilogy culminate in a celebration of the supersession of private vengeance by the majesty of civic law. But he never recants on the principle that "each must suffer the thing he did" enunciated by the chorus as "ordained" in the Agamemnon (1564) and as the "thrice-venerable tale" in the Choephoroi (T8 above). In Seven Against Thebes Antigone invokes it (1049-50) to justify her brother's retaliatory assault against Thebes and does not question the validity of the principle: she only rebuts its application in the present case.

Nor does Herodotus succeed where Aeschylus falters. His Pausanias (9.78-9) rejects indignantly the proposal that he avenge Leonidas by doing to Mardonius' corpse what he and Xerxes had done to that of the Spartan hero. But what are his reasons for rejecting the proposal? (a) That to desecrate the dead "befits barbarians rather than Greeks," and (b) Leonidas has been already avenged in the huge casualties suffered by the Persians. The propriety of revenge is not denied in (a), and is assumed in (b). Herodotus' Xerxes (7.136), declining to retaliate against Sperthias and Bulis for what Sparta had done to his ambassadors, explains that "what he had blamed in the Spartans he would not do himself." This remarkable statement³⁹could be used to derive Socrates' Principles II and IV below. But it is not. There is no hint of the insight that since one may not do oneself what one condemns in another, therefore one should not return wrong for wrong or harm for harm.

A third candidate comes from Thucydides in the speech of the Spartan envoys at Athens in 425 B.C. Their force at Sphacteria, now cut off, is in desperate straits. A truce has been patched up. Negotiations are afoot. The spokesmen for Sparta plead:

T15 Thuc. 4.19.2-3: "We believe that great enmities are not best brought to secure resolution when the party that got the best of the war, bent on retaliation …,⁴⁰ forces on the other a settlement on unequal terms, but rather when, though the victor has the chance to do just that, yet, aiming at decency. … he rises higher in virtue … to offer unexpectedly moderate terms. For if what the other now owes is not retaliation for what was forced on him …, but a return of virtue …, a sense of shame will make him readier to stand by the agreement."

The Spartans plead: Don't go by the talio this time or, better still, work it in reverse: leave us generosity, not injury, to repay. Defeat on these terms we could live with. Your moderation would evoke our best, not our worst, and you would have that further surety that the peace will endure.

Clear in this passage is the perception of a better way to settle a long-standing dispute. Morally better, certainly—perhaps even prudentially, since the victor might have more to gain from enhanced security that the agreement will be kept than from any immediate advantage he could extort. But is there so much as even a hint that the Spartans, and Thucydides himself who credits their spokesmen with this fine sentiment in this passage, perceive that the talio itself is unjust? None that I can see. To say that, if you did not drive the hardest bargain your present advantage puts within your grasp, your restraint will be admirable and will also pay off, is not to say that if you did prefer the other course you would be acting unjustly.⁴¹

My last candidate is the character of Odysseus in Sophocles' Ajax. The mad protagonist of this tragedy, imbued with mortal hatred for Odysseus, had planned to put him to a slow, tortured, death. He had announced the plan to Athena in Odysseus' hearing and reaffirmed the determination to carry it out despite her plea that he refrain. Knowing this, Odysseus takes no joy in the calamities which now afflict his enemy. When burial is denied to Ajax, Odysseus pleads with Agamemnon to rescind the edict.

T16 Sophocles, Ajax 1332ff.: "Listen, For the gods' sake, do not dare / So callously to leave this man without a grave. / Do not let violence get the better of you / So as to hate this man so much that you trample justice./To me too he was bitterest enemy … / But nonetheless, though he was all of that, / I would not so dishonour him in return … as to deny / He was the best of us who went to Troy,/Save for Achilles … /It is not just to injure a good man/After his death, even if you hate him.

From the standpoint of our own Christianized morality Odysseus' reaction to his enemy's downfall, however admirable, is not extraordinary. In his own time and place it is so far above anything that could be expected of a decent man that it takes Athena by surprise. She had offered Odysseus to parade before him Ajax in his disordered state, thinking it would please her favorite to see his rival, once so mighty, now laid low. She asks Odysseus,

T16 Ibid. 79: "When is laughter sweeter than when we laugh at our foes?"⁴²

When he declines the offer we are moved to agree with Albin Lesky that here "the man is greater than the goddess."⁴³

Can we then say that what we see here is a man who has come to understand that retaliation itself is unjust? We cannot. What we see is a man of exceptional moral stature realizing that this particular application of the principle—in denial of burial (contrary to divine law) to this man (next to Achilles the best of the Achaeans)—would be unjust.⁴⁴ What we do not see is a man who would scruple to apply it in any circumstances against any man. Elsewhere in the play his Odysseus accepts the justice of retaliation as a moral commonplace. He remarks in another connection,

T18 Ibid 1322-3: "If he gave insult for insult I pardon him."

Odysseus has not come to see that the talio as such is wrong, a precept not of justice but of injustice. Neither has the poet for whom he speaks.

If we go back to to an earlier scene, near the start of the play, when Agamemnon's decree had not yet fouled the waters, and ask ourselves how Sophocles accounts for the pure nobility of Odysseus' rancorless response to his stricken enemy's state, we can tell, I believe, that the poet wants us to see it rooted in the sense not of justice but of compassion. He evokes what we all may feel for a fellow-creature when touched by the sense of our common frailty, our common defencelessness against implacable fate:

T19 Ibid. 119-26: Athena: "Here was a man supreme in judgment, unsurpassed in action, matched to the hour. Did you ever see a better?"⁴⁵ Odysseus: Not one. And that is why, foe though he is, I pity his wretchedness, now yoked to a terrible fate. I have in view no more his plight than mine, I see the true condition of us all. We live, yet are no more than phantoms, weightless shades."

This is the mood of the eighth Pythian:

T20 Pindar, Pyth. 8.1-2: Day-creatures. What is it to be or not to be? Man is a shadow in a dream.

It is the mood of Herodotus' Solon when he remarks, "Man is all accident." It is as old as the Odyssey. We hear it in book 18 in Odysseus' sombre musings (vv. 130-7) on the theme "Earth breeds no creature feebler than man." The moral import of the sentiment we see after the massacre of the suitors in book 22. When Eurycleia lets out a whoop of vengeful joy at the sight of the gore spattered about the banquet hall, Odysseus rebukes her sternly,

T21 Od. 22.411-12: "Keep your gloating to yourself, old woman. Shut, up. Don't yell. It isn't pious to exult over corpses."⁴⁸

More successfully than Pindar or Homer Sophocles distills moral therapy from the sense of man's brittleness. He reveals how it can purge the heart from the toxins of spite and hatred. But when he has done this, we still want to know: Has he seen that the talio is a fraud, its justice a delusion? To this we must reply that he has not even faced the question. So we return to Socrates, who did, and reasoned out an answer.

III

The reasoning which leads him to it is laid out in that short section of the Crito (48B-C)⁴⁹ which starts the deliberation by which Socrates justifies the decision to remain in jail and await execution. He calls this the arche of the deliberation, its "starting-point" or, as we would say, reading the metaphor differently, its foundation. This comprises five principles laid out in rapid-fire succession:

T22 Cr. 48B4-C9:

1. "We should never do injustice.…"
2. "Therefore, we should never return an injustice.
3. "We should never do evil … [to anyone]."-⁵⁰
4. "Therefore, we should never return evil for evil [to anyone].…"
5. "To do evil to a human being is no different from acting unjustly to him.…"

Of these five principles the one that would hit Plato's readers hardest are 11 and IV. Here Greeks would see a fellow-Greek cutting out of their morality part of its living tissue. Socrates is well aware of this. For after laying out all five principles he proceeds to zero in on just these two:

T23 Cr. 49C10-D5:⁵¹ "Therefore, we should never return a wrong [Principle II] or do evil to a single human being … no matter what we may have suffered at his hands [Principle IV]. And watch out, Crito, lest in agreeing with this you do so contrary to your real opinion … For few are those who believe or will believe this. And between those who do and those who don't there can be no common counsel.… Of necessity they must feel contempt for one another when viewing each other's deliberations."⁵²

What Socrates says here he never asserts about any other view he ever voices in Plato: with people who do not agree with him on these two principles which enunciate the interdict on retaliation he would be unable to take "common counsel" about anything. Is he saying that this disagreement would cause a total breakdown of communication? No. Socrates is not saying that he cannot argue with anyone who rejects Principles II and IV. Obviously he can: he does so, copiously, with Polus, Callicles, Thrasymachus, and who knows how many others. But what he is saying is serious enough: if agreement cannot be reached on these two principles there can be no common deliberation: the gulf created by this disagreement will be unbridgeable when it comes to deciding what is to be done. The political consequences of his remark I shall be unable to pursue in this book.⁵³ Here I must concentrate on Principles II and IV as norms of personal action within the limits fixed for the individual by public law.⁵⁴

While they mark Socrates' break with the established morality they do not account for the break by themselves. Each is derived from one or more other principles in the set. Principle II is derived directly and exclusively from Principle I.

1. We should never do injustice. Ergo:
2. We should never do injustice in return for an injustice.

From the proposition that we should refrain from doing injustice in any circumstances whatever ("never" do it), Socrates infers by simple deduction that we should refrain from doing it in the special circumstances in which we have been victims of injustice ourselves. To derive IV he uses I again, this time in conjunction with V:

V. Doing any evil to a human being is the same as doing injustice to that person.

And since

I. We should never do injustice,

it follows from this in conjunction with Principle V, that

III. We should never do any evil to a human being. Ergo

IV. We should never return evil for evil.

From the proposition that we should refrain from doing evil to anyone in any circumstances whatever ("never" do it), he infers as before that we should not do it when evil has been done to us.

The commanding importance of Principle I in this reasoning should be evident: it is the sole premise for the derivation of Principle II, and it is used again for the derivation of Principle IV in conjunction with the further premise, Principle V. How would Socrates justify the latter? What reason would he give us to agree that to do any evil⁵⁵ to anyone is no different from doing that person an injustice? There is no fully satisfactory answer to this question anywhere in Plato's Socratic dialogues. The nearest Socrates comes to confronting the question is in that passage of Republic I where he refutes the conventional notion that justice consists of doing good to friends and evil to enemies (335A8-10). To rebut the second term in that conjunction Socrates picks what he believes to be the worst evil that could be done to a human being—to impair that person's justice—and argues that this would be impossible: justice in one person could not produce injustice in another—no more than heat in one thing could produce cold in another or drought in one thing produce moisture in another (335B-D). The force of these analogies is problematic.⁵⁶ And even if the validity of the reasoning were granted in this case, where the retaliatory evil would impair the enemy's justice, how it would be extended beyond it is not made clear: if the just man cannot impair another man's justice, how would it follow that neither could he harm another in any of innumerable ways in which one could do evil to an enemy without impairing the enemy's justice? The one thing that is made clear in this passage—and this is what we must settle for—is Socrates' intuition that true moral goodness is incapable of doing intentional injury to others, for it is inherently beneficent, radiant in its operation, spontaneously communicating goodness to those who come in contact with it, always producing benefit instead of injury, so that the idea of a just man injuring anyone, friend or foe, is unthinkable. This version of undeviatingly beneficent goodness guides Socrates' thought at so deep a level that he applies it even to the deity; it leads him to project a new concept of god as a being that can cause only good, never evil.⁵⁷ Let us then accept it as such, as a powerful intuition whose argumentative backing remains unclear in Plato's presentation of Socrates' thought.⁵⁸

So the full weight of the justification of Socrates' rejection of retaliation must fall on Principle I. From this alone, without appeal to any further consideration whatsoever, Socrates derives the interdiction of returning wrong for wrong for wrong in Principle II and therewith the surgical excision of that malignancy in the traditional morality which surfaces in actions like the genocide Athens had all but inflicted on Mytilene and then, as the war dragged on, did inflict on Scione, Torone, and Melos.⁵⁹ Plato's awareness of the importance of Principle I shows up in the way he leads up to it in the text of the Crito which immediately precedes T22 above.⁶⁰ He takes the whole of that paragraph to introduce it, stating and restating it no less than three times,⁶¹ reminding Crito that they had often agreed to it in the past and that he cannot go back on it now just because to stick to it would be to die.

How then should we read the modal language Socrates uses in the first two of those three statements of Principle I in that paragraph?

T24 Cr. 49A4-B6: "Do we say that in no way should ive intentionally do a wrong … ? Or that we may do wrong in some ways but not in others … ? Or that to do a wrong is never good or noble …, as has been often agreed between us in the past?"

In the preamble to a moral deliberation it would be natural to read the modal operators as signifying the "should" or "ought" of moral obligation, the "may" of moral acceptability. We must resist that reading: it would be too narrow: it would give us only part of what Socrates means. For he is not saying that if an action does a wrong then it is morally forbidden no matter what might be the circumstances. That would itself be a strong thing to say. But Socrates must mean much more than that. For he proceeds to ask, rephrasing the question with which he began, "Or that to do a wrong is never either good or noble…" Of these two adjectives, … the latter is the one normally used to express what is morally right as such. The use of the former is much broader-fully as broad as that of "good" in English, ranging over the whole spectrum of values: not only moral ones, but also hedonic, economic, political, psychological, physiological, or whatever.

Now it is all too obvious that there are circumstances in which by doing a wrong to someone we may reap a rich harvest of non-moral goods: win a huge sum of money, realize a long-cherished dream, gratify the dearest wishes of a much-loved friend; in the present case it would make the difference between life and death.⁶³ In saying that it is never good to do a wrong, and making this the foundational reason for breaking with the accepted morality, Socrates must be using the word in its most inclusive sense. He must be saying: "If an act of yours will wrong another, then it is bad for you, the agent, so bad that no other good it offers could compensate you for its evil for you. If everything else you value—pleasure, comfort, security, the good opinion of your fellows, the affection of those for whom you care, your own self-preservation—required you to do an unjust action, the mere fact that it is wrong would give you a final, insuperable, reason to refrain. Were there a world to win by wronging other persons, you must refrain. Life itself would not be good if you could keep it only by wronging someone else."

Compare Thoreau: "If I have wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself." Here too the force of the modality must be the same. Were we to take Thoreau's "must restore" to mean no more than "I am morally required to restore" we would flatten out his dictum, we would squash it into a platitude. For then the consequent would follow with dreary obviousness from the antecedent. Who would galnsay that I am morally obligated to undo an Immoral act which is about to cost another man his life? But Thoreau is not asking us to endorse a moral commonplace. He wants us to declare for the most difficult choice anyone could ever be asked to make. Socrates is asking us to do the same-—to acknowledge not only the validity of the claim of Principle I on us, but its sovereignty over all other claims. How Thoreau would justify that hard "must" in his dictum is not our affair: his transcendentalism would be a far cry from Socrates' eudaemonism, which is all that matters for us here; Principle I is an immediate consequence of Socrates' commitment to the Sovereignty of Virtue and therewith of his construction of eudaemonism.…

Notes

²Against Timocrates, 170.

³Against Leocrates, 29. Some scholars have claimed that this was rarely applied. Their claim is more of a wishful projection of humanitarian sentiment than a sober conclusion from evidence: see Marie-Paule Carriere-Hergavault, 1973: 45-79; also MacDowell, 1978: 245-7.

⁴ It was forbidden by law: MacDowell, 1978: 247 and n. 563.

⁵ For a rich documentation of this pervasive feature of Greek morality and for extensive references to comment on it in the scholarly literature, see especially Blundell, 1989: ch. 2.

⁶ Euripides, Med. 807-10: "Let no one think me a low and feeble thing, / A quiet one, but of that other sort, / Harsh to foes, gracious to friends, / For such are they whose life is most glorious."

⁷ I was reminded by the late Friedrich Solmsen that Schadewaldt (diss, Halle, 1928: 326, n. 1) had objected that Pindar could not have associated his own person with "crooked" action, and had amended the text accordingly … to make "crooked" refer to the adversary. But the received text is palaeographically impeccable, and no reason has been offered for assuming that Pindar would balk at "crooked paths" against an enemy.

⁸ In Euripides' Ion (1046-7) the elderly slave remarks as he goes forth to carry out Creusa's errand (to poison the youth), "When one wants to do evil to enemies, no rule … bars the way." Here [rule] does not refer to statute law (else the sentiment would make no sense), but to the moral code.

⁹ Blundell (ef. n. 5 above) notices that this is the Latin legal term for "repayment in kind."

¹⁰ At this point I am indebted to Terry Irwin for criticism of an earlier version of this paper.

¹¹ Blundell cites (1989: 30) Hesiod, Op. 709-11 ("If he starts it, saying or doing some unpleasant thing, be sure to pay him back twice as much") among other expressions of the sentiment. As she notes, though Hesiod favors "twice as much," he does not say this would be just: cf. T7 below.

¹² Cf. Vlastos, 1975: chapter I ("The Greeks discover the cosmos").

¹³ More to the same effect from Aristotle below: T13, T14.

¹⁴" Translated by G. Thomson (1938) as "Wrong shall be done to you for the wrong you did."

¹⁵ Euripides, Electra 969-73: Orestes: "How shall I kill her who bore me and brought me up?" Electra: "Just as she killed your father and mine." Orestes: "O Phoebus, you prophesied a great folly." Electra: "Where Apollo errs, who could be wise?" Orestes: "He prophesied that I should kill a mother whom I ought not to kill." …

¹⁹ The obliteration of Histiaea in 447/446 (Thuc. 1.14.3) had also been brutal in the extreme and would even be bracketed with that of Melos, Scione, and Torone in retrospect (Xen. Hell. 2.2.3). But so far as we know the action was not taken after formal debate in the Assembly but through summary decision in the field by military command; and the city was wiped out by expulsion of its people and parceling out of their land among Athenian cleruchs rather than by wholesale executions and enslavement.

²⁰ Emphasis on the violation of justice by the Mytileneans (3.38.1; 3.39.1 and 6) comes early on in his speech, and it culminates in the appeal that both justice and interest require the proposed action (3.40.4-7).

²¹ He had argued earlier (3.38.1) that retaliatory action should be as prompt as possible because "the response upon the heels of what one suffered exacts a vengeance that most nearly matches the offense."

²² Throughout the ages retaliation has been the standard justification for genocidal acts and policies. Pogroms in medieval Europe and then in Poland and the Ukraine in modern times were ostensibly carried out in retaliation against "Christ-killers." Massacres of Armenians in Anatolia were perpetrated in retaliation for an incendiary assault against the Bank of Turkey in Istanbul by Armenian terrorists. The Nuremberg outrages against the Jews which paved the way for the Holocaust gained a measure of mass support from the belief that Jewish bankers had conspired to "bring Germany to her knees."

²³ "If we are sensible we shall not make the issue turn on their injustice …, but on what is the wise course for us to follow … We are not involved in a lawsuit with them, so as to be concerned about the justice of their case; we are deliberating about them to determine how our treatment of them may best serve our interest" (3.44.2-4).

²⁴ Failure to notice that at 3.47.3 Diodotus has momentarily shifted to a different conception of justice, not tied to the talio, to which he returns at 3.47.4-5, may result in a misunderstanding of the position allowed him by Thucydides: it may lead one either to ignore the previous remark, thereby making Diodotus rest his whole case on imperial expediency (so Andrews takes him to "present his own case entirely in terms of expediency" [1962: 72]) or else to dismiss as "hollow" the remark in TI I that the Athenians should let themselves "suffer wrong" (so Macleod, 1978: 77, who doesn't see that by the justice of the talio they would be letting themselves be wronged if, in pursuit of self-interest, they were to forgo retaliation).

²⁵ In her essay on the Melian Dialogue, Jacqueline de Romilly (1963: part III, ch. 2) connects that Athenian atrocity (identical with the one they were to inflict, later in the war, on Scione and Torone) with Thrasymachean immoralism (R. 1, 338aff.) and Calli-clean antimoralism (G. 483Aff.). She might have reflected that the Athenians would not need to go so far as that to justify genocide against a powerless enemy: wherever they could see themselves as returning wrong for wrong (as at Mytilene, Scione, and Torone): the ultra-respectable talio could supply the hard-liners with a righteous fig-leaf.…

²⁷ In his prose nouthetein, which may also be used for "punishing" in the classical period, is never used for this purpose, but only in its literal sense of "admonishing."

²⁸ Even Socrates, who rejects revenge, is allowed by Plato occasional use of timorein, when "punishing" is what he means (so e.g. at G. 472D-E, 525BE),

²⁹ For a more complete analysis of the differences between revenge and deserved punishment ("retribution") see especially Nozick, 1981:366-8. He clears up well what remains most unclear in the common use of "revenge": cf. the definition of the word in the O.E.D. to which I refer in the text below.

³⁰ Were it not for its occurrence in this text we would not have known that Protagoras was the discoverer: there is no record of it in any of our other, all-too-meager, sources for his thought. So powerful an innovation could only have come from a daring and original thinker. When Plato (who has no motive for favoritism to the sophist) assigns it to him we have good reason to accept the assignment, as is done by the majority of scholars (for some references see Guthrie, 1969:64, n.1).…

³² Plato makes Protogoras use this word for "punishment" throughout the passage in clear distinction from vengeance, reserving XXXX for the latter.…

³⁴ We have no positive reason for thinking otherwise.

³⁵ The quotation (which I owe to Allen, 1980a: 137) is from Stephen's History of the Criminal Law (1883:83) where he argues that "it is highly desirable that criminals should be hated, that the punishment should be so contrived as to give expression to that hatred. … gratifying an healthy natural sentiment." It did not occur to Stephens that, while punishment does indeed have an "expressive" function (see Feinberg, 1970:95ff.), the sentiment it should express in a humane society is concern for the enforcement of justice and for the welfare of the community, which criminal legislation is designed to protect in solicitude for all members of the community (the law-breaker himself not excepted; see Vlastos, 1962:55: "The pain inflicted on him for his offence against the moral law has not put him outside the law … does not close out the reserve of goodwill on the part of others which is his birthright as a human being").

³⁶ See e.g. Oldenquist (1985:464-79), who calls penal justice "sanitized revenge." By the same token marriage would be sanitized fornication.

³⁷ Arist. Rhet. 1369b12-14: Revenge and punishment … differ: for punishment is for the sake of the person punished, revenge for that of the one who does the punishing, to satisfy [his feelings].…" (At this point I am indebted to oral and written comments from John Procope.)

³⁸De Anima 403a29ff: explaining the difference between the natural and the dialectieal understanding of a psychological phenomenon, he says that in the case of anger … "the dialektikos would say that it is desire to cause retaliatory pain … or something of the kind, the fisikos would say that it is boiling of the blood and the hot element about the heart." In the Rhetoric (1378a31 ff.) he gives a fuller definition of anger, whose core is "pained desire for conspicuous revenge".…

³⁹ The principle that it would be unseemly for you to do x if you are indignant when x is done by someone else (a special form of the "Universalization Principle" in ethics) is not without acknowledgement in Greek moral reflection. It is anticipated in the Iliad (6.329-30 and 23.492-4) and the Odyssey 6.285-6).

⁴⁰ Good example here and in the next occurrence of the word in this text of the traditional conflation of the concepts of retaliation with self-defense.… In both occurrences it is clear that only retaliation is meant: the victor is no longer in the position of having to defend himself against his defeated enemy; the only question is whether he should retaliate for the real or fancied wrong he has suffered.

⁴¹ As MacDowell (1963: 127ff.) observes, the virtue the Spartan envoys are recommending to Athens is not justice ("there are no laws or rules that a foreign state defeated in war must be treated mercifully") but generosity ("giving one's opponent more than he could reasonably expect").

⁴² Cf. Stanford (loc. cit.): "Athena here expresses … the normal heroic attitude, that nothing is more pleasant than to be able to exult and gloat over the misfortunes of one's enemies."

⁴³ 1967: 100.

⁴⁴ The grounds on which Odysseus protests Agamemnon's decree show very clearly that his objection has nothing to do with the moral impropriety of revenge. To leave the corpse of Ajax unburied would "trample justice" (a) because it would violate the divine interdict on denying burial to anyone in any circumstances whatsoever and would breach "the divine laws", 1343, to which Sophocles refers as "the unwritten unshakeable laws of the gods (Antigone 454-5) which constrain Antigone's obedience at frightful cost to herself, and also (b) because the high and well deserved esteem in which Ajax had been held entitles him to posthumous respect (1340-1; 1345).

⁴⁵ My translation here follows E. F. Watling's rendering of these lines in Sophocles, Electra and Other Plays (Baltimore, 1953).…

⁴⁸ Stanford (1963:67) remarks that Odysseus is the first character in Greek literature to proclaim that it is impious to exult over a fallen foe.

⁴⁹ A fuller encounter with this crucial text must await chapter 8, section III sub fin. Here I take a first look at its language and reasoning.

⁵⁰ For the justification of the expansion I have added in square brackets here and again in IV note how Socrates himself rephrases IV when he refers to it in T23.

⁵¹ Will be quoted again in chapter 8 (there as T13).

⁵² So far from allowing Socrates the same position on this fundamental point, Xenophon gives him its opposite, making him endorse repeatedly the traditional help-friends-hurt-enemies ethos: the good man "toils to win good friends and to worst his enemies" (Mem. 2.1.19); "it is thought worthy of the highest praise to anticipate enemies in causing them evil and friends in causing them good" (ibid. 2.3.14); "you have come to know that a man's virtue consists in outdoing friends in conferring benefits and enemies in inflicting harm" (Mem. 2.6.35; cf. TI above). On why Plato's testimony should be preferred to Xenophon's on this point see additional note 7.1.

⁵³ If Socrates cannot join in a common deliberation with people who disagree with him on Principles II and IV he excludes himself from the decision-making processes of Athens' participatory democracy: the "multitude" that staffs those processes would indeed disagree with him on his rejection of the talio, as he himself emphasizes in T23.

⁵⁴ Cf. what was said in the third paragraph of this chapter above.

⁵⁵ I.e. any morally avoidable evil—any evil which is not purely incidental to the execution of a non-malicious intent, as in the case of self-defense (where harm is inflicted on an aggressor solely to prevent him from causing wrongful harm) or that of punishment (where infliction of the evil of the penalty Socrates takes to be moral therapy for the wrongdoer [G. 480A-D, 525B] and/or retribution and deterrence [G. 525A-527A]).

⁵⁶ Cf. the discussion of this argument in Annas, 1981: 31-4.

⁵⁷ Cf. chapter 6 (discussion of the text quoted there as T7).

⁵⁸ Plato's recreation of Socratic thought may limp at this point, possibly because he had not been fully in sympathy with this particular aspect of Socrates' teaching. The ethic expounded in the middle books of the Republic lacks the unqualified universalism of Principle III, "We should never do evil to any human being." In R. V, 470A Socrates does not demur when Glaucon declares that the atrocities Greeks now commit against one another when fighting fellow-Greeks (devastation of the land, desecration of corpses, enslavement of prisoners) should be forbidden to "our citizens" when they are fighting fellow-Greeks, but "towards barbarians they should behave as Greeks now behave to one another."

⁵⁹ An apologist for Athens, like Isocrates, belittles the enormity of such actions, explaining them away as "severe discipline" of states which had made war on Athens, and alleges that the Spartans had done much worse (Paneg, 100, defending the Athenian action against Melos and Scione; and Panath. 70, excusing what Athens had done to unnamed "islets"). His apologia would have been hollow if it had not presupposed the justice of the lex talionis to which, as we heard from Cleon in the debate on Mytilene (TIO above), advocates of such actions would have appealed.

⁶⁰Cr. 49A4-B6. I shall be returning to the discussion of this passage in chapter 8. Now I am rounding out my discussion of the passage which starts with the text quoted as T15 in chapter 8 and culminates in the text quoted as T13 in that chapter.

⁶¹ A4-5; A5-7; 49B4-7.…

⁶³ Socrates is satisfied that if he were to save his skin by availing himself of the opportunity to escape, his action would be destructive of his city's laws, which command that one should submit to the authority of the verdicts of the courts (even if they are wrong in one's own opinion) (Cr. 50B8), and would thus flout the interdict on returning evil for evil (Cr. 54C2-4).