"Life of Nicias," by Plutarch

"Nicias" by Joachim von Sandrat (1606-1688)

"Life of  Nicias," our selection this month, comes from Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. The work is also known as the Parallel Lives, as it contains side-by-side biographies of noteworthy personages of Greco-Roman antiquity, with commentary on the successes and failures of each pair.


Nicias was an Athenian political and military leader of the 5th-century B.C., and the selection relates tales of his penchant for pomp and circumstance, his political rivalries (especially with Alcibiades), and the Athenian military expedition to Sicily, which ended disastrously in 413 B.C.

Bust of Plutarch (ca. 46-ca.119)
in his home village of Chaeronia, Greece

It's a rich narrative, worthy of an epic motion picture.  At its center is the personage of Nicias, the reluctant warrior. He vied with more hawkish elements in Athens's political arena, and negotiated a truce with Sparta and her allies that bears his name.  In Plutarch's telling, is Nicias a hero or anti-hero?

You decide.

"Better Men, Braver and Less Idle": Meno's Paradox

In our meeting on the 25th of last month of Plato's "Meno," what's commonly known as "Meno's Paradox" came up.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the dialogue returns again and again to the question of what virtue is. Here's Meno:

"How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know?" (Section 80d in the Grube translation)

The demonstration with the slave boy ensues, in which Socrates proves, and Meno accepts, that a slave boy raised in his household is able to work his way through a geometry problem (with what some consider "leading questions" by Socrates), despite having had no formal training in the discipline.

Socrates concludes that universal truths are embedded in the boy's soul, which he has the ability to "recollect."

"Meno's Paradox" is: if we know something, inquiry is unnecessary, however it we don't know something, inquiry is impossible.  How will we know the truth if we see it?

Socrates reply: "...I would contend at all costs in both word and deed as far as I could that we will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it." (Section 86b).

In other words: Dare to know.