Anytus and the Socratic Mission in Plato’s Apology and Meno

Thomas Falkner (McDaniel College)

Why does Anytus appear in Plato’s Meno? Rowe (2007) sees Apology as a “manifesto” that looks “back/forward to the written ‘reports’ of the conversations that helped get Socrates into trouble” and singles out Meno, in which Anytus threatens Socrates for what he regards as his slander of politicians. In another study, Scott (2006) suggests that in addition to providing a critique of Socrates’ principal accuser, the dialogue uses Anytus as a mirror wherein Meno is to see his own weaknesses. But we also need to appreciate the way Meno as a whole relates to the centerpiece of Socrates’ defense in Apology—the mission mandated by the oracle (Reeve 1989) to exhort others to virtue (aretê). Socrates is emphatic about the demands of this commitment:

I shall do this for everyone I meet, young or old, foreigner or citizen, but especially for you citizens, inasmuch as you are closer to me in kinship. For this is what God commands . . . I spend all my time going about trying to persuade you, young and old, to make your main concern . . . that your soul be as good as possible. (Apol. 30a-b)

Meno provides a powerful illustration of Socrates engaged in this mission precisely as he describes it, with interlocutors young and old, citizen and foreigner, and a sustained effort to engage them in an inquiry into aretê. In the dialogue Socrates lavishes time and attention on Meno: they had also spoken the day before, and Socrates regrets that Meno must leave Athens before being initiated into the Mysteries. Socrates enlists his assistance in telling Anytus, who is his host-friend, what he has learned from him in the hope this may make Anytus more agreeable—an indication that Meno has made progress. It is both ironic and telling that soon afterwards Anytus will come to mistake someone so clearly devoted to the moral education of the young with someone who corrupts them.

James Arieti, Interpreting Plato: The Dialogues as Drama, Rowman & Littlefield (1991)

R. S. Bluck, Plato’s Meno, Cambridge University Press (1964)

C. D. C. Reeve, Socrates in the Apology, Hackett Publishing (1989)

Christopher Rowe, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing, Cambridge University Press (2007)

Dominic Scott, Plato’s Meno, Cambridge University Press (2006)