Despite relatively recent historical and anthropological studies on the topic of reputation in democratic Athens as a form of power for those who are usually voiceless in the city,[1] no comprehensive or monographic approach to this phenomenon in philosophical terms has been published so far. As a matter of fact, although honor or reputation counts as a good for many philosophers, for instance under the form of an “external good” for Aristotle or a “preferred indifferent” for some Stoics, most ancient Greek philosophers do not seem to deem reputation totally politically relevant. This is particularly true for Plato, who considers reputation an expression of doxa, i.e., an inferior form of knowledge or a form of ignorance. In addition, his political thought seems to leave reputation aside: it focuses instead on the required structural and social changes to build a just polis, as well as on the importance of knowledge in the ruler and its inculcation in all the members of the city.
Andreas Avgousti’s book is an interesting challenge to this longstanding academic prejudice, taking as a premise that if doxa is often understood as reputation, reputation is not limited to doxa: it also refers to honor, fame, rumor, praise, and blame, and has its source in the many. As he convincingly shows, Plato understands that these reputational phenomena deserve attention in the political field, where knowledge is hardly to be expected from the many citizens. For, far from deeming it absolutely authoritarian, Plato thinks that reputation is something that can be put to use in the hands of the true statesman or philosopher-ruler, to the point of making it a constitutive demotic power inherent to the city of Magnesia in the Laws. In this sense, this book includes itself among the recent scholarship on how Plato speaks to the contemporary democratic moment on a large variety of topics. It widens the topic of reputation as a demotic power by showing that it also obtains outside democratic regimes; and it deals with the question of the place of the many in Plato’s political thought in an original way.
Avgousti explains in the Introduction that the topic of reputation requires one to pay special attention to the dramatic settings of Plato’s dialogues, since they usually contain various reputational elements. The six chapters that follow this Introduction consist in a rigorous and close examination of reputation in selected Platonic dialogues and excerpts within these dialogues. The first two chapters focus on Socrates’ ambivalent attitude toward the many as the source of reputation: he both relies on it and devaluates it. Chapter 1 shows that in the Apology, his defense consists not only in encouraging in the audience the pleasure of watching how he refutes his interlocutors, but also in bringing his accuser Meletos into disrepute. Socrates also explains—once he has been sentenced—that, while his own reputation for wisdom will probably fade, the disreputation of Athens for its false beliefs about philosophy will not. Chapter 2 deals with the Gorgias, where Socrates shows that the reputation that matters is not that of the crowd, but of the judges in the afterlife. What Callicles makes clear is that Socrates is like a popular orator in knowing how to mobilize images and themes. According to Avgousti, this is true only up to a certain point, mostly in the myth intended to frighten Callicles. For in the part of this myth concerning posthumous judgment, where Socrates denounces reputation as a mask for the qualities of the soul, he “takes leave of the many” and the importance they give to reputational power.
As Avgousti shows, it could be argued that Socrates’ attitude in these two dialogues is strategic and does not reflect either his thinking or Plato’s. For instance, Socrates seems to recognize here the importance of reputation in the political and moral life of the city, as he does in the Crito, distinguishing between the often erroneous opinion of the multitude on the one hand, and the much more solid opinion of the wise man on the other hand. For this reason, Chapters 3 and 4 propose to study reputation in Platonic characters whose attitude to it appears more positive than Socrates’ in the Apology and the Gorgias. Chapter 3 has to do with the section of the Theaetetus known as the “Digression”, and mostly the confrontation between the orator and the ideal philosopher, the coryphaeus of Theaetetus 173c. As Avgousti highlights, in spite of his ambivalent reputation in the eyes of the many, the coryphaeus preserves and uses the demotic power of reputation as he laughs at the politicians, landowners and high-born people, and explains that he deserves the praise of the many for his attempt to be godlike. Chapter 4 is dedicated to the metic Cephalus in the Republic, a character often treated as non-political by the commentators. He is truly concerned about his reputation and shows by his words and acts that money is not primary to him but rather the just, moderate, and pious behavior. Avgousti argues that, through Cephalus, Plato shows that an individual does not need to be a citizen to be engaged in the way of life of the city if he shares his most fundamental opinions. However, Cephalus coincides with the many regarding wealth as a legitimate value for reputational judgment, a premise that has no place in Plato’s just city.
The last two chapters focus on Plato’s sketches of the just city, Kallipolis in the Republic and Magnesia in the Laws. These chapters are probably more surprising than the previous ones as Avgousti shows that the many, according to Plato, also participate in power by their judgments of reputation. Chapter 5 explains, among other things, how the Noble Lie can be understood not merely as ideology but also as a rumor or pheme, a bottom-up device circulating among the many. In other words, in the just city of Kallipolis, the many are expected to judge the reputation of their rulers or guardians and to acknowledge that they are the best suited to govern. Many aspects of the guardians’ life are conceived with this in mind, as for example the openness of their home or lack of privacy, so that they are subject to anyone’s judgment. Chapter 6 shows that, far from being an elite pursuit in Magnesia, reputation is institutionalized under the form of a social competition for reputation for virtue. Reputational judgments may be made by individual Magnesians but they can also be understood as a collective judgment. Each performance and practice in the city, in any walk of life, lends itself to blame or praise, and the large diversity of political offices, including in the Nocturnal Council, are distributed according to the citizens’ reputation for virtue. Through this competition for virtue the citizens not only practice but also communicate virtue to each other. The last part of the chapter brings Clinias to the fore, claiming that, as the founder and citizen of the future colony of Magnesia, he is subject to the demotic power of reputation: his role consists not only in giving the city its laws but also in being a long-term guardian, as a first-generation citizen who will have to perform the agonistic ethos of envy and slander that characterizes the future polis.
The Conclusion engages with modern theories of reputation and discusses their tendency to rationalize it. Avgousti also places emphasis on the political legitimacy of the many noncitizens according to Plato, through characters like the Thracian maid of the Theaetetus and Cephalus in the Republic, although we should say that, pace Avgousti, these characters do not have the same political relevance, the latter having a direct impact on Athens that the former does not have. No less important is how Plato imports a democratic feature into his own fictional aristocratic constitutions, since reputational judgments make nonexperts judges of appearances in the just cities of the Republic and the Laws—an aspect of Plato’s political thought that has been so far rather unnoticed.
Avgousti’s remarkable, detailed analysis of Plato’s texts illuminates a so far rather hidden topic and opens new perspectives on how we could read the political Plato, in particular on the issue of what it means to be part of the civic space (broadly construed). The reader might have expected from time to time some short paragraphs to sum up and condense the author’s analysis. But this remark does not detract from the decisive contribution of this volume to the renewal of the understanding of Plato’s political philosophy. As he proposes a “from bottom to top” approach, Avgousti sheds light on the complexity of Plato’s attitude to democracy.
Notes
[1] For instance Alex Gottesman, Politics and the Street in Democratic Athens. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014 ; Virginia J. Hunter, Policing Athens: Social Control in the Attic Lawsuits, 420–320 B.C.. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.