The Etymologies in Plato's Cratylus

Journal of Hellenic Studies

Volumn 118, Issue , 1998, Pages 140-154

  Sedley, David ^a  

^a CHRIST S COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 79953463262     PISSN: 00754269     EISSN: 20414099     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/632235     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. This assumption still underlies the most recent and in many ways the best study of the kind, T.M.S. Baxter, The Cratylus. Plato's Critique of Naming (Leiden 1992), where the etymological section is interpreted as a sustained satire on attitudes, throughout the entire Greek cultural tradition down to Plato's day, to the relation between reality and language.
2. Probably Baxter's most important forerunner in this tradition of interpretation is V. Goldschmidt, Essai sur le “Cratyle” (Paris 1940), which detects in the etymological section an ‘encyclopedic’ of flux-based theories in cosmology, theology and ethics.
3. G. Grote, Plato and the Other Companions ofSokrates (1st ed., London 1865; 3rd ed., 1875) 2, ch. 29. Grote's admirable arguments deserve to be read by everyone interested in the interpretation of this dialogue.
4. Rachel Barney, ‘Socrates agonistes: the case of the Cratylus etymologies’, OSAP 16 (1998, forthcoming) also regards the etymologies as exegetically serious; her conclusions, if very different from mine, are complementary rather than antithetical.
5. The serious philosophical content of certain etymologies is recognised by K. Gaiser, Name und Sache in Platons Kratylos (Heidelberg 1974)
6. F. Montrasio, ‘Le etimologie del nome di Apollo nel “Cratilo”’, Rivista di storia della filosofia 43 (1988) 227–59
7. P. Wohlfahrt, ‘L'etimologia del nome Hades nel “Cratilo”. Contributo alio studio della religione in Platone’, Rivista di storia della filosofia 45 (1990) 5–35.
8. Translating the reading of the new OCT, edited by W.S.M. Nicoll and E.A. Duke, in Platonis Opera vol. 1, ed. (Oxford 1995), $ W: $ BTQ: $ Heindorf, Burnet).
9. Baxter (n.1) ch. 5 is a very useful guide to this background.
10. Tim. 90c
11. see further, D.N. Sedley, ‘“Becoming like god” in the Timaeus and Aristotle’, in T. Calvo and L. Brisson (eds.), Interpreting the Timaeus-Critias (Sankt Augustin 1997) 327–39.
12. Rep. 369b-c.
13. Thus R. Hackforth, Plato's Phaedrus (Cambridge 1952) 59.I resist any suggestion that Socrates, departing for once from his project of rhetorical persuasiveness, is here for reasons of his own resorting to an intentionally ridiculous and therefore Unpersuasive device. Cf. especially C.J. Rowe, Plato's Phaedrus (Warminster 1986) 170–2, where the second group of etymologies is ‘deliberately fanciful’ (170) and ‘a kind of reductio ad absurdum’ of the Cratylus thesis that names are a guide to the truth (172).
14. For acceptance of the Cratylus etymologies as at least exegetically serious, see e.g. Plut. De hide et Osiride 375C-D
15. Dionysius Hal. De comp. verborum 62.18–63.3 Usener-Radermacher; Proclus Schol. In Crat. passim
16. cf. Alcinous, Did. 159.44–160.30. Perhaps the most revealing acceptance of etymology is that of Sextus Empiricus, Adversus grammaticos (= Adversus mathematicos 1) 241–7.
17. Hermogenes was an intimate enough member of the Socratic circle to be present at Socrates' death, Phd. 59b. Note too that he is familiar with the theory of Forms {Crat. 389–90).
18. Respectively Phys. 197b 29–30, EN 1103a 17–18, 1132a 30–2, 1152b 7, DA 429a 2–4.
19. GA 736a 18–21
20. DC 1.9, 279a 18-b 1. In the former he follows the (fairly obvious) derivation from $ at Crat. 406c, but differs from the explanation offered there that the name reflects the goddess's birth from the sea.
21. Metaphysics 12.1074a 38-b 14. Plato himself has a similar cataclysm theory in his late dialogues—at Timaeus 22b-23c, Critias 109d-110c, and Laws 677a-679e—but the latter two passages explicitly deny that any knowledge is preserved from one civilisation to the next beyond a bare record of some names of great dynasts.
22. (Thus L. Brisson, Platon, Phedre (Paris 1989), contrary to the more favoured but linguistically strained interpretation that the ancients alone know whether it is true or not; at Tim. 40d-e, in a case where the ancients' word cannot be checked, Timaeus insists that it must simply be accepted as true.) In fact Socrates even set out to check the word of a divine authority, the Delphic oracle, despite an extreme reluctance to believe that it could be wrong (Apol. 21b-c).
23. Cf. also Laws 714a, 957c, where the association of $ with $, the ‘dispensation of (or ‘by’) intelligence’, is meant to invoke law's mythical origin in the age of Cronos as a divine benefaction to mankind, and therefore implicitly the original meaning of the word. Similarly, at Laws 654a the suggested derivation of the word $ from $ is attributed to the gods who first instituted dance.
24. Charm. 173e-174a
25. Ion 531b
26. Lack 196d, 199a
27. cf. Tht. 179a
28. Rep. 389d
29. Laws 828b.
30. PI. Crito 44a-b. Many scholars, following the lead of Lambinus, have thought that Socrates' interpretation of the dream was itself based, if not on an etymology, at any rate on a linguistic decoding—that of $.
31. Cf. Apol 22b-c
32. Ion 534c-d
33. Meno 99c.
34. For a full list of occurrences, see A.S. Riginos, Platonica (Leiden 1976) 35–8.
35. J. Notopoulos, ‘The name of Plato’, CP 34 (1939) 135–45.
36. P.M. Fraser and E. Matthews, A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, 2
37. ‘Attica’, ed. M.J. Osborne and S.G. Byrne (Oxford 1994).
38. E.g. no one ascribes Aristotle's name—’ $ = ‘best goal’?—to his pioneering work in teleology. Nor, when (exceptionally) Pythagoras' name was etymologized (Diog. Laert. 8.21), did any name-change story result.
39. Fr. 5A FHS&G.
40. At Crat. 397a-b, the mechanical naming of a child after an ancestor is judged liable to be incorrect. This may have been one ground for rejecting ‘Aristocles’. Another may have been that any name with the ‘-cles’ termination, signifying a kind of ‘fame’, must fail to convey the subject's essence. Contrast the ‘crat-’ element in two names of which Cratylus does approve, Socrates and Cratylus, ‘power’ being an intrinsic property (I owe this last point to C.D.C. Reeve's draft introduction to his forthcoming translation of the Cratylus).
41. See esp. R. Barney (n.2) for a convincing interpretation of Socrates' etymological performance as an ‘agonistic display’. Cf. also C. Dalimier, Platon, Cratyle (Paris 1998) 16–17.
42. The Derveni commentator, like Euthyphro, combines being a mantis with being a purveyor of etymologies. Cf. C.H. Kahn, ‘Was Euthyphro the author of the Derveni Papyrus?’, in A. Laks and G.W. Most (eds.), Studies on the Derveni Papyrus (Oxford 1997) 55–63.
43. On the acceptability of multiple etymologies, cf. Dalimier (n. 29) 43–44. See 406b 5–6 for the principle applied to Artemis, and the multiple etymology of Apollo at 404e-406a. The same principle will explain why Cronos is allowed two etymologies (396b, 402b). Sometimes one decoding may commend itself as superior to another (399d-400b, 404b), but it is only when the two decodings of a word contradict each other that one must necessarily be rejected, as in the case of epistēmē, p. 151 below).
44. Myles Burnyeat (in conversation) has illuminatingly compared the double meanings of many modern acronyms (cf. p. 142 above on ‘Basic’).
45. In the table which follows, square brackets indicate subordinate or digressive etymologies, round brackets indicate words which are listed but not etymologised (at least here). I have found no comparably full analysis in the modern literature, although R. Brumbaugh, ‘Plato's Cratylus: the order of the etymologies’, Review of Metaphysics 11 (1957–1958) 502–10 does discern some natural philosophical sequences amounting to a ‘double dialectical progression from complex to simple, from thing to thought to name’.
46. Xenocrates frr. 264–6 Isnardi Parente = fr. 53 Heinze: a verbatim quotation from Xenocrates' Life of Plato preserved by Simpl. In Ar. Phys. 1165.33 ff
47. In Ar. De caelo 12.22 ff., 87.23 ff. For a survey of modern dismissals, see Isnardi Parente (Senocrate-Ermodoro, frammenti, Naples 1981) 433–5.
48. The new list, at 437a-c, is: $.
49. This is well argued by David Robinson, ‘$ in Plato's Cratylus’, in L. Ayres (ed.), The Passionate Intellect (New Brunswick and London 1995) 57–66.
50. For the association of Cronos with nous, see also n.17 above on Laws 714a, 957c.
51. fully argued by Wohlfahrt (n.2).
52. See e.g. Montrasio (n.2) for a thoroughly Platonising reading of the multiple Apollo etymologies (404d-406a).