1 Cf. 365 D.
2 i.e., the one who in vulgar parlance is so; cf. τῷ ῥήματι, Plat. Rep. 340d.
3 A rare but obvious proverb. Cf. Schol. ad loc. and Aristides, Orat. Plat. ii. p. 143.
4 καὶ ταῦτα=idque, normally precedes (cf. 404 C, 419 E, etc.). But Thrasymachus is angry and the whole phrase is short. Commentators on Aristophanes Wasps 1184, Frogs 704, and Acharn. 168 allow this position. See my note in A.J.P. vol. xvi. p. 234. Others: “though you failed in that too.”
5 Cf. 541 B, Euthyphro 11 E, Charmides 153 D.
6 Plato, like Herodotus and most idiomatic and elliptical writers, is content if his antecedent can be fairly inferred from the context. Cf. 330 Cτοῦτο, 373 C, 396 B, 598 Cτεχνῶν, Protagoras 327 C.
7 Pater, Plato and Platonism, p. 242, fancifully cites this for “art for art's sake.” See Zeller, p. 605. Thrasymachus does not understand what is meant by saying that the art (=the artist qua artist) has no interest save the perfection of its (his) own function. Socrates explains that the body by its very nature needs art to remedy its defects (Herodotus i. 32, Lysis 217 B). But the nature of art is fulfilled in its service, and it has no other ends to be accomplished by another art and so on ad infinitum. It is idle to cavil and emend the text, because of the shift from the statement (341 D) that art has no interest save its perfection, to the statement that it needs nothing except to be itself (342 A-B). The art and the artist qua artist are ideals whose being by hypothesis is their perfection.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.