1 The Statesman: A Formalist Approach to Narrative

The cosmological myth of the Statesman (268e4–274e3) is narrated by the central figure of the dialogue, the Eleatic Visitor (henceforth, the Visitor),1 immediately after an initial and unsuccessful effort of the interlocutors to reach a definition of statesmanship. The conclusion which the Visitor and his conversation-partner, Young Socrates, reach before the myth is as follows: the statesman should be treated as the shepherd of humans. The latter is distinguished from the rest of the animals in being a two-legged, non-interbreeding species which lives on land. At this point, the Visitor complains that the aforementioned definition cannot stand, as it is marred by the following flaw. The parallelism between statesmanship and shepherding is methodologically inappropriate because the statesman is of the same nature as his herd (a human among other humans) and is therefore invited to deal with the competitiveness of citizens who act as pretenders of his power. On the contrary, the shepherd is of a nature superior to that of his herd and is therefore the unquestionable administrator of all the activities which aim at his animals’ welfare. In order to make this difference between human statesmen and herdsmen more perceptible in Young Socrates’ mind, the Visitor decides to relate the cosmological myth. In this way, he explains to the boy that only god is to be considered a true shepherd to humans, being superior to them in nature and their absolute ruler.

The narrative arrangement of the myth will be discussed at length in Sections 1.1 and 1.2. For the moment, let us offer a short summary of the story. According to the Visitor, the world moves in two periods which eternally follow each other. In the one period, which is named by the narrator “the Age of Cronus”, the universe is moved by its divine creator, while the beings that live in the world (including humans) are governed as herds by some other deities, who are inferior to the demiurge. Similarly to all mortal beings, humans are abundantly provided by nature and their divine shepherds with food and all kinds of care. For this reason, in this phase of their history humans have not developed yet any kind of civilisation or socio-political organisation. They do not breed but come directly out of the earth at an advanced age, and then, for the rest of their lives, gradually grow young and eventually return to the earth. In the other period, which is defined as the “Age of Zeus”, the god-creator and his subordinate divinities decide to abandon the universe, while the latter subsequently begins moving by itself. Humans now breed through sexual intercourse and develop arts and political life in order to protect themselves from wild animals and the adversities of the natural environment, which ceases to offer them the abundance of goods they need for their survival. The Visitor ends his narration by explaining to Young Socrates that the message of the myth for the subject at stake (the definition of statesmanship) should be that the sole governor of humanity who can be taken to resemble a shepherd is the divine demiurge of the universe.

The myth is framed by the Visitor’s introductory remarks (268d8–269c3) and an extensive digression that follows its narration and pertains to its narrating time (283b1–287b3). It also includes an abundance of authorial comments on the procedure through which it was composed. It thereby serves as a narrative paradigm that exemplifies the way in which the metanarrative reflections expressed in the opening statements and the excursus define the structuring of a narrative. The schemes on the basis of which this cosmological story unfolds and the metanarrative comments of the Visitor have been mostly overlooked by modern scholarship with regard to the picture they convey of Plato’s view on the relationship between certain aspects of narrativity and the narrative’s educational potential.

In this chapter, I argue that Plato builds an elaborate net of cross-references between, on the one hand, the plethora of metanarrative statements found both in the introductory remarks to the myth and after it, and, on the other hand, comments and narrative schemes within the myth. Through this cross-referencing Plato underlines (a) the three main aspects of narrativity that, according to formalist narratologists, distinguish a raw material from a coherent narrative whole (selectivity and creation of causal and temporal connections between the events of the plot) and (b) the issue of narrating/listening time and its relation to the audience’s suspense, as defined by structuralist narratology. I first analyse the narrative arrangement of the myth (Section 1.1), and then present how the Visitor’s reflections on the aforementioned aspects of narrativity define the myth’s structure at its most pivotal points (Sections 1.2 and 1.3).

1.1 The narrative arrangement of the myth

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the myth lies in the spatial and temporal widening of the Visitor’s gaze towards the universe.2 On a temporal level, in order to juxtapose the limited capacity of humans in political affairs with the administrative perfection of the divine demiurge, the Visitor places the god in a period of time remote from that of the interlocutors. The narrator thereby leads Young Socrates to a distant past, in which the universe is administered by the god, and compares this phase with the present, which is marked by the imperfect self-administration of the cosmos and the inefficacy of human political life.3 Young Socrates is thus invited not only to identify shepherding with an entity that is different from humans but also to search for it in a period beyond that of their own political existence. Furthermore, after structuring this antithetical relation between past and present, the Visitor broadens our temporal horizons further, by placing the cosmos in all three levels of time (past, present and future). This is so because, as he explains, these two phases of cosmic administration do not merely emerge from a temporal sequence which began in the past and was completed in the present; these two phases keep following each other ad infinitum.

This contrast between divine perfection and human deficiency in politics is accentuated even further by a simultaneous widening of the spatial horizon. The cosmic field of action, although being smoothly organised by its demiurge, cannot be fully controlled by humans in the absence of gods and troubles men through obstacles in their struggle for existence. One can easily perceive the contrast that Plato creates between the demiurge’s competence in governing the universe in its entirety and the humans’ difficulty in trying to cope with only the places they inhabit. By the end of this juxtaposition between divine and human nature within the space-time continuum, the Visitor’s verdict that no man but only the god deserves the metaphor ‘shepherd of humans’ strikes Young Socrates as undoubtedly convincing. Scholars have exhaustively analysed the origins and meanings of this divergent material which the Visitor uses for the construction of his myth. It is thus today taken for granted that this account serves as the avenue for a plethora of information, which pertains to multiple fields such as cosmology, theology, anthropology and political theory.4 Nonetheless, what has not been much explored is the narrative structure of these elements’ blending.

The account can be divided into two parts. In the first one, the Visitor presents what happens in the Age of Cronus (269c4–272d4), and in the second part what takes place in the Age of Zeus (272d4–274e3). Now, each of these segments is further divided into three sub-segments, which shape the route ‘cosmos → human nature into the cosmos → politics into the cosmos’. 5 In essence, each time the Visitor initially sketches the universe as an all-encompassing whole (first sub-segment), into which he then places humanity, first in terms of biology (second sub-segment) and finally in terms of politics (third sub-segment).6

Let us begin with the Age of Cronus. From the very beginning of his narration, the Visitor broadens our gaze by realising a shift from the political microcosm of humans towards the wider movement of the universe. The world undergoes a circular movement around itself, initially under the guidance of its divine demiurge and, when the latter abandons it, by itself and in the opposite direction. The Visitor offers three reasons why the world changes direction. First, the world consists of soul and body. Its bodily nature is conditioned by an inherent tendency not to remain in the same state, in contrast to divine beings.7 Second, it is hard to believe that it is the god who changes direction in the world’s movement, since the god can hardly do something opposite to what he had initially decided.8 Third, it is also hard to believe that the first movement is governed by a certain god and the opposite movement by another god, because such an assumption would entail the impossible condition that two gods act in an opposing way.9 So, according to the Visitor, what remains is that the one movement of the world is governed by the god and the other emerges as soon as the god abandons the world...