Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece 9781108492072, 110849207X

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 The Pais of Paizō: Children, Intoxication, and Play in Ancient Psycho-physiology
2 Why Plato Needs Play
3 Plato’s Play and the Tragic Paradox
4 What Do Pleasure-Objects Do? An Inquiry into Toys
5 Aristotle’s Demotion of Play
6 Play vs. Mimesis in Aristotle’s Aesthetics
7 Serious Play as Goal-Oriented Play
8 The Value of Serious Things before and after Death
Conclusions: Toward a Pleasure-Model of Play
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

PL AY AND AESTHETICS IN ANCIENT GREECE

What is art’s relationship to play? Those interested in this question tend to look to modern philosophy for answers, but, as this book shows, the question was already debated in antiquity by luminaries like Plato and Aristotle. Over the course of eight chapters, this book contextualizes those debates and demonstrates their significance for theoretical problems today. Topics include the ancient child psychology at the root of the ancient Greek word for “play” (paidia), the numerous toys that have survived from antiquity, and the meaning of play’s conceptual opposite, the “serious” (spoudaios). What emerges is a concept of play markedly different from the one we have inherited from modernity. Play is not a certain set of activities which unleashes a certain feeling of pleasure; it is rather a certain feeling of pleasure that unleashes the activities we think of as “play”. As such, it offers a new set of theoretical challenges. stephen e. kidd is Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Classics at Brown University, where his work focuses on ancient Greek literature and culture, especially that of the classical period. He is the author of Nonsense and Meaning in Ancient Greek Comedy (Cambridge, 2014), as well as articles on the meanings of Greek words, ancient games, science, and what Herodotus has to say about virtual worlds.

P L AY A N D A E S T H E T I C S IN ANCIENT GREECE STEPHEN E. KIDD Brown University

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108492072 doi: 10.1017/9781108590914 © Stephen E. Kidd 2019 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2019 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Kidd, Stephen E., 1980– author. title: Play and aesthetics in ancient Greece / Stephen E. Kidd. description: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. indentifiers: lccn 2018056587 | isbn 9781108492072 subjects: lcsh: Play – History. | Pleasure. | Plato. | Aristotle. | Philosophy, Ancient. classification: lcc bf717 .k53 2019 | ddc 155.4/1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056587 isbn 978-1-108-49207-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To Carolyn Erkkila Kidd For those first—and best—moments of play

Comparisons have often been made, sometimes amounting to identification, between art and play. They have never thrown much light on the nature of art, because those who have made them have not troubled to think what they meant by play. – Collingwood, Principles of Art i.V§1 Tell me: what happens when we get this puppet drunk? – Plato, Laws 1.645d

Contents

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

page x xii

Introduction

1

1 The Pais of Paizō: Children, Intoxication, and Play in Ancient Psycho-physiology

20

2 Why Plato Needs Play

49

3 Plato’s Play and the Tragic Paradox

74

4 What Do Pleasure-Objects Do? An Inquiry into Toys

97

5 Aristotle’s Demotion of Play

122

6 Play vs. Mimesis in Aristotle’s Aesthetics

143

7 Serious Play as Goal-Oriented Play

162

8 The Value of Serious Things before and after Death

182

Conclusions: Toward a Pleasure-Model of Play

204

Bibliography Index

213 230

ix

Acknowledgements

This book has benefited from the support of many friends, colleagues, and institutions. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awarded the project a grant from 2015–16, where I spent a wonderful year at Humboldt University in Berlin with the ideal host, Markus Asper, a source of inspiration and encouragement for so many. Support was also given by a Wriston Fellowship and Robert Gayle Noyes professorship from Brown University, as well as the William S. Calder III grant from the American Friends of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I thank Classical Philology for allowing me to publish my article “Play in Aristotle” as Chapter 5, and Aisthesis for allowing me to publish part of my article “Toys as Mimetic Objects: A Problem from Plato’s Laws” in the Introduction. Parts of this book have been presented as lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Exeter, St. Petersburg University, Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of Chicago, the Ludics Seminar at Harvard University, the University of Florence, KU Leuven, Newcastle University, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, the Classical Association of New England, and various meetings of the Society for Classical Studies. I am grateful to those audiences for their invitations and feedback. In the preparation of this manuscript, the anonymous readers at Cambridge University Press have greatly improved the shape of the book with their advice, and I owe a debt of thanks to Michael Sharp, the book’s editor, and his editorial assistant, Sophie Taylor. Here at Brown University, Christopher Ell’s editorial work was invaluable, as was Elijah Broussard’s collection of images. Along the way insights and ­encouragement have come from many colleagues, including, but not limited to, Ralph Rosen, Sheila Murnaghan, Emily Wilson, Sara Chiarini, Christopher Gill, Richard Seaford, Elena Zheltova, Alexander Verlinsky, Dmitri Panchenko, Lucia Prauscello, Sarah Nooter, Michèle Lowrie, David Williams, Vassiliki Rapti, Pierre Destrée, David Creese, x

Acknowledgements xi Natasha Peponi, Arnaud Zucker, David Konstan, David Sider, Véronique Dasen, Malcolm Heath, Stephen Halliwell, and Teresa Morgan. Thanks are also due to Krista Campbell from the PBS American Masters series. Finally, I would like to express thanks, in print, to my wonderful parents, first and foremost; my two terrific brothers; and those generous teachers who took an interest along the way. There are so many, but to name two—Naomi Lebowitz and George Pepe—for helping me during particularly slippery years. I thank my good friends and colleagues here at Brown and abroad, and especially those two closest ones at home. Olya, in her devotion to Eric, once let me see, if not remember, my own first moments of play. Speaking of whom, a little apology: since I was unable to fit him into the bibliography or footnotes, I would like to acknowledge here some of the things my son Eric has taught me about play. Three moments especially stand out. At age one, we were pretending to be stuck on a purple stripe painted onto a sidewalk in Florida: “I like this game,” he said, although I had not realized it was a “game”. At age three, after watching Disney’s Robin Hood for the first time, he immediately turned to me and said, “Let’s play it.” It was the obvious next step for him, but not for me. A year or so later we were playing a real game, and, when one of us lost, he was so shocked and upset—not by the ignominy of defeat, but by the fact that a game could be so quickly and irrevocably over. A devastating, but incredibly efficient, closural device.

Abbreviations

ARV = Beazley, J. D. 1963. Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters. 2nd edn. Oxford. CA = Powell, J. U. 1925. Collectanea Alexandrina. Oxford. CEG = Hansen, P. A. (ed.) 1983, 1989. Carmina Epigraphica Graeca. 2 vols. Berlin. CMG = Corpus Medicorum Graecorum. Leipzig/Berlin. DK = Diels, H., and Kranz, W. (eds.) 1952. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 3 vols. 6th edn. Berlin. FGrH = Jacoby, F. (ed.) 1923–58. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Berlin/Leiden. FHG = Müller, C. 1841–70. Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum. 5 vols. Paris. GE = Montanari, F., Goh, M., and Schroeder, C. (eds.) 2015. The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek. Leiden. GP = Gow, A. S. F., and Page, D. L. 1965. Hellenistic Epigrams. 2 vols. Cambridge. IEG = West, M. L. (ed.) 1989–92. Iambi et Elegi Graeci. 2 vols. 2nd edn. Oxford. IG = Inscriptiones Graecae. Berlin. IMT = Barth, M., and Stauber, J. (eds.) Inschriften Mysia & Troas. Leopold Wenger Institut. Universität München. KA = Kassel, R., and Austin, C. (eds.) 1983–2001. Poetae Comici Graeci. 8 vols. Berlin. LIMC = Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae. 1981–97. 16 vols. Zurich. LM = Laks, A., and Most, G. 2016. Early Greek Philosophy. 9 vols. Cambridge, Mass. LSJ = Liddell, H. G., and Scott, R. (eds.) 1996. Greek–English Lexicon: With a Revised Supplement. 9th edn. Rev. H. Stuart Jones and R. McKenzie; supplement edn. by P. G. W. Glare. Oxford. MW = Merkelbach, R., and West, M. L. (eds.) 1967. Fragmenta Hesiodea. Oxford. OED = Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. 2nd edn. Oxford. PLF = Lobel, E., and Page, D. L. (eds.) 1955. Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta. Oxford. xii



List of Abbreviations

xiii

PMG = Page, D. L. (ed.) 1962. Poetae Melici Graeci. Oxford. RE = Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. 1893–1978. Stuttgart. SEG = Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. 1923–. Leiden/Amsterdam. SH = Lloyd-Jones, H., and Parsons, P. (eds.) 1983. Supplementum Hellenisticum. Berlin. SVF = von Arnim, H. (ed.) 1903–5. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta. 3 vols. Index vol. 1924, ed. M. Adler. Leipzig. TAM II = Kalinka, E. (ed.) 1920–44. Tituli Asiae Minoris, vol. II: Tituli Lyciae linguis Graeca et Latina conscripti. 3 fascs. Vienna. TAM III.1 = Heberdey, R. (ed.) 1941. Tituli Asiae Minoris, vol. III: Tituli Pisidiae linguis Graeca et Latina conscripti, fasc. 1. Vienna. TrGF = Snell, B., et al. (eds.) 1971–2004. Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. 5 vols. Göttingen.

Introduction

Is play an emotion? As speakers of English, we are accustomed to the idea that it is not. Play is an action, a context, a circumscribed space. It is a “free or unimpeded movement”, an “exercise or action for enjoyment”, a “recreational activity”.1 Other modern European languages suggest a similarly non-emotive concept: for Huizinga, play is “first and foremost…a voluntary activity”;2 for Caillois, “play is essentially a separate occupation, carefully isolated from the rest of life”.3 For Freud, children pass “from the passivity of experience to the activity of play”,4 and, for Groos before him, play is an “activity which is enjoyed purely for its own sake”.5 Play may be many things—a mimetic act, an activity of freedom, an autotelic action—but it is not an emotion. Paidia, however, the ancient Greek word for “play”, was conceived to be something much closer to an emotion than its modern European equivalents allow—or so I will argue in this book. It is not an activity that is engaged in “for pleasure”, as if by partaking in certain activities called “play”—for example, rolling dice or jumping rope—a player might trigger some sort of pleasure reward. Paidia is, rather, often a feeling of pleasure that spills over into the physical manifestations of that OED I.5b, II.6, II.7a. Huizinga (1971 [1938]) 7, a translation of (2008 [1938]) 35, emphasis in the original: “Alle Spel is allereerst en bovenal een vrije handeling.” 3 Caillois (2001 [1958]) 6, a translation of (1958) 18: “En effet, le jeu est essentiellement une occupation séparée, soigneusement isolée du reste de l’existence…” 4 Freud (1921) 13: “Indem das Kind aus der Passivität des Erlebens in die Aktivität des Spielens übergeht, fügt es einem Spielgefährten das Unangenehme zu, das ihm selbst widerfahren war, und rächt sich so an der Person dieses Stellvertreters.” 5 Groos (1899) 493: “Beides lässt sich in dem auch von uns so häufig angewendeten Satze ausdrücken, dass sich das Spiel psychologisch als eine Thätigkeit darstelle, die rein um ihrer selbst willen genossen werde.” 1

2





Introduction

pleasurable feeling.6 Just as an emotion like fear might cause someone to flail their arms frantically and run screaming in a certain direction, paidia causes someone, in a perceived overflow of pleasurable feeling, to dance, sing, and make certain movements just for the pleasure of it.7 In the case of fear, the physical manifestation of that feeling is regularly denoted by the verb phobeomai: one is being “routed”, and so running away. In the case of paidia, the physical manifestation is denoted by the verb paizō, which regularly covers singing and dancing as well as more typical forms of English play, like rolling dice, playing ball games, and play-fighting. Although paidia usually maps nicely onto the English “play”—children “play” with dolls and toys, adults “play” drinking games and gambling games—this is not always the case, and these moments of asymmetry are informative. Take, for example, the climactic passage from the medical treatise On the Sacred Disease, usually dated to the end of the fifth century bce. Here the author is revealing his, at the time unusual, belief that the brain holds the key not only to the disease which is the subject of the treatise, epilepsy, but to a vast array of seemingly soul-related phenomena. He writes: “People ought to know that pleasures and good moods and laughter and paidiai arise from nothing other than the brain; the same goes for pains and sorrows and bad moods and crying.”8 Most of these internal states seem to pair up nicely with one another: pleasures (hēdonai) and pains (lupai) arise from the brain, since it is the brain that decides whether something is pleasurable or painful, not some other organ, or some external agent. Good moods (euphrosynai) and bad moods (dysphrosynai) look like opposites as well: although there might be external catalysts for good moods, like beautiful weather or good luck, There are important distinctions between “emotions”, “feelings”, and “moods” (for which, cf. BenZe’ev 2000, 45–8, 86–92, and Konstan 2006, xi–xiii, 3–40, 270–1 n. 34), but I am being intentionally loose here. The argument is not that paidia is an emotion, but that it helps to imagine play as an emotion in order to grasp paidia’s difference from the English “play”. Cf. OED s.v. “play” II.6.b for the lost meaning “enjoyment, pleasure, joy, delight”, not attested since the sixteenth century. 7 For the opposition of play (paidia) and fear (phobos), see Pl. Laws 1.635b: τῶν μεγίστων ἡδονῶν καὶ παιδιῶν…τὸ δὲ τῶν λυπῶν καὶ φόβων… Schöpsdau (1994–2011) i.21 translates “Lustgefühlen und Vergnügungen”; Sauvé Meyer (2015) ad loc. “pleasures and enjoyments” (although in her note at 136 she writes that it is “more literally: recreations”, and at 137: “Elsewhere in this translation the term paidia, here translated as ‘enjoyment’, is rendered ‘recreation’, although for stylistic or contextual reasons it and its compounds is occasionally translated as ‘play’ or ‘playful’ (as at 643b–d, 653e2–3, 659e4)”); and Saunders 2004 [1970] translates “entertainments and pleasures”. Cf. playing in the absence of fear at Eur. Bacch. 866–70. 8 De Morbo Sacro 14: εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ τοὺς ἀνθρώπους, ὅτι ἐξ οὐδενὸς ἡμῖν αἱ ἡδοναὶ γίνονται καὶ αἱ εὐφροσύναι καὶ γέλωτες καὶ παιδιαὶ ἢ ἐντεῦθεν, καὶ λῦπαι καὶ ἀνίαι καὶ δυσφροσύναι καὶ κλαυθμοί. Note that, like Plato’s use of “pleasures” and “pains” above, the terms here can signify both the internal states and the class of external phenomena which give rise to those internal states (English “pleasures” and “pains” work this way as well), as does “amusements”. For discussion of the authenticity of this passage, see Roselli (1996) 101 n. 87. 6

Introduction  such moods have no existence outside the brain. Laughter (gelōtes) and crying (klauthmoi) too seem to parallel each other: both are intimately related to moods and feelings, either as feelings that are inextricable from their external manifestations, or simply the manifestations themselves. The opposition paidiai to aniai (“sorrows”) poses a problem, however. In what sense can “games” be in opposition to “sorrows”?9 Even if the two are not meant to be in parallel, the word paidiai alone protrudes in this list of eight. All the other items in the author’s list are moods, feelings, and internal states (pleasures, pains, good moods, bad moods, sorrows) or manifestations of those internal states (laughter, crying). “Games”, however, distracts the passage away from this rubric into some social world of dicing, knucklebones, and football. Even if we ignore the plural form, and translate it simply as “play”, the effect is still incongruous: play is an activity or context for activity, not an internal state or a manifestation of some internal state. Translations such as Littré’s “games” (jeux), Jones’ “jests”, and Adams’ “sports” thus suggest something like a categorical error in the sentence— does the author really mean to introduce issues of linguistic deviance (“jests”) or activities of recreation (“games”, “sports”) into this discussion of moods and feelings?10 Chadwick and Mann, by contrast, perhaps aware of the problem, hit closer to the mark with “amusement”.11 With “amusement”, the word paidiai no longer appears to be so anomalous: like pleasure, pain, good moods, bad moods, laughter, crying, and sorrow, “amusement” fits this category of feelings and moods, and even functions as a suitable opposite to “sorrow” if such pairing indeed is the author’s intention. Just like pleasures and pains, amusement and sorrow can be understood as feelings created by the brain alone.12 “Game” here is meant simply as any concrete instantiation of the abstract action “play”. Although the history of English has resulted in different words applied to the verb “play” and the noun “game”, many languages, like ancient Greek, use the same word: “spielen ein Spiel” in German, “jouer à un jeu” in French, “giocare un gioco” in Italian, “ludere ludum” in Latin. Game theorists, by contrast, tend to desire separate treatments of “games” and “play” (cf. Galloway 2006, 19–21, and Ensslin 2014, 7–8); see Chapter 4 for reasons why. 10 Littré (1962 [1849]) 387 has “les plaisirs, les joies, les ris et les jeux”; Adams 1868 “joys, delights, laughter and sports”; Jones 1923 “pleasures, joys, laughter and jests”; Grensemann (1968) 83 “Lust und Freude, Lachen und Scherzen”; and Roselli (1996) 79 “scherzi”. 11 At Lloyd (1978 [1950]) 248. 12 For similar reasons perhaps, “amusement” has been the traditional English translation for Aristotle’s discussions of paidia since at least Chase (1861) 293–4 (cf. Burnet 1900 passim; earlier, Taylor 1818, 386–8, e.g., has “diversions”), although Newman (1887–1902 passim) regularly translates “play”. One reason may be that play and games are, in English, just one type of “amusement” (e.g., Joachim 1951, 287, under “pleasant amusements” includes not just “games and play” but “witty conversation, and all forms of artistic enjoyment”). Another reason may be implied by Kraut’s (1997) 181 note ad Pol. 1337b33–1338a1 that “games are a frequent source of amusement” (emphasis added). 9



Introduction

The Sacred Disease author thus seems to be using the word paidia in a way suggestive of an internal state—something like an emotion, feeling, or mood. If so, he is not alone: there are a number of instances where “play” does not seem to be the right translation for paidia. Consider, for example, the depiction of Paidia from the Metropolitan Museum, reproduced on the cover of this book.13 Painted around the cylindrical curves of a pyxis—a small jewelry or makeup box—Paidia is found alongside Eudaimonia (Happiness), Peithō (Persuasion), Euklea (Reputation), and Hygeia (Health), all in the retinue of Aphrodite. While at least two of the other abstractions converse with one other, Paidia appears to be in her own world, separated from the rest, entirely focused on balancing a stick on her finger. Her stance is dynamic: legs spread with the weight on her front foot, her left arm outstretched to counterbalance the stick, hair electrically charged as if windswept despite the fact that she is apparently standing still.14 “Happy” is not the word that describes her expression; she is not smiling or laughing. Rather, she is focused: her eye trains on the tip of the stick, her eyebrow is drawn downward, and her mouth is closed in a flat line with soft chin beneath. The expression is that of someone who is concentrating, unaware or uninterested that others might be looking, like someone biting their fingernails or holding the tongue between the teeth. We understand this character and recognize her action immediately: she is playing, and Paidia means “Play”. Yet, interestingly, not all interpreters translate her in this way. Ferrari, for example, translates the inscription “Paidia” here as “Joy”.15 Such a translation, like the passage from the Sacred Disease, suggests a different category for the word altogether: whereas joy might be described as an emotion or feeling, play tends not to be. We might feel joy during play or enjoy playing, but it does not make sense to say that play just is joy. Play is an activity, joy an emotion. But what of Greek play—that is, paidia? During the period between 425 and 400 bce, as Shapiro notes, named depictions of Paidia appear on vases “more often than that of virtually any other personification”, and some of the other vases offer clues.16 The personified Paidia is Met. Mus. no. 09.221.40; ARV 1328,99; Shapiro (1993) 181–3, cat. no. 1; Ferrari 1995. For the balancing-stick game, cf. Beck (1975) 52, pl. 64, and Neils and Oakley (2003) 272 for depictions and further references. 14 Note too that the folds of her chiton follow those dynamic horizontal lines in the back leg. 15 Ferrari (1995) 17. 16 Shapiro (1993) 180; 180–5 he discusses twelve labeled depictions and one possible unlabeled depiction. Cf. Aly 1942, Kossatz-Deismann 1994, and Halliwell (2008) 20 n. 45. 13

Introduction  often depicted as a woman holding a necklace or string of beads; she appears to have, as Shapiro writes, “a particular interest in more expensive playthings, like jewelry.”17 But in what sense is jewelry a “plaything”? We don’t usually “play” with jewelry in the way that children “play” with toys, so the regular occurrence of jewelry in these Paidia depictions comes as something of a surprise. Yet, as will be seen in this book, the Greek words that usually cover the English “toy” (athurma, paignion) also regularly denote objects like jewelry, necklaces, and other such “delights”, as if such objects were understood to be in the same class as “toys”.18 It is not that the adult female Paidia is “playing” with such objects—at least, not in the way that the child Paidia plays with the balancing stick. It is rather that she “delights” in such objects, and this delight is what is shared with the child Paidia, who “delights” in her toy. Much like the passage from the Sacred Disease, “play” here does not seem fully to cover the range of this word, even if the Metropolitan depiction appears unmistakably familiar. Ferrari’s “Joy” instead points to another dimension of paidia, one which denotes not the activity but the internal state out of which such activities arise. Although translators often show awareness of this aspect of the word— Dover, for example, translates the “playing” (paizousin) of the initiates in the Frogs underworld as “enjoying themselves”, Olson translates the common hedonistic exhortation “eat, drink, play” (esthie, pine, paize) as “eat, drink, enjoy yourself ”, and Sauvé Meyer takes the paidiai opposed to fears (phoboi) in the Laws as “enjoyments”19—the interest here lies not in finding some suitable translation for the Greek paidia that can cover delight, enjoyment, play, amusement, and others simultaneously. Rather, it lies in grasping the conceptual challenge that ancient Greek paidia offers us: how can this emotive aspect of “joy” or “delight” be understood as continuous with that other aspect, namely that activity we think of as “play”? For us, the natural relationship between the two insists on a separation: the play activity (rolling dice, playing catch) gives rise to joy and delight. But the Greek offers a reversal, and so a promise of continuity: joy and delight cause people to “dance” (paizō), “sing” (paizō), and engage in other forms of play, like balancing a stick, throwing a ball, and rolling dice. The continuity suggested by this is not that singing, dancing, See Shapiro (1993) 183, e.g. the Eretria Painter’s Paidia (30 Shapiro), who is “holding out a string of beads” (181); cf. 19, 21, 32 Shapiro, the last of whom “holds the jewelry in its box” (183). 18 See Chapter 4 for discussion. 19 Dover (1993) 57 on Ar. Frogs 318–20; Olson (2010) 97 on Ath. 12.530c; Sauvé Meyer (2015) 137 on Pl. Laws 1.635b. Cf. Xen. Cyr. 2.3.18, where Miller 1914 translates paidia as “merriment”. 17

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Introduction

and playing are results of “joy” or “delight”, but rather that they just are forms of “joy” and “delight”. How exactly does this work? Understanding this continuum is the challenge of the book. Over the next eight chapters I will explore ancient Greek play (paidia) by studying the child psychology at the root of the word (the pais of paizō), engaging with the philosophical debates surrounding play in the classical period, reimagining the numerous toys that have survived from antiquity, and probing the meaning of play’s conceptual opposite, the “serious”, or spoudaios in Greek. What emerges is a concept of play markedly different from the one we have inherited from modernity. Play is not a certain set of activities which unleashes a certain feeling of pleasure; it is rather a certain feeling of pleasure that unleashes the activities we think of as “play”. This question of play may be of some significance for those who are interested in the multidisciplinary field of play studies, especially when it is considered how the modern word “play” has shaped many of the field’s assumptions and inquiries. But the question takes on additional stakes when it is remembered how interrelated play is with traditional questions of aesthetics. Guyer, for example, in his history of modern aesthetics, chooses “play” as one of his three strands to trace through the centuries, from Kant, who speaks of the “free play of the imagination”, to Walton’s 1990 book Mimesis as Make-Believe, which appears in the epilogue of Guyer’s third volume.20 Yet the connection between art and play does not begin in modernity. Plato, for example, in his later works, categorizes all painting, sculpture, theater, music, and dance—namely, those practices today categorized under the word “art”—as forms of “play”. Although it would be easy to confuse this discussion of play with his more famous discussions of mimesis in the Republic, if we examine his notion of paidia carefully we will see that, with paidia, Plato is embarking on entirely new ideas about art.

Play, Mimesis, Aesthetics The potted history of Greek aesthetics reads that Plato banned the poets in the Republic due to the dangerous effects of mimesis while Aristotle rescued mimesis in the Poetics, endowing it with the theoretical Guyer (2014) i.9; for Kant, i.421–58; for Walton, iii.557–66. Other notable advocates of play’s role in aesthetics include Schiller (Guyer i.485–6), Schleiermacher (ii.149–51), Arnold (ii.226), Pater (ii.251–4), Spencer (ii.380–9), Gadamer (iii.50–6), and Santayana (iii.243–5). Cf. Hein 1968, Sonderegger 1998, and Wetzel 2010 for overviews.

20



Play, Mimesis, Aesthetics

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grounding that would last it through the following centuries.21 Although this history of aesthetics is widely circulated, less studied is the fact that Plato returns to aesthetic questions after the Republic, and, in three late works, the Sophist, Statesman, and Laws, establishes “play” (paidia) as the new overarching category set above all forms of what we today name “art”: music, poetry, theater, sculpture, painting, and so forth. His definition of “play” in all these texts is “that which is for the sake of pleasure alone”. What may be most remarkable about this definition is that mimesis is absent, and, in fact, not essential to the new category at all. Plato was not the first to associate play with art. Long before Plato, yet continuing steadily up to Plato’s day, “play” was a term that regularly denoted activities like music, dancing, choral performances, and, by extension, theater. Regarding music, Apollo in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo performs on the kithara amidst the other gods, and this act of musical performance is described as “playing” (paizonta). 22 Pan in Aristophanes’ Frogs is similarly described as “playing” when he performs on his panpipes (paizōn).23 In Euripides’ Bacchae there are the “melodies” (paigmata) of an aulos,24 and Stesichorus similarly mentions that Apollo loves “paigmosunai and songs” 25. The fourth-century Ephippus also appears to be referring to songs or melodies when he uses the more familiar diminutive of paigma, paignion.26 Along with music, dancing was also a common denotation of paizō: in the Odyssey, the house resounds with the “feet of men and women dancing (paizontōn)” (Od. 23.146–7), while, in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Ares and Hermes “dance” together (paizousi, 200–1).27 The eighth-­ century Dipylon vase, one of the earliest surviving examples of Greek alphabetic writing, bears the following verse inscription about “dancing”: Cf., e.g., the front-cover jackets of Guyer 2014: “Aesthetics began with Aristotle’s defense of the cognitive value of tragedy in response to Plato’s famous attack on the arts in The Republic, and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience have been central to the field ever since.” Cf. Freeland (1992) 111: “It is well known that one of Aristotle’s aims in the Poetics was to defend tragedy against Plato’s moral critique in Republic X.” Cf. Ford (2002) 95–6 and Halliwell (2002) 178. 22 Hom. Hym. Apoll. 206: υἷα φίλον παίζοντα μετ᾽ ἀθανάτοις θεοῖσι. 23 Ar. Frogs 230: καὶ κεροβάτας Πὰν ὁ καλαμόφθογγα παίζων. 24 Eur. Bacch. 160–5: λωτὸς ὅταν εὐκέλαδος / ἱερὸς ἱερὰ παίγματα βρέμῃ σύνοχα / φοιτάσιν εἰς ὄρος εἰς ὄρος. Dodds (1944) ad 152–69 translates paigmata as “music” (“sweet and holy music of the pipe”), Kovacs (2003) as “songs”; Roux (1972) ad 160–9 writes: “Παίγματα: les ‘jeux’ d’un instrument de musique, d’où les ‘morceaux joués’”; cf. Λύδια παίγματα λύρας, CA 37.15, Hedylus 10.7 GP, Polyb. 16.21.12. 25 PMG 232: παιγμοσύνας φιλεῖ μολπάς τ᾽ Ἀπόλλων, / κήδεα δὲ στοναχάς τ᾽ Ἀίδας ἔλαχε. 26 Ephippus fr. 7 KA κοινωνεῖ γάρ, ὦ μειράκιον, ἡ / ἐν τοῖσιν αὐλοῖς μουσικὴ κἀν τῇ λύρᾳ / τοῖς ἡμετέροισι παιγνίοις· ὅταν γὰρ εὖ / συναρμόσῃ τις τοῖς συνοῦσι τὸν τρόπον, / τόθ’ ἡ μεγίστη τέρψις ἐξευρίσκεται. 27 While Apollo engages in his own form of “playing” (see above note). 21

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“Whoever among the present dancers dances the best [will win the cup].”28 The verb for “dancing” in this inscription is paizō. Similarly, the dancers of a Hesiodic fragment are described as “lovers of the paigma (dance)”, while, in Homer, dance itself is similarly described as paigmaloving.29 Later, in Euripides’ Bacchae, the chorus describe their desire to dance as a fawn “playing in the verdant pleasures of a meadow (empaizousa)”—a verb that describes not just the fawn’s activity but the chorus’ as well.30 Both music and dance are thus covered by this term “play”: as an activity it is paizō, and as an instance or product of that activity it is paigma, or the diminutive paignion. Most of all, however, it is in the union of these two—both singing and dancing—that paizō is most often used, not least because this combined activity of singing and dancing typifies the traditional Greek chorus. In the Hesiodic Shield, for example, choruses follow a wedding procession and “play”—that is, “sing and dance” or “perform” (paizontes)—while, a few lines down, young men are described as “playing/performing in dance and song” (paizontes).31 Pindar similarly speaks of the choral dancing and singing in Olympian 1 as “playing”,32 and it is in this tradition that members of dramatic choruses describe their own activity of singing and dancing as “playing”. The chorus at the end of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae tell the audience, “we’ve played enough, and so it’s time to go…”, and earlier in the comedy they strike up a song with “Let’s play”.33 In Frogs, “play” repeatedly occurs in the chorus’ descriptions of their dancing and singing: the chorus describes their activity as “playing and dancing”, and, when Dionysus, a few lines down, expresses his wish to join in the chorus, paizō covers that combination of song and dance.34 CEG I 432.1: hὸς νῦν ὀρχεστôν πάντον ἀταλότατα παίζει… [Hes.] fr. 10a.19 MW: φιλοπαίγμονες ὀρχηστῆρες. Hom Od. 23.134: φιλοπαίγμονος ὀρχηθμοῖο. Cf. Pl. Laws 7.796b and Xen. Symp. 9.2. 30 Eur. Bacch. 866–7: ὡς νεβρὸς χλοεραῖς ἐμπαίζουσα λείμακος ἡδοναῖς. 31 Hes. Scut. 277–9: τῇσιν δὲ χοροὶ παίζοντες ἕποντο… (Most 2007, ad loc.: “Performing choruses ­followed them”); Hes. Scut. 281–4: νέοι κώμαζον ὑπ᾽ αὐλοῦ, τοί γε μὲν αὖ παίζοντες ὑπ᾽ ὀρχηθμῷ καὶ ἀοιδῇ… (Most 2007, ad loc.: “Young men were carousing, accompanied by a pipe, some performing in dance and song…”). 32 Pind. Ol. 1.16–7: οἷα παίζομεν φίλαν | ἄνδρες ἀμφὶ θαμὰ τράπεζαν. 33 Ar. Thesmo. 1227–8: ἀλλὰ πέπαισται μετρίως ἡμῖν·| ὥσθ᾽ ὥρα δή᾽στι βαδίζειν (cf. Pl. Phdr. 278b: πεπαίσθω μετρίως ἡμῖν τὰ περὶ λόγων). Ar. Thesmo. 947: παίσωμεν (cf. 795, 983). 34 Ar. Frogs 388: παῖσαί τε καὶ χορεῦσαι; 415: παίζων χορεύειν βούλομαι. See Dover (1993) 57–9 for a list of paiz- words in Frogs. For further examples of paiz- meaning “dance” elsewhere, see Autocr. fr. 1 KA (with Orth 2014, 144 ad loc.), Ar. Peace 816–17 (Olson 1998) ad loc. glosses “‘Join me in celebrating this festival’, i.e. ‘in my dancing’”; cf. Birds 669), Plut. Sol. 8.5 (παίζειν καὶ χορεύειν), and Mul. virt. 249d with Calame (1977) 165. 28

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When considered in this way, “play” appears to cover, as both verb and noun, a similar range of pursuits to those that the word mousikē covers: as has been noticed before, mousikē tends to include singing, dancing, and, by extension, the poetry and dramas involved in such performances, but does not cover visual arts, like sculpture and painting.35 This, on the whole, holds true for “play” as well; yet, in the fourth century, as has been seen, perhaps even already in the late fifth, there is an apparent expansion of “play” into the realm of the visual arts as well.36 The extension would seem to be a natural one: “play” often includes physical objects—that is, “toys” or “playthings” (athurmata, paignia)— so it is not a far step for one to “delight” in physical objects like sculptures and paintings.37 Although paigma or the diminutive paignion tend to denote more abstract instantiations, like “dance (n.)”, “song”, “theatrical play”, or “piece of writing”, the Stranger of Plato’s Statesman may be prima facie evidence that paignion was being used as a term for paintings and sculptures, at least inasmuch as these too were considered to be pleasure-objects.38 Plato’s turn to play in his later writings may thus not be particularly innovative considering this long history. If anything, mimesis was his radical addition to the vocabulary of ancient aesthetics, as has often been noted.39 Play, by contrast, may be viewed as a return to tradition: as so often in his writings, Plato takes the intuitions inherent in the Greek spoken around him—for example, words like “beauty” (to kalon), “justice” (to dikaion), or “play” (paidia)—and articulates these intuitions in new and surprising ways. Play becomes his new category for all art because, in some sense, art had always been thought of as play.

Cf. Ford (2002) 94. Thus the necessary but awkward phrasing of Pol. 288c regarding “the mimēmata which partake in painting and mousikē”. Pl. Pol. 288c, Laws 10.889c–d, with Gundert (1965) 210. Cf. Plut. Advers. Colot. 1123c. 37 For discussion of athurmata and paignia, see Chapter 4. 38 For paigma as dance, cf. the term philopaigmones (“lovers of the paigma/dance”) at [Hes.] fr. 10a.19 MW and Hom Od. 23.134, discussed above. For paigma as song, cf. Eur. Bacch. 160–5, Ephippus fr. 7 KA, and Stesich. PMG 232, discussed above. For paignia as theatrical performances, cf. Euphro fr. 1.35 KA, Com. Adesp. 925 KA (= Suet. Aug. 99.1), Pl. Laws 7.816e, Dioscorides 21 GP, Alex. In Arist. Metaph. Comm. 18.18 Hayduck, Ath. 14.621d. For paignia as a type of “non-serious” (i.e., “just entertainment”, “just for fun”) writing, cf. Gorg. Hel. 21, Alcimus Hist. Sikelika, fr. 1 FGrH 560 (=Athen. 7.322a), Leonides (AP 6.322); paignia are also attributed to Crates the Theban, Aratus, Philetas, and others: see Chapter 8, 200–201, for discussion. 39 Cf. Ford (2002) 95, with further references at 95 n. 7. 35

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Introduction

Chapter-by-Chapter Overview of the Book If pleasure is the cause, not the result, of the actions and objects of play, how exactly does this play-pleasure arise in the first place? This is the question of Chapter 1, which investigates the psycho-physiology lying behind “play” (paizō) and its etymological root, “child” (pais). It has become a truism that paizō means “to behave like a child” or perform “the spirit of childhood”, but what exactly do these latter terms mean?40 I explore this childish mode of being as perceived by various authors, such as Diogenes of Apollonia, Plato, Aristotle, Chrysippus, and anonymous medical writers. From Homer onward children are described as intellectually inferior to adults, and, at least from the time of Heraclitus, this intellectual inferiority is related to the decreased cognitive capabilities that adults experience during intoxication. But this cognitive incapacity has a positive flipside: for both children and intoxicated adults there is a physiological state of heightened pleasure. As Aristotle says, the young share the condition of the intoxicated as part of “their nature”.41 Deferral of pleasure for the sake of some longer-term goal— the act of reason par excellence—becomes impossible, and all that is functionally left for both groups is enjoyment and the acting out of that enjoyment. This heightened state of pleasure—one which motivates certain actions, but is not necessarily caused by those actions—offers the central clue about play’s physiological origins; after all, the verb that regularly characterizes the activities of both children and intoxicated adults is “play” (paizō). In Chapter 2, “Why Plato Needs Play”, it is noticed that in three late works, Plato establishes play as the new overarching category encompassing poetry, music, sculpture, painting, theater, and other forms of what we today categorize as “art”. What does Plato mean by “play” and how does this differ from his better-known conception of “mimesis”? Although moderns, especially since Darwin, tend to think of play as necessarily mimetic, Plato clearly disagrees; play, as he defines it, is that which is “for pleasure alone”, and mimesis occupies no place in his definition at all. By “pleasure alone” he seems to mean that unlike eating, drinking, and sex, which are all processes accompanied by pleasure, play is “only” pleasure, “just” pleasure, much in line with the subjective pleasure-models developed in Chapter 1. Plato is thus not simply reshuffling Beekes (2010) 1143 s.v. pais, Halliwell (2008) 20, respectively. Arist. Rh. 2.12, 1389a18–19: ὥσπερ γὰρ οἱ οἰνωμένοι, οὕτω διάθερμοί εἰσιν οἱ νέοι ὑπὸ τῆς φύσεως. See Chapter 1 for discussion.

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Chapter-by-Chapter Overview of the Book

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terms in this move from mimesis to play. The new concept allows him to achieve something which eluded him in the Republic: an explanation of why mimetic works of art should be pleasurable at all. In Chapter 3, “Plato’s Play and the Tragic Paradox”, I explore the significance of Plato’s new model in terms of the so-called tragic paradox, which asks, roughly: why do we enjoy watching suffering on the tragic stage, but become upset when we see actual suffering in everyday life? Plato has trouble with this problem in the Republic, where he attempts to distinguish actual grief from the grief felt in the theater, but he approaches the problem from a new angle later in the Philebus, where he discusses mixed emotions. Plato draws a distinction in this passage between the negative feelings we feel when we wish someone ill in real life—the emotion is phthonos, often translated as “envy” or “malice”— and the form this emotion takes when we watch a comedy. Although phthonos seems to be present when we watch a comedy—we want the character to slip on the banana peel, we want the character to fall down the stairs—it is somehow mixed with enjoyment, and he calls this mixture “playful phthonos” (paidikos phthonos). In the theater, the reason why the spectators enjoy the spectacle of suffering is not that there is something inherently pleasurable in seeing someone suffer, but because the spectators are sitting there “playing” along with the actors, and this play is pleasurable. The mixture of pleasurable and painful feelings under discussion, he explains, applies not only to phthonos but to grief, anger, and the rest of the emotions that arise in the theater and in life. The next stop in the story of play and aesthetics is Plato’s student, Aristotle, but, before considering his rather adamant rejection of play directly, I deal with a question that is pressing after Chapter 3: if play can make anything into a pleasure-object what role is left for the objects themselves, whether they be toys or traditional objects of art? I address this question in Chapter 4, “What Do Pleasure-Objects Do? An Inquiry into Toys”, where I study the concrete realia of ancient play—the knucklebones, dolls, dice, yo-yos, wind-up toys, and so forth—via both literary and archaeological evidence. The fact that the Greek words for “toy”— athurma and paignion—regularly denote jewelry, baubles, trinkets, and other such sparkling items lends support to the overarching thesis of this book: just as the verb paizō can denote “delight”, under which the English “play” might be thought of as a subcategory, so too paignia chiefly denotes “pleasure-objects”, under which the English “toys” can be thought of as a subcategory. But this poses problems even while it lends support. Considering that play is typically omnivorous—a player can

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Introduction

play with anything (sticks, rocks, potsherds)—what is the nature of this more limited set of objects, namely “toys”? If the pleasures of play are self-emanating, how do these special objects come to be recognized as more pleasurable than everyday objects, as if they themselves were the sources of pleasure? These are some of the questions I ask in this chapter. In Chapter 5, “Aristotle’s Demotion of Play”, I return to the historical narrative, and consider Aristotle’s rejection of play, not only with regard to aesthetic questions but, more prominently, with regard to his conception of the best life, or what he calls eudaimonia. Although the aesthetic questions are the main focus of this book, it must first be understood why Aristotle demotes play in the way he does, and he discusses these reasons elsewhere in his philosophy, especially in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. Remarkably, Aristotle, like Plato and others before him, treats the pleasures of play as self-emanating and intrinsically pleasurable. But, rather than conceiving this intrinsic pleasure as an overflow of pleasurable feeling, he reformulates play as a form of “relaxation” (anesis). Crucially, this removes any notion of goal-oriented action for play, and this is his coup de grâce for play, making it ultimately irrelevant for him in matters of real importance. This demotion also explains why play can claim only a marginal space in Aristotle’s aesthetic thought. If Aristotle were to identify the pleasures of art with the pleasures of play, art too would be dragged down into the realms of the frivolous. For this reason, he must find another explanation for art’s pleasures. This is the subject of Chapter 6, “Play vs. Mimesis in Aristotle’s Aesthetics”. Scholars may dispute the significance of mimesis for Aristotle’s ideas about art, but the key point I focus on in this chapter is his notion of mimetic “learning”. If it is possible to “learn” from any sort of mimesis—not just paintings and sculptures but maps and medical models—and that “learning” is the source of mimetic pleasure, what separates these non-artistic mimēseis (maps, medical models) from the artistic ones (paintings, sculptures)? There is no easy way for Aristotle to make this distinction, and this may help to explain why Plato, who also recognized the intrinsic pleasures of learning, sought another pleasure source. As if lending support to Plato’s later views on play, those scholars who wish to make mimesis the centerpiece of Aristotle’s aesthetics often have a way of smuggling play back into the discussion. The last two chapters are devoted to play’s opposite, the “serious”. In Chapter 7, “Serious Play as Goal-Oriented Play”, I ask what the word “serious” (spoudaios) means and how exactly it is opposed to play (paidia). If play is for immediate pleasure, and the serious defers that pleasure for the sake of longer-term goals, how is it possible for there to



Chapter-by-Chapter Overview of the Book

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be something like “serious play”, a phenomenon so often remarked upon by play theorists and regularly attested in ancient Greek? I argue that serious play is goal-oriented play, but with significant qualifications regarding what a “goal” might mean for activities where pleasure is available at each and every moment. Passages studied include Parysatis’ dice-game in Plutarch’s Life of Artarxerxes and Cyrus’ king-game in the first book of Herodotus’ Histories. These players are “serious” inasmuch as they are focused on the goals and rules of their game. As such, at the end, I suggest that more- and less-serious play might be articulated in terms of tragedy and comedy: in tragic play, rules and goals persist, while, in comic play, they are erased and recreated with each passing fancy.42 Sometimes, however, “serious” (spoudaios) is used more as a term of evaluation than a description of some “goal-oriented” mood, and I study this evaluative sense of “serious” in Chapter 8. To say that a certain play or painting is “serious” art is often not the same thing as saying that tragedy is more “serious” than comedy. The former is an evaluation made from outside the act of play, the latter describes the goal-oriented or “serious” mode of engagement within the act of play (as argued in Chapter 7). But what is the connection between these two senses of “serious”? I argue that there is an unnoticed goal-oriented aspect that persists in the notion of “serious” even when it denotes “important”, “good”, or “of value”—and, further, that this temporal, goal-oriented structure underlies the very notion of value itself.43 To approach this idea, I consider visions of the Greek afterlife as an eternity of play, for example, that of a lost threnos of Pindar, the underworld in Aristophanes’ Frogs, and numerous Greek burials containing board-games, dice, and other such playthings. What is “serious” in premortem life does not remain constant for a timeless, postmortem world. The reason for this, I suggest, is that when “serious” is used as a term of evaluation, this evaluation occurs under the assumption of a projected future full of implicit goals. In the Conclusions to the book, “Toward a Pleasure-Model of Play”, I consider how the Greek notion of paidia might help resolve some knotty problems that often arise in modern theorizing about play. Play is often described as accompanied by pleasure or giving rise to pleasure, while, other times, pleasure is hardly mentioned at all. The Greek notion of paidia, however, suggests an alternative: play is a manifestation of pleasure itself, and for this reason there can be no moment during play without pleasure, since Cf. Kidd (2014) 116–17. As will be seen, the argument is deeply influenced by Scheffler 2013.

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pleasure is its defining feature. Putting paidia into dialogue with modern play theorists like Huizinga, Caillois, Gadamer, and others, I consider both the strengths and weaknesses of such a pleasure-model of play.

A Final Example Since it may not yet be clear what the distinction between play and mimesis is for this book, it would be helpful to end with an example which begins to disentangle the two. Mimesis is so engrained in modern thinking about play—consider notions like “make-believe” or the ethological “play as practice” idea—that it is sometimes hard to imagine how play can resist mimesis’ pull.44 But it is worth hesitating before conflating the two, or concluding too quickly after reading ancient texts that Greek ideas about play map perfectly onto our own. In the first book of Plato’s Laws, usually considered his final work, there is an extended discussion of toys. As in the Republic, the education of citizens is central to the proposed political programs, but, in the Laws, a stronger focus is given to early education, especially that central activity of childhood, play.45 The star character of the Laws, the Athenian, says to his travel companions: I think that everyone on the course to becoming a good adult ought to practice right from childhood this very thing: namely, to play and to engage seriously with those parts of the real world fitting to each. That is, if someone is to become a good farmer or builder, the one should play at building some childish structure, the other at farming. And the caretaker of each of these children should provide them with little tools, mimēmata of real ones. In this way they ought to learn ahead of time as much as they ought to have learned, that is, a builder to measure or estimate and a warrior to ride horses, while playing, or doing some other such thing. He should try, through their play, to turn the pleasures and desires of the children in that direction which they should follow to reach their end.46 See below n. 51. For the role of play in the Laws, see Jouët-Pastré (2006) 63–6 for this passage; for comparative treatment of the Republic’s Kallipolis and the Laws’ Magnesia, see Prauscello (2014) 21–101. 46 Laws 1.643b–c: λέγω δή, καί φημι τὸν ὁτιοῦν ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα μέλλοντα ἔσεσθαι τοῦτο αὐτὸ ἐκ παίδων εὐθὺς μελετᾶν δεῖν, παίζοντά τε καὶ σπουδάζοντα ἐν τοῖς τοῦ πράγματος ἑκάστοις προσήκουσιν. οἷον τὸν μέλλοντα ἀγαθὸν ἔσεσθαι γεωργὸν ἢ τινα οἰκοδόμον, τὸν μὲν οἰκοδομοῦντά τι τῶν παιδείων οἰκοδομημάτων παίζειν χρή, τὸν δ᾽ αὖ γεωργοῦντα, καὶ ὄργανα ἑκατέρῳ σμικρά, τῶν ἀληθινῶν μιμήματα, παρασκευάζειν τὸν τρέφοντα αὐτῶν ἑκάτερον, καὶ δὴ καὶ τῶν μαθημάτων ὅσα ἀναγκαῖα προμεμαθηκέναι προμανθάνειν, οἷον τέκτονα μετρεῖν ἢ σταθμᾶσθαι καὶ πολεμικὸν ἱππεύειν παίζοντα ἢ τι τῶν τοιούτων ἄλλο ποιοῦντα, καὶ πειρᾶσθαι διὰ τῶν παιδιῶν ἐκεῖσε τρέπειν τὰς ἡδονὰς καὶ ἐπιθυμίας τῶν παίδων, οἷ ἀφικομένους αὐτοὺς δεῖ τέλος ἔχειν. 44 45



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Here, as in the Republic, the speaker is interested in starting the education of citizenship early: in the imagined scenario,47 caretakers need to manipulate children’s natural inclinations to play in such a way that prepares them for their future roles as farmers, builders, cavalry officers, and so forth. The trick is to give them the proper toys, he says, which he calls “small tools” (smikra organa), or, in apposition, mimēmata of real tools. For the builder one might imagine a hammer or measuring instrument, for the farmer a shovel or hoe, for the cavalry officer a hobby horse, and so forth. What makes these little hammers and shovels mimēmata, as opposed to real hammers and shovels? For one, they are smaller. Presumably, but not necessarily,48 they are smaller to scale: a full-size shovel would be too heavy for the child to wield, a full-size measuring stick would not allow the child the right agility for learning how to measure carefully, and so forth. But, when we turn to Plato’s usage of the term mimēma elsewhere, it becomes clear that smallness really has nothing to do with these little objects’ status as mimēmata. Pictures are mimēmata, words are mimēmata, songs are mimēmata; anything that stands in some relationship to reality but is itself to be distinguished from that reality—these are mimēmata.49 This would suggest that the smallness of these objects only incidentally make them feel less real, if one indeed feels this. It is not simply that these objects are small but that, by virtue of being small, they connote toys and playthings, and thus mimēmata of real objects.50 The little shovels are not “real” shovels, then, but “representations” of shovels, or one might say “pretend” shovels. They are meant to be played with, not used in any proper sense, and thus, for the Athenian, they are mimēmata. But, if this is so, it should be immediately noticed how different these mimēmata are from the more typical examples of mimēmata that Plato cites, like pictures, stories, and songs. One can view a picture, but one cannot enter it, or touch or taste the objects depicted there. If a landscape, for example, is depicted, most of the senses are barred from experiencing it, to say nothing of that immediate feeling of moving through space and time. But with the little toy mimēmata there are often As Rankin (1958) 65 notes, the passage is “is illustrative rather than legislative” —i.e., the real education the Athenian is interested is to come (643e) and the present passage is meant as an analogy to introduce it. See Frede (2010) 115 and Kurke (2013) 128–9. 48 E.g., toy carts, which are often considerably smaller than scale itself would demand: for depictions, see Beck (1975) 277–81. 49 For words as mimēmata, cf. Pl. Crat. 423b, 430a, Soph. 234b; for pictures, Pl. Crat. 430b, Soph. 235e, Pol. 300c, 306d; for songs, Laws 668b. 50 The verb “play” (paizō) appears three times in the passage (1.643b–d). 47

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Introduction

no such barriers, and the difference between actually digging with a shovel and playing with a shovel is comparatively insignificant. The shovel is still the shovel, the dirt is still the dirt—all the inputs of the five senses in fact are exactly the same—yet it is only a mimēma of a shovel, and thus only representative of the act of shoveling, not the real thing. This play-barrier is often imperceptible, but clearly a barrier is perceived or the Athenian would not have called these objects mimēmata in the first place. Usually the way that such play is described by modern theorists is something like an energetic activity practiced in a demarcated space where real-life consequences are suspended.51 But the Athenian’s conception of play is strikingly different: rather than focusing on barriers and removes from reality—which tends to dominate Plato’s mimesis discussions—the Athenian almost exclusively focuses on pleasure (hēdonē) as the defining characteristic of play.52 The primary goal in these play activities is not that the children learn and practice their future work as farmers and builders—these are mere externalities—but that their pleasures (hēdonas) and desires-for-pleasure (epithumias) be directed toward those activities of their future adult lives. The caretaker, he says, should try, “via the children’s play, to turn their pleasures and desires” in a certain direction. It is easy for a modern reader to import notions like “imagination” or “make-believe” into such ancient contexts of play, but there is little reason to assume that these children are “pretending” to shovel, “imagining” a “real” shovel, or involving themselves in some game of “make-believe”.53 Instead, the distinction for the Athenian seems to be that the children engage in such shoveling for the sake of pleasure alone, and this criterion is what distinguishes play-shoveling from “real” shoveling. Handling the shovel is pleasurable and enjoyable in itself, and nothing more than this pleasurable engagement is required for the Athenian’s act of “playing”. Cf. Groos (1899) for the influential play-as-practice theory, with Burghardt (2005) 3–43 for a survey of ethological positions; Huizinga (1971 [1938]) 10–14 for the “magic circle” (for the Sanskrit term, 57); and Caillois (2001 [1958]) 9, who often cites Groos, for play as “separate” and “circumscribed”. Spariosu (1982) 19 claims Plato conflates play with mimesis, thereby impacting “the next two thousand years”, but overlooks key passages, like those I will discuss in Chapter 2, which show this not to be the case (nor does ablabē mean “pastime”: 18); Sonderegger (2000) 12–14 uses the “Spielbegriff” to demonstrate the autonomy of art, noting influence from Huizinga and Caillois for this concept (8). 52 See nn. 54–6 below. Rep. 10.596d–e for the infamous mirror analogy, with Halliwell (2002) 133–47 for its defense. 53 The word phantasia—which leads to the Latin imaginatio, which leads to the English “imagination”—did not mean “imagination” for Plato and Aristotle. There was no such concept, and so one would do well to avoid it in descriptions of ancient play (cf. Rankin 1958, 64: “‘Imagination’ is probably too fluid and modern a word to be useful in discussing this passage [Laws 643].”). For the meaning of phantasia, see especially Nussbaum (1978) 221–69 and Caston 1996. 51



A Final Example



There is a good deal of evidence to support this reading: Plato not only frequently pairs “pleasure” and “play” together as if they were all but synonymous,54 but also, as I have already noted, explicitly uses “play” in his later works as a positive category to encompass both mimetic arts (e.g., paintings, poetry) and non-mimetic arts (e.g., decorations, designs).55 This would suggest that play is not essentially mimetic for Plato; instead, as he explicitly claims elsewhere, what is essential about play is that it is for “pleasure alone”.56 This raises a new sort of problem for mimesis. The traditional problem of mimesis has tended to be: how does one move from mimesis to pleasure? That is, why is it pleasurable, for example, to look at a painting of a farmhouse or watch a dramatic depiction of a homicide? The reason, some might say, is because “we infer that this is that” when engaging with a mimesis, and this learning is pleasurable.57 But the new problem the Athenian poses reverses the question: not “how does one move from mimesis to pleasure?” but “how does one move from pleasure to mimesis?”. More precisely: is it possible to explain something as complex as mimesis by means of pleasure alone? It may help to consider the Athenian’s child again: the child is provided a small shovel, and it engages in some sort of shoveling for no other reason than that shoveling’s immediate pleasure. The desires-forpleasure guiding this behavior—epithumiai in Greek—are immediate, not long term. As Lorenz has argued in his study of epithumia, there is no means–end reasoning involved with these irrational desires (epithumiai), and it is primarily in this sense that the epithumiai are said to be “irrational”.58 A child sees a shiny object and grabs it for its immediate pleasure, not as a means to some future good or deferred long-term pleasure.59 Similarly, one might say that play-shoveling or pleasure-­ shoveling is not engaged in for the sake of some future goal—for Cf. Timaeus 26b–c (“pleasure and play”, ἡδονῆς καὶ παιδιᾶς), Critias 115b (“for the sake of pleasure and play”, παιδιᾶς τε ὃς ἕνεκα ἡδονῆς), and Laws 1.635b (“pleasures and plays”, ἡδονῶν καὶ παιδιῶν), 7.819b (“both play and pleasure”, παιδιᾶς τε καὶ ἡδονῆς). 55 See above, and Chapter 2. 56 Cf. Statesman 288c, where the category “plaything” (paignion), which encompasses both mimetic and non-mimetic art forms, is defined as “for our pleasures alone” (πρὸς τὰς ἡδονὰς μόνον ἡμῶν); cf. Laws 2.667e, discussed in Chapter 2. 57 Poet. 4.1448b15–17. For this highly contentious passage and the meaning of “learning”, see Chapter 6. 58 Lorenz (2006) 11, 32–34. 59 Cf. Baudelaire’s “Philosophy of Toys” (1995 [1863]) 198–9, with Payne 2011 for Callimachean applications. 54

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Introduction

example, a ditch for the garden—but rather because of its immediate pleasure: it is pleasurable to handle the shovel and pleasurable to be engaging in this act of quasi-shoveling. To actually dig a ditch, however, appears to require something more than that draw of immediate pleasure. Whether this is because the bulk of ditch digging is actually a painful chore or because such activities require careful planning, actual goal-oriented digging would seem to compel the digger to endure whatever present pains are at hand (and to defer whatever pleasures are beckoning from elsewhere) for the sake of that future goal. Thus, what emerges side by side are two similar, yet markedly different activities: actual, “serious” digging, on the one hand, and pleasurable, “play”-digging, on the other hand. In play-digging the child follows its pleasure, digging now here, now there, filling in the hole it just dug, and so forth. Most importantly of all, the child quits digging whenever the digging stops being immediately pleasurable. Actual digging, on the other hand, defers that immediate pleasure for some future goal (e.g., the ditch), and is no more connected to pleasure than the “serious” look on the digger’s face.60 If this is what the Athenian has in mind regarding the pleasure of play, a certain mimesis appears to emerge even though no mimesis is intended. Although the child is not intentionally imitating or representing “real” shoveling, its action nevertheless stands in some relationship to “real” shoveling, and so—especially from the adult perspective—can be claimed as a mimesis of real shoveling. Similarly, the objects involved in these two actions cannot help but mirror each other: in “real” shoveling, where the action is engaged in for the sake of some deferred end, the shovel becomes an object in service of that end: it is a tool to be used. In playshoveling, where the action itself is immediately pleasurable, the shovel becomes a pleasure-object, which is to say, a toy. Although these two objects and two acts look almost exactly alike—the toy shovel looks like a real shovel, only smaller, and real shoveling is all but indistinguishable from play-shoveling—to the Athenian they involve different intentions, different experiences, and completely different psychological frameworks lying behind those intentions and experiences. The play shovel is primarily an object of pleasure and desire-for-that-pleasure (epithumia), whereas the real shovel, one might say, even if it is a small one, is simply a shovel, without any special purchase on pleasure at all. For consideration of the term “serious” (spoudaios), see Chapter 7.

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A Final Example

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It would thus seem that it is possible not only to move from mimesis to pleasure, as Aristotle and later theorists of the mimetic school do, but also, oddly enough, to move from pleasure to mimesis. Play conceptually connects the two. How both the creation and reception of toys, games, and art can be conceived not as catalysts for pleasure but as products of this pleasure-mode called play is the main theoretical work of this book. It is a lost chapter of ancient aesthetics, but, as I hope to show, one worthy of serious attention.

chapter 1

The Pais of Paizō: Children, Intoxication, and Play in Ancient Psycho-physiology

In most cultures the word “play” has some connotation of children and childhood, if only because this is what children are known to do, or because the brightest moments of play are from that period of life.1 But no language conveys this connection so vividly as Greek, where the verb “to play” (paizō) is rooted in the noun “child” (pais): one might imagine a similar English word for “to play” such as “to child-ize” or “to child-ate”. This does not mean that the word was restricted to children; paizō was a word for adult recreation no less than the English “play”. But the connection between “child” and “play” is simply more overt for Greek than for many other languages. This makes the question too more overt: what is the relationship between the child and this activity or range of activities described as “play”? Etymologists suggest the verb must originally have denoted something like “to behave like a child” or to perform “the spirit of childhood”, but, like so many definitions, one then wishes to know the definitions of the defining words.2 What does it mean to “behave like a child”? And what, exactly, is the “spirit of childhood”? Such notions may be recognizable and intuitive, but, as with play, it is often hard to articulate just what one is recognizing. For associations between play and children, cf. Freud (1921) 10–14 (influenced by Pfeifer 1919), Piaget (1999 [1945]) (who treats play and imitation separately), Hartley, Goldenson, and Frank. 1952, Rosenthal (1975) 13, Power 2000, and Burghardt (2005) 66–8. For various “play” words across languages and their etymologies, see Huizinga (1971 [1938]) 28–45. 2 For the pais of Greek paizō, see Beekes (2010) 1143 (παίζω…“to behave like a child”); cf. Chantraine 1999, Frisk (1960–70) s.v. pais, Gundert (1966) 13 (“das Tun des Kindes, des pais”), Burkert (2003) 96 (“eine Erweiterung von pais”), and Halliwell (2008) 20 (“performing the spirit of childhood, so to speak, rather than being a child”). Meerwaldt (1928) 160–5 rightly rejects the idea of “imitation” at the root of -izō verbs, but overextends the original meaning of paizō to cover all of a child’s actions. The two central passages for his argument, Pl. Gorg. 485b and Theoph. Char. 5.5, are misunderstood (164–5): for Gorg. 485b the subsequent line rejects his meaning (ἢ παίζοντα ὁρᾷ), while his interpretation of Theoph. Char. 5.5 is a stretch; cf. Diggle (2004) 230. 1



The Pais of  Paizō 

21

The best way to approach such questions is by considering the explanations on offer by those ancient writers who also wished to grasp the characteristic psychological differences between children and adults. From Homer onward there is general agreement that the crucial distinction between children and adults is one of rationality: children are simply unable to engage in the sort of reasoning that adults engage in, and so they are left with a reality of immediate presentations. But a persistent motif runs through these various discussions of child psychology, namely the association made between children and intoxicated adults. When adults are intoxicated, their rational capacities are temporarily diminished in much the same way that children’s rational capacities are diminished. As Aristotle puts it, the young share the condition of the intoxicated as part of “their nature”.3 Mental incapacity is prominent in this shared condition, but there is something more to it: the related shared feature seems to be a state of heightened pleasure. It is enjoyable to be intoxicated much in the same way that it is enjoyable to be a child, as if the “spirit of childhood” were little more than a state of pleasurable intoxication. Whether this state of heightened pleasure gives rise to mental ­incapacity—that is, reality presents itself as so pleasurable that it is impossible to defer that pleasure for some further end—or the mental incapacity gives rise to the state of heightened pleasure—that is, the inability to engage in means–end reasoning creates a reality that is reduced to the immediate pleasures of the moment—is ambiguous. But the link made between mental incapacity and heightened pleasure helps to develop the idea of paidia presented in the Introduction to this book. There I argued that paidia (the activity “play”) was a manifestation of an internal state (paidia in the sense of “joy” and “delight”). In the overflow of pleasure, I suggested, there is an urge to sing, dance, and “play”. In this chapter, we find something like a psycho-physiological basis for this condition: due to the heightened pleasure and the simultaneous inability to defer that pleasure for some further end (the act of reason par excellence), there is little left for the child or the intoxicated adult to do but “play”. And this, of course, is what both groups are so often described as doing.4 Arist. Rh. 2.12, 1389a18–19: ὥσπερ γὰρ οἱ οἰνωμένοι, οὕτω διάθερμοί εἰσιν οἱ νέοι ὑπὸ τῆς φύσεως. For the “child playing” (pais paiz-), cf. Alcman fr. 58 Page (with restoration), Heracl. fr. 52 DK, and Emped. fr. 100.8–9 DK. For play as a central activity of the symposium, see Xen. Symp. 1.1, 2.26.7; Amphis, fr. 8 KA = Ath. 8.336c, Hermipp. Theoi fr. 24 KA; Ion Chi. 27.7 IEG; Pind. Ol. 1.16–17; Theog. 567–70; Pl. Phdr. 276d; cf. Pl. Laws 7.803d–e, Od. 8.251–3; Pl. Euthyd. 277d; Ps.-Pl. Minos 320a; Hedylus 5 GP; for “Paikhnios” (playful) depicted at a sympotic scene, see the Louvre “Komios” krater (CA 3004). Cf. Halliwell (2008) 20 n. 45 and Sauvé Meyer (2015) ad 635b: “drinking party (labeled paidia at 666b5, 671e5–6)”.

3

4

22

The Pais of  Paizō

I begin the overview with a brief gesture toward Homer and archaic poetry, but begin the investigation in earnest with the scientists and philosophers of the fifth century. These writers, importantly, do not simply accept the generally assumed notion that children are lacking in rationality but attempt to discover reasons for this state of affairs. The late sixth-/ early fifth-century Heraclitus, the later fifth-century Diogenes of Apollonia, and certain anonymous medical writers of the classical period are the first step. They provide physiological explanations for children’s mental incapacities and connect their “moist” physiology to the psychic state of the intoxicated. Although these texts are fragmentary there is nothing to suggest that there was not a fully formed psycho-physiology of the child already in the fifth century. In the fourth century many of these themes are picked up and developed by Plato, Aristotle, and—so it seems from the fragments—the famous doctor Mnesitheus of Athens. Children and the intoxicated share a sort of “heat”, and this heat itself is pleasurable even if the pleasurable fire causes its subjects to move in sporadic and irrational ways. At the end of the chapter, I turn to early Stoic views on children and notice some particular differences from the foregoing treatments; for one, these children are not thought to be pursuing pleasure at all. Yet, despite the mental gymnastics required for redescribing the psychology of children without recourse to pleasure terms, there is nevertheless a feature that is recognizable from the tradition: a certain cheerful mood manifests itself in a rather play-like activity. All these discussions on child psychology and child psycho-physiology are suggestive and connective, but it is important not to oppress this rich material with too strong of an argument. Instead, the preference here is to allow as much as possible this material to speak for itself, with particular treatments sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing with other treatments. That said, the chapter does not aim to provide an exhaustive treatment of ancient child psychology and psycho-physiology, since, for the book as a whole, it is important to keep this constellation of ideas— children, intoxication, and play—at the forefront of the discussion. As much as possible, however, I will include the less applicable (though fascinating) elements of the subject—for example, Aristotle’s discussions of children as being “dwarf-like” and the importance of this idea for his psycho-physiology in general—in the footnotes. Finally, a brief word about terminology. In what follows, I will generally be translating “child” for words such as pais and paidion and “youth” for words such as neos and neotēs. As in English, sometimes children are “youths” and sometimes “youths” are older children, and further distinctions



Archaic and Fifth-Century Child Psycho-physiology

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are sometimes drawn.5 I will draw these distinctions when possible, but it must be kept in mind that age groups are notoriously ambiguous in Greek, even in medical texts.6 More importantly, however, the interest in this chapter regarding the meaning of “child” has more to do with its differential from the concept of the normative adult than with specific age referents. As will be seen, Plato even refers to “youths” or “children” as those under the age of thirty. Yet, to discount such evidence as not really referring to a “child” but to an “adult” would not only overlook the actual word Plato uses and his reasons for doing so, but also miss his important contributions to the ongoing conversation about children and their difference.

Archaic and Fifth-Century Child Psycho-physiology In one of his discourses, the late first-/early second-century ce philosopher Epictetus considers the play of children as a quasi-model for adult action. His meditation may seem wistful and commonplace to a modern reader, but what is startling and unfamiliar is his passing explanation for why children engage in such play. The brief “because” (hypo) is easy to miss, but it betrays an assumption shared with much of the Greek thought of the previous centuries: Why should we make ourselves worse than children? Whenever they are left alone, what do they do? They take some potsherds and dirt and build some house or other; then they knock it down and again build another house. They are in this way never at a loss regarding how to spend their time. So am I going to sit here and cry if you sail off, since I’m left alone in such solitude? Won’t I have potsherds and dirt? You may say that those children do these things out of senselessness: but are we to be unfortunate because we are sensible?7 E.g., paidion can sometimes mean “little child”, as opposed to a pais: cf., e.g., Aristoph. Byz. fr. 38 and 41 Slater, Philo (reporting Hippocrates) On the Creation of the Cosmos According to Moses 105; but very often it simply means “child”, with the diminutive being all but redundant. Cf. Golden (2015) 10–19. 6 Cf. Hansen (2003) 190: “The lack of age-specific terminology for the young was as common a characteristic of earlier medical writers as it was of Attic tragedy and Homeric epic. Terminological precision seems not to have entered the discourse about children until the second century BC.” Cf. n. 20 for Zeuxis’ complaint about Hippocrates’ and Herophilus’ use of the word nēpios (cf. von Staden 1989, 436–7). Cf. Golden (2015) 12 (“Usage is thoroughly inconsistent”) and Bertier (1996) 2162–4. 7 Epict. Disc. 3.13.18–19: τί χείρονας ἑαυτοὺς ποιῶμεν τῶν παιδαρίων; ἅ τινα ὅταν ἀπολειφθῇ μόνα, τί ποιεῖ; ἄραντα ὀστράκια καὶ σποδὸν οἰκοδομεῖ τί ποτε, εἶτα καταστρέφει καὶ πάλιν ἄλλο οἰκοδομεῖ· καὶ οὕτως οὐδέποτε ἀπορεῖ διαγωγῆς. ἐγὼ οὖν, ἂν πλεύσητε ὑμεῖς, μέλλω καθήμενος κλαίειν ὅτι μόνος ἀπελείφθην καὶ ἔρημος οὕτως; οὐκ ὀστράκια ἕξω, οὐ σποδόν; ἀλλ’ ἐκεῖνα ὑπ’ ἀφροσύνης ταῦτα ποιεῖ, ἡμεῖς δ’ ὑπὸ φρονήσεως δυστυχοῦμεν. 5

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The key line of this passage is the imagined rejoinder of Epictetus’ interlocutor:8 children play because of a certain “senselessness” or “foolishness” (aphrosynē). Although much of this passage is geared rhetorically toward reversing the expected adult–child hierarchy, the imagined objection is nevertheless one he expects to be on his audience’s lips, almost as a commonplace: children play because they are “without sense” (aphrones). What might Epictetus mean by this? Although it is possible to make mistakes or say inappropriate things out of “senselessness” (aphrosynē), it is surprising to find “senselessness” as the cause for child’s play. For one, it requires a dynamic activity to arise out of a certain lack: how can the absence of a mental capacity result in something like play? Further, this negativity seems to group play alongside more typical products of “senselessness”, like faulty actions, mistakes, and misunderstandings. It reminds of Aesop, who, when found playing with nuts as an adult, was derided as if he were insane; or Agesilaus, who, when caught as an adult playing a make-believe horse game, requested that the aberrant activity be kept secret.9 Epictetus’ causal connection between play and a child’s “senselessness” is a product of a long history, and in this section I will examine some of the first investigations into this alleged “senselessness”. These texts ask: what makes children different from adults? Why do they behave in the way that they do? And what is it to experience this non-normative-adult mode of behavior? Homeric and Hesiodic poetry already display a wellestablished sense of children’s lack of adult capacities, not only in the phrase “senseless child” (pais aphrōn) but very often in the word nēpios, which regularly means both “infant” and “fool.”10 Later lyric poetry shares much of the same vocabulary, as does fifth-century tragedy.11 But the first explicit inquiry into this general observation about the aphrosynē of children appears in the mid-fifth-century author Diogenes of Apollonia. According to Theophrastus, Diogenes explains the difference between children and adults in the following way: For ἀλλά as an imagined counter-argument, see Denniston (1975 [1934]) 8–9 s.v. ἀλλά I.3.iii. Phaedrus 3.14.1–3: quasi delirum risit; Plut. Ages. 25. For the concatenation of play and aberrant or “nonsensical” activities, see Kidd (2014) 43–51. 10 Cf. Il. 2.872–5, 9.439–41, 11.389, 16.46, 22.445; Od. 9.44, 13.237, 18.229–30, 19.19–20, 20.309–10; Hes. Op. 40, 131; with Garland (1990) 128, Edmunds 1990, Ingalls (1998) 17–21, and Hansen (2003) 190. 11 Cf. Simon. fr. 20.9 IEG, Pind. Pyth. 2.132 with Σ 132c2; for tragedy, Aesch. Pers. 782 (though, for the textual issue here, see Garvie 2009, 305); Soph. Ajax 552–3, OT 1510–11; Eur. Med. 47–8, Andr. 754–5, Tro. 749 with Sifakis (1979) 78; cf. Garland (1990) 127–9. 8

9



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Thinking, as was said, is by means of pure and dry air; for moisture blocks the mind. That’s why also during sleep and drunkenness and repletion there is less thinking; a sign that moisture takes away the mind is that the other animals have less understanding: for they breathe the air from the earth and take nourishment of a moister kind.12

The way this affects the mind of children, Theophrastus reports, logically follows: Children are unintelligent for the same reason: for they hold a great deal of moisture, with the result that it is not possible [for the air] to permeate the whole body, but it is separated off around the chest area. That’s why they are slow-witted and unintelligent.13

Exactly what age group Diogenes has in mind with “children” is less important than the gradualist picture that lies behind his thinking. Animals that live closer to the ground are less intelligent than those animals, humans, which stand upright further from the ground-level moisture. This is one of the observations that leads, or at least lends support to, his idea that the air itself is the substance of thinking, and humans are more intelligent by partaking of that upper, drier air. The gradual progress that a child makes in its growth is, in a sense, from lower animal to fully human, and its growth is simultaneously physical and mental. By virtue of that growth, as well as standing more and more upright, higher and higher into the drier air, the child partakes of a greater share of intelligence. As will be seen, Aristotle, working off roughly the same gradualist observations, offers a comparable theory as to why adult humans are more intelligent than children and non-human animals, but for now the key starting point is this word aphrōn. This is the same word, it will be recalled, that Epictetus uses centuries later to explain the cause of child’s play. But what does Diogenes mean by the word? Is it a lack of “sense”, an inability to reason, a difficulty formulating and attaining desires, or a weakness of perception? Laks translates the word as “without Theoph. Sens. 44 = Diogenes D44 LM = A19 DK: φρονεῖν δ᾽, ὥσπερ ἐλέχθη, τῷ ἀέρι καθαρῷ καὶ ξηρῷ· κωλύειν γὰρ τὴν ἰκμάδα τὸν νοῦν· διὸ καὶ ἐν τοῖς ὕπνοις καὶ ἐν ταῖς μέθαις καὶ ἐν ταῖς πλησμοναῖς ἧττον φρονεῖν· ἔτι δὲ ἡ ὑγρότης ἀφαιρεῖται τὸν νοῦν· σημεῖον δ᾽ ὅτι τὰ ἄλλα ζῷα χείρω τὴν διάνοιαν· διαπνεῖν τε γὰρ τὸν ἀπὸ τῆς γῆς ἀέρα καὶ τροφὴν ὑγροτέραν προσφέρεσθαι. For overviews of Diogenes, cf. Harris (1973) 20–8, Laks (1983) xix–xl (with the added English essay in the 2008 edition), Lloyd 2006, and Laks and Most (2016) vi.218–21. 13 Theoph. Sens. 45 = Diogenes D44 LM: ταὐτὸν δ᾽ αἴτιον εἶναι καὶ ὅτι τὰ παιδία ἄφρονα· πολὺ γὰρ ἔχειν τὸ ὑγρόν, ὥστε μὴ δύνασθαι διὰ παντὸς διιέναι τοῦ σώματος, ἀλλὰ ἐκκρίνεσθαι περὶ τὰ στήθη· διὸ νωθῆ τε εἶναι καὶ ἄφρονα… 12

26

The Pais of  Paizō

intelligence”14 while Stratton translates it as “witless” or lacking “understanding”,15 but it is often difficult to know precisely what range of cognitive processes are being included and excluded by such terms.16 One way to approach the question of the child’s “senselessness” is via Diogenes’ analogue, the intoxicated person (en tais mēthais). Intoxication causes the movement of air—which seems not just to allow cognitive functioning but just to be cognitive functioning17—to be impeded by moisture (ikmas).18 Perhaps when that air is impeded, thoughts do not fully form, intentions are forgotten, or “trains” of thought (to use our expression) become “lost”—or, as Diogenes might say, “blocked”. Whatever that impaired cognitive state is precisely, one can at least say that the intoxicated person’s temporary experience of this “senseless” state is that which the child experiences on a more permanent basis. This connection between the psychic state of the child and that of the intoxicated adult does not begin with Diogenes, but may already be found in Heraclitus’ writing some decades earlier. Here is one of Heraclitus’ fragments: “A man when he is drunk, stumbles, led by an unfledged child, not knowing where he’s going, and has a wet soul.”19 The drunk man and the “unfledged child” are going in the same direction, it seems, which is to say, in no particular direction at all. As with Diogenes, a certain element of moisture seems to be involved for Heraclitus: the intoxicated man is malfunctioning cognitively because his soul is simply too wet. This malfunctioning seems to involve something more than motor skills: as Heraclitus fr. 118 suggests, which claims that the dry soul is “wisest” and best,20 physical motion is only one aspect of the cognitively impaired “wet” soul. The intoxicated person is like the child not just in the motions of his body but in the motions of his mind: both are incapable of moving (or thinking) toward some deferred goal (ouk epaiōn Laks (1983) 111: “sans intelligence”; 122: “L’épithète νωθῆ, ajoutée à ἄφρονα dans le cas des enfants, montre que Diogène envisage une forme d’hébétude…”—from which children, unlike animals, will eventually emerge. 15 Stratton (1917) 105. 16 Cf. Hüffmeier 1961 for a study of the meaning of phronesis in so-called Hippocratic writers; see also Byl 2002. 17 Cf. Laks (1983) 121: “La section sur la pensée ajoute à la détermination générale, selon laquelle la pensée est due à l’air, la condition de la sécheresse.” 18 The word famously appears at Ar. Clouds 233. For the relationship between Diogenes and the “Socrates” of Clouds, cf. Dover (1968) ad 233, Laks (1983) 77, Byl 1994, Janko (1997) 69–70, and Fazzo 2009. 19 Heracl. fr. 117 DK: ἀνὴρ ὁκόταν μεθυσθῇ, ἄγεται ὑπὸ παιδὸς ἀνήβου σφαλλόμενος, οὐκ ἐπαΐων ὅκη βαίνει, ὑγρὴν τὴν ψυχὴν ἔχων. 20 Heracl. fr. 118 DK: αὔη ψυχὴ σοφωτάτη καὶ ἀρίστη. For the likely gloss ξηρή often found in quotations of this fragment, cf. Diels and Kranz I.177 ad loc. 14



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hokē bainei), but simply move, both mentally and physically.21 To what extent this Heraclitean psycho-physiology sheds light on the muchinterpreted fragment 52 DK (“a lifetime is a child playing, moving pieces in a board-game: the kingship is the child’s”) must be left as uncertain.22 In his report of Diogenes, Theophrastus proceeds with more information about children: And they are also passionate and generally capricious and flighty because a great deal of air moves from their little vessels. This is also the reason for their forgetfulness: because the air does not make its way through the entire body, it is not possible to put it together [i.e., comprehend, understand].23

There is some debate whether in the second sentence Diogenes is speaking of the forgetfulness of children or forgetfulness in general,24 but the first sentence at least continues some of the Heraclitean observations above. As Laks writes, after discussing the “intellectual slowness” of children, this passage considers “the excessive vivacity which is its counterpart”.25 It seems as if this “vivacity” arises out of an intellectual lack or the absence of a certain capacity, perhaps not unlike Epictetus’ notion of play arising out of a similar lack. But, if this physiological counterbalance is the cause of such vivacity, it is reinforced psychologically as well: the necessity of following the presentations of the moment rather than any long-term thinking guarantees the child’s “capricious” and “flighty” motions.26 Thus this “capricious” and “flighty” nature appears to be directly related to the sentence that follows about memory. As will be seen, The “mental” is no less “physical” for many ancient thinkers: so one can gloss “physical movements” here as “movements visible to others”, and “mental movements” as “movements invisible to others.” 22 Heracl. 52 DK: αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεσσεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη. Among the myriad interpretations, cf. Kahn (1979) 227–9, Wohlfahrt 1991, Kurke (1999) 263–5, and Halliwell (2008) 349– 50; Schädler (2008) 185–7 and Meerwaldt (1928) 162–3 have similar interpretations. 23 Theoph. Sens. 45 = D44 LM = A19 DK: ὀργίλα δὲ καὶ ὅλως ὀξύρροπα καὶ εὐμετάπτωτα διὰ τὸ ἐκ μικρῶν κινεῖσθαι τὸν ἀέρα πολύν· ὅπερ καὶ τῆς λήθης αἴτιον εἶναι· διὰ γὰρ τὸ μὴ ἰέναι διὰ παντὸς τοῦ σώματος οὐ δύνασθαι συνεῖναι. 24 The definite article can be read either way: Beare (1906) 259 and Laks (1983) 124 interpret it as referring to children (Laks: “L’insuffisance de la mémoire caractérise également l’enfance”) while Stratton (1917) 107 prefers a general article introducing the theme of memory in general. For the reasons Laks provides at 124, the former position is likely the correct one. 25 Laks (1983) 123: “Le paragraphe 45 considerè en effet, après la lenteur intellectuelle, la vivacité excessive qui en est la contrepartie.” He notes at 123 the antithesis of πολὺ τὸ ὑγρὸν regarding intelligence and πολὺς ὁ ἀήρ regarding their “excessive vivacity”, but it is also worth noting that Diogenes’ description of pleasure also involves πολὺς ὁ ἀήρ (Theoph. Sens. 43). 26 “Flighty” is Stratton’s 1917 translation ad loc. of εὐμετάπτωτα. 21

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weakness of memory in children is something that becomes of interest later for Aristotle, and Diogenes may be observing something similar here. Just as children are “capricious” and “flighty” because the air of thought is impeded in some way, so too memories have difficulty forming—almost “coming together”27—because some or all of a memory’s components become blocked in the moist passages. Although the relationship between the child’s forgetfulness and its “flighty” nature is not made explicit in Diogenes, or, at least, Theophrastus’ report of him, the two share the same physiological cause—namely the blocked passageways in the movement of air—and so appear to reinforce one another. This impression of almost incidental reinforcement may be intended, offering as it does a strong case for a purely physiological approach to the child’s psychological differences. Diogenes was not alone in this approach. His description of children shares many similarities to the late fifth-/early fourth-century medical text On Regimen 1 and his psychic “air” compares well with other texts of the period.28 All of which suggests that in the later fifth century there was a problem developing around the previously accepted fact of a child’s “senseless” nature. Why do children behave differently from adults? The obvious answer—and one that will become important for Plato—that they simply have not learned enough, either does not occur to writers like Diogenes or does not fully satisfy them as an explanation. Rather there are clear physiological limitations on the child—their excess of moisture and small passages, for example—that make it impossible for a child to function cognitively in the way an adult would. With time, almost inevitably through growth alone, it seems, Diogenes’ child will have access to new cognitive capabilities because it will be partaking in the drier air of the higher regions and this air will be able to move more easily through its mature, dry body. The child will have made the transition Note the συνεῖναι/συνιέναι verbal resonances in the passage. For Reg. 1, cf. Jones (1953 [1931]) xxxviii–xlviii, Joly (1984) 19–49, Byl 2002, and Jouanna 2007. Since humans and other animals essentially consist of water and fire for this author (Reg. 1.3.1–10), the growth and decay of a single life form are presented as the “give” and “take” of these two elements (Reg. 1.6.10 for his analogy of the saw); the human being is hottest and moistest nearest to birth (ὑγρότατα μὲν οὖν καὶ θερμότατα, ὅσα ἔγγιστα γενέσιος, 1.33). After discussing the various ages as the ebb and flow of heat and moisture, he proceeds to a lengthy treatment regarding the psycho-physiology of intelligence and other character traits in the same manner (cf. Lo Presti 2015 for discussion). For comparative treatments regarding the psychic properties of air, cf. Anaximenes fr. 1–3 DK, Xenophanes A1.27–8 DK, Emped. fr. 100 DK, Hipp. Morb. Sac. 4, 7, Flat. 4, with Thivel 2005, Lloyd 2006, and Frixione 2013.

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from something “senseless,” aphrōn, to something “sensible,” phronimos, to use Epictetus’ word.29 As has been seen, however, there are moments when this dry adult may return to something resembling that child’s psychological state, and this is the case with intoxication. Whether or not one accepts Laks’ interpretation of “vivacity” as a “counterpart” to “intellectual slowness”, the intoxicated adult provides something of a key to the question posed at the beginning of this section: how can aphrosynē be the cause of child’s play? As the rational capacities deteriorate and the soul becomes more “moist” through intoxication, the adult’s behavior begins to change: one thinks differently and acts differently, and, whether or not intoxication causes the adult to build little houses of potsherds, there is nevertheless a notable difference in speech and action. This adult does not simply become less of an adult through that cognitive limitation, but rather becomes more of something else, and this cognitive terrain is shared with the child. Although this psychic state can often be dynamic and productive, it nevertheless is essentially characterized by, and even thought to be effected by, a lack of a certain mental capacity (aphrosynē). If paizō is to inhabit some perceived mode of a child, this psychic state of suspended rationality adds some substance to that designated mode.

Plato’s Child Psychology In Plato’s Laws, his Athenian discusses the care and education of citizens beginning with their life in the womb and continuing on to their treatment in early infancy. Roughly by the age of three, he reckons, it is time for these children to socialize and play with each other. This play is part of their nature, he explains: “Play in its different forms arises naturally for young children, and whenever they come together they invent these games pretty much on their own.”30 The children are to be collected at a temple sanctuary—something like an ancient playground—and to be watched carefully by adults so that they do not misbehave.31 The play itself, however, is something more or less untaught at this stage. Like Cf. Laks (1983) 122: “[L]es enfants, dont la croissance s’accompagne précisément de la réduction progressive de l’humeur, encore prépondérante dans l’embryon, au profit des chairs fermes”, citing T17 = A27 DK. For comparable physiological changes as children grow, cf. Hipp. Aph. 1.14, Nat. Hom. 12, De san. tuenda 1.12 (= CMG V.4.2. 28.12); for further references and discussion, see Bertier (1996) 2164–6. 30 Laws 7.794a: παιδιαὶ δ᾽εἰσὶν τοῖς τηλικούτοις αὐτοφυεῖς τινες, ἃς ἐπειδὰν συνέλθωσιν αὐτοὶ σχεδὸν ἀνευρίσκουσι. 31 Ibid. 29

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some natural outgrowth or natural instinct, it simply arises by itself: it is what children do “by nature”. If it is natural for a child to play, the child has, on the other hand, considerable difficulty engaging in that opposite “serious” mode. The Athenian says: “Because the souls of the young are not able to bear the weight of the serious, [educational exercises] are called and made ‘games’ (paidiai) and ‘songs’.”32 A child is able to play a game naturally enough, but if this same activity were presented as important, educational, or “serious”, it seems that suddenly the activity would become not just difficult but “unbearable” (mē dunasthai pherein).33 Something in the child’s nature prohibits it from being able to engage seriously in the world, and this very thing seems to be what is causing it to play without ever being taught (autophuēs). What exactly is it about the child’s nature that makes the child behave in this way? The writers of the fifth century, as we have seen, characterized children by a certain lack—“senseless” (aphrones) was the word—and sought physiological reasons to explain that comparative “senselessness” (aphrosynē). However, one would expect Plato’s Socrates to avoid such physiological explanations: famously, in Phaedo, Socrates expresses his disappointment as a young man with this kind of thinking.34 Whereas Socrates wanted to know what that mechanism controlling the body was—namely mind (nous)—he could only find in Anaxagoras’ explanations of the controlling mechanism more “body”—that is, more discussions of “airs, aethers, and waters”.35 This is not the sort of psychology Socrates was interested in, and, for Plato, not the sort of psychology of his earlier writings. This is important when considering child Laws 2.659e: διὰ δὲ τὸ σπουδὴν μὴ δύνασθαι φέρειν τὰς τῶν νέων ψυχάς, παιδιαί τε καὶ ᾠδαὶ καλεῖσθαι καὶ πράττεσθαι. Cf. Jouët-Pastré (2006) 68: “Le nom même de παιδιαί renvoie à l’enfant, παῖς. Ces jeux sont un premier stade avant une pratique plus sérieuse capable de conduire à l’harmonie, de même que les mouvements du corps sont appelés ‘danse de ceux qui jouent (παιζόντων ὄρχησιν)’” at 673a. 33 This childish propensity toward play—and analogous difficulty with the serious—is long-lasting; one reason “youths” (i.e., under thirty) should not learn dialectic, Socrates explains at Rep. 7.539b, is that they treat it as a “game” without fully appreciating its serious nature. This mode opposed to the “serious” is so tightly bound with a certain conception of the “child” that Callicles insists that play is the exclusive domain of children (Gorg. 485b–c). Cf. Laws 3.685a (περὶ νόμων παίζοντας παιδιὰν πρεσβυτικὴν σώφρονα), 688b (ὡς παίζων), 690d (φαῖμεν ἂν…παίζοντες); 6.769a (ἡ πρεσβυτῶν ἔμφρων παιδιά), with Gundert (1965) 191, 216–20—described as a child’s activity at, e.g., Laws 4.712b1–2 (πειρώμεθα…καθάπερ παῖδες πρεσβῦται, πλάττειν τῷ λόγῳ τοὺς νόμους), and with England (1976 [1921]) ad loc.: “[Stallbaum] rightly explains the ‘childishness’ of the proposal to lie…in the make-believe that they are real lawgivers.” 34 Pl. Phaed. 98b–99b. 35 Ibid., 98c. 32



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psychology: the way a child’s soul functions need not require an investigation of underlying physiological causes if the soul, generally speaking, is an entity different in nature from the material body that for a time houses it.36 Yet even Plato, in his later texts, like Timaeus and Laws, begins to explore these physical underpinnings.37 The importance of this physiological turn in his thinking cannot be overstated: in the London medical papyrus of the second century ce, for example, Plato is the single most cited medical authority among a long list of ancient doctors.38 The psycho-physiology he turns to, at least with regard to children, is continuous with the fifth century: he too connects the psychic state of childhood with the psychic state of intoxication, and he articulates the relationship more precisely than any previous writer—at least, in the literature that survives. But, before examining this turn to physiology, it is worth considering some of his purely psychological descriptions of children in order to appreciate why Plato might have felt compelled to turn to psycho-physiology in the first place. One of Plato’s most memorable passages about children occurs in Gorgias, where Socrates explores the distinction between advising citizens along the lines of what is pleasant for them (pros kharin) as opposed to what is best (pros to beltiston). To illustrate the distinction, he imagines a doctor (iatros) and a candy-maker (opsopoios) squaring off before a jury of children. The candy-maker accuses the doctor in this way: Children! This man has done you all a great deal of personal harm, and he corrupts the youngest among you with his cutting and cauterizing, and drives you out of your mind with his dehumidifying and smothering, and gives you the most bitter drinks to drink, and forces you to be hungry and thirsty. Not like me who feasts you with lots of sweets of all kinds!39 For the immortality of the soul, key discussions are Phaed. 70c–77a, 78b–80b, 102a–107a; Rep. 10.608c–611a, Phdr. 245c–257a; Tim. 90a–d, Laws 10.893b–99d. Cf. Bostock (1986) 21–41, Robinson (1995) 125–31, and Miller 2015. 37 Cf. Tim. 42e–47e, 81e–86a. Cf. Ryle (1966) 14: “The Plato who compiled what is in large part a textbook for medical students has undergone a major conversion from the Plato who wrote the Phaedo and the Republic.” Some of the psycho-physiological Laws passages will be discussed below. 38 For overview of the Anonymus Londinensis, see Jones (2010 [1947]) 1–20. For Plato’s medical thought and its influence on later doctors, cf. Miller 1962, Tracy (1969) 119–56, Nutton (2004) 116–19, and van der Eijk (forthcoming). 39 Pl. Gorg. 521e–522a: ὦ παῖδες, πολλὰ ὑμᾶς καὶ κακὰ ὅδε εἴργασται ἀνὴρ καὶ αὐτούς, καὶ τοὺς νεωτάτους ὑμῶν διαφθείρει τέμνων τε καὶ κάων, καὶ ἰσχναίνων καὶ πνίγων ἀπορεῖν ποιεῖ, πικρότατα πώματα διδοὺς καὶ πεινῆν καὶ διψῆν ἀναγκάζων, οὐχ ὥσπερ ἐγὼ πολλὰ καὶ ἡδέα καὶ παντοδαπὰ ἠὐώχουν ὑμᾶς. 36

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Socrates wonders what the doctor could possibly say in response to this accusation. To speak the truth (alētheia) and explain that everything had been done hygienically and for the sake of their good health (hygieinōs) would bring about only the greatest outcry among the young jurors. Like all illustrative analogies, the point is easy to grasp and rarely requires much comment.40 But the oppositions set up here—between, for example, what is pleasant and what is best or what is pleasant and what is true—are oppositions that often occur for him when he turns to children to illustrate a point.41 Children do not represent, for example, intemperance (akrateia), that psychic condition in which one knows what is right or best but fails to do so out of weakness of will.42 Rather, children tend to be called upon to represent a general condition of ignorance regarding what is actually good for them. They simply have no basis of judgement beyond the presentations of the moment. Since the candy tastes sweet and the medicine bitter, as far as the child is concerned, there is nothing of value beyond that immediate sweetness and bitterness. In such a state of affairs, the candy becomes that which ought to be pursued—namely the “good”—while the medicine becomes that which ought to be avoided—namely the “bad”. To even conceive of these terms being reversed—that is, candy is bad and medicine good— one appears to require some form of longer-term thinking. How exactly this longer-term thinking is achieved is unclear (is it accrual of experience and abstraction from that experience? is it a structural capacity to hold two thoughts side by side?), but somehow it allows one to defer that immediate pleasure in favor of some longer-term good.43 As with the writers before him, the term that describes this state of the child is a negative one: “mindless” (anoētos) or “senseless” (aphrōn). When Cf. Dodds (1966 [1959]) ad loc. for the “witty parody of the complaints brought against Socrates at his trial”; Irwin (1982 [1979]) ad loc. for the omission of the “religious charge mentioned at Ap. 23d”; and Dalfen (2004) ad 522a for the similarly offensive aporias caused by Socratic elenchus. 41 Thus, at Rep. 9.577a the child cannot “see through” (dioraō) the dazzling displays of a tyrant presumably lacking dianoia; at Rep. 8.557c children judge colorful coats to be best on the basis of their bright, colorful appearance; at Laws 2.658c they judge puppet shows to be better than tragedy or epic, likely by similar criteria of visual appearance. Negative appearances that prove to be untrue are equally the province of children: at Phaed. 77d they fear that wind will disperse the soul; at Rep. 1.330e they wake up frequently in fright from bad dreams; at 5.451a they are afraid of being laughed at; at 8.548b they run away in fear of their fathers. 42 For akrateia in Plato, despite Socrates’ famous claim at Prot. 358b–c, cf. Rep. 4.430e–31b, 5.461b, Laws 5.734b, 10.886a. For discussion, cf. Carone 2001 and Dorter 2008. 43 Cf. the similar role of immediacy at Rep. 10.604c8–9: when hurt, the child can only hold the spot which hurts, rather than take the steps required to seek a remedy. Since they are unable to think ahead (get a bandage, get healing ointments, etc.), the immediate pain alone motivates their actions. 40



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Socrates mentions the child and candy-maker earlier in Gorgias he offers an alternative group alongside the children: “If the doctor and the candymaker had to compete before children, or among men as mindless (anoētoi) as children, …the doctor would starve to death.”44 These adults are “mindless” in precisely the same way children are: they cannot think beyond the immediate presentations of pleasure and pain, and so these become the only guides to follow. The doctor will starve among such people, just as they will starve among children, because, each and every time, these customers will choose the candies over the bitter medicine. This term “mindless” (anoētos) to describe children arises elsewhere in Plato’s writings,45 as does the all but synonymous term (aphrōn) which Diogenes had earlier used to describe children, and Epictetus much later used to describe the source of their play.46 It is one thing, however, to call a child “senseless”, another thing to explain why it is so, and Plato faces a considerable challenge on this front. Without recourse to physiology, it would seem that the difference would have to lie in a lack of education alone: the child simply has not accrued the knowledge and experience that an adult has.47 They may be driven by appetites and gradually weaned off those appetites through the educational process, but their souls, or at least some part of their souls, are eternal and essentially the same as their adult selves. But the problem of the child, it will be recalled, is not that it knows what is “good” but is unable to act upon that knowledge (akrateia), but rather that it is somehow unable to “know” what is good even upon it being explained to them, for example, by the doctor in Gorgias. They must gain rationality before they can gain knowledge of a certain sort, and this rationality seems to be something not acquired by education, but rather some sort of capacity that is either present or absent, depending on the child’s stage of physical development. Gorg. 464d–e: εἰ δέοι ἐν παισὶ διαγωνίζεσθαι ὀψοποιόν τε καὶ ἰατρόν, ἢ ἐν ἀνδράσιν οὕτως ἀνοήτοις ὥσπερ οἱ παῖδες…λιμῷ ἂν ἀποθανεῖν τὸν ἰατρόν. 45 Cf. Phil. 65d, where Protarchus, upon being asked whether pleasures or intelligence are closer to the truth, responds that pleasures, like children, have not even the smallest intelligence (nous), and thus have no purchase on truth (ὡς καθάπερ παίδων τῶν ἡδονῶν νοῦν οὐδὲ τὸν ὀλίγιστον κεκτημένων). 46 Cf. Rep. 10.598c, where children are grouped alongside “senseless” (aphrones) people (ἀλλ᾽ ὅμως παῖδάς τε καὶ ἄφρονας ἀνθρώπους) as types who might mistake a depiction of a carpenter for an actual one; cf. Soph. 234b. Children are also easily deceived at Gorg. 499c, as are the good-natured youths at Rep. 3.409a, who are “easy to deceive” (εὐεξαπάτητοι) and “naïve” (εὐήθεις). 47 For the impressionable nature of children and the consequent importance of early education, cf. Rep. 2.377b, 2.381e, 7.536e; cf. Alc. 121d, Pol. 268e, Tim. 26b, Crit. 113b; for the “empty vessel” idea, cf. Theaet. 197e, where it is discussed, not endorsed; for children lacking foreknowledge, see Clit. 408e. 44

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It may be with good reason, then, that Plato turns toward physiological explanations of the child’s psychē in his later writings. In Laws, a child is not the way it is simply because it is a soul lacking education, but because it is physically full of “fire”. As many medical writers preceding him had written, this fire or heat will presumably decrease as the child becomes older: “a human is hottest on the first day and coldest on the last” is something of a Hippocratic maxim. 48 Plato’s Athenian thus sounds rather like those Anaxagorean types Socrates had earlier rejected in the Phaedo: lying behind a child’s voluntary motion is not some mechanism opposed to “body” but, at least in part, more “body”—that is, the child’s “fire” or “fiery nature”, not unlike Anaxagoras’ alleged “air, aethers, and waters”: We said at the beginning of this discussion, if I recall, that the nature of all young creatures, since it is fiery, is not able to be still either in body or voice, but always yells and jumps in a disorderly fashion…49

Plato is not being metaphorical here. He literally means that the physical bodies of the young are filled with a sort of fire (diapuros), and that this fire drives their motion. Just as fire moves in an intense but disorderly way, so do children. This non-metaphorical meaning of fire can be seen later in his explanation for why children ought not consume alcohol before the age of eighteen: “One should be cautious about the wild nature of the young and not pour fire onto fire, regarding both body and soul”.50 The sense here is that both alcohol and the child have fiery natures: to add one to the other can only create a conflagration or cause one fire to quench the other.51 This is to be avoided for the sake of “both body and soul”.52 Hipp. De nat. hom. 12 = VI, 643f. Littré (1962 [1849]): εὖ γὰρ χρὴ εἰδέναι ὅτι ὁ ἄνθρωπος τῇ πρώτῃ τῶν ἡμερέων θερμότατος ἐστιν αὐτὸς ἑωυτοῦ, τῇ δὲ ὑστάτῃ ψυχρότατος. See above note and Schöpsdau (1994–2011) i.309 for more references. 49 Laws 2.664e: εἴπομεν, εἰ μεμνήμεθα, κατ᾽ ἀρχὰς τῶν λόγων, ὡς ἡ φύσις ἁπάντων τῶν νέων διάπυρος οὖσα ἡσυχίαν οὐχ οἵα τε ἄγειν οὔτε κατὰ τὸ σῶμα οὔτε κατὰ τὴν φωνὴν εἴη, φθέγγοιτο δ᾽ ἀεὶ ἀτάκτως καὶ πηδῷ… 50 Laws 2.666a: οὐ χρὴ πῦρ ἐπὶ πῦρ ὀχετεύειν εἴς τε τὸ σῶμα καὶ τὴν ψυχήν, …τὴν ἐμμανῆ εὐλαβουμένους ἕξιν τῶν νέων. 51 For the fiery nature of wine, cf. Tim. 60a. Further references and discussion at Schöpsdau (1994– 2011) ad 2.666a5; cf. 6.775c for the notion that wine makes one unstable and mad. 52 This psycho-physiology seems to be almost unavoidable in Bk. 1 when the Athenian raises the question of inebriation: what happens to “this puppet” (thauma)—i.e., the human—when it is drunk? (προσφέροντες τῷ θαύματι τούτῳ τὴν μέθην, ποῖόν τί ποτε αὐτὸ ἀπεργαζόμεθα, 1.645d). For the effects of alcohol on both “body and soul”, cf. Mnesitheus fr. 45 Bertier (= Athen. 11.483f ): συμβαίνει τοὺς μὲν πολὺν ἄκρατον ἐν ταῖς συνουσίαις πίνοντας μεγάλα βλάπτεσθαι καὶ τὸ σῶμα καὶ τὴν ψυχήν. 48



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The notion is familiar from the fifth century, as was discussed in the previous section: children’s natural state is comparable to the state created by intoxication. For Plato’s Athenian, this state is “fiery” (diapuros). But Plato adds a level of detail regarding this shared mental state not provided by those earlier texts, at least in what survives of them. The Athenian and his companions agree in Book 1 that the process of intoxication is a return to a young child’s state of being: “Thus doesn’t the intoxicated person as far as his psychic state is concerned return to the same state which he had as a young child?”53 What this means for the Athenian and his companions had already been agreed upon: on the one hand, “the consumption of alcohol makes pleasure and pains and passions and desires more intense”, while, on the other hand, it decreases “perceptions and memories and judgments and thoughts”.54 Whether one would agree that this is an accurate description either of intoxication or childhood (and a lot depends on how one interprets these psychological terms),55 the general thrust of the argument is clear and familiar: capacities like rational thought (phronēsis) are diminished for the child and intoxicated adult, while desires, pleasures, and passions are more intense. The intoxicated adult, as the Athenian goes onto say, becomes “a child for a second time” (dis pais, 1.646a).56 The “fiery” nature of youth may also help to explain the Athenian’s observed fact that children “play” as some sort of natural inclination. Whatever this play consists of—jumping, dancing, or building houses of potsherds—it seems to arise, for the Athenian at least, out of that fiery Laws 1.645e: οὐκοῦν εἰς ταὐτὸν ἀφικνεῖται τὴν τῆς ψυχῆς ἕξιν τῇ τότε ὅτε νέος ἦν παῖς. Laws 1.645d–e: σφοδροτέρας τὰς ἡδονὰς καὶ λύπας καὶ θυμοὺς καὶ ἔρωτας ἡ τῶν οἴνων πόσις ἐπιτείνει…τὰς αἰσθήσεις καὶ μνήμας καὶ δόξας καὶ φρονήσεις…πάμπαν ἀπολείπει…αὐτόν. The recapitulation at 1.649a–b focuses only on the good mood wine brings. 55 One immediate problem regards perception (aisthesis): without perception, how can there be pleasures and pains, let alone “more intense” ones? 56 See, e.g., Schöpsdau (1994–2011) ad 2.664e3–665a6: “Ursprung der jugendlichen Bewegung ist die feurige Natur (φύσις διάπυρος) der Jugend. Die Nutzanwendung daraus folgt 666a–c: um die Alten zum Singen zu bringen, muß man in ihnen dieses ‘Feuer’ mittels des im Wein enthaltenen Feuers…wieder anfachen.” For the desired “play” which the wine should help to bring about, cf. Laws 2.666b4–5 (τὴν τῶν πρεσβυτέρων…παιδιάν). But should the shared psychic condition of the intoxicated and children be limited to pleasurable modes? For children’s changeability (eumetaptōta was Diogenes’ word), cf. Hor. Ep. 2.1.99–100, Pl. Leg. 7.798c; for “laughing now crying”, cf. Marc. Aur. Med. 5.33 with Halliwell (2008) 20. For despondency and silence from alcohol, cf. Xen. Symp. 6.1–2; Asclep. 16 Gow and Page (= A.P. 12.50). But, both for alcohol and for children, these do not seem to be an essential characteristic: one drinks for the good mood it brings (cf. Pl. Laws 1.649a–b), and the children’s supposed natural good mood characterizes the verb “play”. 53

54

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inability to keep still.57 The play of those early years is disorderly, like fire, and eventually will need to be reined in by the adult caretakers and harnessed in the creation of orderly dances, songs, and other educational exercises.58 But the play itself arises out of the child naturally (autophuēs), much as the child’s movements arise naturally out of its inborn fire ­(to kata phusin pēdan, 2.673d). Although play may be full of intensified “pleasures and passions” (hēdonas…kai thumous), it essentially lacks “rational thought” (phronēseis) and rational “judgement” (doxas)—those capacities which cause one to defer immediate pleasures for some longerterm goal. The child’s fiery nature and its inborn propensity toward play both express that same mode of being, the one which differentiates children from the normative adult mode. Plato’s characters, from the earliest dialogues, thus share in the intellectual tradition which assumes children to be “senseless”, but it is not until his final work that he fully grapples with the nature of their difference. That he turns toward physiology for this explanation may be due to the exigencies of the problem itself—how can one explain the appearance of rationality in children without appeal to their physical growth?—or it may have been partly due to the trends of the times. As Bertier has shown well, at roughly the same time Plato was writing, the famous doctor Mnesitheus of Athens was publishing the first known treatise on pediatrics, which considered not only the proper medical treatment for children but also explanations for these treatments.59 Another treatise for which Mnesitheus was famous, incidentally, dealt with intoxication.60 Considering the strong connections seen so far between children and intoxicated adults in Greek medical theory, these treatises may not have been unrelated in his thinking. The “jumping” is a particularly clear connection. Cf. 2.673c–673d (οὐκοῦν αὖ ταύτης ἀρχὴ μὲν τῆς παιδιᾶς τὸ κατὰ φύσιν πηδᾶν εἰθίσθαι πᾶν ζῷον) and 2.664e, quoted above, where the inability to keep quiet (ἡσυχίαν οὐχ οἵα τε ἄγειν) and instead always “jumping” around (πηδῷ) are the markers of the youth’s fiery nature. 58 See Chapter 2 for discussion of these passages. 59 Bertier (1996) 2211: “Tous les philosophes grecs se sont intéressés à l’enfant et à son éducation. Mais il faut attendre Platon et Aristote pour voir l’enfant pris dès sa naissance figurer dans un programme éducatif théorique. Et sans doute n’est-ce pas l’effet du hasard si le premier document de puériculture médicale est l’oeuvre d’un contemporain, Mnésithée d’Athènes.” For Mnesitheus’ pediatrics (περὶ παιδίου τροφῆς), see Bertier (1972) 101–16; for his work’s relationship to Pl. Laws 7, see Bertier (1972) 118–26; for his fame, see Arnott (1996) 622–3 and Nutton (2004) 123–5. 60 See Bertier (1972) 57–86. The treatise seems to have taken the form of an epistle (περὶ κωθωνισμοῦ ἐπιστολή). Especially significant for Chapter 5’s discussion of Aristotelian anesis is fr. 45 Bertier (= Ath. 11.484a): τὸ μέντοι κωθωνίζεσθαι διά τινων ἡμερῶν δοκεῖ μοι ποιεῖν τινα καὶ τοῦ σώματος κάθαρσιν καὶ τῆς ψυχῆς ἄνεσιν. 57



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Aristotle When Aristotle rejects play as the activity of the good life (eudaimonia), he often cites children as a reason for this dismissal. First, he uses children as a counter-argument against those wealthy few who seem to be living the good life by directing their resources toward play and amusements. Such people are not evidence that the good life consists of play any more than children are: “Just as things are valued differently for children and adults, so also for bad adults and good ones.”61 Children and adults have different goals and value systems, it seems, and this is directly related to the relative importance of play for each group. He turns to children again when he asserts that the purpose of play in the good life is for the sake of serious goals. Although it is sensible to break up life’s labors with occasional amusements for the sake of attaining those goals, it is “foolish and too childish” (paidikon) to do the opposite— that is, to “be serious and work in order to play”.62 Play is what the child seems to be about: if the child labors at school work, for example, it is in order to play afterwards. More abstractly, play seems to be the fulfillment of a child’s nature for Aristotle: just as the adult is fulfilling its nature through leisurely contemplation, so too the child is most a child when it is playing. Such an opinion is readily at hand for Aristotle in Greek with the pais–paizō connection—but it also provides him with a central reason to reject play as the good life for adults: it is too “childish” (paidikon).63 What, however, does Aristotle mean by “childish”? It is no mere token for him, since he frequently observes children and analyzes their difference in his oeuvre. For example, in the Nicomachean Ethics he illuminates some familiar territory with a passing phrase: “Likewise in youth, people are—because of the growth that is going on—in a bodily condition similar to those who are intoxicated. And youth is pleasurable.”64 While EN 10.1176b23–4: ὥσπερ παισὶ καὶ ἀνδράσιν ἕτερα φαίνεται τίμια, οὕτω καὶ φαύλοις καὶ ἐπιεικέσιν. EN 10.1176b32–4. 63 The word paidikon can mean both “of a child” and “playful” (LSJ), but one should be careful about importing too rigid a distinction, since “play” (paidia) itself is essentially “childish” (paidikos). 64 EN 7.15, 1154b9–11: ὁμοίως δ᾽ ἐν μὲν τῇ νεότητι διὰ τὴν αὔξησιν ὥσπερ οἱ οἰνωμένοι διάκεινται, καὶ ἡδὺ ἡ νεότης. Gauthier and Jolif (1958–9) ii.813 ad loc., emphasis in the original, express concern over the usual interpretation of the passage (e.g., by Ross, Rackham, and Festugière), namely that “youth is pleasurable”, suggesting emendation to say that youth “pursues” pleasure: “On attend la conclusion que la jeunesse cherche le plaisir, pour remédier au travail de la croissance et au bouillonnement qui’l entraîne; peut-être y aurait-il lieu de suppléer: καὶ ἡδὺ ἡ νεότης”; in favor of the former group, cf. van der Eijk (2005) 150–1. For the distinction between “intoxication” (οἰνώσις) and “drunkenness” (μέθη), cf. Plut. De Garr. 503f1–2, which Ross (1955) 11 claims as testimonium 3, and Rose 1886 claims for Aristotle as fr. 102, but Gigon 1987 does not. 61

62

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previous scientists (physiologoi) had claimed that all animals, qua living beings, have grown accustomed to a constant state of labor and pain,65 Aristotle explains that the young “likewise” exist in a permanent state of intoxication and pleasure.66 Like the intoxicated, the young are impaired in some basic cognitive functions,67 but the emphasis here is on their shared pleasure. Youth is pleasurable in much the same way intoxication is pleasurable. Heat is the key for the good mood both of youth and of intoxication, as was also the case in Plato’s Laws. Since heat causes growth,68 the young qua growing organisms are in a permanent state of elevated temperature. The psychic effect of this heat is a sort of optimism or good mood that is almost identical to the good mood of intoxication, only more permanent: children are optimistic (euelpides) because, “just as intoxicated people are hot, so are the young by nature hot”.69 Whatever moments of optimism, euphoria, or illumination one experiences when intoxicated are what the young experience on a permanent basis. When it is considered in this way, it is with good reason that commentators often cite the following passage from the Peripatetic Problemata Physica 30.1, which is certainly Aristotelian if not by Aristotle’s pen.70 It is worth quoting in full: The heat surrounding the area where we think and hope makes one in good spirits, and because of this everyone is eager to drink to the point of EN 7.14, 1154b7–9: ἀεὶ γὰρ πονεῖ τὸ ζῷον, ὥσπερ καὶ οἱ φυσιολόγοι μαρτυροῦσι, τὸ ὁρᾶν, τὸ ἀκούειν φάσκοντες εἶναι λυπηρόν· ἀλλ’ ἤδη συνήθεις ἐσμέν, ὡς φασίν. For Anaxagoras here, cf. Gauthier and Jolif (1958–9) ad loc. 66 For added contrast, he includes another type, melancholics, whose default mode, due to their chemical make-up (krasis, mixture), is one of continually seeking remedies (iatreia), which is to say the remedy of pleasure (he had just used iatreia in this way at 1154a30). Due to some sort of bodily lack in their chemical make-up, they need to self-medicate, as it were, which presents itself as the need constantly to seek out pleasures; 7.14, 1154b11–13: οἱ δὲ μελαγχολικοὶ τὴν φύσιν δέονται ἀεὶ ἰατρείας· καὶ γὰρ τὸ σῶμα δακνόμενον διατελεῖ διὰ τὴν κρᾶσιν, καὶ ἀεὶ ἐν ὀρέξει σφοδρᾷ εἰσίν. That children too are eminently pleasure seekers raises the important question of how to distinguish these two types, and I will discuss this problem at the end of the section. 67 See below regarding the De Mem. Passage, which attributes a child’s poor memory to its state of growth or being “in flux”. The heat of the very young is so intense that they cannot even dream (cf. Insomn. 461a13, where the heat and flux prevent the dreams from coagulating, and HA 4.10, 537b14, where children do not dream up to the age of four or five). 68 Cf. De Long. 466b16–22 with Leunissen (2015) 210. 69 Rh. 2.12, 1389a18–19: ὥσπερ γὰρ οἱ οἰνωμένοι, οὕτω διάθερμοί εἰσιν οἱ νέοι ὑπὸ τῆς φύσεως (cf. Plato’s diapuroi for Aristotle’s diathermoi, and Rh. 2.13, 1389b29–32). Cf. van der Eijk (2005) 215 and Schütrumpf (2015) 378. 70 Cf., e.g., Burnet (1900) and Dirlmeier (1999 [1956]) ad EN 7.15, 1154b9–11. For overviews of Prob. 30.1, cf. Flashar (1966) 60–72, van der Eijk (2005) 139–68, Centrone 2011, and Schütrumpf 2015. 65



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drunkenness, because a lot of wine makes everyone optimistic, just as youth makes children so.71

Wine heats the body and, most importantly, the “area where we think and hope”; as that internal temperature rises, so too does one’s mood (euthumos, euelpis).72 Youth affects children in a similar way, this writer claims, and this stance is repeated throughout the text.73 With intoxication and youth, we are on familiar ground with Aristotle’s physiology. However, this constellation of ideas does not fully cover his reasons for children’s reduced mental capacities. Often, for example, he dwells on the prominent effects of their “dwarf-like” body structure. Children, like non-human animals, are “dwarf-like”, he explains, and this affects their cognitive abilities.74 Since memories, for example, require clear passages to move through—and here Aristotle often sounds like Diogenes75—the added weight or increased density of this “dwarf-like” physique compresses those cognitive passages, and this results in a general cognitive impairment.76 Since children share this physique with Prob. 30.1, 954b39–955a4: τὸ δὲ θερμὸν τὸ περὶ τὸν τόπον ᾧ φρονοῦμεν καὶ ἐλπίζομεν ποιεῖ εὐθύμους καὶ διὰ τοῦτο πρὸς τὸ πίνειν εἰς μέθην πάντες ἔχουσι προθύμως, ὅτι πάντας ὁ οἶνος ὁ πολὺς εὐέλπιδας ποιεῖ, καθάπερ ἡ νεότης τοὺς παῖδας. For melancholics (the subject of Prob. 30.1), see below. 72 For the heart as the organ of consciousness for Aristotle, cf. PA 2.10, 656b24, 3.4, 666a12, GA 2.6, 743b25–32 with Peck (1953) 592 for further references. For Plato, it was the brain (cf. Tim. 69d– 70b). For further discussion on the debate, cf. Tracy (1976) 43–52 and van der Eijk (2005) 119–35. 73 Cf., e.g., 30.1, 955a13–18: ψυχροτέρα μὲν οὖν γινομένη ἡ κρᾶσις ἡ ἀπὸ τῆς μελαίνης χολῆς, ὥσπερ εἴρηται, ποιεῖ ἀθυμίας παντοδαπάς, θερμοτέρα δὲ οὖσα εὐθυμίας. διὸ καὶ οἱ μὲν παῖδες εὐθυμότεροι, οἱ δὲ γέροντες δυσθυμότεροι. οἱ μὲν γὰρ θερμοί, οἱ δὲ ψυχροί· τὸ γὰρ γῆρας κατάψυξίς τις. For the heat of youth, see above footnote in “Plato” section. 74 With the exception of adult humans, most mammals have a “dwarf-like” physique, and this topheavy weight forces them to walk on all fours, as do infants (Cf. PA 4.10 686b8–11, 686b25, De inc. anim. 11.710b9–17, Mem. 453b4–7). This weight or density presses upon the central psychic organ and the vessels leading to and from it, and thereby impedes many cognitive functions. Regarding difficulties in memory, e.g., he writes that dwarves have difficulty recollecting because of the heavy weight “upon the organ of consciousness” (so Ross’ translation for διὰ τὸ πολὺ βάρος ἔχειν ἐπὶ τῷ αἰσθητικῷ at 453b2, although thinking of to aisthetikon as a perceptual “system” rather than an organ is closer to the mark, as Everson 1997, 140, argues well), and adds that “children are dwarf-like in type up to a considerably advanced time in their life” (ἔτι δὲ τά γε παιδία καὶ νανώδη ἐστὶ μέχρι πόρρω τῆς ἡλικίας), which is to say that children share these mnemonic difficulties. This aspect of child psycho-physiology tends to receive more attention than the heat/intoxication aspect: cf. Coles (1997) 307–10 and Dasen (2008) 49–51. For dwarves in antiquity, see Dasen 1993. 75 Cf. Lloyd (2006) for Aristotle’s interest in Diogenes, at 238: “[Diogenes’] detailed account of the phlebes that Aristotle saw fit to quote in extenso at HA… At 48 lines that is one of the longest Presocratic fragments we have…” 76 Aristotle leaves open the possibility that children and dwarves may excel nevertheless in other areas of the soul, if not intelligence (PA 4.10 686b25), but provides no specific examples. But, at Rh. 2.12–13, the young more than the old follow what is noble or beautiful because they, unlike the old, are not driven by pure calculation (logismos).

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non-human animals, they also share with them certain cognitive deficiencies. What is not shared, however, is the default mode of elevated pleasure; this seems to be due to the increased heat of youth alone. Nevertheless, it is worth considering at least briefly the ways that this pleasure-mode and the cognitive impairments of children might interact with and reinforce each other, as earlier seemed to be the case with Diogenes. Whether we attribute a child’s psychological difference to its increased heat or its top-heavy body structure—and often such psychological phenomena appear to be doubly determined in Aristotle77—these differences appear to be structurally related to one another. A deficit in a lower cognitive function like memory creates deficits at higher-level cognitive functions like reasoning and deliberation, and Aristotle often expresses such hierarchies explicitly, even axiomatically.78 So, for example, in On Memory and Recollection he writes that children (“the very young”) have poor memories because they are in a state of flux due to the fact that they are growing79—the same reason, it will be recalled, which lay behind their heightened mood.80 Since the stimuli of the outside world create an impression in the soul like that of a signet-ring, if that soul is in flux, the signet-impression simply will not hold, just as if the ring had been pressed into a flowing river.81 Since children are in flux and excessively moist, the thought-image (phantasma) underlying a memory cannot hold, just as it cannot for the very old, whose capacities are too dry and brittle for the signet-ring to make much of an impression at all.82 The first missing piece of the child, then, is its memory. For more than one reason, it does not have easy access to past events.83 But the effect of Cf. King (2004) 148 ad 453b7–8: “Das soll neben dem wachstumsbedingten Fließen eine weitere Begründung für das schlechte Erinnerungsvermögen von Kindern liefern.” 78 Cf. Met. 1.1, 980a21–981a1. 79 Mem. 450b5–7: διόπερ οἵ τε σφόδρα νέοι καὶ οἱ γέροντες ἀμνήμονές εἰσιν· ῥέουσι γὰρ οἱ μὲν διὰ τὴν αὔξησιν, οἱ δὲ διὰ τὴν φθίσιν. 80 Cf. Phys. 247b18–248a2 on children’s difficulty with learning: διὸ καὶ τὰ παιδία οὔτε μανθάνειν δύνανται οὔτε κατὰ τὰς αἰσθήσεις ὁμοίως κρίνειν τοῖς πρεσβυτέροις· πολλὴ γὰρ ἡ ταραχὴ καὶ ἡ κίνησις. 81 Mem. 450a32–450b2: διὸ καὶ τοῖς μὲν ἐν κινήσει πολλῇ διὰ πάθος ἢ δι’ ἡλικίαν οὖσιν οὐ γίγνεται μνήμη, καθάπερ ἂν εἰς ὕδωρ ῥέον ἐμπιπτούσης τῆς κινήσεως καὶ τῆς σφραγῖδος. 82 Mem. 450b10–11: τοῖς μὲν οὖν οὐ μένει τὸ φάντασμα ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ, τῶν δ’ οὐχ ἅπτεται. 83 For the top-heavy weight, Mem. 453a34–b8; for being in a state of growth, Mem. 450b5-7, 453b5-7; for children having their whole lives ahead of them (i.e., little to remember), see Rhet. 2.12, 1389a22–3 (τοῖς δὲ νέοις τὸ μὲν μέλλον πολὺ τὸ δὲ παρεληλυθὸς βραχύ). 77



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this handicap is more than an inability to remember previous experiences or parental commands: it affects the child’s very perception of time, since, as Aristotle says at the beginning of On Memory and Recollection, “the organ of memory is that which enables time to be perceived”.84 Without easy access to the past, or a well-established structure of “before”, the child lives in a perpetual present, or at least more so than the normative, rational adult. This handicap of memory affects the child’s experience of the future as well. Aristotle writes: “Children and non-human animals share in what is voluntary, but not in decision: we call sudden actions ‘voluntary’ but we don’t call them ‘decisions’.”85 Time is a clear factor in this distinction: the child’s actions are “immediate” acts (exaiphne¯s), acts of the present moment. A child may grab a sweet candy or a multicolored fabric following some momentary impulse, but that “sudden” act does not qualify as a “decision”. A decision (prohairesis) requires reason (logos) and rational thought (dianoia), things to which children and animals do not have access.86 Since Aristotle reaches the tentative conclusion that the distinguishing feature of decision is its being a result of deliberation, the child’s handicap of memory finds its way into higher cognitive functions.87 Without the capacity to draw upon past experience (for example, “last time the candy made me sick” or “last time the dazzling display turned out to be a deception”), the child cannot engage in the sorts of deliberation that require such memories. All that is left for the child, it seems, are those attractions of the present—the candy is sweet, the fabric is dazzling—and so the child pursues them. It is no wonder that the word that keeps Ross (1973 [1906]) trans., with slight changes, of Mem. 1.449b31–3: ὥσθ᾽ ὅσα χρόνου αἰσθάνεται, ταῦτα μόνα τῶν ζῴων μνημονεύει, καὶ τούτῳ ᾧ αἰσθάνεται (“And so, those that have a sense of time are the only animals that remember, and the organ of memory is that which enables us to perceive time”). 85 ΕΝ 3.2, 1111b8–9: τοῦ μὲν γὰρ ἑκουσίου καὶ παῖδες καὶ τἆλλα ζῷα κοινωνεῖ, προαιρέσεως δ᾽ οὔ, καὶ τὰ ἐξαίφνης ἑκούσια μὲν λέγομεν, κατὰ προαίρεσιν δ᾽ οὔ. Since “decision” underlies aretē more than actions themselves (οἰκειότατον γὰρ εἶναι δοκεῖ τῇ ἀρετῇ καὶ μᾶλλον τὰ ἤθη κρίνειν τῶν πράξεων, EN 3.2, 1111b5–6), the child’s inability to decide provides a reason for its inability to share in eudaimonia (EN 1.9, 1100a1–2; cf. EN 1.9, 1100a1–2, EE 1.1215b22, with more references in Gauthier and Jolif 1959, ii.75–6). 86 EN 3.2, 1112a15–16: ἡ γὰρ προαίρεσις μετὰ λόγου καὶ διανοίας. 87 EN 3.2, 1112a15–16: ἀλλ᾽ ἆρά γε τὸ προβεβουλευμένον; cf. Taylor (2006) ad 1111b8–9: “The reason why children and non-human animals do not act from choice is that they do not act from deliberation; their actions are directed not towards the general (and relatively remote) goals assumed in 84

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reappearing to describe children is epithumētikos: children are creatures of pleasure and can pursue only the pleasures of the moment.88 Thus the general picture of children in Aristotle is that of pleasureseeking creatures inhabiting a reality of sudden perceptions and sudden reactions. Children do not take the time, or have the capacities to take the time, for deliberating whether what presents itself as pleasurable is in fact “good” for them; they are like the children of the Republic, who cannot “see through” (dioraō) a dazzling display to the reality that lies behind it. Nor does the structure of time fill the content of their thinking: memory and past experience, which might offer presentations to rival those of the present moment, are always just out of grasp. Like the Athenians of Thucydides’ plague, what is “good” for them are the “pleasures of the moment”, since the structure of time is collapsed and the long-term future an absent concept.89 In the previous sections, play arose out of a sort of incapacity— “senselessness” (aphrosynē) was Epictetus’ term. Like the intoxicated adult, the child cannot engage in higher-level cognitive functioning, and so is limited to the pursuit of immediate pleasures. Aristotle in some ways maps easily onto this picture: he adopts the notion of children as being essentially pleasure-chasers, and depicts their reality as the pursuit of what is immediately pleasurable. Yet, if this is the case, what differentiates children from all the other pleasure-chasers in Aristotle’s system, from non-human animals to the mentally ill humans he calls “melancholics”?90 As was seen at the beginning, the child’s difference from these other groups lies in its elevated temperature (due to growth), which causes it to inhabit a default state of heightened pleasure. This, however, then raises the question: if children already experience pleasure as some sort of default state, in what sense can they then be “pursuing” pleasure? Usually the pursuit of pleasure arises out of some perceived lack, but children, unlike other pleasure

deliberation, but towards the immediate goals presented by spirit and appetite.” Cf. Rhet. 2.12, 1389a3, EN 3.12, 1119b5–7 (the child being practically the mascot of epithumia at 1119b4–5); he groups them with non-human animals at EN 3.2, 1111b8–10, 7.11, 1152b19–20 (reported view), 7.12, 1153a27–35 (his partial acceptance of this view); cf. HA 8.1, 588a31–b3. Much of Aristotle’s discussion of epithumia is reminiscent of the tripartition of Plato’s Republic: cf., e.g., the principal of opposites (Rep. 4.436b8–9 with Lorenz 2006, 18–34) and epithumia being attracted to pleasure (Rep. 4.439d6–8) with EN 3.2, 1111b15–16, which reminds that rational choice can oppose epithumia, but epithumia cannot. I.e., one might observe that a shiny object is a trap and so decide not to grab it, but one cannot impulsively desire to grab the shiny object and, at the same time, impulsively desire not to grab the shiny object. 89 Thuc. 2.53.3–4: ὅτι δὲ ἤδη τε ἡδὺ, παντχόθεν τε ἐς αὐτὸ κερδαλέον, τοῦτο καὶ καλὸν καὶ χρήσιμον κατέστη. 88



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seekers, seem to be pursuing pleasure from a state that is already pleasurable. How is that possible? Their world—like that of the intoxicated adult—is illuminated with surface delights, as if the pleasure were already simply there, rather than the comparatively sober reality adults face, mapped and motivated by daily necessities. Although for children certain pleasures, such as the candy, must be motivated by perceived lacks, Aristotle may be leaving room for some relationship to pleasure that is even closer than that of the appetites (epithumiai). Rather than “pursuing” some pleasure they lack, children may be following their already present pleasure—as if their characteristic activity were the activity of pleasure itself.91

After Aristotle Inquiries into child psychology and physiology naturally continue into the following centuries, and there is no obvious point at which one might conclude the story. Yet many of the writers of these next centuries show considerable influence from Plato and Aristotle, just as Plato and Aristotle had shown the influence from the writers who had preceded them. To take a few examples: the second-century bce Posidonius in his book On the Passions is reported to have written the first part of the book as a quasi-epitome of Plato’s own treatment of children in Laws.92 The second-century ce Galen discusses children as not yet rational but following, like animals, their appetites (epithumia) and spirit (thumos)—a tripartition he adamantly endorses from Plato.93 The second-century ce Athenaeus of Attaleia often sounds like Aristotle in his discussions of children: once children are weaned, he writes, children should be habituated by means of “relaxation” (anesis) and “play” (paidia)—which is Aristotelian not just in advice but in its view of play as “relaxation”.94 For melancholics, see above notes 66 and 70. So, e.g., in a state of pleasure one might stretch the arms “for pleasure” as a manifestation of that pleasure, but not because this stretch will give some pleasure that is currently lacking. For more discussion of this idea, see Chapter 7. 92 Galen PHP 5.5.32 with Gill (2006) 287–8; cf. the Academic Piso’s remark in Cic. Fin. 5.55 that, although “all ancient philosophers” consider childhood (pueritia) to understand how human nature functions, this is “especially” the case for those in his school—i.e. the Academy. Cf. Brunschwig (1986) 113–15. 93 For Galen’s Platonism, cf. De Lacy 1972, Tracy 1976, and Tieleman (1996) xxi. 94 Athen. of Attalus (apud Oribasius Collect. Med. Lib. inc. 39.1 Raeder): τοὺς νηπίους καὶ ἀπὸ τοῦ γάλακτος γεγονότας ἐν ἀνέσει τε ἐᾶν καὶ παιδιᾷ καὶ τῇ ψυχικῇ ῥᾳθυμίᾳ κατεθίζειν αὐτοὺς καὶ 90 91

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Thus it is not to end the story of ancient child psychology but to offer an alternative view to it that the third-century bce Chrysippus of Soli enters the conversation. Although all the thinkers discussed in this chapter are in agreement that children are non-rational creatures following something other than the dictates of reason, in the fourth century this non-rational drive seems to have been increasingly conflated with the drive toward pleasure. This was seen in Plato and Aristotle—although for both thumos coexists with epithumia—and was reported as the position of Eudoxus of Cnidus, Polyarchus of Syracuse, Aristippus and the Cyrenaic school, Epicurus and his followers, and perhaps Democritus as well.95 However, the drives that underlie the irrational need not be reduced to or even include some pleasure principle. In opposition to the Epicurean view of pleasure as a universal drive, the Stoics seemed to have held instead that there was a drive underlying all animals toward what is “appropriate”, not “pleasurable”. One example for this argument was that of children: when a child is learning to walk it will fall down and cry, but in the midst of these painful tears attempt to stand and walk again.96 This is no pursuit of pleasure, it is claimed, any more than a turtle’s attempt to right itself when placed on its back.97 Instead, children in such moments follow an instinct to do what is “appropriate” for themselves, a natural urge of sorts. So it is when a child appears to be pursuing “pleasure”: it is not actually “pleasure” the child is pursuing but, rather, what seems “appropriate” for its continued existence.98 How exactly Chrysippus himself articulated this position is uncertain, but children were an obvious point of debate for any such psychology. Galen, centuries later, gave a sense of the possible objections: he writes, “children make very little use of reason, but like wild animals, are enslaved to the strongest passions and desires”;99 Chrysippus, on the other hand, ταῖς μετ᾽ ἀπάτης καὶ ἱλαρότητος γυμνασίαις. Cf. Bertier (1996) 2221. For the pleasure principle of Eudoxus, Arist. EN 10, 1172b9 with Warren 2009; cf. Pl. Phil. 67b; for that of the (possibly fictional) Polyarchus, cf. Aristox. fr. 50 Wehrli (= Athen. 12.545a) with Huffman (2005) 307–22 and Lampe (2015) 2; for that of Aristippus and the Cyrenaic school, cf. Diog. Laert. 2.88 with Zilioli (2012) 156–7 and Lampe (2015) 26–55 with this passage at 43; for Epicurus and the Epicureans, cf. Cic. Fin. 1.30, 2.31, (pleasure as the connate good also at: Epic. Letter to Menoeceus 128–9, Diog Laert 10.31, 34, 137) with Brunschwig 1986; see Long and Sedley (1987) i.112–25 for further fragments on pleasure with discussion. For Democritus on pleasure, see especially fr. 70 Taylor (παιδὸς, οὐκ ἀνδρὸς τὸ ἀμέτρως ἐπιθυμεῖν); cf. 26, 34, 53, 55, 65, 71, 75, 99 Taylor with Gosling and Taylor (1982) 27–37. 96 Sen. Ep. 121.6–15 (= 57b LS); see Long and Sedley (1987) i.350–4 and Gill (2006) 43–5 for discussion. 97 Ibid. 98 For this Stoic position on pleasure, cf. Diog. Laert. 7.85–6 (57a LS = SVF 3.178), Cic. Fin. 3.17 with Brunschwig (1986) 128–44 and Long and Sedley (1987) 350–4, 421, for discussion.

95



After Aristotle

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“along with the rest of the Stoics, boldly attacks this view… And when they speak of children they twist their arguments up and down…not all in the same way, but all shamelessly making proofs that go against what is seen.”100 Galen makes it clear that there is the common-sense view—children and non-human animals experience passions and pursue pleasures—and then there is the Stoic view, which completely falls short of common sense.101 For Chrysippus, children are not epithumetic creatures pursuing pleasure, but rather are in pursuit of something else. While Plato or Aristotle would explain the child’s pursuit of the sweet candy as an irrational pursuit of pleasure (epithumia), Chrysippus seems to have agreed that the child lacks reason (logos) but disagreed that the child is thus pursuing pleasure. Instead, Chrysippus’ child pursues the candy out of a perception that it is the best or most “appropriate” thing for it, not out of some perceived pleasure that it might contain. How this change in terminology actually affects the description of a child’s experience is difficult to pinpoint. Both Plato’s child and Chrysippus’ child, after all, believe the candy to be what is best and not merely what is pleasurable. The difference seems to be that, for Plato, the child’s impulses are mistaken (that is, pleasures are the good) while, for Chrysippus, the children are mistaken about their impulses (“this is ‘appropriate’ for me”). For Plato, the child, by maturing and developing logos, will be able distinguish between what is good for the long term (medicine) as opposed to what is pleasurable in the short term (candy). For Chrysippus, the drive toward what is “appropriate” remains a constant, but the development of logos allows rationalization regarding what exactly that single drive is directed towards: one realizes, perhaps, that what one really wants is not the sweet candy after all but the bitter medicine.102 How would such a position, if this indeed is a Chrysippean or Stoic position, explain “play”?103 The Stoic Epictetus, whose description of Gal. PHP 3.7.12 (215.12), De Lacy trans., modified: καὶ προσέτι τῶν παίδων, οἳ λογισμῷ μὲν ἥκιστα χρῶνται, θυμοῖς δὲ καὶ ἐπιθυμίαις ἰσχυροτάταις ὥσπερ τὰ θηρία δουλεύουσι. 100 Gal. PHP 3.7.16 (215.12), De Lacy trans., modified: ὁ δὲ Χρύσιππος ἅμα τοῖς ἄλλοις Στωϊκοῖς ἐπὶ μὲν τῶν ἀλόγων ζῴων ὁμόσε χωρεῖ πρὸς τὸ δόγμα μηδ’ ἐπιθυμεῖν φάσκων· καί μοι περὶ τῆς ἀναισχυντίας τοῦ λόγου πρόσθεν εἴρηται· ἐπὶ δὲ τῶν παίδων ἄνω καὶ κάτω περιπλέκουσιν, οὐχ ὡσαύτως μὲν ἅπαντες, ἀναισχυντοῦντες δὲ καὶ παρὰ τὸ φαινόμενον ἀποφαινόμενοι πάντες… 101 Brunschwig (1986) 133–4 states the case well for just how unusual the Stoic position compared to everyday notions: “[T]he Stoics found themselves obliged to defend their own interpretation of child behaviour against the hedonists’, which was the most obvious and widespread (even among those moralists who were opposed to pleasure). On the other hand, their theory involved certain paradoxical consequences…” 102 For the child’s ethical development in Stoicism, cf. Gill (2006) 136–45. At 138: “The point is… that the Stoics do not explore, as Plato and Aristotle do, the linkage between habituation and the training of the non-rational part of the psyche since they do not accept the existence of a separate non-rational part.” 99

46

The Pais of  Paizō

play began this chapter, describes play as arising out of irrationality (aphrosynē), but would Epictetus have rejected such play being described as a pursuit of pleasure? If anything, pleasure would seem to have a secondary role: Diogenes Laertius, for example, reports the following about Stoic doctrine on pleasure: the Stoics “hold it false to say, as some people do, that pleasure is the object of animals’ first impulse. For pleasure, they say, if it does occur, is a by-product which arises only when nature all by itself has searched out and adopted the proper requirements for a creature’s constitution, just as animals [then] frolic and plants bloom.”104 “Play” (paizō) had previously been a word for such phenomena as gamboling animals,105 but here the word used is aphilarunō—a hapax legomenon which Long and Sedley translate as “frolic”. Just as one directs one’s vision at something (apoblepō), one directs one’s “cheerfulness” or “good mood”, it seems, when one “frolics” (aphilarunō). Here the animal is not seeking out food or drink: instead, the animal’s nature is acting “all by itself ”, and in this acting “all by itself ” is revealing its own nature. At such moments pleasure arises as a by-product of sorts (epigennēma), not unlike Aristotle’s “supervenient” pleasure (epigignomenon).106 Would this be Epictetus’ explanation of the child who builds and crushes little houses of potsherds? Is the child engaging in the activity not for pleasure but as a natural drive of its own nature, for which pleasure may arise secondarily? This would perhaps not be a bad description: although play may be pleasurable, the purpose a player might articulate in the moment may not be “to experience pleasure”, but rather “to build the house of potsherds” or “to win the game”.107 Pleasure itself is not the goal one pursues in playing but accompanies that goal whatever it is. The Stoic view thus may offer a gentle reminder not to rely too heavily on the word “pleasure” to describe such “childish” actions as play. “Pleasure” can often look much like a cypher once placed under the microscope, even if it provides a useful token for identifiable descriptions. To avoid the term “pleasure” in descriptions of For Stoic views on the ethics of laughter and play, cf. Halliwell (2008) 302–7 and Nussbaum 2009. 104 LS 57a, Diog Laert 7.85–6, SVF 3.178, the key passage for us being: ὃν τρόπον ἀφιλαρύνεται τὰ ζῷα καὶ θάλλει τὰ φυτά. For discussion of the passage, see Long (1971) 96–101, with his translation at 103–4. 105 For animals “frolicking” (paizō), cf. Arist. HA 572a30 and the beautiful Xen. Cyn. 5.4.4. 106 Arist. EN 10.4, 1174b20–33, with epigignomenon at 1174b33 (cf. 2.3, 1104b4). Brunschwig (1986) 118 n. 14 considers this passage to be that of Chrysippus. 107 But incisive is Brunschwig’s (1986) 134 objection: “[W]hy should not the living being aim at the 103



Conclusions

47

play as a quasi-taboo term might eventually yield more robust descriptions, but it would likely also cause new coinages, like aphilarunō, and, as Galen writes, the need to “twist arguments up and down” about children and their play.

Conclusions Although children were already depicted in Homeric poetry as lacking an adult’s cognitive abilities, the first fragments of substance which investigated the child’s difference were from Diogenes of Apollonia and other medical writers of the fifth century. Diogenes claimed that the child was “senseless” (aphrōn) because of its moist and narrow vessels, which often impeded the flow of conscious air. This lack of intelligence did not cause the child to become somehow less alive but, on the contrary, rather more “vivacious”, full of intense but easily changeable passions. Plato in the fourth century nuanced the picture of childish “senselessness” (aphrosynē) as an inability to “see through” appearances or use means–ends reasoning. This was illustrated well by his mini-drama of the candy-maker and the doctor, where children, even upon it being explained that medicine was for their longterm good despite its momentary bitterness, were unable to break through the powerful presentations of the moment. Aristotle anchored this “senselessness” at least partly in the child’s psycho-physiological limitations of memory: if a child has difficulty with its memory, how can it deliberate, weighing past experiences alongside present presentations? The child is hemmed in on both sides of time, past and future, to a reality of the present moment. As a final counterbalance to this growing consensus regarding the child’s relationship to immediate pleasure, it was seen that, for Chrysippus of Soli and other Stoic thinkers, there was an urge to describe the pursuits of irrational creatures without reliance on terms like “pleasure”. However, the result of such descriptions, at least as Galen’s fierce criticisms insist, is a departure from everyday language. For example, instead of using the typical Greek idiom of paidia-joy manifesting itself as paidia-play, new Stoic descriptions require neologisms like aphilarunō: now a “cheerful” (hilaros) mood is manifesting itself as a sort of directed-cheer, or, as the translators put it, a sort of “frolicking”. The key network of associations that emerges from this overview is the one repeatedly made between children, play, and intoxication. Diogenes and Heraclitus imagined that children were “foolish” and “senseless” in much the same way (and for roughly the same reasons) as intoxicated adults. Plato too explained that the “fire” underlying a child’s exuberant

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nature and its natural urge to play is also the fire of intoxication. For this reason, he explained, if a city official wants to stimulate older men to “play” (i.e., “dance”), the answer is simply to have these older citizens consume a good deal of wine, which will make them become like children again and thus naturally play. Aristotle, whose child psycho-physiology was the most detailed of all, similarly adopted the idea of children and wine’s shared heat and consequent optimism. Although any nonrational animal can pursue immediate pleasures, what makes a child distinct from these other types is that its default state already is pleasurable: the child is “by nature” in the state that the intoxicated adult inhabits only temporarily. This constellation of ideas (child–play–intoxication), not always expressed in the same way by different authors, but nevertheless recognizable upon each reappearance, adds substance to the idea of paidia offered in the Introduction to this book. Children “play” and intoxicated adults “play”, but this is no coincidental shared activity. Rather, the activity of paidia is simply a manifestation of the pleasurable psychic state that children and intoxicated adults share. The internal state paidia (“joy”, “delight”) is continuous with the activity paidia (“play” in our sense of the word), and it must be primarily in this sense that paidia is to be understood as the “spirit of childhood”. Whether this exuberant state causes the subject to dance, sing, or build little houses of potsherds and dirt, the insistent idea seems to be that these activities are not what is creating pleasure for the player, but rather that the pleasure is producing these various, yet closely connected activities of play.

chapter 2

Why Plato Needs Play

In the middle of the fourth century bce Plato and Aristotle had a disagreement. This disagreement had to do with play: was it central to art and life, or was it marginal? Plato, like many of his predecessors, took the former position: in dialogues like the Sophist and Statesman his starring character treats all art forms—for example, drama, music, and visual arts—as subcategories of “play”, while in the Laws his Athenian famously announces that the best life is one spent “playing”.1 Neither of these ideas were particularly revolutionary, and, if anything, seem to be subtle reformulations of commonly accepted notions.2 Aristotle did not like the idea, however: he banished play completely from the activity of the good life, and, in his discussions of various art-forms, focused on mimesis, not play, as the common element.3 Mimesis, of course, is also the word that comes to mind when recalling Plato’s ideas about art, but, as Gundert and others have shown, a characteristic feature of Plato’s later thought is his interest in “play” (paidia). In the dialogues usually considered early, the word is practically absent, but, as the corpus develops, “play” appears with increasing frequency: Gundert writes, “[I]n the so-called Socratic dialogues of the first period, mention of paidia is very rare and largely in passing; paidia first appears explicitly to explain essential phenomena in the middle dialogues, above all in the Republic, only to occupy an even larger space in his late works.”4 Soph. 234a, Pol. 288c, Laws 7.803d–e. For paiz- words denoting singing, dancing, music, performance, etc., see Introduction. For predecessors maintaining that play is the goal of life, see Chapter 5, section “Play before Aristotle”. 3 See Chapter 5. Although, for Aristotle, humans who live the good life still play, just as they still sleep, the activity of the good life itself (eudaimonia) is not play, just as it is not sleep. 4 Gundert (1965) 191: “[I]n den sog. Sokratischen Dialogen der ersten Periode, am wenigsten und höchstens beiläufig von παιδιά die Rede ist; explizit, zur Deutung wesentlicher Phänomene, tritt sie erst in den mittleren Dialogen ins Blickfeld, vor allem in der Politeia, um dann im Spätwerk immer grösseren Raum zu gewinnen—eine Entwicklung, die in eigentümlicher Weise parallel geht mit der Weise, wie das Wort für göttlich, θεῖος, in Platons Werk in Erscheinung tritt.” It is worth noting that Guthrie (1975) 64–5 gives Gundert pride of place in the final section of his introduction (“Philosophical Status: Play and Earnest”, 56–65). 1

2





Why Plato Needs Play

There are likely many reasons for this Platonic development,5 and it is not my intention here to cover the various uses and meanings of play across Plato’s late works, let alone his entire corpus: a number of book-length studies have already been devoted to this project.6 Rather, I wish to tackle one specific question which is not adequately addressed in the literature: what is the relationship between play and mimesis for Plato? Considering that play is so often conceived of as essentially mimetic (“make-believe”, “pretend”), it is easy to conflate the two terms in Plato, as if he, when discussing “play”, were really just discussing mimesis after all.7 This, however, I will show to be a mistake. I begin with two passages from the Sophist and Statesman where “play” is set as a category above mimetic art (“art” in the sense of poetry, theater, dance, music, as well as visual art): in the Sophist, the characters describe paidia (“play”/ “entertainment”) as a category embracing mimetic and non-mimetic art, while, in the Statesman, the characters similarly describe the more concrete paignion (“plaything”) as a category above art in its mimetic and non-mimetic forms.8 What work is this category of play doing that mimesis itself cannot do? For one, it allows non-mimetic art to be included alongside mimetic art; but it does something much more significant than this. Play connects artistic mimesis to pleasure: what play essentially is, he writes, is an activity “for the sake of pleasure alone”. I develop this argument with a close reading of Laws Book 2, where the Athenian attempts a definition: play, he says, is the only activity which can be judged by “pleasure alone”, and, inasmuch as mimetic For this Platonic “development” (Entwicklung), see previous note with Gundert (1965) 213: by the Laws, he claims, play is not “ein biologisch-psychologisches Phänomenon” but “die Weise, in der Sterbliche das Gefüge seiner Seele erneuert, das von den Göttern kommt, und den Einklang mit ihnen gewinnt und erhält”. The relationship is certainly of interest to his addressee, the philosopher Eugen Fink, whose magnum opus posited “play” (Spiel) as the essential metaphysical substrate of “being” (Fink 1960). 6 Cf. de Vries 1949, Ooms 1956, Viangalli 2005, Jouët-Pastré 2006, Normandeau 2008, Nagel (2002) 29–46, and Dunshirn 2010. 7 Gundert (1965) 192 criticizes Fink (1960) for basing his discussion of Plato’s play on the mimesis of the Rep., yet himself often makes play and mimesis all but interchangeable: both articles on play (1965 and 1966) focus largely on Plato’s critique of poetry, which is to say mimesis. Gundert (1966) 15: play was understood “als potenziertes Derivat, ohne Wissen, von großer psychagogischer Kraft, aber um so gefährlicher, je mimetischer es ist” and “dem Spiel der Mimesis” (16); cf. 34. Cf. Guthrie (1975) 60: “Worth noting is the frequent connexion of paidia with imitation as opposed to the real thing, and with the mimetic arts.” Cf. Spariosu (1982) 19 for Plato’s alleged conflation of play and mimesis and Halliwell (2002) 65 for the Laws “renegotiating” the treatment of mimesis in the Republic. 8 A paignion (“game”, “plaything”) is a concrete instantiation of any act of paidia (“play”). Linguistically the diminutive of paigma, it is to paidia what mimēma is to mimēsis or poiēma is to poiēsis. 5



Sophist and Statesman

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art—such as mousikē—is pleasurable, it is play. So, for example, a mimesis of a noble bearing or voice is not inherently pleasurable, but when someone “plays” that noble bearing or voice—for example, by dancing and singing—such activity is made pleasurable. Mimesis, meanwhile, is left with no inherent relationship to pleasure at all. This is not an unreasonable move: many acts of mimesis are not generally associated with pleasure—for example, forging a document or counterfeiting a coin— and so one might hesitate to assume that mimetic activities or mimetic objects are somehow inherently pleasurable. Instead, Plato simply posits a category, “play”, which is “for pleasure alone”, and includes under this category those mimēseis which are “for pleasure alone”. In this new arrangement, art’s pleasures become confined to the pleasures of play, and play becomes a prerequisite for art’s enjoyment: to engage with art just is to “play” with it.

Sophist and Statesman The two late dialogues Sophist and Statesman are paired together as the first two parts of an unfinished trilogy. In this work, a foreign philosopher visiting from the southern Italian town of Elea seeks to discover with his young interlocutors definitions for different types of people: first the “sophist” (part 1), then the “statesman” (part 2), and, finally, the “philosopher” (part 3, never written).9 The way these definitions are reached is via a series of divisions, moving bracket-like from genus to species, genus to species. His young interlocutors rarely put up much resistance and the dialogues are often felt to be more dogmatic than earlier ones,10 but the “division” method and its clarity are particularly useful for the subject at hand: defining play’s relationship to mimesis. Near the middle of the first dialogue, Sophist, the Stranger and his young companions notice that they have been pursuing the definition of “sophist” via a variety of routes. The shifty sophist seems to appear at the end of a number of definitions: first as a hunter, then a merchant, a retailer, a manufacturer, an athlete, and a cleanser.11 The Stranger suggests a step back is needed to define the sophist in a more comprehensive way, See Gill (2015 [2005]) and (2012) 1–17 for overviews, although in the latter she also refers to it as a tetralogy, since both the Sophist (216a) and Statesman (258a) are dramatically connected to the earlier Theaetetus, which thus “herald the Philosopher as a fourth member” (3). 10 See Gill (2015 [2005]): “The Sophist and Statesman strike many scholars as more dogmatic than other Platonic dialogues.” Cf. Clay (2000) 168 and Gill (2012) 4. 11 Soph. 231c–e: θηρευτής, ἔμπορος, κάπηλος, αὐτοπώλης, ἀθλητής, καθαρτής. 9



Why Plato Needs Play

and to do so he sets up a riddle of sorts for his interlocutor. Since the sophist claims to have the power to dispute all things, he says, what would be the parallel case of someone who claims to have the power to “create” all things?12 The young Theaetetus does not catch his meaning, so the Stranger spells it out for him: “I mean he alleges to be able to create you and me of all things, and in addition to us all other animals and trees.”13 When Theaetetus remains clueless even when the Stranger reformulates this sentence, he tries for a fourth time: “I mean, one who claims to be able to create both the creatures of the sea and the sky and the gods and everything else. And, you know, once he’s quickly made these things he sells each of them at a really low price.”14 Theatetus finally manages to solve the riddle: “You’re speaking about some form of play (paidian),” he says.15 Although Theaetetus solves the riddle and the Stranger apparently approves, it must be admitted that “play” or a “game” does not sit particularly comfortably as an answer here.16 “Entertainment” or “amusement” is a better translation,17 but, nevertheless, someone who “creates” a number of animals and then sells them on the cheap is more easily solved as a “painter” or an “artist”. It is the “painter”, after all, who the Stranger is ultimately searching for in this example: just as the painter creates seeming realities but not actual ones with paint, so too does the sophist with words.18 But, if this familiar terrain of mimesis is the target, why Soph. 233d: ποιεῖν καὶ δρᾶν. Note that the second verb may already open the category beyond the ultimate target, painting, to also include, e.g., drama. 13 Soph. 233e: λέγω τοίνυν σὲ καὶ ἐμὲ τῶν πάντων καὶ πρὸς ἡμῖν τἆλλα ζῳα καὶ δένδρα. 14 Soph. 234a: φημί, καὶ πρός γε θαλάττης [καὶ γῆς] καὶ οὐρανοῦ καὶ θεῶν καὶ τῶν ἄλλων συμπάντων· καὶ τοίνυν καὶ ταχὺ ποιήσας αὐτῶν ἕκαστα πάνυ σμικροῦ νομίσματος ἀποδίδοται. 15 Soph. 234a: παιδιὰν λέγεις τινά. 16 There is a joke in these lines but that does not mean that paidia itself means “joke” (pace Jowett 1892, “jest”, ad loc., Fowler 1921, ad loc., Ambuel 2007, 70, “joke”, and Palumbo 2013, 273, “a mockery”; Seeck’s gloss 2011, 54–5, “‘Spiel’…d.h. das Versprechen könne nicht ernst-gemeint sein”, verges close to this). Although the verb form paizeis can mean “you’re joking”, paidia does not similarly denote “joke” (cf. converting the English “you’re teasing” to “you’re making a tease” or “you’re kidding” to “you’re making a kid”). Rather, the Stranger’s joke here revolves around the pejorative aspect of “entertainment” (as Fowler rightly translates paidia at 235a): “Well, you’re not going to tell me that someone who claims [what the sophist claims] is not providing entertainment/amusement, are you?” (234a: τί δέ; τὴν τοῦ λέγοντος ὅτι πάντα οἶδε καὶ ταῦτα ἕτερον ἂν διδάξειεν ὀλίγου καὶ ἐν ὀλίγῳ χρόνῳ, μῶν οὐ παιδιὰν νομιστέον). By 234b the joke is dropped and paidia is treated as a category: thus its reappearance at 235a. 17 White (1997) ad loc. translates “some kind of game for schoolchildren”, but this is to overemphasize the word’s etymology (cf. Notomi 1999, 125, “a kind of playfulness (paidia, 234a6-b4, 235a57)”, and, 128, “childish play”). 18 Soph. 234b–c. Considering this target, some commentators find it natural to skip the paidia step altogether: cf. Bluck (1975) 58–9 and Kolb (1997) 70. 12



Sophist and Statesman

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does the Stranger take this extra and rather laborious step to arrive at “play” (paidia) first? The fact that Theaetetus circles back to the word a page later (235a) suggests that it is more than just introductory banter. Notomi lists and analyzes well the correspondences between this passage and the treatment of mimetic poetry in Republic 10.19 Like the sophist, the poet creates appearances, not realities; like the sophist, the poet can trick the young to believe that these appearances are realities; and so forth. Most importantly for present purposes, the poet’s mimetic activity, like the sophist’s, is also considered a sort of “play” or “game” (paidia). In the Republic 10 passage, after a long consideration of other crafts, like cobbling, medicine, and generalship, he concludes that the mimetic poet, unlike the cobbler and other craftsmen, really knows nothing of the things he represents nor “in what way his depictions are good or bad”.20 After reaching this conclusion, Socrates adds the critical point: “The mimetic artist knows nothing worthwhile about that which he represents (mimeitai), and instead mimesis is a sort of game (paidia) and not a serious thing.”21 For Socrates in this passage, a creation is “serious” or “worthwhile” if it is made by someone who has real knowledge of what is being created—for example, the shoe-maker and the shoe.22 But someone who creates things with no such knowledge, basing his creations upon appearances instead, can be engaging only in a “sort of play”. Paidia might even be translated here as “trifle”, all but synonymous with the previous line’s “nothing worthwhile”23: Socrates is offering a final negative judgement on poetic mimesis and using the word paidia pejoratively to do so.24 Is this the sense of paidia in the Sophist passage? It is one thing to judge a certain activity negatively as “a sort of play” or “trifle” after a long discussion of that activity, but another thing to introduce a new subject as “a sort of play” or “trifle”. That is, pejorative “play” (“game/trifle”) tends to sit most comfortably in the predicate: mimetic poetry is “nothing worthwhile” but a “game/trifle” (paidia) in the Republic, just as “writing” is a “game/trifle” (paidia) in the Phaedrus, or “philosophy” is a “game/trifle” Notomi (1999) 127–8. Rep. 10.602b: οὐκ εἰδὼς περὶ ἑκάστου ὅπῃ πονηρὸν ἢ χρηστόν. 21 Rep. 10.602b: τόν τε μιμητικὸν μηδὲν εἰδέναι ἄξιον λόγου περὶ ὧν μιμεῖται, ἀλλ᾽ εἶναι παιδιάν τινα καὶ οὐ σπουδὴν τὴν μίμησιν. 22 Rep. 10.600e–601d; see Halliwell (2002) 133–42 for the provocative rather than dogmatic nature of such passages. 23 Rep. 10.602b: μηδὲν…ἄξιον λόγου. 24 For pejorative play, cf. e.g., Pl. Prt. 347c–d regarding symposia ἄνευ τῶν λήρων τε καὶ τούτων and Crito 46d (ἦν δὲ παιδιὰ καὶ φλυαρία ὡς ἀληθῶς) with Kidd (2014) 43–50. 19

20

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Why Plato Needs Play

(paidia) in the Crito, at least if it is abandoned in the face of death.25 However, the riddling guessing game of the Sophist is not yet making a judgement about a certain subject, not least because it is not yet clear what the subject actually is. To answer the riddle “Who is the man who claims to be able to make anything and sells it on the cheap?” with “You’re speaking of some trifle” simply does not offer enough in the way of a solution. Yet the Stranger approves and, in fact, appears to have been expecting Theaetetus’ somewhat awkward answer of paidia, since he proceeds to a further subdivision: “And do you know of any form of play more skillful or, indeed, pleasing than the mimetic form of play?”26 Just as the Stranger elsewhere moves from genus to species, like “hunting” to “fishing” or “fishing” to “spear-fishing”, here he is moving from “play” to “mimetic play”. This is something rather different from Republic 10: paidia here is not some pejorative predicate (“X is just a game/trifle”, “X is not something worthwhile”) but an actual subject (“entertainment is X”, “play is X”), one which has its own subdivisions, like every other subject in the Sophist. Gundert writes well regarding this and other such passages: it is not that mimesis is being “degraded” as play, or play is being “degraded” as mimesis, but rather something else: “Actually, paidia appears in later Plato explicitly as the over-arching genus, to which mimesis, along with its subcategories, belongs as a species.”27 It is thus with good reason that Theaetetus returns to the term paidia after the Stranger has finished describing the sophist as a painter. The Stranger asks whether the sophist offers reality or is simply a creator-of-imitations (mimētēs), and Theaetetus answers by way of conclusion: “It’s pretty clear now from what we’ve said, that the sophist is to be found among the subcategories of play.”28 This entire section of the dialogue can thus be seen moving from supercategory (play) to subcategory (mimesis) and back again. The strongest evidence for this reading comes in the second part of the trilogy, the Statesman. Here “play” appears again in the same genus– species relationship, but in a different dialectical context. After the Stranger and his interlocutor have agreed that the statesman is like a Phdr. 276d–e, Crito 46d. Some scholars assign much more significance to play in the Republic and Phaedrus than I am inclined to do (cf. Gundert 1965, 1966, perhaps importing too much from the Laws; cf. Ardley 1967 and Plass 1967). 26 Soph. 234b: παιδιᾶς δὲ ἔχεις ἤ τι τεχνικώτερον ἢ καὶ χαριέστερον εἶδος ἢ τὸ μιμητικόν. 27 Gundert (1965) 210: “Tatsächlich erscheint bei Platon später die Paidia ausdrücklich als das umfassende Genus, dem auch die Mimesis mit ihren Unterarten als Species angehört.” 28 Soph. 235a: ἀλλὰ σχεδὸν ἤδη σαφὲς ἐκ τῶν εἰρημένων ὅτι τῶν τῆς παιδιᾶς μετεχόντων ἐστί τις μερῶν. 25



Sophist and Statesman

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herdsman as he guides his flock, but unlike the herdsman since he does not provide everything for the herd himself (for example, caring for the sick, entertaining them, delivering the lambs, and so forth), it later becomes necessary to distinguish the statesman’s role in the city from these other roles. The Stranger lists the following goods and service: (1) tools, (2) containers, (3) vehicles, (4) protections, (5) entertainments, (6) raw materials, and (7) nourishment.29 These seven classes apparently cover everything the inhabitants of a city might require, other than leadership. The fifth class, “entertainment” or “play”, is the important one for the present argument.30 The Stranger describes it like this: str.: For the fifth class, would we like to posit that which involves decoration and painting, as well as the representations (mimēmata) which partake in painting and mousikē? These are created only for the sake of our pleasures, and justly can be grouped together under one name. soc. yo.: What name? str: “Plaything” (paignion) I suppose is the term. soc. yo.: What do you mean? str.: This one name, you see, will fit as a term for all these things: for none of them are made for the sake of something serious (spoudē), but all are done for the sake of play (paidia).31 Although the topic is different, the categorization here is still of the same cloth as the Sophist. All forms of art—for example, painting and music—are not categorized primarily as mimēmata but as “playthings” (paignia) or things made “for the sake of play” (paidias heneka). It can immediately be seen that one reason these objects are not simply called mimēmata is that non-mimetic forms of art are being included: “decoration” (kosmos) seems to be the idea, for example, colored patterns, ὄργανα (287d), ἀγγεῖα (287e), ὀχήματα (288a), προβλήματα (288b), παίγνια (288c), πρωτογενῆ κτήματα (288e), τροφός (289a). 30 Note that the issue of “entertainment” or “play” already appears at 268b: ἔτι τοίνυν παιδιᾶς καὶ μουσικῆς ἐφ᾽ ὅσον αὐτοῦ τὰ θρέμματα φύσει μετείληφεν. 31 Soph. 288c: Ξε. πέμπτον δὲ ἆρ᾽ ἂν ἐθέλοιμεν τὸ περὶ τὸν κόσμον καὶ γραφικὴν θεῖναι καὶ ὃσα ταύτῃ προσχρώμενα καὶ μουσικῇ μιμήματα τελεῖται, πρὸς τὰς ἡδονὰς μόνον ἡμῶν ἀπειργασμένα, δικαίως δ᾽ ἂν ὀνόματι περιληφθέντα ἑνί; Νε.Σω. ποίῳ; Ξε. παίγνιόν πού τι λέγεται. Νε.Σω. τί μήν; Ξε. τοῦτο τοίνυν τούτοις ἓν ὄνομα ἅπασι πρέψει προσαγορευθέν· οὐ γὰρ σπουδῆς οὐδὲν αὐτῶν χάριν, ἀλλὰ παιδιᾶς ἕνεκα πάντα δρᾶται. For paignion, Campbell’s (1988 [1867]) “child’s play” ad loc. suffers from the over-etymologizing discussed above and misses contemporary usage like Ephippus fr. 24 KA, discussed below; Ricken (2008) translates kosmos as “Schmuck” (47, 171) and paignion as “Spiel” (47); Rowe’s (1997) 331 “plaything” catches the sense. 29

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Why Plato Needs Play

designs, ornaments, and so forth. One might think of objects from the Republic, like Eriphyle’s necklace or the multi-colored piece of fabric that Socrates mentions: these objects seem to be created “for pleasure alone” but are not to be thought of as “representations” (mimēmata).32 Similarly, in the Critias, certain architectural designs—namely the patterning of different colored rocks—are described as “for the sake of play” (paidias kharin).33 What is implicit in the Sophist is made explicit in the Statesman: there is non-mimetic art alongside mimetic art, and the two can be categorized together under the rubric of “play” (paidia) or “plaything” (paignion). The discussion of the Sophist is thus not isolated to the particular context or theme of the sophist’s seeming realities, but endures as a genus–species relationship running through these two late dialogues. Although the relationship between mimesis and paidia in the Sophist is similar to that of the Republic, there is a crucial difference: Plato has taken the “play” of Republic 10—a pejorative predicate—and transformed it into a subject, more or less value-neutral, under which mimesis is subsumed.

The Definition of Play in the Laws What is Plato doing with this new category of “play”? Gundert suggests that Plato is making a radical move in his description of mimetic art as paidia, but this is not quite right. 34 Instead, as was seen in the Introduction to this book, the move to “play” would seem to be, if anything, a move back to traditional Greek terminology. 35 Long before Plato, the verb paizō could denote singing, dancing, playing music, and performing in a theatrical chorus. Apollo in the Homeric Hymn was described as “playing” when he performed on the kithara; Ares and Hermes were described as “playing” when they danced to this music; theatrical choruses ended performances with “We’ve played enough, and so it’s time to go”; and, in the Hesiodic Shield, choral performers were similarly described as “playing”.36 If mimesis was Plato’s radical addition For Eriphyle’s necklace, see Rep. 9.590a; for the multi-colored fabric, see Rep. 8.557c. Hirsch (1995) for discussion of mimesis in the Statesman beyond this passage. 33 Crit. 116b: παιδιᾶς χάριν. 34 Gundert (1966) 15 for Plato’s judgement of poetry being play as “revolutionär”. 35 See Introduction, section “Play, Mimesis, Aesthetics”. 36 Hom. Hymn Apoll. 206 and 200–1; Ar. Thesm. 1227-8; ps.-Hes. Scut. 277–9, 281–4. See Introduction for further references and discussion. 32



The Definition of Play in the Laws

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to the vocabulary of aesthetics, play would seem to be his return to tradition.37 Conservative impulses, however, cannot fully explain the nature of Plato’s late move. “Play” as a category is not renaming mimesis, after all, nor being conflated with it, but rather doing a sort of theoretical work that mimesis itself cannot do. Here Gundert and others have trouble distinguishing this function, not least because it is difficult to escape the notion of play as somehow essentially mimetic.38 But for Plato, as has been seen, play cannot be mimetic in its essence: the Statesman’s category “plaything” (paignion) includes both mimetic and non-mimetic artforms, and the Sophist’s category of “play” (paidia) includes both mimetic and non-mimetic forms as well. If play includes the non-mimetic, it obviously cannot be essentially mimetic. But what, then, is it essentially? As was seen in the Statesman, “play” or “plaything” is defined as being “for pleasure alone”. This is what the mimetic forms like music, theater, and portraiture have in common with non-mimetic forms like ornament, design, and architectural decoration. The move to “play” might thus be seen as a practical one: since not all acts of mimesis are “for pleasure alone”—one might forge a signature or counterfeit a coin for different purposes than writing a song—Plato can escape the treacherous business of explaining why certain mimēmata are pleasurable while others are not. Instead, he begins with the category of “things for pleasure alone”, and treats certain mimēmata as a subcategory, namely pleasurable mimēmata. This difference between play and mimesis is articulated most explicitly in the Laws, where the Athenian distinguishes play from mimesis during a discussion of mousikē. In this passage, the Athenian poses the question to his companions of whether mousikē ought to be judged by the pleasure it yields or by something else, such as its correctness (orthotēs) or benefit (ōphelia, 2.667b). He then approaches his answer by way of analogy: food and drink are pleasurable, but their correctness and benefit lie in their “healthful” For mimesis as Plato’s addition, cf. Ford (2002) 94–5, with 95 n. 7 for further references. Was Plato alone in his turn to play? Gundert speculates about precursors (1965) 210: “[W]ahrscheinlich gehen die summarischen Subsumierungen der Mimesisformen unter den Sammelbegriff ‘Spiel’ schon auf eine vorplatonische Kulturtheorie zurück.” He is referring to Pl. Laws 10.889c–d, which describes the origin of nature and culture according to certain contemporary, but unnamed, atomists/materialists: here art is described as “certain games” (παιδιάς τινας). 38 See Introduction n. 51. For the modern connection between the two, cf. Groos (1899) for the influential play-as-practice theory with Burghardt (2005) 3–43 for a survey of ethological positions. Caillois (2001 [1958]) often cites Groos and describes play as “separate” and “circumscribed” (9), yet treats “mimetic” play as a subcategory; Walton (1990) limits his interests in play to its mimetic forms: see Chapter 3 for discussion. 37

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Why Plato Needs Play

aspect (2.667c). Learning too, he says, is pleasurable, but its correctness and benefit lie in the learning’s truth (alētheia), not its pleasure (it does not matter, for example, how pleasurable it is to learn that two and two make four; what matters is whether this information is actually true). These first two examples seem like reasonable analogies for mousikē; music too, he wants to argue, is pleasurable, but its correctness and benefit lie elsewhere. But the next example falters, as the Athenian himself seems to suggest: copies (eikastikai ergasiai, 2.667d), he says, might on occasion have some pleasure attached to them (“if pleasure arises…”), but their correctness lies in their “equalness”.39 A copy of a coin or a brick, he seems to mean, ought to be exactly the same in measurement and material as the original. These measurable parameters are what matter, not the pleasures that such copies might bring. The problem is: do we find coins and bricks pleasurable qua copies in the same way we find eating, drinking, and learning pleasurable? Not really, it seems, and neither does the Athenian appear to think so: he can express it only with the conditional “if pleasure were to arise”. At this point the Athenian, whether as a new example or a digression, feels a need to consider play. Since it is his most elaborate definition of the term, not only in the Laws but anywhere in Plato’s corpus, it is worth quoting in full: ath.: Using the criterion of pleasure, someone could accurately judge only that which provides no benefit, no truth, no likeness, nor, in turn, any loss in its yield; instead of these, this thing is exclusively for the sake of that which accompanies these other things [i.e., benefit, truth, loss]: namely, delight (kharis), which one would do very well to call pleasure (hēdonē)—whenever nothing of the former [i.e., benefit, truth, loss] follows in consequence. cl.: You mean only harmless pleasure. ath.: Yes, and I mean this same thing to be “play”, when there is neither loss nor profit of any serious worth.40 For the distinction between eicastic and artistic mimesis, see especially Soph. 235d–236c with Notomi (1999) 147–55 and Halliwell (2002) 62–7. While eikastikē has objective measures, phantastikē is based on subjective presentations (phantasmata). So, e.g., if in forging a signature I copy it on the basis of its appearance, my act is phantastikē mimēsis; if I copy it by actually measuring it with a ruler and other instruments of precision, my act is eikastikē mimēsis. 40 Laws 2.667d–e: Αθ. οὐκοῦν ἡδονῇ κρίνοιτ᾽ ἂν μόνον ἐκεῖνο ὀρθῶς, ὃ μήτε τινὰ ὠφελίαν μήτε ἀλήθειαν μήτε ὁμοιότητα ἀπεργαζόμενον παρέχεται, μηδ᾽ αὖ γε βλάβην, ἀλλ᾽ αὐτοῦ τούτου μόνου ἕνεκα γίγνοιτο τοῦ συμπαρεπομένου τοῖς ἄλλοις, τῆς χάριτος, ἣν δὴ κάλλιστά τις ὀνομάσαι ἂν ἡδονήν, ὅταν μηδὲν αὐτῇ τούτων ἐπακολουθῇ; Κλ. ἀβλαβῆ λέγεις ἡδονὴν μόνον. Αθ. ναί, καὶ παιδιάν γε εἶναι τὴν αὐτὴν ταύτην λέγω τότε, ὅταν μήτε τι βλάπτῃ μήτε ὠφελῇ σπουδῆς ἢ λόγου ἄξιον. Cf. Pl. Gorg. 501d–502c. 39



The Definition of Play in the Laws

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Although the syntax is perfectly regular here, it is slightly difficult to translate because the Athenian, rather like the riddling Stranger of the Sophist, is suspending the word “play” until the very end, providing instead a series of “this thing”s (ho, toutou, etc.), which, to make matters worse, refer not only to play but to pleasure as well. If we insert his riddled answer into the beginning, we produce the following definition: “Play is the only thing that can be judged by pleasure alone; it provides no benefit, no truth, no likeness, nor loss in its yield; it is for pleasure alone, although pleasure can accompany benefit, truth, and loss. But if benefit, truth, and loss follow play as its consequence, it is not properly play.” Cleinias fixates rather dully on “harmless pleasure”,41 but this is really not the centerpiece of the Athenian’s definition, which develops around the idea of “pleasure alone”. Just as the Stranger had maintained in the Statesman, play is only for pleasure, and whenever an activity brings some benefit or loss, even if it is pleasurable, it is not properly to be considered “play”.42 This digression on play then causes the Athenian suddenly to conclude: “Should we not thus agree from what we’ve just said that every mimesis should least of all be judged by pleasure and false opinion?” 43 How exactly this conclusion is reached from the preceding lines is uncertain, but at least now the answer lies in sight for mousikē. Since all mousikē is mimetic,44 he says—and, it is implied, the mimetic must be judged by non-pleasure elements—music too must be judged by non-pleasure elements, such as whether the likeness is exact or the symmetrical is symmetrical (2.668a). Most of all, mousikē must be judged by whether it

Cf. England (1976 [1921]) ad 667e5: “Cleinias’s remark is merely an echo of the Athenian’s μηδ᾽ αὖ γε βλάβην”; cf. the ἡδονὰς…ἀσινεῖς at 2.670d. Note that at Pol. 288c the pleasures of play (“pleasure alone”) are also implicitly distinguished from other sorts of pleasures. “Nourishments”, e.g., make a different class (the seventh) from “playthings” (the fifth), and this fits the Athenian’s distinction: eating and drinking may be pleasurable but they are not for “pleasure alone”. This does not necessarily mean that the Athenian excludes the pleasures of the palate from play (cf. Ephipp. fr. 24KA on paignia as edible dainties), or, for that matter, the pleasures of sex (cf. Longus 4.40 with Konstan 1994, 87, and ps. Lucian Onos 11.1, pace Huizinga 1971 [1938], 43–4), but simply excludes those pleasures which are related to sustenance, benefit, or relief. So, e.g., if one eats to relieve hunger or craving, that food cannot be a paignion (litmus test: does one need to swallow the food to enjoy it?); similarly, if one is having sex toward some end (“getting off”, e.g., to say nothing of procreation), that too is not “playing”. 43 Laws 2.667e: ἆρ᾽ οὖν οὐ πᾶσαν μίμησιν φαῖμεν ἂν ἐκ τῶν νῦν λεγομένων ἥκιστα ἡδονῇ προσήκειν κρίνεσθαι καὶ δόξῃ μὴ ἀληθεῖ. 44 And eicastic (2.668a): see above note regarding the distinction between the (artistic) mimetic and the eicastic.

41

42

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Why Plato Needs Play

contains a likeness to the “good”.45 The Athenian thus finds the answer to his question by way of analogy: music should not be judged by the pleasure it brings, but by these other more important, non-pleasure elements. In many ways, the Athenian’s definition of play corresponds rather nicely with the Stranger’s treatment of play in the Sophist and Statesman. As in the Statesman, the emphasis is on pleasure: playthings (paignia) in the Statesman are “created only for the sake of our pleasures”, just as play in the Laws is “for the sake of pleasure alone”. So too, just as the Stranger in the Sophist wishes to distinguish play from mimesis (“Do you know of any form of play more skillful or pleasurable than the mimetic form?”), the Athenian in the Laws takes even greater pains to keep the two terms separate. Indeed, play and mimesis appear to be—at least on a first reading—mutually exclusive. But what exactly is the Athenian saying about play in this passage? His definition is usually treated as an awkward digression or side-glance in his ongoing discussion about mousikē and its judgement. Barker, for example, sums up play’s role in the discussion by saying that, “because things of that sort are mere playful trivialities, we need pay them no further attention”, while Sauvé Meyer similarly supposes that the digression regards “the (very limited) conditions in which anything is to be judged by the criterion of pleasure (667b–668a)”.46 All the Athenian requires for his analogy, after all, is: just as food and drink ought to be judged by non-pleasure elements, and just as learning ought to be judged by nonpleasure elements, so too mousikē should be judged by non-pleasure elements. Thus the lengthy definition of play can function only as an aside or a digression, diminishing, not adding to, the argument’s clarity. There is, however, a rather fundamental problem with this reading of the Athenian’s definition: as others have noted, it conflicts with his Laws 2.668b1–2: τὴν ἔχουσαν τὴν ὁμοιότητα τῷ τοῦ καλοῦ μιμήματι. England (1976 [1921]) ad 668a9: lit. “which preserves its life-likeness to the representation of the right and good”. Schöpsdau (1994–2011) ad 668b2, emphasis in the original: “Der Sinn der Stelle ist: wenn man die schönste Musik sucht, muß man…eine solche suchen, die in ihrer Darstellung (μιμήματι) Ähnlichkeit mit dem Schönen erstrebt.” Moss (2012) 218 extends the meaning of παρεπόμενον and ἐπακολουθῇ to mean not just that pleasure “follows” correctness but “results from it”; but this misses the point of the analogy, which demonstrates a non-causal relationship between the two: pleasure can “accompany”, e.g., eating, whether or not the food is healthy. 46 Barker (2013) 394; Sauvé Meyer (2015) 293. Cf. England (1976 [1921]) ad 667e5f (“[Cleinias’] remark serves to introduce the following statement of the Athenian, that in the case just imagined we should have παιδιά pure and simple—not παιδεία”) and Jouët-Pastré (2006) 72 (“Elle [the paidia of this passage] permet de circonscrire une sphère particulière où le plaisir éprouvé est sans danger pour l’âme”). Cf. Hatzistavrou (2011) 371: “However, artistic creation is not like play. For Plato, it is mimesis…”

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The Definition of Play in the Laws

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treatment of play throughout the Laws.47 The Athenian’s ongoing stance about play has always been that it carries along with it the highest consequences: if a child’s play is bad, it results in a society’s destruction, and, if it is good, it results in a society’s harmony and bliss. This is not just his position in the first two books, where the Athenian demonstrates the importance of play in citizen education: “Right away from childhood,” he says, the citizens should “play” the activities fitting to each (1.643b), since the “essence of education” lies in this form of directed play (1.643c– d);48 or where he describes in Book 2 the “serious intentions” behind the “plays and songs” (paidiai te kai ōidai) of children, namely to create the all-important “harmony” in their souls (2.659e). It is his position throughout the Laws. For example, later in Book 7, he declares: “In all societies there is a complete failure to recognize that the types of games played is the most important issue in legislation regarding whether the established laws are to be uniformly permanent or not.”49 The forms of play are crucial to a society’s health, he continues: “When a set of games is instituted with the same people always playing the same games and enjoying the same toys in the same way and same fashion, it allows also the laws that have been seriously established to remain untouched; but when the same games are changed and innovated…there is no greater penalty for society.” Play is not some minor theme in the Laws; it is a central one.50 Considering that this interest in play throughout lies in its pervasive social consequences, how can the Athenian suddenly define play as an activity with no consequence other than pleasure? Such a play definition, moreover, which treats play and mimesis as mutually exclusive, also conflicts with the fact that play is always Cf. Schöpsdau (1994–2011) ad 667e6: “Dieser abschätzige Gebrauch von παιδιά ist in den Nomoi die Ausnahme, die dem Spiel durchaus eine ‘ernste’ Seite abgewinnen.” Cf. Müller (1935) 58: “Die hier genannte παιδιά ist der absolute Gegensatz zu σπουδή, während die religiöse Musik eine παιδιά ist, die Platon zugleich allerernsteste σπουδή nennt (803cd und andeutend 659e). Die verschieden schattierten Bedeutungen von παιδιά in den Νόμοι zu untersuchen, ist noch eine Reizvolle Aufgabe.” Koller (1956) 98–9 n. 133 sees the impossibility of making paidia refer to any form of music considering the ethical consequence of music in Plato, but follows Müller in thinking of it as “Scherz- und Unterhaltungspiele”; this is no less problematic. 48 Cf. 2.656a–d, 3.700a–701b, 7.793e–794c, 7.798b–d, 7.803c–e (for the centrality of this last passage, cf. Jouët-Pastré 2006, 15, and Ooms 1956, 2). Cf. Rep. 4.424c–e. 49 7.797a: φημὶ κατὰ πάσας πόλεις τὸ τῶν παιδιῶν γένος ἠγνοῆσθαι σύμπασιν ὅτι κυριοώτατόν ἐστι περὶ θέσεως νόμων, ἢ μονίμους εἶναι τοὺς τεθέντας ἢ μή. Ταχθὲν μὲν γὰρ αὐτὸ καὶ μετασχὸν τοῦ τὰ αὐτὰ κατὰ αὐτὰ καὶ ὡσαύτως ἀεὶ τοὺς αὐτοὺς παίζειν τε καὶ εὐθυμεῖσθαι τοῖς αὐτοῖς παιγνίοις, ἐᾷ καὶ τὰ σπουδῇ κείμενα νόμιμα μένειν ἡσυχῇ. κινούμενα δὲ τὰ αὐτὰ καὶ καινοτομούμενα…, (797c) οὐκ εἶναι ζημίαν μείζω πάσαις πόλεσιν. Cf. Schöpsdau (1994–2011) ad 797a7–800b3 (“Die Stabilität der Gesetze und der Verfassung hängt ab von der Unveränderlichkeit der musikalischen Formen”) and D’Angour (2013) 299–301. 50 See especially Jouët-Pastré 2006 for tracing this theme in the Laws. 47

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Why Plato Needs Play

understood to be consequential precisely because of its mimetic aspect. Like Socrates in the Republic, the Athenian of the Laws repeatedly indicates mimesis as the decisive factor underlying ethically “good” or “bad” play: if play is mimetic of good activities, it is good; if bad, bad.51 For the Athenian suddenly to distinguish play and mimesis as mutually exclusive, as he seems to do in this passage, or claim that play lacks all consequence but its pleasure would be inconsistent, to say the least. It is thus worth examining the context of this play definition, considering that play has been such a central theme for the first two books of the Laws. As will be seen, this definition of play arrives at a rather dramatic point in the first two books: he has been leading up to this discussion for some time and is finally offering some answers. The context clarifies the intentions of his play definition: the Athenian is not treating mimesis and play as two mutually exclusive activities at all. Rather, he is treating them, as he has throughout, as two aspects of a single activity, mousikē.

The Context of the Athenian’s Definition of Play The Athenian’s concerns over the proper judgement of mousikē for citizens can be traced back to the beginning of his discussion of education in Book 1. Citizens need to be conditioned to be virtuous, and this conditioning is largely executed through having citizens play virtuous activities from an early age. To approach this idea, the Athenian begins his definition of education (paideia, 1.643a) with the examples of farming and carpentry. This passage was fully quoted earlier in the Introduction, so it may be recalled that, if a child from an early age is continually invited to “play” farming or “play” carpentry, the caretaker can “turn” (trepein) that child’s pleasures in a certain direction.52 As the Athenian puts it, the caretakers “try, through their play, to turn the pleasures and desires of the children in that direction which they should follow to reach their end”.53 The idea seems to be that the pleasures of play will become associated with the activities of farming and carpentry themselves, and so eventually not just play-farming and play-carpentry but actual farming and carpentry will become, if not pleasurable, at least more appealing. But the assumption underlying this play program is the most significant for Cf. Rep. 4.424c–e and Laws 7.797a–c. See Introduction, section “A Final Example”. 53 Laws 1.643c: καὶ πειρᾶσθαι διὰ τῶν παιδιῶν ἐκεῖσε τρέπειν τὰς ἡδονὰς καὶ ἐπιθυμίας τῶν παίδων, οἷ ἀφικομένους αὐτοὺς δεῖ τέλος ἔχειν. 51

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The Context of the Athenian’s Definition of Play

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present purposes: the activities of farming and carpentry are being presented as not inherently pleasurable themselves—a natural enough position, since otherwise children would have to be attracted to hard labor from an early age. Play, however, has the ability to make such activities pleasurable: the things children are attracted to are not farming and carpentry themselves but “playing” farming and “playing” carpentry. This urge to play is what the educator hopes to manipulate. As the Athenian makes clear, however, this educational program of farming and carpentry functions only as an analogy, since actual citizens are not to be educated in manual labor but in excellence (aretē).54 But where does the Athenian actually articulate the other side of this analogy? Where does he describe citizens being taught to “play” excellence, just as the children of his initial example “play” farming and carpentry? It takes the Athenian a long time to reach the other side of this analogy. First he digresses on the psychology of pleasure and pain (1.644c), and introduces the model of the puppet to explain his views. Then he discusses the psycho-physiology of intoxication (“What happens when we get this puppet drunk?”, 1.645d), and, for the next ten pages, considers the various uses of wine and its psycho-physiological effects for society more generally. Only in Book 2 does he return to the topic of “right education” (orthē paideia, 2.653a). He defines it as learning to hate what is bad and love what is good (2.653a–c), and claims that this can be attained through choral training (2.654a). Choral training allows citizens to learn noble comportments (skhēmata, 2.655a), because, in the chorus, citizens dance these comportments. Through choral training, citizens thus learn “excellence” (aretē): “To cut a long story short,” he says, “let’s say simply that the things that have to do with excellence (aretē) with regard to soul and body—either excellence (aretē) itself or some idea of it—are the sumtotal of noble comportments and musical tunes” (2.655b).55 A citizen becomes excellent in body by moving excellently and excellent in soul by having the right tunings, as it were. Whatever we make of the Athenian’s somewhat hasty definition of aretē, what is important to notice is that here we have finally reached the other side of the Athenian’s analogy, introduced all the way back in Book 1. Just like the child who has learned to love farming or carpentry by playing farming and carpentry at an early Laws 1.643e; cf. Rankin (1958) 65, Frede (2010) 115 and Kurke (2013) 128–9. Laws 2.655b: καὶ ἵνα δὴ μὴ μακρολογία πολλή τις γίγνηται περὶ ταῦθ᾽ ἡμῖν ἅπαντα, ἁπλῶς ἔστω τὰ μὲν ἀρετῆς ἐχόμενα ψυχῆς ἢ σώματος, εἴτε αὐτῆς εἴτε τινὸς εἰκόνος, σύμπαντα σχήματά τε καὶ μέλη καλά…

54 55

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Why Plato Needs Play

age, so too this citizen child will, by playing with “courageous” or “noble” comportments (skhēmata), tunes, and utterances (phthegmata), eventually find these comportments, tunes, and utterances themselves to be pleasurable, or at least more appealing.56 If this is the Athenian’s intention with this analogy, it would seem that there is nothing inherently pleasurable about these comportments, tunings, and utterances themselves, yet play renders them pleasurable. That is, making a noble gesture (skhēma), for example, is not inherently pleasurable no matter how “good” it is; but dancing (paizō) a dance of noble gestures is pleasurable, since dancing qua play is inherently pleasurable. Repeating a virtuous maxim is not inherently pleasurable no matter how “good” it is. But singing a song which expresses this virtuous maxim is pleasurable since singing qua play is inherently pleasurable. The pleasure, the Athenian implies, is to be found in the “play”, not in the content of that play. This may help to explain why the Athenian returns so often to his ethology of play throughout Book 2.57 The first time he mentions this bit of ethology he puts it into the mouth of folk wisdom, but he soon adopts it, more or less, as his own. Certain vocal movements (proto-singing), he claims, and certain bodily movements (proto-dancing) are engaged in for pleasure, and this is youthful “play” in its most primal form (2.653d-e; he calls this “play” at 2.673c): The argument goes that youth as a whole, so to speak, is unable to stay still both with its bodies and voices, but always tries to move and yell, jumping and leaping on the one hand, as though dancing and playing with pleasure, and yelling all sorts of noises on the other.58

This bodily and vocal movement seems to be motivated by nothing other than pleasure (hoion…meth’ hēdonēs). Later it is described as what Cf. 2.655a regarding “comportments/movements and vocalizations/sounds” (τά τε σχήματα καὶ τὰ φθέγματα) of the “courageous” or “cowardly” soul (ἀνδρικῆς ψυχῆς…καὶ δειλῆς). From this he concludes with regard to mousikē’s regulations that “all the comportments and tunes related to excellence of soul or body…are good, and of badness, the opposite” (ἁπλῶς ἔστω τὰ μὲν ἀρετῆς ἐχόμενα ψυχῆς ἢ σώματος…σύμπαντα σχήματά τε καὶ μέλη καλά, τὰ δὲ κακίας αὖ, τοὐναντίον ἅπαν). That such mousikē is pleasurable is implicit; this is why it needs to be regulated. 57 Laws 2.653d–e, 2.657c, 2.664e–665a, 2.673c–d. Cf. Schöpsdau (1994–2011) ad loc., Jouët-Pastré (2006) 69–74 and Prauscello (2014) 140–9. At 2.673c–d the union of singing and dancing does not give birth to “choreia and play” but “choral play” (i.e., χορείαν καὶ παιδιὰν at 263d is a hendiadys). This both fits his usage and avoids conflict with his origin of paidia elsewhere (including 2.673c): children do not need to learn to sing and dance in order to “play” nor is orderly play any more pleasurable than disorderly play. 58 Laws 2.653d–e: φησὶν δὲ τὸ νέον ἅπαν ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν τοῖς τε σώμασι καὶ ταῖς φωναῖς ἡσυχίαν ἄγειν οὐ δύνασθαι, κινεῖσθαι δὲ ἀεὶ ζητεῖν καὶ φθέγγεσθαι, τὰ μὲν ἁλλόμενα καὶ σκιρτῶντα, οἷον ὀρχούμενα μεθ᾽ ἡδονῆς καὶ προσπαίζοντα, τὰ δὲ φθεγγόμενα πάσας φωνάς. 56



Play and Mimesis as Two Aspects of Mousikē

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happens when we “rejoice” (khairomen)—“We are unable to keep still” (2.657c)—as if in pleasure or enjoyment’s overflow we cannot help but start to move in certain ways.59 Such movement, characteristic of the “child” (pais), is his central example of “play” (paizō) throughout Book 2. Education (paideia) is described as filling that naturally pleasurable play with content, imposing “order” (taxis) upon this proto-singing and proto-dancing, but it does not follow that this content is inherently pleasurable in the way that the play itself is.60 Rather, this pleasurable movement and pleasurable noise-making appears to be as enjoyable in its disorderly form as its orderly one: the distinction between the two lies in the order (taxis), not the pleasure.61 Even the traditional “gift of the Muses and Apollo” is tellingly reduced to the educational aspect of mousikē (paideia), not the pleasurable play itself.62 Instead, as with the farming and carpentry, via continued “play” with a certain content—for example, a noble or courageous comportment—the child begins to associate that play-pleasure with the content itself, just as the child did with farming and carpentry. The educator manipulates the child’s natural inclination to play, and so “turns” its “pleasures” and “desires-for-pleasure” in a certain direction.63

Play and Mimesis as Two Aspects of Mousikē To return to the Athenian’s definition of play: on a first reading, it seems that the Athenian is considering two different types of activities. On the one hand, there is an activity, paidia, which brings no “profit”, “loss”, Cf. the Chorus at Ar. Peace 301–336, who are so overjoyed that they cannot stop from dancing and singing (e.g., at 324–5: ἀλλ᾽ ἔγωγ᾽ οὐ σχηματίζειν βούλομ᾽, ἀλλ᾽ ὑφ᾽ ἡδονῆς | οὐκ ἐμοῦ κινοῦντος αὐτὼ τὼ σκέλει χορεύετον). 60 Cf. Morrow (1960) 309: “As forms of play, dancing and singing are spontaneous expressions of natural exuberance and are intrinsically pleasurable.” 61 Cf. Prauscello’s (2014) concession at 145 n. 123, emphasis in the original: “This of course does not rule out the possibility that non-human beings may experience pleasure in movement qua movement, even if the movement is unruly… Such a comparison…does indeed suggest that in all young beings already unruly, disordered movements of the body engender, or at least can engender, pleasure. This pleasure probably consists in some kind of consciousness, even if only sensorial, of being in motion.” 62 Laws 2.653d–654a, where the Athenian assigns to folk wisdom the idea that the gods gave to humans alone the gift of “pleasurable perception of rhythm and harmony” (τὴν ἔνρυθμόν τε καὶ ἐναρμόνιον αἴσθησιν μεθ᾽ ἡδονῆς, 2.654a) and asks whether this view should be approved (2.653d). Although he answers by articulating this gift not as a “pleasure” but a first “education” (2.654a παιδείαν…πρώτην), commentators assume this to mean that rhythm itself is inherently pleasurable, and this is what separates humans from the animals. I argue against this view below in “Play and Mimesis as Two Aspects of Mousikē”. 63 Cf. 7.819a–c for how to make letters and arithmetic pleasurable through play. 59

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Why Plato Needs Play

“likeness”, or “truth” but only pleasure; on the other hand, there is an activity, mimesis, which always yields such consequences, due to its central claim of “likeness”. Yet his interest in food and drink before this definition of play was not in separating two different types of food and drink—for example, one which provides sustenance and one “very limited set” which provides only pleasure—but rather two aspects to eating and drinking: the pleasurable aspect and the healthful aspect. Both occur simultaneously but must be distinguished if food and drink are to be judged correctly. Similarly, his interest in learning was not in separating two different types of learning—one type which provides true information and one limited set which provides only pleasure—but rather two aspects to learning: the pleasurable aspect and the healthful aspect. By analogy, mousikē, like food, has a pleasurable aspect, but also, like food, has an aspect of being beneficial or detrimental. Like food, it should thus be judged not by the former—that is, the pleasure which accompanies it—but rather by the latter, namely the benefit or detriment it yields. When the Athenian separates play and mimesis, it thus would seem that he is not discussing two different types of activities—play (inconsequential) and mimesis (consequential)—but two aspects of a single activity, namely mousikē. Inasmuch as mousikē is pleasurable, it is play (paidia). Inasmuch as it is beneficial or detrimental, it is mimesis. Rather than offering an impossible definition of play that conflicts with his other accounts of play throughout the Laws, the Athenian is simply separating two aspects of a single activity in order to identify the proper way to judge it.64 Mousikē, even if it is engaged in for the sake of play, must be judged by the criterion of good or bad mimesis, not pleasure. If this is so, it would explain why the Athenian cannot simply follow the analogy of the pleasures of food, drink, and learning (mathēsis) onward to mimetic activities. In the Laws, mimetic activities are not inherently pleasurable in the way that food, drink, and learning are.65 Yet, after defining play, it becomes clearer what the nature of those mimetic pleasures are (“Should we not thus conclude from what we’ve just said Cf. Ritter (1896) 81: “Für die μουσική, deren Beurteilung in Frage steht, ist der erziehliche die Entwicklung des ganzen Lebens einschließsende Zweck festgestellt worden. Sie ist παιδιά nur in dem Sinne, daß sie μεθ᾽ ἡδονῆς ausgeführt werden soll” (cf. at 70). England (1976 [1921]) ad 667e5f: “At 668b1 he expresses a doubt whether this pure and simple παιδιά is ever to be found” with εἴ τις ἄρα που καὶ γίγνοιτο. Cf. Aristotle’s separation of truth- and play-aspects at EN 2.7, 1108a9–14. 65 The best the Athenian can do regarding the eicastic is the conditional “if [pleasure] arises” (ἐὰν γίγνηται, 2.667d). For the relationship between eicastic and (artistic) mimetic, see above note; cf. 4.705c–d for non-pleasurable mimesis. 64



Play and Mimesis as Two Aspects of Mousikē

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that every mimesis should least of all be judged by pleasure and false opinion…?”). Only in play, he seems to be saying, do we judge “for pleasure alone”: if the player is ruminating over consequences, benefits, detriments, and other extra-play concerns during the play, the player is not truly “playing”. At the same time, this subjective aspect of play does not prevent it from having objective consequence. From an outside perspective—that is, outside the perspective of the player—play is understood to be highly consequential, not least because, from the outside perspective, it can be seen as mimetic of good or bad behavior.66 The Athenian’s distinction between play and mimesis is thus not some strange departure from the position he maintains throughout the Laws; it is his most explicit articulation of it. At the beginning of Book 2, as was mentioned in the previous section, the Athenian reports some contemporary folk wisdom which explains human delight in music, specifically the “pleasurable perception of rhythm and harmony”, to be a gift from Apollo and the Muses, and asks whether this folk view should be approved (2.653d–654a). Non-human animals, after all, tend to remain unaffected by these particularly human pleasures, so the joys of music must be something that makes humans unique. This is nothing short of saying that music is intrinsically pleasurable: what else could the gift of Apollo and the Muses be? Prauscello in her excellent book notes that the Athenian returns to this folk anthropology three times through the course of Book 2, and she, like most readers of these passages, assumes that the Athenian generally endorses this folk idea of music being intrinsically pleasurable. However, she notices in her list of these anthropological passages that, when the Athenian reformulates the folk wisdom in his own terms, “the link with pleasure is not explicitly stated”. No matter: she explains the inconsistency away by saying that it “is easily inferred from the relative contexts”.67 However, it may be worthwhile to resist such inferences, and Cf. Introduction, section “A Final Example”, where I argue that a child’s play-shoveling need not be read as subjectively mimetic (i.e., the child is not pretending to shovel; the child is just shoveling), but, from an outside perspective, since that child’s activity can be compared to real-world, serious shoveling (i.e., shoveling engaged in for something other than its immediate pleasure), such play-shoveling can be described objectively as mimetic of that world. When considered in this way, any act of play can be potentially interpreted as mimetic, but certain acts may appear more mimetic (i.e., relatable to extra-play reality) than others. This may help to explain the Stranger’s notion of mimetic and non-mimetic forms of play. Alternatively, he may wish to reserve some role for intentional mimesis within the act of play (i.e., copying or mirroring X for the sake of pleasure) as opposed to the unintentional mimesis that arises through action (i.e., doing or being X) for pleasure alone. 67 Prauscello (2014) 141. 66



Why Plato Needs Play

instead recognize that the Athenian reformulates the folk anthropology in slightly different terms because he understands the nature of this gift in different terms. The “perception of rhythm and harmony” is not intrinsically pleasurable for the Athenian; after all, would the gods lead humans astray down all the false paths new music might take them?68 Rather, play is what makes the “perception of rhythm and harmony” pleasurable. The nature of the gift, as the Athenian understands it, instead seems to be an expansion of the domain of what humans can play, which is to say, what humans can make pleasurable through play. Unlike non-human animals, humans can play with content like number and symmetry and embrace these divine things intimately in their own lives.69 Any animal can move the voice or body for the sake of pleasure alone; only humans are able to do this rhythmically or harmonically. But, if music is being made pleasurable through play, what exactly is that content which is being made pleasurable? Is it music itself or something else? To return to the farming and carpentry analogy from earlier, the argument was that “playing” farming causes the content of “farming” itself to become pleasurable even when there is nothing obviously pleasurable about shovels, digging, and so forth. But is music the content that citizens play, in the way that farming is? This is where the Athenian’s analogy with farming and carpentry breaks down: music is not the content that is played with, as if we were “playing music”. It is that music, so long as it is being performed, is inextricable from play: the player produces sounds from the voice or instrument “for the sake of pleasure alone”. Unlike farmers and carpenters, who presumably stop “playing” farming or “playing” carpentry and at some point transition to actual farming and carpentry, citizens never stop “playing” music, and this is presumably the only context in which most citizens ever engage with it. They are not, for example, studying the mathematical proportions which lie behind certain musical modes; they are “singing” and “dancing” those

For the Athenian’s negative stance toward musical innovation, cf. Laws 2.669b–e, 3.700a–701a, with Csapo (2004) 235–45, Kowalzig (2013) 186–7, and Folch (2015) 117–28. 69 Cf. ps.-Arist. Prob. 30.6, 956a11–14: “Why should we obey a human rather than another animal? Is it because, as Plato answered to Neocles, humans alone among animals know how to count? […] Or is it because they are the most mimetic [of all animals] and are able to learn because of this? (διὰ τί ἀνθρώπῳ πειστέον μᾶλλον ἢ ἄλλῳ ζῴῳ; πότερον ὥσπερ Πλάτων Νεοκλεῖ ἀπεκρίνατο, ὅτι ἀριθμεῖν μόνον ἐπίσταται τῶν ἄλλων ζῴων; …ἢ ὅτι μιμητικώτατον; μανθάνειν γὰρ δύναται διὰ τοῦτο.) The distance between Plato’s answer and the final Aristotelian one may also be suggestive of their two different approaches to aesthetic problems (for Aristotle, see Chapter 6). 68

Conclusions  musical modes.70 There is no escape from the “play”-aspect of music, since singing and dancing, for Plato’s Athenian—and, it should be remembered, the Greek usage that precedes him—just are “playing” (paizō). This is why the Athenian can so decisively separate music into two aspects: there is a mimetic aspect to music, which is the aspect by which it should be judged; but, inasmuch as music is pleasurable, it is play. His citizens blindly pursue “pleasure alone” in their dancing, singing, and festivals, since, if they were pursuing anything else, they would not be properly “playing”. Of course, the songs and dances have been decided upon ahead of time by the oldest, best, and most rational citizens, who use “goodness” not “pleasure” as their criterion, and so the citizens are reaping ethical benefits from their pleasurable pursuit as well. But, from their own perspective, these citizens must be blissfully unaware of these simultaneous benefits, if they are actually doing what they are meant to be doing—that is, playing.71

Conclusions In three late dialogues, the Sophist, Statesman, and Laws, Plato turns to a new theoretical tool, play (paidia), in order to address some longstanding philosophical problems. In the Sophist, he treats paidia as an overarching category embracing both mimetic and non-mimetic forms of play and art, while, in the Statesman, he uses the similar term “plaything” (paignion)72 as a category to encompass mimetic arts like painting and sculpture, and non-mimetic arts like ornament and decoration. This allows him not just to have a term set above mimesis which can embrace non-mimetic art alongside mimetic art; it also allows him to connect such art to pleasure. Play as a category is that which is “for pleasure alone”. He develops this idea most fully in the Laws. There the Athenian also defines play as “for pleasure alone”, but he does not mean by this that play is inconsequential. He means that, when we engage with a The exception is the older citizens whose thorough education is meant not for their role as performers but judges selecting what songs and dances should be sung and danced (2.670a–671a; cf. 7.812b–c). 71 Cf. Ritter (1896) 70 (“Dagegen durch die ὀρθὴ χρεία dieser Triebäußserungen wird das Spiel under der planvollen Leitung des Gesetzgebers, ohne daßs der Spielende selbst es merkt und ohne daßs es aufhört μεθ᾽ ἡδονῆς zu geschehen und in diesem Sinne παιδιά zu bleiben, doch eine ernste μελέτη”) and Laws 7.802c–d. Cf. Heath (2013) 50–2. 72 For the linguistic relationship between paidia and paignion (cf. mimesis vs. mimēma), see above n. 8. 70

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Why Plato Needs Play

certain content—for example, noble comportments or noble maxims— for the sake of pleasure alone, we are playing. Singing, dancing, music— or, we are allowed to believe, other forms of art—are thus not pleasurable due to the comportments, maxims, and mathematical formulas they might contain. They are pleasurable inasmuch as they are play. This is significant in light of the aesthetic problems from Plato’s earlier writings. Before late works like the Sophist, Statesman, and Laws, Plato never failed to make it clear that mimetic art was pleasurable. He wrote about audiences’ delight at mimetic performances (khairomen, 605d), their essentially pleasurable nature, and, most extensively, the psychological dangers such pleasures pose.73 But precisely what it is about mimetic art that makes it pleasurable, for example, in the Republic is less clear, especially if one compares Aristotle’s explicit treatment of mimesis’ pleasure in the Poetics.74 Some scholars even treat this as a central problem or gap in Plato’s aesthetics: while Plato treats mimesis negatively in the Republic and elsewhere, his treatments of “beauty” (to kalon, kallos) are uniformly positive.75 This creates a difficult calculus: how is it possible for a mimēma (representation) like a painting or a poem to be pleasurable, without that pleasure deriving from the perceived beauty of the mimēma?76 One solution for these earlier works might be that the nature of Plato’s beauty lies in certain proportions and mathematical formulas, as he

Cf. Rep. 10.606b regarding internalizing the mimēmata we “enjoy” (ἀπολαύειν ἀνάγκη ἀπὸ τῶν ἀλλοτρίων εἰς τὰ οἰκεῖα); 607a (εἰ δὲ τὴν ἡδυσμένην Μοῦσαν παραδέξει ἐν μέλεσιν ἢ ἔπεσιν, ἡδονή σοι καὶ λύπη ἐν τῇ πόλει βασιλεύσετον…); 10.607c (ἡ πρὸς ἡδονὴν ποιητικὴ καὶ ἡ μίμησις); 10.607d (οὐ μόνον ἡδεῖα). 74 See Arist. Poet. 4.1448b8–17 on the pleasure of mimetic “learning”, with Chapter 6 for discussion. 75 See, e.g., Pappas 2017 (“If aesthetics is the philosophical inquiry into art and beauty (or a contemporary surrogate for beauty, e.g. aesthetic value), the striking feature of Plato’s dialogues is that he devotes as much time as he does to both topics and yet treats them oppositely”) with his final section, “Imitation, Inspiration, Beauty”, on the difficulty of unifying these treatments. Cf. Murdoch (1977) 17: “Plato wants to cut art off from beauty, because he regards beauty as too serious a matter to be commandeered by art”, quoted at Janaway (2006) 398. See Grube (1927) 286–8 for a biographical reading. 76 E.g., Rep. 5.476b: οἱ μέν που, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, φιλήκοοι καὶ φιλοθεάμονες τάς τε καλὰς φωνὰς ἀσπάζονται καὶ χρόας καὶ σχήματα καὶ πάντα τὰ ἐκ τῶν τοιούτων δημιουργούμενα, αὐτοῦ δὲ τοῦ καλοῦ ἀδύνατος αὐτῶν ἡ διάνοια τὴν φύσιν ἰδεῖν τε καὶ ἀσπάσασθαι. “Beauty” seems to be the source of attraction, which is tantamount to saying that “beauty” seems to be the source of the pleasure. But, to fit mimesis into such a statement, poems and paintings would need to have some element of truth or goodness about them, considering that truth/goodness should ultimately lie behind the perceptions of actual beauty and its concomitant pleasures.

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Conclusions  suggests elsewhere.77 The mimēma reproduces that form, but it is ultimately a falsehood, like so much red lipstick reproducing youthful red lips. The representation appears to be something “beautiful”—that is, it bears certain qualities characteristic of the “beautiful” (for example, a certain proportion)—but, upon closer inspection, it is actually just an optical illusion. The problem with this reckoning, however, is that it suggests an artist who actually knows the proper proportions and tries to counterfeit them, rather like the lipstick manufacturer reproducing the youthful lips. But, in Republic 10, it is specifically the artist’s ignorance of these realities that causes his representations to be false. That is to say, the artist, in a sense, gets the proportions wrong, which would have to mean that the artist is creating something not actually beautiful at all.78 Why don’t spectators then find these mimēmata ugly and repulsive rather than sources of pleasure? The problem may thus be better approached from the side of the spectator: in the Republic, for example, what spectators are attracted to in a mimesis is not real beauty at all but what they mistake for beauty, as Socrates himself says.79 People generally are ignorant about beauty, and what they take to be beautiful is not actually beautiful but something else altogether.80 Likely for this reason, Plato emphasizes the role of the irrational part of the soul in the viewing of mimēmata: the appetites (epithumiai) can follow only perceived pleasures but cannot know what real beauty is. Opined beauty is thus nothing more than an experience of pleasure, and only rarely is any real beauty involved.81 This calculus, Cf. Phil. 64e (μετριότης γὰρ καὶ συμμετρία κάλλος δήπου καὶ ἀρετὴ πανταχοῦ ξυμβαίνει γίγνεσθαι), Pol. 284a-b, with Pollitt (1974) 16–17, who contextualizes these passages on symmetria well with the fifth-century Polycleitus’ Canon; cf. also Pl. Laws 668a2–3, 668d7–3e5, with Schöpsdau (1994–2011) ad loc. for more Polycleitus-related bibliography. 78 Not just a little bit wrong, but “wholly” wrong: e.g., Rep. 10.603a: ὅλως ἡ μιμητικὴ πόρρω μὲν τῆς ἀληθείας ὂν τὸ αὑτῆς ἔργον ἀπεργάζεται (cf. Rep. 10.598e: ἀνάγκη γὰρ τὸν ἀγαθὸν ποιητὴν, εἰ μέλλει περὶ ὧν ἂν ποιῇ καλῶς ποιήσειν, εἰδότα ἄρα ποιεῖν, ἢ μὴ οἷόν τε εἶναι ποιεῖν). 79 Rep. 10.602b: “But, so it seems, the sort of thing which appears to be beautiful to the masses and those who don’t know anything, this is what the poet makes mimēseis of ” (ἀλλ᾽, ὡς ἔοικεν, οἷον φαίνεται καλὸν εἶναι τοῖς πολλοῖς τε καὶ μηδὲν ἐἰδόσιν, τοῦτο μιμήσεται). Adam (1969 [1902]) ad loc. writes: “He will copy τὰ τῶν πολλῶν πολλὰ νόμιμα καλοῦ τε πέρι καὶ τῶν ἄλλων (5.479d).” 80 Cf. Rep. 5.476d on the distinction between “knowing” and “opining” beauty (οὐκοῦν τούτου μὲν τὴν διάνοιαν ὡς γιγνώσκοντος γνώμην ἂν ὀρθῶς φαῖμεν εἶναι, τοῦ δὲ δόξαν ὡς δοξάντος). 81 Cf., e.g., Rep. 10.605d: when we listen to Homer or the tragedians, our judgements are based on our delight (χαίρομέν τε καὶ…ἐπαινοῦμεν ὡς ἀγαθὸν ποιητήν, ὃς ἂν ἡμᾶς ὅ τι μάλιστα οὕτω διαθῇ); cf. Laws 2.667d–e (quoted above) for the interchangeability of khar- words and hedon-

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Why Plato Needs Play

however, is also not without its problems: beyond the issues it brings to Diotima’s ladder, it is also unclear what that thing mistaken as beautiful is or why it should be a source of pleasure at all.82 If irrational desires are somehow attracted by nature to seemingly beautiful things, there ought to be some resemblance between the seemingly-beautiful and the actually beautiful.83 But, if this is what the appetites are attracted to, one would have to return to those proportions and formulas above, which Book 10’s treatment rejects. Thus, the problem of these earlier texts boils down to: what makes artistic mimēmata pleasurable for Plato? He clearly understands them to be pleasurable, but it seems that he has not yet found the language to articulate the nature of that pleasure. With “play”, he finds that language. The pleasures that arise in and around various artistic forms are the pleasures of “play”, and what spectators desire is not the artistic objects themselves but to “play” with such objects. With play, the divorce between “beauty” (to kalon) and “pleasure” (hēdonē)—toyed with in the Republic—becomes, at some level, explicit: there is nothing inherently pleasurable about a kalon (beautiful/good) art-object at all.84 Compared to the “beauty” of the Symposium, the word kalon has become much closer to the English “good”: one does not desire the beautiful object of art, but one desires to play, and that play itself may or may not be “good” (kalon). Since play (paidia) has the ability to turn anything into a pleasure, whether bad or good, it becomes the work of education (paideia) to turn those pleasures (hēdonai) and desires-for-pleasures (epithumiai) in the proper direction. Mimesis, meanwhile, appears to have no purchase on pleasure outside such “play”. Mousikē, the Athenian claims, is not pleasurable inasmuch as it is mimesis—forging a signature or counterfeiting a coin, after all, also words. For Diotima’s ladder, see Pl. Symp. 210a–212c. In both Diotima’s ladder and the Republic the clear proviso is that one must be led (i.e., taught) regarding beauty (cf., e.g., Rep. 5.476c: ἄν τις ἡγῆται ἐπὶ τὴν γνῶσιν αὐτοῦ (κάλλους)). But, while Diotima’s teaching regards how to abstract on the beauty all around us, in the Republic the teaching is required for selecting which things are really beautiful and not false beauties. Beauty is thus no longer a compass at all: now all directions are equally magnetic, and so one needs a guide in this quagmire to show which direction is the true beauty. For the important distinction between opinion (doxa) of beauty and knowledge (epistēmē) of it, cf. 5.477b, 5.479d–480a. 83 Cf. Rep. 3.401b–d with Prauscello (2014) 30–1 for the botanic imagery. 84 Cf. Jouët-Pastré (2006) 72, emphasis in the original, regarding Laws 667d–e: “L’Athénien souligne que le plaisir en soi n’est jamais critère du beau (seul le plaisir de l’homme bien éduqué peut servir de norme)…” Cf. the question at Gorg. 474d. For the “pure” pleasures of Phil. 51c–d (emphatically excluding, e.g., paintings), cf. Porter (2010) 87–9 and Peponi (2012) 115–21. For the distinc82

Conclusions  is mimetic; it is pleasurable inasmuch as it is play. The work that “play” does, then—or why Plato needs “play”—is that it connects mimesis to pleasure in a new and appealing way that improves upon his attempts in the Republic. As I hope to have shown, play not only deserves a central place in overviews of Plato’s aesthetic thought—at present, it is generally absent85—but also should cause reconsideration of the traditional history of Greek aesthetics. As will be seen, whether or not Aristotle’s mimesis is reacting to Plato’s Republic, it does seem to be reacting to a theory which attempts to abstract mimesis from pleasure, rather than his own more famous theory, which abstracts pleasure from mimesis. tion between kalos and kallos, see Konstan (2014) 31–61. Cf., e.g., Grube 1927, Janaway 2006, Kamtekar 2008, Westermann 2009, Destrée and Herrmann

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Plato’s Play and the Tragic Paradox

In the last chapter it was seen that Plato was developing some new and bold ideas about art toward the end of his life, and these ideas revolved around the concept of play. All art is play, his characters keep suggesting: there are mimetic forms like portraiture, and non-mimetic forms like ornament; there are traditionally denoted activities of “play” like singing and dancing, but also less traditional paiz- activities, like painting and sculpture. In this unifying vision it seemed that Plato had found a tool to explain the pleasures of art: whatever the content or medium of the work of art, there is nothing necessarily pleasurable about that content or medium. Rather, it is our play which makes these things pleasurable. Such a position raises an almost endless number of questions. Even if an activity of play could be described as being “for pleasure alone”, how does this translate into what we think of as an aesthetic experience? That is, “playing” dice might have some vague relationship to watching a “play”, but the differences surely outweigh the similarities. So too, what can it mean that Plato’s “play” covers not only the production but also the reception of art? On the one hand, he describes citizens “singing” and “dancing” as “playing”; on the other hand, he describes art-objects like paintings and sculptures as being “for the sake of play,” as if we “played” with such objects. Yet, like the dicing and theater-going, the differences between consuming and creating art seem to be at least as pronounced as their similarities. Finally, one would wish for at least a few examples from these various media that are allegedly related through play. How is listening to music “playing”? How is looking at an architectural design “playing”? How is watching a tragedy “playing”? Are they all the same sorts of play or are they somehow different? There are no explicit answers to these questions, unfortunately, since Plato did not write an exhaustive treatise on play’s relationship to art, but rather only offered glimpses of the idea across a few late dialogues that are chiefly concerned with other topics. This is, of course, not unlike his 



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treatment of artistic mimesis earlier: the Republic, too, for example, is not a treatise, let alone an exhaustive treatment of art. However, it is possible to think through Plato’s ideas about play further, and even focus on a particular medium which might begin to approach some of the above questions. The focus of this chapter will be on drama, particularly on the so-called tragic paradox, which boils down to, roughly: why do we enjoy watching suffering in a tragedy, even though it disturbs us to encounter such suffering in real life?1 Socrates struggles with this issue in Republic 10, where he considers the relationship between a father weeping over his dead son and a spectator weeping over tragic events in the theater. What is the difference between the two, if there is a difference? The primary difference, of course, is that in one case the spectators are dealing with a mimēma and not the actual thing. But exactly why a mimēma of suffering should be pleasurable is unclear. The man mourning for his lost son—who stands at the beginning of this argument—is never described as actually “enjoying” his grief, and the incremental appearance of “pleasure” words suggests a certain careful distance Socrates is trying to maintain between theatrical weeping and the experience of real loss.2 Yet he considers theatrical mimēmata to be pleasurable, and so naturally treats them as akin to “those most obvious pleasures” of eating and drinking: he uses appetite words like “insatiable” (aplēstos) at 604d and “starved” for tears at 606a.3 It seems that, just as the desire for drink takes pleasure in the drink, and the desire for food takes pleasure in the food, the desire to weep takes pleasure in the weeping. Spectators thus gorge themselves on this pleasure at the theater and, as Socrates warns, run the risk of becoming insatiable gluttons.4 The problem is that, if spectators desire the weeping itself, it becomes difficult to distinguish the man mourning his lost son from the For the “tragic paradox” or “paradox of tragedy”, Hume’s formulation is regularly cited: “It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy” (Hume 1757 “Of Tragedy” in Hume 1987, 216, with Guyer 2014, i.139); cf. Addison (1712) The Spectator 418 in Addison and Steele (1965) iii.566–70, with Guyer i.71–3; Burke (2008 [1757]) i.xv–xvi, 46–9, with Guyer i.156; and Schiller (1993 [1792]) 1–21, “On the Art of Tragedy,” with Guyer i.468–71, 475–5. 2 Rep. 10.603e for the father’s loss; at 10.604d, the recall of suffering in the mind is engaged in aplēstōs. Areskō and kharizō appear at 605a–b as the aim of the mimetic poet, and this kharmorphs into khairomen of the audience at 605d, with khairein te kai epainein at 605e; epithumia (appetite for pleasure) appears at 606a, and hēdonē appears in full force only at 606b. 3 For hunger and thirst as the “clearest” (ἐναργεστάτας) forms of appetites (ἐπιθυμιῶν), see Rep. 4.437d. 4 Rep. 10.606a–607a. Cf. Heath (2013) 32–40 and Liebert (2017) 120 for precursors to this “psychosomatic addiction to painful emotion”. 1

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spectator mourning at a tragedy. Beyond the fact that people are more prone to “hold down” these emotions when they themselves experience misfortunes, as opposed to when they view at a distance these misfortunes befalling others, the negative emotions themselves are presented as roughly equivalent: we desire weeping itself whatever the context.5 Socrates clearly wants to expose a powerful influence between art and life in Republic 10, but can he really be identifying theatrical emotions with real-life emotions? This would force him to admit, for example, that in cases where emotions are not being checked but given full rein they are more or less identical with the experiences of the theater: when the bereaved father is alone not only is he able to give full vent to his grief, but he actually “enjoys” grieving in the same way that he would do at the theater. When people are fleeing for their lives and entirely overwhelmed by fear, they actually “enjoy” that fear in the same way they would “enjoy” fear at the theater. Such equations, even if accepted, yield a glaring inconsistency: if these are indeed identical enjoyments, why don’t people desire to see—and actively seek out—tragic situations in the same way that they seek out tragedies? Why do they not similarly seek out genuine mortal dangers as they do terrifying plays? Although Socrates carefully distances theatrical experience from actual experience, it seems that he has not found the language to articulate the difference between the two. With play he finds that language. He returns to the tragic paradox later in the Philebus, where he considers the experience of watching tragedies and comedies and the “mixture” of emotions that are experienced there. Unlike in Republic 10, where it seems that spectators desire the negative emotions themselves, in the Philebus Socrates articulates these spectators as desiring to “play” with such emotions. Here especially it becomes important to remember the emotive aspect of Greek paidia. Unlike in English, where we cannot properly “mix” a feeling such as “malice” (phthonos) with “play” since “play” (unlike, say, “joy”) is conceived as an activity, not an internal state, in Greek the word is often included among other feelings, moods, and emotions. For Socrates, play and malice can thus combine as a proper “mixture”: the mixture, as he calls it, is “playful malice” (paidikos phthonos).

For “holding down”, see Rep. 10.606a (τὸ βίᾳ κατεχόμενον…πεπεινηκὸς τοῦ δακρῦσαι). For further discussion of this passage, see below in the section entitled “Plato’s Play and the Tragic Paradox”.

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Before turning to this passage of the Philebus, however, which suggests spectators somehow “playing” in the theater, some preliminaries must be dealt with: not least, how can spectators “play” at all? Even if we can imagine children engaging with objects for “pleasure alone”—for example, the child playing with the shovel in the Introduction, or young Paidia herself playing with the stick on the Metropolitan vase—such a child would be recognizably “playing”. Spectators, by contrast, do not appear to be doing much at all, and, if they are well-behaved spectators, they are characterized by their stillness and silence, not the exuberant motion and noise of the playing child. The “play”, after all, is on the stage, not in the spectators’ seats. To consider this problem before looking at the treatment of the tragic paradox in the Philebus, it is necessary to return briefly to the Laws.

Spectator Play Of the many philosophers and psychologists who locate the genesis of art in child’s play, it is illuminating to place two of them—Plato and Freud—side by side for contrast. When Freud discussed the evolution of jokes, he envisioned children as agents who were able to enjoy their play freely and, for that reason, were in no “need” of jokes. Through a process of education, those pleasure sources, which were freely available in childhood, become effectively blocked for the adult by an insurmountable heap of inhibitions. The evolution from play to art is essentially a psychological one for Freud: at some point inhibitions become so pronounced that one can no longer “play” freely but needs to be tricked into playing; this is what jokes do.6 Plato in the Laws suggests something remarkably similar, but for his Athenian the crucial development from child to adult when it comes to play is not psychological but physiological. The child, as was seen in the previous chapters, is so hot with energy that it cannot keep still and so is always physically jumping and yelling as manifestations of that state of heightened pleasure. This pleasurable jumping and yelling is “playing” (paizō), an activity, of course, that had always been linguistically associated with children (paizō > pais). But when these children become older and cool down, their bodies simply lose that excess of hot energy, and lose that childish exuberance. For this reason the “older citizens”, who are Freud (1989 [1905]) chap. IV, “The Mechanism of Pleasure and the Psychogenesis of Jokes”, 143– 70, especially 160–70. Cf. the summary of the book on 293.

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physiologically too fatigued to play like the younger citizens, content themselves in watching the play of younger citizens, since they cannot play themselves. The Athenian puts it like this: While the young are ready to dance themselves, don’t we think it a fitting activity for us older people to spend our time watching (theorountes) them, taking delight in their festive play, since the nimbleness among us is gone? Since we desire and embrace that youthful nimbleness, we set up competitions for those who are especially capable of awakening us to youth in our memory.7

The youthful overflow of pleasurable energy is gone, and all that remains for older citizens is to “watch” the younger citizens as they “play”. Remarkably, the Athenian is not satisfied with this state of affairs and later insists that the older citizens themselves ought to participate in a chorus, just like the other age groups, and even suggests that they can do so by becoming young again through intoxication.8 My interest here, however, is not in these later prescriptions but in the nature of the spectatorship being described in this paragraph. What exactly are these older citizens doing when they are watching the younger citizens “play”? It might seem that the “play” of these older citizens has been terminated long ago due to the process of aging and the consequent handicapping such aging is said to produce. As the Athenian says, the older citizens’ “nimbleness” is gone and no longer accessible, unless, of course, they receive some artificial stimulation (that is, childish heat) from wine. On the other hand, there is no suggestion that these citizens’ desire to play has vanished along with their bodily vigor. Far from it, he says: these older citizens “desire” (pothountes) that youthful activity, and, furthermore, their longing for such activity is what makes them such avid spectators in the first place. As the Athenian describes it, the citizens “rejoice” (khairomen) watching these young performers’ festive play (paidia), but what sort of watching is this? They are not, it seems, watching like censors in concern for moral transgressions, nor are they watching like parents worried over potential accidents. They are engaged in a pleasurable form of viewing: the spectators “rejoice” or “delight” in viewing the performances. As the Athenian describes it, the spectating provides not just a substitute for the Laws 2.657d: ἆρ᾽ οὖν οὐχ ἡμῶν οἱ μὲν νέοι αὐτοὶ χορεύειν ἕτοιμοι, τὸ δὲ τῶν πρεσβυτέρων ἡμῶν ἐκείνους αὖ θεωροῦντες διάγειν ἡγούμεθα πρεπόντως, χαίροντες τῇ ἐκείνων παιδιᾷ τε καὶ ἑορτάσει, ἐπειδὴ τὸ παρ᾽ ἡμῖν ἡμᾶς ἐλαφρὸν ἐκλείπει νῦν, ὃ ποθοῦντες καὶ ἀσπαζόμενοι τίθεμεν οὕτως ἀγῶνας τοῖς δυναμένοις ἡμᾶς ὅτι μάλιστ᾽ εἰς τὴν νεότητα μνήμῃ ἐπεγείρειν. 8 Cf. 2.666a–c, 671d–e; Peponi (2013) 216–23, Murray 2013. For Freud’s connection between childhood and intoxication, see Freud (1989 [1905]) 155–6. 7



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spectators’ own lost youth but a joyful reminder of it, as if in rejoicing they are “awakened” once again to their own youthful play. He seems to mean this “awakening” almost literally: as he says in the previous line (2.657c), “when we rejoice, we are unable to keep still”.9 Perhaps the older spectators are tapping their feet or humming along, but, whatever this inability to “keep still” amounts to, it is impossible not to recall the Athenian’s description of the activity of play itself, which also arises from a joyful inability to “keep still”.10 Are the spectators somehow “playing” even though they are sitting in the spectators’ seats? This connection between spectatorship and play becomes even more explicit in the next paragraph (2.657d–e): We don’t think it altogether worthless what most people say about festivals nowadays, do we? I mean their notion that whoever causes us to delight and rejoice the most ought to be considered cleverest and judged the victor? Since we’ve allowed ourselves to play on such occasions, we ought to appreciate most and, as we just said, give prizes to whoever causes the most people to enjoy the greatest amount.11

There is a general way to take this sentence regarding spectators “allowing themselves to play”, of course. The older citizens are by nature “playing” inasmuch as they are attending a “festival”: paidia words often denote “festival” in Greek.12 But this weaker reading loses the gradual point of Laws 2.657c: καὶ μὴν ἔν γε τῷ τοιούτῳ, χαίροντες, ἡσυχίαν οὐ δυνάμεθα ἄγειν. Cf. 2.673c9–673d1 (οὐκοῦν αὖ ταύτης ἀρχὴ μὲν τῆς παιδιᾶς τὸ κατὰ φύσιν πηδᾶν εἰθίσθαι πᾶν ζῷον) and 2.664e3–6, quoted above, where the inability to be quiet (ἡσυχίαν οὐχ οἵα τε ἄγειν) but always “jumping” around (πηδῷ) are the markers of the youth’s fiery nature, with Chapter 1 for discussion. 11 2.657d–e: μῶν οὖν οἰόμεθα καὶ κομιδῇ μάτην τὸν νῦν λεγόμενον λόγον περὶ τῶν ἑορταζόντων λέγειν τοὺς πολλούς, ὅτι τοῦτον δεῖ σοφώτατον ἡγεῖσθαι καὶ κρίνειν νικᾶν, ὃς ἂν ἡμᾶς εὐφραίνεσθαι καὶ χαίρειν ὅτι μάλιστα ἀπεργάζηται; δεῖ γὰρ δή, ἐπείπερ ἀφείμεθά γε παίζειν ἐν τοῖς τοιούτοις, τὸν πλείστους καὶ μάλιστα χαίρειν ποιοῦντα, τοῦτον μάλιστα τιμᾶσθαί τε, καὶ ὅπερ εἶπον νυνδή, τὰ νικητήρια φέρειν. For the key phrase, cf. Schöpsdau (1994–2011) ad loc. (“Denn da wir uns bei derartigen Gelegenheiten an Spaß und Spiel ergötzen dürfen…”); Peponi (2013) 220 (“since we give ourselves over to play on such occasions…”); England (1976 [1921]) ad loc. (“as it is recognized that merry-making on such occasions is right”); Des Places (1951) ad loc. (“puisqu’on nous a permis de nous distraire à ces spectacles…”); and Bury (1926) ad loc. (“seeing that we give ourselves up on such occasions to recreation…”). Saunders (2004 [1970]) is a bit too Aristotelian ad loc.: “[B]ecause the fact that we are allowed to relax on such occasions…” Note that this causal clause about play distinguishes the sentiment from the similar formulation at Rep. 10.605d. 12 See, e.g., Pind. Ol. 1.16–17 (victory banquet); Her. 9.11 (Ὑακίνθιά τε ἄγετε καὶ παίζετε); Ar. Lys. 700 (schol. = παιγνίαν· ἑορτήν, paignia = “festival” LSJ, “neighbourhood party”, Henderson 1987); Pl. Phdr. 276b (for the sake of play and festival), Rep. 2.365a (διὰ θυσιῶν καὶ παιδιᾶς ἡδονῶν); Pl. Leg. 2.657d (παιδιᾷ τε καὶ ἑορτάσει), Men. Sam. 41–2 (τῆς δ᾽ ἑορτῆς παιδιὰν πολλὴν ἐχούσης), Epitr. 478 (sunepaizen refers to participation in the festival Tauropolia); and Herod. 3.55 (paignia = “a feast”, “holiday”). 9

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these two paragraphs: the Athenian is observing that the older citizens can no longer physically play like the younger ones since their bodies have lost their youthful vigor. Yet these older citizens can watch the younger citizens play and be “awakened” to that youthful play in their memory (mnēmēi)—something which causes them to delight and be unable to keep still. By attending a festival, they are playing, but there is a content to that festival engagement: they are rejoicing, delighting, and making the sorts of movements that rejoicing and delighting cause. This is what he seems to mean by “allowing ourselves to play”: it is not just attending a festival, it is engaging festively, that is, “playing”. If this reading is correct, the careful wording of the Athenian seems to remind that there is nothing necessarily pleasurable about watching a performance. We might watch like censors concerned over moral transgressions, or watch like parents worried about potential dangers; we might watch as rivals scanning the performance for mistakes, or like engineers calculating the weight and impact on the dancing platform. There are a number of ways to watch a performance, and many of them do not seem to be particularly pleasurable. Yet the way these spectators watch is bound up in “delight”, which suggests a special mode of watching. They are “awakened” to their own youthful play, unable to keep still in their delight, as if they were playing along with the performers. The Athenian obviously does not mean that the spectators are running into the orchestra and joining the dance, nor does he even necessarily mean that they are tapping their feet and humming along from their seats. He means that their spectating, inasmuch as it is “rejoicing” or “delighting”, is playing. The only problem, of course, is that these spectators are generally ­characterized not by their movement but by their immobility, at least in comparison to the performers, who are visibly “dancing” and “singing”— which is to say, visibly “playing” in Greek. In what sense does a spectator “play”? The question concerns not only the nature of play without a moving body but the nature of play without some self that the body represents.13 That is, when a performer dances in a chorus or plays a theatrical role, that performer is the one doing the playing, inasmuch as the performer’s body is engaging in the dance or swinging the prop of the theatrical role. Spectators, through the paralysis of spectating, seem not Well articulated by Rosenfield and Ziff (2017) 66: “We have a sense of self because we have a preexisting sense of our body that contains that self. The basis of our subjectivity is our ‘body image,’ a coherent, highly dynamic (it is constantly changing with our movements), three-dimensional representation of the body in the brain.” For the ancient Greek role in this body–self connection, see Holmes 2010.

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just to lose the motion of their bodies and voices but, by virtue of that loss, to renounce any claim on selfhood in the act of playing: they are not the ones playing; other people are playing. So, in what sense, if the Athenian indeed means that spectators “play” while they watch performances, can spectators actually be playing, without body and, consequently, without self? As Peponi and others have noticed, the Athenian’s focus is not on this spectatorial paralysis but on the necessary physical engagement in the actual performances of the imagined city.14 So this brief glimpse at play in the spectators’ seats is, on the whole, passed by in favor of those other concerns. The question of how to get the older citizens to dance strikes the Athenian as more pressing than, for example, articulating precisely how motionless spectators can be said to be playing. At the same time, the very possibility of spectator play—that is, play not just in the orchestra and on stage but in the theater seats—puts us in a good position to turn to the discussion of tragedy and comedy in the Philebus. Here, play also is associated with the spectators, and so it provides a good deal of insight into what spectator play might look like. The spectators of the Philebus experience certain emotions during a dramatic performance, Socrates says, but these emotions arise with a recognizable admixture of pleasure.

Comedy and Mixed Emotions in the Philebus Despite frequent treatments of Philebus 47d–50e as Plato’s theory of comedy or laughter, its intentions really lie elsewhere.15 Socrates, in a dialogue devoted in part to the nature of pleasure, wishes to show that intense pleasures often consist of pains as well as pleasure, and comedy is introduced in order to illustrate a particular example of this. Socrates first divides this category of mixed pleasures into (1) those which are mixed in the body alone (body–body), (2) those mixed between body and soul (body–soul), and (3) those mixed in the soul alone (soul–soul). For body–body, he describes, in remarkable detail, a sort of itch where a surface pain mixes with a subdermal pleasure: as the surface pain is relieved, thus becoming pleasurable, the subdermal pleasure becomes painful and Cf. Peponi (2013) 223–32, Prauscello (2014) 105–51 and Folch (2015) 49–112. Cf., e.g., Morreall (1987) 10–13, Cerasuolo (1996), McCabe (2010), and Prauscello (2014) 197–200; Halliwell (2008) 300 argues against using such texts “to construct an account of Plato’s own supposed view, even ‘theory’, of laughter”.

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so itself requires relief. The two thus oscillate in an ongoing pleasure– pain mixture; Socrates reports that some pleasure-lovers “call these the greatest pleasures, and count happiest whoever lives most in their grip”.16 For the body–soul mixtures, he points to previous parts of the dialogue, where he had exhaustively treated desires like thirst as a pain of the body mixed with the soul’s hope for relief, which is pleasurable.17 Whether this body–soul mixture undergoes the same ongoing oscillations as the bodily itch is not asked. For the soul–soul mixture, he turns to emotions like “anger, fear, desire, grief, love, envy, malice, and so forth”,18 noting that even the painful emotions among them, like anger, can be found to be “full of inconceivable pleasures”.19 Yet, just when it seems that Socrates is going to provide a straightforward account of emotions (anger, mourning, desire, and so forth), he veers off in a strange direction to examine tragedy, comedy, and the emotions experienced there. In tragedy spectators “enjoy themselves at the same time that they are weeping”,20 and in comedy there is some such similar mixture. This turn to the theater is no minor digression: his analysis of comedy makes up some ninety percent of the discussion of mixed emotions, and occupies roughly three of the five Stephanus pages devoted to mixed pleasures of body, body–soul, and soul. Socrates explains that it will be worthwhile to focus on comedy because it is supposed to help us “understand more easily the mixture of pain and pleasure in other cases as well”.21 After this lengthy discussion of comic psychology, he offers his conclusion regarding the particular pleasure–pain mixture of the soul under investigation: “So when we laugh at the risible aspects of our friends, we mix up pleasure with pain, since we are mixing together pleasure with malice (phthonos).”22 This pleasure–pain mixture, however, does not apply only to spectators in the theater; rather, “the argument reveals for us that in laments, tragedies and comedies—not only on the stage but in the whole tragedy and comedy of life—pleasures are mixed Phil. 47b: καὶ καλεῖ δὴ μεγίστας ταύτας, καὶ τὸν ἐν αὐταῖς ὅτι μάλιστ᾽ ἀεὶ ζῶντα εὐδαιμονέστατον καταριθμεῖται. 17 Phil. 47c referring to Phil. 31e–32d. See Frede (1997) 280–1 for discussion. 18 Phil. 47e: ὀργὴν καὶ φόβον καὶ πόθον καὶ θρῆνον καὶ ἔρωτα καὶ ζῆλον καὶ φθόνον καὶ ὅσα τοιαῦτα. 19 Phil. 47e: ἡδονῶν μεστὰς…ἀμηχάνων. 20 Phil. 48a: χαίροντες κλάωσι. 21 Phil. 48b: ἵνα καὶ ἐν ἄλλοις ῥᾷον καταμαθεῖν τις οἷός τ᾽ ᾖ μεῖξιν λύπης τε καὶ ἡδονῆς. 22 Phil. 50a: γελῶντας ἄρα ἡμᾶς ἐπὶ τοῖς τῶν φίλων γελοίοις φησὶν ὁ λόγος, κεραννύντας ἡδονὴν αὖ φθόνῳ, λύπῃ τὴν ἡδονὴν συγκεραννύναι. 16



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with pains, and in countless other ways”.23 By explaining the nature of spectators’ emotions during a comedy, he seems to think that he has explained mixed emotions in general. What to make of these strange pages about comedy and mixed emotions? The standard reading, well represented by Frede’s commentary, is crisp and, at first, convincing.24 Just as in the body–soul mixtures of pleasure and pain which Socrates had treated earlier at length, the mixtures of soul–soul consist of a present pain mixed with the pleasurable hope of future relief. All the “pains of the soul” Socrates lists at 47e (anger, fear, desire, mourning, and so forth) can be treated in this way. Anger (orgē) is a pain mixed with a pleasurable desire for revenge; fear is a pain mixed with a pleasurable desire for safety; the pleasures of desire (pothos, erōs) lie in desire’s hope of fulfillment; the “envy/malice” words (zēlos, phthonos) have their pleasure in imagining the hoped-for evil’s realization; even grief ’s (threnos) pleasure might be seen as lying in the memory of past happiness.25 Such an interpretation is not only congruent with the Philebus’ earlier discussion of soul–body pleasures, which are discussed in terms of pleasurable anticipation, but also congruent with Aristotle’s descriptions of many of these emotions in the Rhetoric. In these passages, the student may be taking a page from the teacher.26 One wishes that Plato could have been as crisp and clear as Frede, simply dispatching soul–soul with the same easy paragraph that he dispatched soul–body, or even body–body. He could have simply explained that the mixed pleasure-pain of soul–soul is a painful psychic feeling mixed with the pleasurable anticipation of that painful feeling’s relief. Instead, as has been seen, he turns to comedy to explain the workings of phthonos (“malice”), and does so for a number of pages. Why does he do this? It seems difficult to imagine that it is in order to reach Frede’s account of phthonos, since already by 48b he has provided Frede’s explanation: Phil. 50b: μηνύει δὴ νῦν ὁ λόγος ἡμῖν ἐν θρήνοις τε καὶ ἐν τραγῳδίαις καὶ κωμῳδίαις, μὴ τοῖς δράμασι μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ τῇ τοῦ βίου συμπάσῃ τραγῳδίᾳ καὶ κωμῳδίᾳ, λύπας ἡδοναῖς ἅμα κεράννυσθαι, καὶ ἐν ἄλλοις δὴ μυρίοις. 24 Such a reading explains the mixed pleasure-pains of the soul in terms of a painful psychic feeling mixed with the pleasurable anticipation of that pain’s relief: cf. Gosling and Taylor (1982) 191–2 and Frede (1997) 283–95 (cf. Frede 1996). Although Delcomminette (2006) 440–8 does not analyze the mixture in terms of anticipation, he too discerns the pleasures of comedy as arising out of envy itself. Cf. Destrée (forthcoming) and Trivigno (forthcoming); see Peponi (2012) 51–8 for Homeric resonances. 25 Frede (1997) 293 with 293 n. 107 for grief (threnos). 26 Cf. Frede 1996.

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soc. Do you consider the topic now under discussion, phthonos, to be a certain pain of the soul, or what? prot. A pain. soc. But the person who feels phthonos won’t he reveal himself by taking pleasures in the misfortunes of his neighbors? prot. Indeed.27 What more does Socrates need than this? He has just shown malice (phthonos) to be related not just to pain but also to pleasure, and, depending on what kind of character Socrates is taken to be, Socrates could even call the pleasure of malice (phthonos) a highly intense pleasure. Socrates does not stop there, however, nor would one expect him to since he does not seem to be a particularly nasty character elsewhere. What sort of person takes pleasure—intense pleasure—in the misfortune of their neighbors, let alone friends? Things are more complicated, he suggests, and so he proceeds to his elaborate discussion of comedy. Yet Frede and others tend to interpret the intense pleasure of comedy as nothing other than the pleasure of phthonos itself. As Gosling and Taylor write: Plato’s example of the pleasure–pain mixture of phthonos “obscures” the point he is trying to make “because we are faced with a spectator chortling in a theatre”.28 Socrates, in other words, appears to be taking a long and repetitive route to achieve what he has already achieved at 48b: that, when we wish someone ill, we simultaneously anticipate the future pleasure when this person actually experiences misfortune. If the mixture is as clear as all this, Socrates can only be muddling things by introducing the theater and the emotions experienced there, since he is someone who already experiences an intense pleasure whenever he sees friends and neighbors suffer misfortune, and expects us to recognize this feeling too. Socrates’ moral character aside, the most important aspect of the problem for us is its bearing on the tragic paradox. Does Socrates actually identify the phthonos experienced in the theater with the phthonos experienced in everyday life? Yes, I may desire someone to fall down the stairs in a comedy, but I do not really desire that they fall down the stairs—it is not real phthonos. Similarly, I might grieve in the theater, yet I am not really grieving; I might fear in the theater, yet I am not really fearing. The Phil. 48b–c: Σω. τό τοι νυνδὴ ῥηθὲν ὄνομα φθόνου πότερα λύπην τινὰ ψυχῆς θήσεις, ἢ πῶς; Πρ. οὕτως. Σω. ἀλλὰ μὴν ὁ φθονῶν γε ἐπὶ κακοῖς τοῖς τῶν πέλας ἡδόμενος ἀναφανήσεται. Πρ. σφόδρα γε. 28 Gosling and Taylor (1982) 191. 27



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distinction would seem to be obvious: if the fear experienced in genuine perils were identical to the fear experienced in the theater, spectators would regularly be observed fleeing theaters. On the standard reading of this passage, not only is Socrates obscuring what could easily have been a clear argument with this segue into comedy, and not only is Socrates revealing himself to be a rather nasty character who feels intense pleasure when his friends suffer: Socrates actually cannot tell the difference between theatrical emotions and everyday emotions. The fear of the theater just is the fear experienced in the real world, and the phthonos of the theater just is the phthonos experienced in the real world. Spectators are fleeing the theater after all. This is not Socrates’ position. Instead, he clearly takes pains to distinguish generic phthonos from the kind under discussion in this passage, which is “phthonos mixed with pleasure” or “playful phthonos”.29 When he turns to comedy, he begins by acknowledging “ignorance” (agnoia) and “stupidity” (abelteria) as an evil (48c), and defining the “ridiculous” (geloios) as a sort of opposite to the condition of self-knowledge. People may think themselves richer, more attractive, or wiser than they are, and this seems to be related to being “ridiculous”, but on a certain condition: we do not laugh at powerful people who are self-ignorant, but weaker sorts who cannot retaliate (49b). But, before articulating this condition, he feels a need to step back to remind what the target of all this talk about comedy and the ridiculous is (49a): “Well, you know, we must divide this further into two parts, Protarchus, if we are going to see the strange mixture of pleasure and pain once examining playful malice (paidikon…phthonon).”30 The target in all this is not “malice” at all, he says; it is a mixture that he calls “playful malice” (paidikos phthonos). Phil. 49a for παιδικός φθόνος, 50a for κεραννύντας ἡδονὴν αὖ φθόνῳ. Considering the fact that he concludes phthonos is a pain (50a), ambiguity can be avoided if the future tense is respected at 48b (ἀναφανήσεται): feeling malice is not “feeling pleasure” at others’ misfortunes, but the malicious person will reveal themselves by the enjoyment they show at others’ misfortunes, not unlike, perhaps, the stressed person revealing themselves by the relief they show when that stress is removed. More importantly, he introduces these emotions (rage, grief, malice, etc.) as having elements of pleasure, but this does not commit him to the notion that all these emotions are always “mixed”. Rather, it serves as an endoxic introduction to the topic before distinguishing the nature of these mixtures: phthonos and these other emotions are themselves painful but can be mixed with pleasure (κεραννύντας ἡδονὴν αὖ φθόνῳ, 50a). Only in this sense does phthonos sometimes appear to us itself as a “pleasure” (as, e.g., at 49d). Cf. Halliwell (2008) 301 n. 93 and Eidinow (2016) 250–3 for further references and discussions of ancient Schadenfreude; Eidinow (2016) 70–9, 102–39, for phthonos in general. 30 Phil. 49a: τοῦτο τοίνυν ἔτι διαιρετέον, ὦ Πρώταρχε, δίχα, εἰ μέλλομεν τὸν παιδικὸν ἰδόντες φθόνον ἄτοπον ἡδονῆς καὶ λύπης ὄψεσθαι μεῖξιν. 29

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Translators take this phrase “playful malice” (paidikos phthonos) in different ways—“the malice of entertainments” according to some, the “malice of comedy” according to others—but it makes little difference for the present purposes, so long as it is recognized that Socrates with this phrase is drawing a distinction between the experience of actual malice and that sort of malice which is “playful”, the sort of malice that arises when watching a comedy.31 After Protarchus asks what all this talk of comedy and the ridiculous has to do with the mixture of pleasure and pain that is the target of the discussion, Socrates reviews their position on envy (49c–d) and then reaches the climax of his argument at 49e–50a. With a series of stinging questions, he forces his companion to admit what amounts to three laughter paradoxes: when we laugh at our friends’ faults, (1) we believe those faults to be misfortunes (implicitly: although we generally wish our friends well); (2) we enjoy laughing at them (implicitly: although a friend’s misfortune generally pains us); and (3) we enjoy this out of malice (implicitly: although malice is never justifiable).32 One misses a lot from those questions if they are taken in a straightforward way—that is, without the implicit parentheses I have suggested above:33 the discussion is not about phthonos per se, but that strange sort of phthonos that occurs in watching a comedy, paidikos phthonos. Like the itch where the internal and subdermal pleasures and pains are shown to be in oscillation, Socrates is putting two psychic desires in oscillation here: the desire to play/laugh and the desire that our friends fare well.34 When we indulge the desire to play/laugh we create pain for Eidinow (2016) 251 rightly signals that “playful phthonos” is an “idiosyncratic version” of phthonos, “unlike any version [of phthonos] we have come across so far” (252); Hackforth (1945) 96 translates “the malice that goes with entertainment”, Gosling (1975) 48 “malice in entertainments”, Benardete (1993) 58 n. 105 “the envy of boyish fun”, Frede (1997) 64 “die Mißgunst der Komödie”; Delcomminette (2006) 442 n. 23 wavers first with “l’envie puérile”, and then the “more probable” interpretation “que παιδικός revête ici la connotation du jeu et de l’amusement (cf. παιδιά), de sorte que l’expression ὁ παιδικὸς φθόνος signifierait ‘l’envie qui s’amuse’, c’est-à-dire le plaisir de la comédie lui-même”. 32 For malice being unjust, see Phil. 49d. 33 More than a comic paradox of laughing at what pains us, Socrates is providing a virtual transcription of the cognitive process that takes place when one laughs at a comic incident. 34 For the frequent connection between play and laughter, cf. Pl., Euth. 3e (παίζοντας καὶ γελῶντας), Xen. Oec. 17.10 (γελάσας εἶπεν· ἀλλὰ παίζεις μὲν σύγε, ἔφη, ὦ Σώκρατες), IEG 27.4 (γελᾶν παίζειν χρησαμένους ἀρετῇ), Antiph. 217 KA (παίζειν καὶ γελᾶν), Ephor. FGrH 70 F 43.4 (τὸ παίζειν καὶ τὸ γελᾶν), Poll. 5.161 (ῥήματα δὲ παίζειν, γελᾶν…) with Halliwell (2008) 20 n. 45 for further references. Delcomminette (2006) 442 rightly emphasizes that “la part de plaisir est constituée par le rire, la part de peine par l’envie (cf. 50a5–9)” for the mixture in question, but sees the pleasure as being catalyzed by envy, not play, despite his comments at 442 n. 23. 31



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ourselves, because it is painful not just to see our friends fare poorly (e.g., fall down the stairs, stumble over their words, etc.) but painful to catch ourselves enjoying it. Yet when we check that desire to play/laugh, thereby relieving that pain of malice, a new itch emerges which needs to be relieved: that desire to play/laugh.35 Like the itch, Socrates sees both aspects of “playful malice” (paidikos phthonos) in oscillation and able to reach similarly ecstatic peaks: spectators laugh at things they are horrified by, yet, upon attempting to check themselves, end up laughing even more intensely. Thus, when Socrates summarizes his argument at the end, it is clear that his interest is not in phthonos per se but in this particular mixture of phthonos-plus-pleasure, which ought to illuminate the more abstract subject, namely the psychic mixing of pleasures and pains in general. Socrates concludes (50a): Thus, our argument claims that when we laugh at the ridiculous aspects of our friends, we, by mixing together pleasure with phthonos, mix pleasure with pain. For we have agreed some time ago that malice is a pain of the soul, and laughter a pleasure, and that the two arise together at the same time.36

Phthonos itself is not the mixture; rather, it is one element in the mixture of paidikos phthonos. Note how well the italicized phrase of “mixing pleasure with” some experience fits Plato’s conception of “play” from the previous chapter. Although scholars like Hackforth write well regarding this phrase—“the phthonos involved in an entertaining spectacle…is an emotion in which both the envy and the malice are only half-real… The phthonos is paidikos: it is ‘all a joke’, or nearly all”37—this misses that Cf. the formulation at Rep. 10.606c (ὃ γὰρ τῷ λόγῳ αὖ κατεῖχες ἐν σαυτῷ βουλόμενον γελωτοποιεῖν) and Arist. EN 4.8 regarding the excessively playful type, the bōmolokhos, who “entirely longs for the laughable” (γλιχόμενοι πάντως τοῦ γελοίου, 1128a5). 36 Phil. 50a: γελῶντας ἄρα ἡμᾶς ἐπὶ τοῖς τῶν φίλων γελοίοις φησὶν ὁ λόγος, κεραννύντας ἡδονὴν αὖ φθόνῳ, λύπῃ τὴν ἡδονὴν συγκεραννύναι· τὸν γὰρ φθόνον ὡμολογῆσθαι λύπην ψυχῆς ἡμῖν πάλαι, τὸ δὲ γελᾶν ἡδονήν, ἅμα γίγνεσθαι δὲ τούτω ἐν τούτοις τοῖς χρόνοις. 37 Hackforth (1945) 92 n. 1: “Now the envy we feel at a good man’s good fortune is commonly linked with a desire for his hurt; hence, as applied to real life, phthonos may well be rendered as ‘malicious envy’. But what we feel towards the comic character, what Plato calls paidikos phthonos (49a), the phthonos involved in an entertaining spectacle, is an emotion in which both the envy and the malice are only half-real: we half envy the pretentious character (e.g. the miles gloriosus) before his pretentions are exposed, because we half believe them; we feel quasi-malicious, we want him to be made to look ridiculous, ‘taken down’, but our malice is weakened by our knowledge 35

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distinctive element of Greek paidia as opposed to English “play”. In “playing” as spectators at a comedy we are literally “mixing together pleasure with phthonos”, not unlike the way that the children of the Laws mix together pleasure with farming and building when they play. That is, the content of the experience has not changed—one really is digging, one really is building, one really is experiencing emotions like malice—but the play makes all the difference. The experiences become “mixed” with pleasure inasmuch as they are “for pleasure alone”. It may be objected at this point that Socrates in this passage is discussing not just the mixed emotions experienced in the theater but those in life as well. He not only regularly refers to these ridiculed targets as “friends” but, more importantly, expands from the particular example of comedy to claim, rather passionately, that what he has been discussing applies to “not just comedy and tragedy, but the whole comedy and tragedy of life”. Rather than taking this to mean that Socrates cannot draw a distinction between the emotions experienced in the theater and emotions experienced in life, it should be understood as revealing why Socrates needed to turn to the theater in the first place, which at the beginning he had said would help us “understand more easily the mixture of pain and pleasure in other cases as well”.38 When we experience these psychic mixtures of pleasures and pains that Socrates is interested in, it is because we are treating life itself as a spectacle. It is not that all life is a tragi-comedy, nor that all our emotional experiences are therefore mixed, but that inasmuch as we treat life as tragedy and comedy—for example, we have the luxury to abstract ourselves from our experience and are not running for our lives—we experience mixed pleasures and pains. Socrates suggests that he will return to these mixed emotions “tomorrow”, but this unfinished business would not have involved a tedious series of emotions (anger, lament, and so forth) described in terms of a painful psychic state mixed with the anticipation of future pleasure—or, in the case of grief, past pleasure.39 Rather, it would have likely resembled the discussion in the Laws where the explanations of theatrical pleasures are articulated in the terms of the pleasures of play.40 The only addition would be that this mode of theatrical engagement, play, is not limited to the theater and festivals. Rather, this “play” connects the laughter of comedy to the laughter shared between friends, the grief felt in a tragedy to that in fact he is going to be… The phthonos is paidikos: it is ‘all a joke’, or nearly all.” Phil. 48b: ἵνα καὶ ἐν ἄλλοις ῥᾷον καταμαθεῖν τις οἷός τ᾽ ᾖ μεῖξιν λύπης τε καὶ ἡδονῆς. 39 Cf. Frede (1997) 293. 38



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the grief of more abstracted bittersweet moments,41 and the rage felt when enjoying a revenge-plot to that rage felt by Achilles who, when sitting in his tent, abstracted from the battlefield, made his anger into a pleasure, and found it to be, as Socrates reminds, “sweeter than honey”.42

Plato’s Play and the Tragic Paradox To sum up thus far, there are distinct clues from the Laws that not just performance but spectatorship can be envisioned as a form of play. As the Athenian says—although not exactly endorsing the idea—“since we have allowed ourselves to play on such occasions [i.e., during spectacles] we ought to choose the performer who makes us rejoice the most”. But what is this spectator play? It certainly cannot mean that spectators are dancing and singing and acting along with the performers: audiences tend to be characterized by their comparative immobility and silence, not their movements and vocalizations. Yet, in the Philebus too, spectators appear to be playing: with the term “playful malice” (paidikos phonos), Socrates describes spectators as actively “mixing pleasure with phthonos” (50a6), as if they were “playing” with the emotion itself. What is pleasurable about comic spectatorship is not the negative emotions that might arise, for example, when seeing someone pushed down the stairs or someone being whipped at a whipping post, but a particular form of play-viewing which is pleasurable.43 “Playful malice” (paidikos phthonos), in short, allows Socrates to make a pleasure of a negative feeling without losing the content of that negative feeling. See Chapter 2 for discussion. Note the subtle distinction Penelope makes at Od. 19.512–17 between “enjoying” her sorrow during the day but being overcome by it at night: “A god has given me sadness without measure: during the day I take pleasure in grieving, weeping, and looking to me and my servants’ tasks in the house. But when night comes, and everyone is asleep, I lie in bed, and the sorrows are dense and sharp around my pressed heart, hounding me in my grief ” (αὐτὰρ ἐμοὶ καὶ πένθος ἀμέτρητον πόρε δαίμων· / ἤματα μὲν γὰρ τέρπομ᾽ ὀδυρομένη, γοόωσα, / ἔς τ᾽ ἐμὰ ἔργ᾽ ὁρόωσα καὶ ἀμφιπόλων ἐνὶ οἴκῳ· / αὐτὰρ ἐπὴν νὺξ ἔλθῃ, ἕλῃσί τε κοῖτος ἅπαντας, / κεῖμαι ἐνὶ λέκτρῳ, πυκιναὶ δέ μοι ἀμφ᾽ ἁδινὸν κῆρ / ὀξεῖαι μελεδῶνες ὀδυρομένην ἐρέθουσιν). Those scholars who try to explain away her pleasure as referring only to her household tasks (e.g., Stanford 2004 [1948] ad Od. 19.513–15) overlook the common formula which describes her (“and after she had enough of (lit. ‘enjoyed’) her tearful weeping”, ἡ δ᾽ ἐπεὶ οὖν τάρφθη πολυδακρύτοιο γόοιο: e.g., 19.213, 251, 21.57. 42 Phil. 47e quoting Hom. Il. 18.108–9. 43 For the whipping, see Frogs 605–74. For the stairs, cf. the quotation sometimes attributed to Tina Fey (“If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the

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This is of no little significance for the tragic paradox and the problems Plato was wrestling with toward the end of the Republic. The father’s grief over his lost son does not appear to be identical to the grief felt by spectators at a tragedy, and so Socrates carefully introduces pleasure words at some distance from the grieving father.44 Yet, inasmuch as the appetites (epithumiai) crave pleasure, so too the appetites must crave the pleasurable experiences of mimetic performances.45 Socrates uses appetite words throughout, such as “getting full” (pimplamenon) at 606a, “nourishing” (trephei), “watering” (ardousa) at 606d, “starving” (pepeinēkos) at 606a. There is a part in each spectator “held down by force” and literally “starved” for tears, and this part desires to weep, it seems, in the same way that other appetites desire to eat or drink.46 The problem, however, is that if the spectators desire weeping or grieving itself there is no easy way to explain why they do not then desire actual weeping in everyday life, or, in terms of fear, crave actual fear alongside the attractions of a theatrical thriller. They may “hold down” such emotions in everyday life, yet surely the occasional moments when they are overwhelmed by grief or fear and cannot “hold them down” are moments which catalyze different feelings than those experienced in the theater: spectators do not regularly pound their heads in grief or run screaming from performances. With the new idea of spectators playing, all of this can be seen in a different light. With regard to the Philebus, spectators do not desire a comic character to fall down the stairs because aggression itself is pleasurable, but because the spectator is making that aggressive feeling, through play, into a source of pleasure.47 With regard to the Republic, spectators do not desire to grieve at a tragedy because grief itself is a pleasurable emotion— like “malice”, it is generally felt to be negative—but because we are “playing” with that grief and so “mixing pleasure together” with it. Only in this sense might the father’s grief—or grievous experiences outside the theater more generally—be mixed with pleasures. The grief itself is not pleasurable, but when we treat our lives as spectacles (“the whole comedy and tragedy of life”) we are play-viewing our life experiences. Such an stairs”) with Kidd (2014) 120 n. 10. See above n. 2 in introduction to this chapter. 45 For the discussion of appetites (epithumiai) in general, cf. Rep. Bk. 9 with Lorenz (2006) 1–110. For appetites for theatrical pleasures, see, e.g., Rep. 10.606a–b. 46 Rep. 10.606a: τὸ βίᾳ κατεχόμενον…πεπεινηκὸς τοῦ δακρῦσαι; just as there is a part of us that wants to “fool around” (γελωτοποιεῖν, 606c), needing to be “held down”. 47 This is to be distinguished from saying that aggressive desire is pleasurable: in the same way that there is nothing necessarily pleasurable about a potsherd but when one plays with it it becomes a source of pleasure (for which, see Chapter 4), so too there is nothing necessarily pleasurable about 44



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idea of pleasurable grief need not be dismissed as perverse, like Leontius and his corpse-gazing malady.48 We need only think of Penelope, who often takes pleasure in her grief: etarphthē goou is the recurring—and oddly recognizable—phrase.49 If this is what Plato has in mind regarding spectator play, these passages of the Laws and Philebus resemble what Walton argues in Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990). There he argues, as others before him, that adult spectators, for example, in the theater, engage in essentially the same sort of activities that children engage in when they play their games of makebelieve.50 Both groups are involved in certain forms of mimetic play, and both use certain “props” for their games. So, the child might imagine, for example, a tree stump to be a bear, and employ this “prop” to create a game or fictional world with other children, and, similarly, the adult spectator plays along in the theater with the various “props” that help to create the fictional world of the stage players.51 But, interestingly, he extends this notion of “props” to include not only the physical objects and stories of the stage but also the emotions that arise in the spectators as they engage with this fictional world. When a spectator experiences fear in the theater this response “is similar in certain obvious respects to that of a person frightened of a pending real-world disaster”, since his “muscles are tensed, he clutches his chair, his pulse quickens, his adrenaline flows”.52 Yet this is not actual fear: it is, instead, what Walton calls “quasi fear”, a reaction that is yet another “prop” helping to generate “fictional truths”.53 Compare Socrates’ position in the Philebus: spectators feel an emotion like malice, but it is not actual malice, it is “playful” malice—something which past commentators have also called “quasi” malice.54 Although Socrates does not call this a “prop” which creates a “fictional world”—as aggression but when one plays with it it becomes a source of pleasure. For whom, see Pl. Rep. 4.439e–440a. 49 See above n. 41, Menelaus at Od. 4.102 (with Burke 2008 [1757] 37–8), and Gorgias’ pothos philopenthēs (Hel. 9 with Liebert 2017, 13). 50 Walton 1990. Cf. Schlegel (1962–74 [1809]) v.30, Dostoevsky (1998 [1880]) 4.10.4, 674–5, Benjamin (1972–89) 2.1: 204–5, 210, and Collingwood (1974 [1938]) 78–82, who actually uses the term “make-believe” (1.5.1); Walton (1990) 4 mentions Gombrich 1963; cf. similar thoughts on children’s imitation (but not explicitly “play”) and its role in art in Vico (1968 [1744], 75 (1.52.215– 17), 166–7 (2.5.498) with Huizinga (1971 [1938]) 119, and Burke 2008 [1757] i.xvi, 48–9, who only implicitly refers to children, but explicitly refers to Aristotle. Halliwell (2002) 178 n. 5 describes Walton’s view as “a modern philosophical adaptation [of Aristotle’s account of mimesis and childhood play], though one that barely acknowledges Aristotle”. For Halliwell’s view on Aristotle’s mimesis and play, see Chapter 6. 51 For the stump-bear which reappears throughout, first at Walton (1990) 21–4. 52 Walton (1990) 196, quoted in Guyer (2014) iii.561. 53 Walton (1990) 240–7. 48

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was seen, he discerns much more of a continuum between on-stage tragedies and the “tragedies of life” than Walton does55—there is overlap in the desire to contrast actual emotions from theatrical ones. In terms of the father’s grief in the Republic, Walton’s solution would seem to distinguish actual grief from “quasi grief ”: the latter functions as a prop “generating” the fictional world of the tragedy. Regarding the comedy of the Philebus, Walton’s solution would similarly distinguish malice (phthonos) from “quasi malice”: it is not that spectators actually desire the comic buffoon to be harmed, it is that this quasi malice functions as a prop to create the fictional world of the comedy. Only in that fictional world, it seems, do characters actually wish to harm that comic buffoon. Despite these striking similarities between Plato’s and Walton’s versions of spectator play, the differences are no less pronounced, and the most crucial one arises from their two very different conceptions of play. Although Walton briefly acknowledges different sorts of play at the beginning of the book, the play that interests him is exclusively mimetic play, or “make-believe”.56 Play qua mimesis holds the theoretical key for Walton’s book. Children create fictional worlds with their props, adults create fictional worlds with their props, and pleasure (“if that is the right word”)57 would seem to be the result of, not the precursor to, these created worlds. Plato, by contrast, as has been seen, does not describe mimetic worlds as giving rise to pleasure, but pleasure giving rise to mimetic worlds.58 Like the child shoveling in the Introduction to this book, it is not that the child is “imagining” a “real” shovel and so using that shovel as a “prop” to create a fictional world of shoveling. It is rather that the child is simply shoveling “for pleasure alone”, and so produces— but only incidentally—a mimesis of “actual” or “serious” shoveling, simply because serious and actual shoveling is not “for pleasure alone”. See, e.g., Hackforth (1945) 92 n. 1, quoted above. Cf. Walton (1990) 192–5 with a telling mention of the bullfight at 194. Later he suggests that the tragic paradox is something which “largely evaporates” when one notices that “Hume’s characterization of sorrow as a passion that is ‘in [itself ] disagreeable’ is very much open to question” (257), but Plato’s discussion of mixed emotions could refine this critique: at issue in the tragic paradox is clearly not pleasurable forms of sorrow (or fear), but its purely negative form. 56 Walton (1990) 11 n. 1 writes that “[s]ome have suggested that all or nearly all children’s play consists in pretense or make-believe…”, but it is uncertain where he draws the boundary. Guyer (2014) iii.558–9 writes that “Walton does not have in mind such children’s games as tag, hide-andseek, ‘Red Rover’ or ‘Marco Polo,’ which do not involve any element of make-believe…”, but, if so, his own reduction of games to winning and losing (563–4)—i.e., precisely the sorts of “games” Walton is not interested in—seems to be an unfair basis of critique. “Game” would seem to mean for Walton “bout of play”, “instance of play”. 57 Walton (1990) 256. 54 55



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Following this logic, it becomes possible to expand further into Walton’s territory of “props”: the objects on stage—say, the king’s sceptre—is not a “prop” that creates some fictional world of kingship. This theatrical object, rather, just is a king’s sceptre as long as it is pleasurable to be so, and the actor holding that sceptre just is a king as long as it is pleasurable to be so.59 As for the emotions that arise in the audience—which Plato does discuss—these too are not props (“fictional emotions”, “imagined emotions”) which create a fictional world. They are simply emotions felt so long as it is pleasurable to feel them: we feel fear before the “king” but we are “mixing pleasure with that fear”, since the very context of this experience is an activity “for pleasure alone”. This slight adjustment in the notion of play—whereby the pleasureact of play gives rise to incidental mimesis rather than mimetic worlds giving rise to pleasure—allows Plato a considerable flexibility that is denied to Walton, or, for that matter, most mimesis-based views.60 Walton’s notion of art is limited to the spectators’ participation in “fictional worlds”:61 “We don’t just observe fictional worlds from without. We live in them,” he writes. But this recognizable intuition hits a roadblock when he encounters those works of art which do not readily create these fictional worlds: for example, ornament, design, abstract art, selfreferential novels, and so forth. Because his play is limited to a modern notion of mimetic play—that is, make-believe—he can articulate such spectator engagements only in negative terms: such works of art “destroy the illusion” and are engaged in “restraining participation”, while ornament similarly “inhibits participation”, 62 and designs and patterns “preempt serious participation in games of make-believe”.63 This would not only seem to make unrecognizable the experiences and engagements with non-mimetic art but also, as Guyer puts it, “leaves open that some part of our appreciation of representational art might lie in our enjoyment of riveting patterns quite apart from the possibility of playing any See Introduction and Chapter 2 for discussion of these late Platonic texts. For the ancient game basilinda, see Chapter 7. Walton’s notion of acting (e.g., at 243: “Acting involves dissembling; actors take pains to hide their actual mental states from the audience”) is also troubling. Rather than seeing acting and playing in opposition, it would seem instead that much of the best acting is very close to playing (actors once were “players”, after all). A good actor (perhaps) is not, e.g., thinking about performing or the audience; this would be akin to a child not engaging in a game but simply putting on appearances. 60 For mimesis accommodating abstract art, see Halliwell (2002) 370 n. 63, although the broader mimesis becomes, the less predicative force it has. 61 Walton (1990) 273. 62 Ibid., 276, 287–9. 58

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game of make-believe with the props that present these riveting patterns”.64 Not so with Plato. Since Plato’s “play” is simply a set of activities “for pleasure alone”, his model is not limited to obviously mimetic activities or objects at all. Anything can be engaged in “for pleasure alone”, and Plato thus easily incorporates ornament, design, and other non-mimetic creations alongside more mimetic works of art like portraits, landscapes, and sculptures. Pleasure, not mimesis, is the overriding feature that connects all these various objects. To engage with an architectural pattern for Plato thus does not mean to be “restrained” from engaging in a fictional world by patterns, decorations, and ornament, as Walton claims.65 It means to engage with the pattern pleasurably, to look at it in only the way that “pleasure alone” can allow one to look at it. Like the older spectators from the Laws discussed earlier—who might potentially watch the festival performances in any number of ways that are not particularly related to pleasure, yet take “delight” in the performances by playing along with them—viewers play along with the ornamental patterns that excite them to their youthful play. Such viewing conjures a “memory”, to use the Athenian’s word, of a lost youth, a time when the world simply was pleasurable due to a natural and ongoing state of intoxication.66

Conclusions Aesthetics begins where the motion of the body ends: the child plays and dances and sings, while the adult watches those plays and dances and songs, fixed and unmoved in the spectator’s seat. Yet, as the characters from Plato suggest, these spectators have not really stopped “playing”. They continue to play as much as they are able, even if their bodies remain unmoved. As I suggested earlier, this raises a difficult problem: what does it mean to play when a spectator can neither move the arms nor legs nor voice, but is in a state of, for lack of a better word, paralysis?

Ibid., 280. Guyer (2014) iii.565. 65 Crit. 116b; note the nuanced distinction between “for the sake of pleasure” and “for the sake of play” (coupled, e.g., at Tim. 26b–c, Laws 1.635b–c, 7.819b); the pattern is pleasurable through our play (cf. Pol. 288c). 66 Cf. John Cage, quoted in Atlas (2001) 20:34: “There are many occasions in 20th century living when we are obliged to wait somewhere, for instance, in line at a supermarket or in an airport when a plane is delayed. And each time if we realize that we’re surrounded by music—the sounds of the environment—and in fact by dance—the movement of the people around us—we’re in a 63

64

Conclusions 95 This paralysis does more than remove the spectator’s body and voice from the ongoing play; by removing the spectator’s body, it removes the spectator’s “self ”—namely that abstract entity rooted in the body’s existence— from the play.67 For spectator play, unlike more recognizable forms of play, there is no self to adopt the role of king, no self to express in the song or dance, no self at stake in the gamble, no self to move around the gameboard. The problem of spectator play is thus not “How does one play without a body?” but, more immediately, “How does one play without a self?”. This problem becomes more urgent with many of the mixed emotions and psychological responses explored in the Philebus. “Malice” (phthonos) was a lucky example for Socrates to fixate on, since this emotion is comparatively object-centered: we wish someone else to come to harm, and we ourselves need not be the imagined agents of that harm. But what of feelings like fear or grief or desire? In the previous section I suggested that a spectator from the Philebus might feel fear before a theatrical king but, due to the theatrical context (an activity “for pleasure alone”), mixes pleasure with that fear. Yet in what sense can spectators feel fear before a king when they, through a sort of chosen paralysis, have abandoned any role for the self in the ongoing engagement? It does not seem to be entirely right to say that the spectator simply feels fear for the on-stage characters, although it might be described that way in hindsight. Rather, it seems that the spectators are feeling fear with the proviso that there is no self to fear for. Or, to put it more precisely: the spectators are feeling fear so long as it is pleasurable (phobos paidikos, Socrates might say) with the proviso that there is no self—which also is adopted by players only for so long as it is pleasurable—that might be the subject of that fear.68 What is left, then, for the spectators and their unhinged emotions? Are their responses dependent on identifying with characters? Is it that, for a time, like some free-floating ghost inhabiting bodies at random, spectators become these characters? Sometimes that may be the case, but other times “identification” does not seem to be the name of the spectator’s game: the bodiless ghost is as free-floating as attention itself. Is the playing spectator thus adopting something closer to a god-like Olympian view, where they might pity and fear for the mortals they like—and feel oppositely toward those they dislike—without necessarily inhabiting place of entertainment.” See above n. 13 in “Spectator Play” section. Like playful fear, the player’s self-need not be the one that is committed to outside the concerns

67 68

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them? This too might occasionally capture the experience of the theater, but certainly not always. Considering the variety of options, the problem might best be left where Plato implicitly seems to leave it: spectators “play” as much as they can play without a body or self to be the subject of that play.69 As Plato’s Athenian suggests, spectators simply do not have enough of that childish exuberance left to continue a more physical form of play. But this loss of body and self in adult spectator-play obviously brings with it rich consolation prizes: as the various possibilities for spectator engagement above imply—none of which seemed fully to capture what it is to be a spectator—the bodiless spectator is no longer harnessed to a single engagement but can float freely, from identifying with and inhabiting certain characters, to a more god-like perspective (benevolent or phthonic), and many other options, without any more effort driving the change than a passing thought. If this is so, it offers a good reason— beyond easily fatigued bodies—as to why spectators, in their play, are so eager to engage in this strange form of paralysis.

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of immediate pleasure. This does not mean that there is no “self ” to experience thoughts and emotions, but that there is no projected self in the game, and so players inhabit a “view from nowhere,” to use Nagel’s phrase. Walton’s (1990) treatment of theatrical asides (especially his green slime example) would be better understood as moments which break from the game, not as moments within the game. The allegedly terrifying green slime approaching the audience seems more likely to produce laughter than fear in the audience: it is not so easy for an audience to accept a sudden change of rules (I had no self/body in the game but now I do). The laughter that asides often produce may relate to play signals (“We are (still) playing”: for which, see Bateson 2000 [1972], 179–80, and Kidd 2014, 109–13).

chapter 4

What Do Pleasure-Objects Do? An Inquiry into Toys

Play can make anything into a pleasure-object, and these pleasureobjects, by virtue of being played with, are called “playthings”. Children play with dirt and potsherds or sand and sticks—not typical delights for the average hedonist—and somehow, through that play, manage to make such objects immediately pleasurable. This would suggest that “playthings” or “toys” are nothing more than objects that are played with: any object of the world, not just typical toys like carts and dolls, can be counted a “toy”, since it is the playing subject, not some intrinsic property of the object, that makes a thing a plaything. Although this may sound plausible in the abstract, a problem arises when we turn to the evidence: if anything can be made a “toy”, why should there be “typical” toys at all? A toy ought to be just anything in the world when engaged with via the play mode, yet the toy is not just anything: instead, many toys, such as spinning tops, balls, and toy carts, appear to be distinct from everyday objects. While potsherds and sticks can easily be mistaken for something other than a child’s toy collection, most manufactured toys (tops, balls, carts) cannot.1 Instead, such objects often have no existence other than being toys: the spinning top, the ball, the toy cart all appear to have no use beyond being useless. And so arises the question of this chapter: what, exactly, is a toy? If the playing subject can make a “plaything” out of any part of the played environment, what is this third object which seems to lodge itself between the playing subject and that environment being played with? The toy already is pleasurable in precisely the way that the playing subject is supposed to make it. That is, it is not necessary to make a toy cart or a The picture is more complex in antiquity, when some “toys”, like dolls, may have been used for religious, symbolic, and magical purposes: cf. Beaumont (2012) 129–34, with Sommer and Sommer (2015) 109–11 on Beaumont 2012 and Beaumont 2017 on Sommer and Sommer 2015; cf. Harlow 2013. For toys as symbola for Dionysiac mysteries, see Levaniouk 2007.

1

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What Do Pleasure-Objects Do?

doll into a “plaything”, as a child might do with a stick or stone. Instead, toy carts and dolls simply are “playthings”: they neither stop being playthings when the child stops playing nor become playthings at the point that play begins. Moreover, while it often seems that non-toy objects become “playthings” when they are no longer put to their proper use—a shoe becomes a phone, a spoon becomes a sword, that is, “play” begins at the point where “use” ends2—this opposition between “playing” and “using” breaks down with toys. In playing with toys, one is using these objects in precisely the way they were meant to be used. What, then, is a toy? I begin this inquiry with an overview of the two Greek words that most closely correspond to the English “toy”: athurma and paignion. These words do not provide exact equivalents for the English “toy”, but often connote something broader, covering a range which includes the English “toy” but is not limited to it. “Pleasureobject” often seems to be the idea: so, for example, dolls, wind-up toys, and other such childish playthings are included among athurmata and paignia, but, tellingly, also the pleasure-objects of adult women, such as jewelry or “baubles”. These women of course do not “play” with such jewelry, at least not in the English sense of “play”; rather, they “delight” in such jewelry. Athurmata and paignia seem to be toys only in that broader sense: just as “baubles” or “trinkets” are delights associated with adult women, “toys” are delights associated with children. The Greek words thus mirror the breadth of paidia itself, which covers “play” but, more broadly, can denote “enjoyment”, “amusement”, or “joy”, as if the English “play” were just the physical manifestation of that emotional range.3 These two Greek abstractions, however, are rarely employed instrumentally, as in the natural English expression “to play with a toy”. Whatever the particular reason, Greek turns to the actual concrete objects themselves to express this, for example, “play with knucklebones” (Antiphanes) or “play with a ball” (Homer). This invites a large range of objects into the discussion, from knucklebones and nuts, to hoops and balls, to dolls and wind-up toys—and I provide an overview of these concrete playthings, not just via the literary evidence but also via the vase depictions and archaeological remains. At the end of the overview, I consider a remarkable subset of playthings, “animate toys”, since animals too Cf. Caillois (2001 [1958]) 25 for the “useless exercise”, 138 for “useless”, and Huizinga (1971 [1938]) 188 (“serving no useful purpose but yielding pleasure”). Historically not always the case for English: cf. OED s.v. “play” II.6b.

2 3



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were referred to as paignia and athurmata. These animate “playthings” raise ethical problems much more marked than in the English word “pet”, namely the problems inherent in treating animate subjects as objects of pleasure. However, the main issue that arises from this overview of Greek toys is the curious distinction between found objects which might be treated as toys (sticks, stones, potsherds) and those objects which are manufactured to be toys (dolls, carts, hoops). While the former objects seem to be made into “playthings” exclusively by the act of play—there is nothing particularly pleasurable about a bone or potsherd outside the play context—the latter objects seem already to have been made pleasurable in just the way play was supposed to make them. It is as if a toy somehow absorbed the act of play into itself, or as if the toy were part of a game already being played. Unlike the found object, which toggles between its temporary status as a “plaything” and whatever it usually is outside the context of play (a stick, a stone, a potsherd), the manufactured toy has no other existence beyond being a plaything. At the same time, as an established plaything, the toy becomes something more than just an object of play: it might be bought as a plaything, sold as a plaything, appraised as a plaything, and much else. Toys, in short, do not need to be played with in order to be playthings, and this may be their most characteristic difference from found objects. But what happens, then, when we play with them? I will consider this question at the end of the chapter, and suggest that although the manufactured toy cannot toggle between toy and non-toy, as was the case with the found object, it does seem to toggle between dormant and active toy. When the manufactured toy is being played with it becomes all but indistinguishable from the found object: both are now internal to the act of play, and both are reduced to mere elements in an ongoing game.

Athurma and Paignion Any inquiry into the nature of toys ought to begin with a note of caution: there is no exact equivalent in Greek for the English word “toy”. The words most often translated as “toy”—athurma and paignion—are in many ways broader than the English term, and often denote something more like “pleasure-object” or “object of delight”.4 Athurmata and paignia Less common words translated as “toy” include μείλιον (with Hunter 1989 ad 3.135) and μέλπηθρον (with Laser 1987, 90).

4

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What Do Pleasure-Objects Do?

are thus “toys” only inasmuch as they are “pleasure-objects”; what is essential to them, just like Greek play (paidia) more generally, is not their mimetic or haptic qualities but the immediacy of their pleasure. To begin with athurma: the word derives from the verb form athurō, which appears to be a sort of “whirling”, as if the soul whirled when it feels delight, or expressed delight through “whirling”, or, alternatively, perhaps the act of whirling itself was felt to produce certain giddy sensations.5 “Toy” or “plaything” often provides the English translation for the Greek word; for example, in a famous Homeric simile a boy is described as making “playthings” (athurmata) in the sand—perhaps sand castles or sand armies—only to destroy them with his hands and feet afterwards.6 The young Hermes of the Homeric Hymn describes a tortoise’s shell as a “plaything” (32), and proceeds to make it his own “plaything” (52) when he carves out its appended owner and adds strings to invent a musical instrument.7 The “toys” which lure the baby Dionysus to his terrible fate are called athurmata as well: “spinning top and rhombos and dolls (paignia) with bending limbs” are included here, as well as knucklebones, balls, and others.8 In Euripides’ Hypsipyle one finds athurmata promised to a weeping child translated as “toys”,9 and in Apollonius’ Argonautica the remarkable ball that Aphrodite promises to the childish Eros is described as a “plaything” or “toy” (athurma, 3.132) as well.10 Athurmata, however, are more than just “toys”: they include the “delights” of adult women as well, and there is no sense that these women are “playing” with such athurmata as children do. Sappho describes Hector’s ship which carried Andromache back from Cilician Thebes as transporting “numerous golden bracelets, and crimson garments, ornate Beekes (2010) s.v. ἀθύρω “from PIE *dhuer(H)- ‘to whirl, rush’”; Frisk (1960–70) s.v. ἀθύρω idg. dhuer- “wirbeln, stürmen, eilen”. 6 Iliad 15.361–6, discussed below. 7 Hom. Herm. 32, 40, 52 (“lovely plaything”: West 2003 ad loc.; “charming toy”: Evelyn-White 1956 [1914] ad 40). 8 OF 307F Bernabé = 34 Kern = Clem. of Alex. Protreptikos 2.17–18: ἀπατήσαντες παιδαριώδεσιν ἀθύρμασιν, “having tricked him with childish toys”, who quotes the list from “Orpheus the Thracian”: κῶνος καὶ ῥόμβος καὶ παίγνια καμπεσίγυια, / μῆλα τε χρύσεα καλὰ παρ᾽ Ἑσπερίδων λιγυφώνων. Clement lists these further playthings as the “useless symbola” of the Dionysiac rite: “knucklebone, ball, spinning top, apples, bull-roarer, mirror, wool” (ἀστράγαλος, σφαῖρα, στρόβιλος, μῆλα, ῥόμβος, ἔσοπτρον, πόκος). See Levaniouk 2007 for discussion. 9 Eur. Hyps. 752d has “toys which (will) calm your mind from crying” (ἀ]θύρμα[τ]α | ἃ σὰς [ὀ] δυρμῶν ἐκγαλη[νιεῖ φ]ρένας), Collard and Cropp 2009 trans. 10 Mooney (1912) ad loc. “plaything”. Much later, Longus writes of the bucolic athurmata that his young lovers play with: locust-cages woven from stalks of asphodel and panpipes made from reeds and wax (1.10.2). Cf. A.P. 6.37. 5



Athurma and Paignion

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athurmata, countless silver cups and ivory…”.11 Here “toys” would be out of place in the list: instead, athurmata appear to serve as an abstraction, perhaps “delights”—Page suggests “trinkets”—alongside such objects as golden bracelets and crimson garments.12 Similarly, the Phoenicians are described by Eumaeus in Odyssey 15 as bearing “countless athurmata on their black ship”.13 These too are not “toys” but “delights”, like those Sappho speaks of: one of them, the “golden necklace strung with amber”,14 in fact plays a significant role in Eumaeus’ story, since this piece of jewelry—which the women “handle with their hands and look upon with their eyes, offering a price”15—provides the necessary distraction to kidnap the child Eumaeus. Penelope also is described as bestowing “delights” (athurmata, 18.321–3) on her pet maid-servant Melantho; these gifts seem to imply the jewelry and baubles Sappho lists rather than more substantial, useful presents. Athurmata can thus be seen extending beyond the “toy” to include objects of “delight”, like jewelry, “trinkets”, or “baubles”. Further, since the noun implies an instantiation of the verb athurō, the denotation can extend to abstract delights as well as material objects.16 The critical observation to make, however, is the general absence of these particular delights from the adult male sphere: typically, only children and women are associated with such objects.17 The reason is clear: athurmata are not objects of the “serious” male world, but objects of immediate pleasure, frivolous both in their positive and negative aspects. “Who does not enjoy childish delights?” one of Euripides’ characters asks, reminding that the intellect associated with pleasures like toys and jewelry is decidedly inferior.18 This connection between “childish” delights and jewelry or trinkets is not limited to the word athurma, however. It will be remembered that, when Paidia is personified in Greek art, she is often depicted holding a necklace, bauble, or “string of beads”; she appears to have, as Sappho 44 PLF: πόλλα δ’ [ἐλί]γματα χρύσια κἄμματα / πορφύρ[α] καταύτ[..]να, ποί̣ κ̣ ι̣ λ’ ἀθύρματα, / ἀργύρα̣  τ̣ ’ ἀνά̣ρ[ι]θ̣μα [ποτή]ρ[ια] κἀλέφαις; cf. Sappho 63.8 PLF. 12 Page (1955) 64. Lombardo and Gordon’s (2016) “jewels of many colors” is a bit too specific for the abstraction. Cf. LSJ s.v. ἄθυρμα “in pl., beautiful objects, adornments”. 13 Od. 15.416: μυρί’ ἄγοντες ἀθύρματα νηῒ μελαίνῃ. 14 Od. 15.460: χρύσεον ὅρμον ἔχων, μετὰ δ’ ἠλέκτροισιν ἔερτο. 15 Od. 15.462–3: χερσίν τ’ ἀμφαφόωντο καὶ ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ὁρῶντο, / ὦνον ὑπισχόμεναι. 16 Cf. Pind. Pyth. 5.23, where a “celebratory procession of men” (κῶμον ἀνέρων) is called a “delight to Apollo” (Ἀπολλώνιον ἄθυρμα), and Bacch. Dith. 4.57, where “war and bronze-clashing battle” (πολέμου τε καὶ / χαλκεοκτύπου μάχας) are the “delights of Ares” (ἀρηΐων δ’ ἀθυρμάτων). 17 See previous note for exceptions, but it may be significant that these are gods, not men. 18 Eur. Auge fr. 272 TrGF: τίς δ’ οὐχὶ χαίρει νηπίοις ἀθύρμασιν; for nēpioi and mental inferiority, see Chapter 1.

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What Do Pleasure-Objects Do?

Shapiro writes, “a particular interest in more expensive playthings, like jewelry”.19 Although English tends to keep “playthings” and “jewelry” rather separate, in Greek the immediacy of the pleasure unites the two spheres.20 Since the intellect associated with the athurma is a “childish” or “frivolous” one, there are occasional dangers lurking behind such objects, as if to remind that the children and women who enjoy them are unable to calculate rationally beyond the pleasures of the moment. Certainly, the athurma of Persephone in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter falls into this category: this “delight”, a narcissus flower with a “hundred blooms”, is the beautiful bait for Hades’ cruel trap.21 One might compare the “toy”athurmata which tricked the infant Dionysus to his death, or the jewelryathurmata from the Eumaeus narrative which distracted the women away from the kidnapping of the little prince. Eriphyle’s necklace, central to the downfall of her husband, may have similarly been described as an athurma: the word is frequent in epic diction, and the vase paintings of the scene are reminiscent of Paidia’s own baubles.22 Paignion is in many ways synonymous to athurma, often extending, like athurma, beyond the English “toy” to denote something more like “delight”. The two terms appear to be interchangeable in Aeschylus’ Theoroi, and ancient scholars often simply define athurma with paignion as if they were equivalents.23 Like athurma, paignion often denotes “toy”: the infant Dionysus is lured by a “toy with bending limbs”—that is, a “doll”—and the paignion described in Plato’s Laws is similar. There the Athenian provides a number of details about a certain “puppet” or “windup toy” (thauma) that works by means of strings and cords: the cords “pull against one another toward opposite actions”.24 Callimachus, in his Shapiro (1993) 181–3. The beads resemble the komboloi beads of modern Greece (www.komboloi .gr), but I have found no reference earlier than Hesych. κ3429 Latte (κόμβαλα· παίγματά τινα). In English one might use the word “toy” metaphorically to describe a new sports car or gadget, but jewelry and baubles are not athurmata/paignia in a metaphorical sense, but in a primary sense. 21 Hom. Dem. 16, “lovely toy” is Evelyn-White’s (1956 [1914]) translation for καλὸν ἄθυρμα. 22 For Eriphyle’s necklace, see especially the red-figure oinochoe by the Mannheim Painter at the Louvre (mid-fifth century bce; other depictions at LIMC s.v. Eriphyle). Cf. Pl. Rep. 9.590a, and Chapter 1 for the inability to see past dazzling appearances to what is actually good. 23 Aesch. Theoroi (or Isthmiastai), fr. 78c.50–2 TrGF. Cf. Suda A767: ἄθυρμα· παίγνιον. Cf. Schol. ad Iliad 15.363a (schol. vet.), Odyss. 18.323. Schol. ad Iliad (= D scholia) 15.363: ἀθύρματα. παίγνια. Schol. ad Oppian 5.455: ἀθύρματα γὰρ τὰ παίγνια. 24 Pl. Laws 1.644e: ὅτι ταῦτα τὰ πάθη ἐν ἡμῖν οἷον νεῦρα ἢ σμήρινθοί τινες ἐνοῦσαι σπῶσίν τε ἡμᾶς καὶ ἀλλήλαις ἀνθέλκουσιν ἐναντίαι οὖσαι ἐπ᾽ ἐναντίας πράξεις. It is debated whether he is describing a marionette or a wind-up toy: see below. 19

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twelfth Iamb, describes the seventh-day birthday celebration for Hera’s daughter Hebe: the gods bring her various “toys” (paikhnia), some of which are “finely carved” and “more valuable than gold”.25 Later, Plutarch writes of his daughter, who had such a gentle spirit that she wanted to share her food not only with the other babies but with her “toys” (paignia)—likely “dolls” (Cons. ad Ux. 608d5)—while, elsewhere, he mentions children’s penchant to cry when one toy (paignion) is taken away, even if there are many other toys left to play with (De Tranq. An. 469d4). However, like athurma, paignion is not constricted to the English “toy”, not least because the Greek verb itself (paizō) covers territories of “delight” and “pleasure” beyond the English verb “play”. It has already been seen that the comedian Ephippus (fourth century bce) called certain dinner-table delicacies paignia, although the guests were not technically “playing” with these hors d’oeuvres in the English sense of the word. Similarly, Callimachus describes a nautilus shell as a “delight” or “trinket” (paignion) for the late queen Arsinoe, an object of natural splendor not unlike the narcissus flower which delighted Persephone as an athurma.26 That these particular delights are immediate and thus generally associated with children and women can be seen in Plutarch, who describes a man wearing a certain golden “bauble” (paignion) among his dazzling dress. The context here is essential: Plutarch is trying to depict the man as effeminate, and the very fascination with such baubles as frivolous and of the feminine sphere (989e7). Thus, it would seem that paignia and athurmata are “toys” only inasmuch as they are pleasure-objects, much as paidia itself is broader than “play”. “Trinkets”, “baubles”, and “jewelry” fall into the category because they too are “delights” of a certain sort. But, just as paignion and athurma are different from the English “toy”, so too the two Greek terms are not exact equivalents. Although the terms are often treated as synonyms in antiquity—technically, they are both deverbative nouns (athurō, paizō), which is to say “things that are played” either in the concrete or abstract sense—the abstract side of paignion is much more developed than athurma. As was discussed in the Introduction, songs, dances, theatrical performances, melodies, and so forth are all regularly called paigmata or, in the diminutive, paignia. Although these too are all instantiations of “play” or “things played”, none of them refers to material objects. Iamb 12.33. Cf. at 12.28: παίχνια Τριτωνὶς ἤνεικεν κόρη. Apollo last gives poetry as a gift, exclaiming that his toy/delight will be best. Athen. 7.318b–c = Ep. 5 Pfeiffer = 14 GP: the nautilus is a dedication for her temple.

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What Do Pleasure-Objects Do?

Athurma, by contrast, never flourishes so extensively in its abstract sense, preferring a more concrete, material existence.

Things Greek Children Played With: Found Objects A “plaything” ought to be just anything played with, yet the usage of paignion and athurma already suggests a tendency toward certain types of objects. Athurmata and paignia tend to be small, for example—a nautilus shell, a narcissus flower, a doll, a piece of jewelry—and so are generally objects that might be grasped and held easily in the hand.27 As such, these “delights” already denote a much more limited set than the sum total of objects in the world viewed through the play mode. Regarding objects that are actually described as being played with—for example, knucklebones and toy carts—this narrowing only becomes more apparent. Children can and do play with anything, yet these “playthings” become increasingly stereotyped as they begin to be manufactured for that play. Such manufacture causes a “plaything” to come to mean much more, but refer to much less, than any object that is played with. To begin with objects that occur in the natural environment: for example, sand, sticks, stones, potsherds, knucklebones, nuts, and fruit. 28 Playing with sand, sticks, and stones was commonplace, but few naturally occurring objects were so intensely associated with play as knucklebones. Found in the hindlegs of various four-legged animals, knucklebones were plentiful in ancient cities, and so “must have cost next to nothing”.29 They were used in a variety of games—in some they were rolled as dice, in others they were thrown at targets or caught in the air, in still others they were hidden in the hand for guessing games.30 Like modern marbles, knucklebones were both what were played with and what were played for: the winner usually collected the lost knucklebones Plut. De Fort. 98e mentions that even an elephant can be made a paignion by humans, but this is meant to demonstrate the marvels of human power, not to suggest that elephants were typical household playthings. 28 For sand, Hom. Il. 15.361–6; for sticks, Plut. Ages. 25 (depictions of games played with sticks at Beck 1975, pl. 64, nos. 328–30); for stones, Plut. De soll. anim. 7.965a–b, Pollux 9.126; for potsherds, knucklebones, nuts, and fruit, see below. 29 Biles and Olson (2015) ad. Ar. Wasps 293–6; for the location of the knucklebone, cf. Arist. HA 2.1, 499b27, with Nollé (2007) 7 for the image. 30 For knucklebones (astragaloi) used in adult dicing games like pleistobolinda, cf. Pollux 9.117, Theopomp. 115 F 121 FGrH (= Athen. 10.444e–445a), Diph. Synoris 74 KA (= Athen. 6.247a–b), Aesch. Tim. 59; children dicing at Ap. Rhod. Arg. 3.114–27, discussed below. For the game tropa, in which a knucklebone was thrown at a target, see Pollux 9.103; for the game pentelitha, in which five knucklebones were thrown into the air to be caught on the back of the hand, see Pollux 9.126; for the guessing game artiasmos, see Pl. Lys. 206e, Pollux 9.101. 27



Things Greek Children Played With: Found Objects

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of the loser. In the Argonautica, for example, Aphrodite scolds Eros for taking advantage of the young Ganymede after winning away all the boy’s golden knucklebones in an otherwise typical game; poor Ganymede had to leave the game “with empty hands, helpless”.31 Potsherds, no less ubiquitous, were also standard fare for child’s play: they were flipped like coins in games like ostrakinda, they were thrown at targets, and, if Epictetus’ child provides a clue, they were used, like sticks and sand, to build little toy houses and other such creations.32 Nuts, meanwhile, were involved in the same sorts of games as knucklebones: in an epigram sometimes attributed to Plato, a nut describes itself as a “toy (paignion) for children” and their “good aim for throwing”: as Pollux reports, children threw nuts at targets in their play as well as knucklebones.33 But also, as with knucklebones, children played with nuts by catching them in the air, hiding them in the hand for guessing games, and gambling with them—“gambling”, that is, if nuts and knucklebones are understood to be a sort of currency won and lost in these games.34 Fruit too are described as the “play/delight” (paidia) of Dionysus: since certain fruits of autumn, like figs and grapes, were stored only in dried or potable form, the fruits left unprepared for storage were simultaneously abundant and fleeting, making them ripe, as it were, for immediate pleasure.35 There may be some reason to think of fruit as more than edible “delight”: golden apples are among the “toys” that lure away the infant Dionysus, and both Plato and Callimachus mention games played with fruit.36 These various naturally occurring objects were regularly incorporated into children’s play, but the nature of that incorporation raises some difficult questions. When Homer’s boy, for example, plays next to the sea and makes athurmata of the sand, what exactly is he doing? Arg. 3.126: κενεαῖς σὺν χερσὶν ἀμήχανος. For ostrakinda, see Pollux 9.111–12. For other games with potsherds (ephetinda, streptinda), see Pollux 9.117. For the boy building houses of dirt and potsherds, see Epictet. Disc. 3.13.18–19, with Chapter 1 for discussion. 33 Pl. Ep. 32 Diehl: εἰνοδίην καρύην με παρερχομένοισ’ ἐφύτευσαν / παισὶ λιθοβλήτου παίγνιον εὐστοχίης. Poll. 9.103 mentions acorns used in the game tropa as well as knucklebones. 34 For nuts used in the guessing game artiasmos, see Pollux 9.101. For nuts used in children’s play and ancient gambling games more generally, see Harlow (2013) 326–7. 35 Cf. Pl. Laws 8.844d–845d, Critias 115b2–3, with Nesselrath (2006) ad loc. 36 For the golden apples, cf. OF 307F Bernabé (34 Kern) = Clem. Alex. Protrept. 2.17–18, with Levaniouk (2007) 167–8. For apples in flirtation, cf. Theoc. 2.120, 3.40–1, 5.88, with Gow (1950) ad loc.; Philetas fr. 17 Lightfoot = schol. to Theoc. Id. 2.120b and Call. fr. 412 Pfeiffer for apples in Dionysus’ garland. Pl. Laws 7.819b for a game played with apples. Dasen (2016) 75–81 for discussion of such games.

31

32

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What Do Pleasure-Objects Do? Apollo tore down the wall of the Achaeans with ease, just as a boy does with sand by the sea, when he makes playthings (athurmata) in his childishness and then destroys them with his hands and feet, playing (athurōn).37

It is awkward to interpret these lines as describing a child who must build certain objects (sandcastles, sand armies, and so forth) before he can play with them, as if the making of these “playthings” (athurmata) were laborious while the actual play consisted of destruction. Rather, it seems that building sandcastles already is an act of “play”, and so “making athurmata” is all but periphrastic for the athurō of the following line. The sand would seem to become a “plaything” not at the moment it is readied to be crushed but at the moment the child views it as a plaything and engages with it as such. In this play mode of engagement, the sand is not mere scenery for the child’s actions, nor material for some useful project, but a pleasure-object to be handled and moved for the sake of that pleasure. As Plato would say, the child builds in the sand for the sake of “pleasure alone”, and, as if to emphasize this fact, the child destroys these objects once they are made.38 Since it is the mode of engagement that makes the object a play-object, the choice of sand as the plaything is arbitrary. The child could have chosen anything from his environment—Epictetus, for example, describes a child building such houses out of potsherds and dirt—it is just that, in this case, the child chose to play with sand. If one turns to an object like a knucklebone, a similar description might be attempted: something happens to a knucklebone when it is engaged with via the play mode; it becomes an object pleasurable in itself—pleasurable to handle, pleasurable to roll, pleasurable to throw. One might envision the development of various knucklebone games along the lines of these pleasures: it is pleasurable to throw the knucklebone at a certain target or in a certain way, and so this action is repeated over and over again, just like the child building and rebuilding the sandcastles. This is not to deprive such knucklebone games (or games in general) of their hedonic contours, yet it nevertheless appears misguided to suppose that a game is pleasurable only at moments of success (for example, hitting the target) while the rest of the game is arduous labor. Rather, just like the child with the sand, at Il. 15.361–6: ἔρειπε δὲ τεῖχος Ἀχαιῶν / ῥεῖα μάλ’, ὡς ὅτε τις ψάμαθον πάϊς ἄγχι θαλάσσης, / ὅς τ’ ἐπεὶ οὖν ποιήσῃ ἀθύρματα νηπιέῃσιν / ἂψ αὖτις συνέχευε ποσὶν καὶ χερσὶν ἀθύρων. / ὥς ῥα σὺ ἤϊε Φοῖβε πολὺν κάματον καὶ ὀϊζὺν /σύγχεας Ἀργείων, αὐτοῖσι δὲ φύζαν ἐνῶρσας. 38 Cf. Caillois (2001 [1958]) 5–6 regarding play as “pure waste”. 37



Things Greek Children Played With: Manufactured Playthings 

each and every moment the action and the pleasure that that action brings are inextricable, as is the fact that the action is engaged in for that pleasure. For this reason, the object, so long as it is played with, never stops being a pleasure-object, a “plaything”, although once viewed from the serious or non-play mode it may be recognized that the knucklebone is no longer a plaything but “worth next to nothing”, and so disposed of altogether. In such cases, it is just like any other bone.

Things Greek Children Played With: Manufactured Playthings Something special thus seems to be happening when naturally occurring objects are being played with: the shell or potsherd or heap of sand, in the moment of play, is being viewed and handled in a different way from that mode of the everyday or “serious” world. But what of objects that were manufactured to be playthings? Suddenly this toggling of modes is confronted with a certain problem: the manufactured “plaything” already is an object of immediate pleasure—that is, it already is what play wants it to become. Can one actually “play” with such objects? And is it possible to view and engage with such objects as anything other than objects of the play mode? As with naturally occurring objects, it is worth overviewing the variety of ancient manufactured toys before addressing these questions. The simplest manufactured objects, like balls, spinning tops, hoops, and dice, often follow simple geometric shapes, but this is in some sense to view the picture in the reverse. It is rather that many geometric shapes receive their names from these toys: a “sphere” is simply a ball-shaped object (sphaira), while a “cube” is a dice-shaped object (kubos); the same might be said of a “cone” (a top-shaped object, kōnos), or a “rhombus” (a bullroarer-shaped object, rhombos). What classroom contexts produced this series of names is a lost history, but the geometric objects remind that toys too are in and of themselves.39 Balls (sphairai) were constructed of various materials and in different ways, consisting of wool, linen, reed, and leather. Although few survive, they were regularly depicted in art and literature.40 In Apollonius’ Argonautica, for example, Aphrodite promises Cf. Dunbar (1995) 555 regarding “familiar objects” being used as “an effective teaching aid” and Ineichen (1996) 39 for those who connect the grammatical term “cases” (πτώσεις) to the four ways that a knucklebone can fall. 40 See Harlow (2013) 328 for balls made of wool, linen, reed, and leather; cf. Fittà (1998) 98–105 and Sommer and Sommer (2015) 126–7. For vase depictions of Greek ball games, see Beck (1975) 51–2, pls. 61–3. For Greek references to balls and ball games, cf. Nausicaa’s ball game at Od. 6.99–101, that of Halios and Laodamas at Od. 8.370–80, Anacr. fr. 13.1 PMG, Antiphanes fr. 278 KA, Damoxenus Comic. fr. 3 KA, Pl. Theaet. 146a, Meleager AP 5.214. 39

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What Do Pleasure-Objects Do?

to the boyish Eros a magnificent ball originally made by Adresteia for the infant Zeus. Nothing comparable survives in the archaeological record, but the fantastic description captures something about this common plaything’s appeal: Its circles are fashioned in gold, and around each are wound two-fold encompassing mesh; but the seams are hidden, since a blue spiral runs over all of them. If you throw it from your hands, it lets off a burning trail through the air like a star.41

The type of ball game Aphrodite describes—throwing the ball to the sky—is reminiscent of that which Halios and Laodamas play in the Odyssey, and that which Pollux later reports was called ourania.42 The literary evidence suggests that balls were very common, central not just to a variety of children’s games but to adult games as well. In the second century ce, for example, Galen devotes an entire treatise to a certain rugbylike ball game, while the roughly contemporary Pollux lists some five different types of ball games, ranging from simply throwing a ball against the ground to more complex forms like the one Galen describes.43 Spinning tops are also frequently depicted, if less represented in literary remains.44 Already, in the Iliad, Hector is given a solid blow which sends him “spinning like a top” (strombos),45 while the perhaps identical whipping-top (bembix) was able to spin indefinitely so long as the player continued to drive it forward. In a repeated anecdote found in Callimachus and other writers, a man asks a sage whether he should marry a woman above his own station in life or avoid such social climbing. He is advised to listen to the children playing nearby with whipping-tops (bembikes): “Drive your own course,” they keep saying to each other. The man Arg. 3.137–41: χρύσεα μέν οἱ κύκλα τετεύχαται, ἀμφὶ δ᾿ ἑκάστῳ / διπλόαι ἁψῖδες περιηγέες εἱλίσσονται· / κρυπταὶ δὲ ῥαφαί εἰσιν, ἕλιξ δ᾿ ἐπιδέδρομε πάσαις / κυανέη· ἀτὰρ εἴ μιν ἑαῖς ἐνὶ χερσὶ βάλοιο, / ἀστὴρ ὣς φλεγέθοντα δι᾿ ἠέρος ὁλκὸν ἵησιν. 42 Cf. Od. 8.370–80 (quoted and discussed in the Conclusions), Pollux 9.106. 43 Galen, On Exercise with the Small Ball (De Parv. Pil. Exerc.). For the ball games episkuros (also called ephebike and epikoinos), phaininda, aporraxis, ourania, and the one named from harpazein (“snatch”), see Pollux 9.103–7. 44 Words generally translated as “top” are bembix, konos, strombos, strobilos, and strophalos. For literary references, cf. Ar. Birds 1461, Call. Ep. 1.9 = 54 GP = AP 7.89. Strobilos at Pl. Rep. 4.436d, Plut. Lys. 12.6; cf. Verg. Aen. 7.376–87. For surviving tops, cf. Coulon (2003) 202, Harlow (2013) 329, Neils and Oakley (2003) 271, and Sommer and Sommer (2015) 126–7; for depictions, see Beck (1975) 48 lists six vase depictions and provides images of three of them (287–9) in pl. 56, Neils and Oakley (2003) 270, and Dasen (2016) 82–5.

41



Things Greek Children Played With: Manufactured Playthings 

interprets this as meaning that he should marry within his own rank.46 Different in shape but similar in principle are hoops (trokhoi): so long as one continues to drive them forward, their motion too is perpetual. The common plaything is well attested in Greek vase paintings of the classical period, yet there are few certain literary references before the second-­ century ce doctor Antyllus, who devotes a thoughtful paragraph to the health benefits of hoop-driving (krikēlasia).47 A reference to these hoops has been thought to lie in Euripides’ Medea at least since the grammarian Trypho, but this variant is not typically preferred today.48 Among such manufactured objects, one can include rattles and clappers as well as more adult playthings, like cubic dice (kuboi) and boardgame pieces (pessoi).49 But the manufactured plaything can also reach a certain level of complexity as well, mirroring everyday objects and not just geometric forms—for example, toy carts, dolls, terracotta figurines, and self-moving wind-up toys (automata). Toy carts are a staple of ancient depictions of play, and can be found regularly in literary references as well. In Aristophanes’ Clouds, for example, the father reminds his son of the toy cart (hamaxis) that he bought him when he was six years old at the Diasia festival (861–4), something that his son would also produce for himself from time to time. While playing inside, his son would “mould houses and carve ships and make carts of figwood, and frogs from pomegranate peels”, his father claims (879–81). Toy carts are often represented on classical Greek vases, although few survive in the archaeological record due to the perishable nature of wood; only the occasional metal cart survives.50 Centuries later the toy cart is singled out as a staple Iliad 14.413. For discussion of this anecdote, see Gow and Page (1965) ad Call. 54 GP (AP 7.89); cf. Cozzoli (2011) 409–10 for bearing on the “child” theme in Callimachus’ poetry. 47 For hoops depicted in Greek vases, see Beck (1975) 47–8, who lists six depictions, of which four are shown on pl. 55; Neils and Oakley (2003) 269; and Antyllus’ discussion of krikolasia quoted at Orib. 6.26; cf. Sext. Emp. Pyrr. Hyp 1.106 (παισὶ μὲν γάρ, εἰ τύχοι, σφαῖραι καὶ τροχοὶ διὰ σπουδῆς εἰσιν). 48 See Mastronarde (2002) ad Eur. Med. 46. 49 For rattles, cf. Beck (1975) 48 with pl. 56, Neils and Oakley (2003) 265, and Harlow (2013) 325–6; for the “clapper”, see below; for cubic dice (kuboi) and board-game pieces (pessoi), see Pollux 9.94–99. For dice remains, cf. Karusu 1973, Kilian 1978, Laser (1987) 118–23, and Fittà (1998) 111. For pessoi remains, see Fittà (1998) 154–79, and Papadopoulos 2002 for certain difficulties of identification; Chapter 8 for pessoi found alongside dice and game-boards in graves. 50 For depictions, Beck (1975) 47 lists ten Attic vases and provides images for five (pl. 54), Neils and Oakley (2003) 269 say “dozens of choes”; for remains, see Rühfel (1984) 118 (n. 117 for the bronze toy cart) and Fittà (1998) 74 for terracotta toy carts outside Greece; cf. Sommer and Sommer 45

46

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What Do Pleasure-Objects Do?

of children’s toys: in Philostratus’ Heroicus, the child Achilles is described as not playing with those typical objects of childhood, “toy carts and knucklebones”, but items of a more heroic nature (Heroicus 45.4.3). Dolls similarly have survived in a variety of forms, both from classical Greece and later antiquity. 51 It has already been seen how Plutarch describes his daughter asking her nurse to feed her dolls—although other toys might be included here for paignion—but there are earlier references as well. In the tattered remains of Erinna’s Hellenistic poem The Distaff, the speaker seems to be describing the childhood shared with her lost friend Baucis: the two played with dolls (dagudes) as if they were brides.52 Callimachus’ Hymn to Demeter also mentions a wax doll (plangōn, 91) which melts in the sun to help his audience visualize the starving Erisychthon as he wasted away. The references to these “dolls” are sometimes uncertain regarding their use—that is, whether they served some religious function or were merely played with—but this is something which applies to archaeological finds of toys more generally.53 Items of even more complexity are certain self-moving toys or automata, few of which seem to have survived for archaeologists. The mechanical pigeon of a certain Archytas, if it ever existed, was said to fly by some “current of air” within it,54 while the toy that Plato describes in Laws, mentioned above, has similarly been thought to be automatic. Aristotle describes a similar contraption in his Motion of the Animals in considerable detail, though he does not specifically say that it functioned as a “plaything”—like the Athenian’s contraption, it is uncertain “whether it is a plaything or something more serious”.55 There is also an entire treatise devoted to such automata, although it is difficult to know just how much of these technologies were available at the time Plato and Aristotle were writing.56 (2015) 123–6. For dolls surviving from classical Greece, see Sommer and Sommer (2015) 115–23 and Neils and Oakley (2003) 267–8; cf. Fittà (1998) 54–65. 52 SH 186–92 and West 1977 for text; excellent discussion in Levaniouk 2008; δαγύδων is the word, cf. schol. ad Theoc. 2.110: δαγὺς δέ ἐστι κοροκόσμιόν τι…καλοῦσι δὲ αὐτὴν καὶ νύμφην, οἱ δὲ πλαγγόνα, ὡς Ἀττικοί. Hesych. s.v. δατύς· κουράλλιον, νύμφη λευκόκηρος, with West (1977) 105. 53 It often may not be a case of either/or: for the connection between play and festival, cf. Pind. Ol. 1.16–17, Her. 9.11, Ar. Lys. 700, Pl. Phdr. 276b, Rep. 2.365a, Pl. Leg. 2.657d, Men. Sam. 41–2, Epitr. 478, Herod. 3.55 ; for religion as a form of play, Huizinga (1971 [1938]) 15–27. 54 Aul. Gell. Attic Nights 10.12 with Huffman (2005) 571–9 for discussion. Some take the thauma or plaything of the gods (Laws 1.644c–645c) as a mechanized or wind-up toy: cf. Frede (2010) 116–20 and Schöpsdau (1994–2011) i.237 for discussion. 55 Arist. MA 701b2–10; Pl. Laws 1.644d. 56 Hero, Automatopoetica; cf. Ps.-Arist. De Mundo 398b13–16; see Nussbaum (1976) 146–52, (1978) 51



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Other objects could be included here, such as terracotta figurines, yoyos, swings, see-saws, and such, but for now the interest is in the distinction between manufactured and naturally occurring toys, if there indeed is a distinction.57 At what moment do such manufactured objects become “playthings” (athurmata, paignia)? Here arises a different sort of problem from naturally occurring objects like the sand or the knucklebone, or found objects like Empedocles’ water-clock, which, as I suggested above, might be viewed in the play mode or in the serious mode.58 The doll, the toy cart, the wind-up toy exclusively are objects of play, and the player is not really making them “playthings” when encountering such objects; they already are “playthings”. The same can also be said regarding the more simple manufactured objects, like balls, tops, and hoops: these are objects given to children as playthings, and not exactly objects which children make into pleasurable toys, as was the case with potsherds, dirt, and heaps of sand. To illustrate the point, it is worth considering the two toy carts of Aristophanes’ Clouds. In one case, the father buys a toy cart for his son Pheidippides at the Diasia festival; in the other case, the son himself builds toy carts out of household scraps. Are these two different sorts of play? The boy who makes himself toy carts is really no different from Homer’s boy building sandcastles. They both use naturally occurring objects, like spare leather scraps, wood, or sand, but view and engage with those materials in a different sort of way from that everyday mode of “serious” adults. These raw materials are not quite being “used”—that is, engaged with for some future good that they might yield—but “played”—that is, engaged with for their immediate pleasure. The sandcastle, the toy-cart-of-scraps, is just an extension of that mode: the players are not building the sandcastle or toy cart for some future long-term use but simply because it is pleasurable to do so.59 If Pheidippides’ mode of engagement can make a pleasure-object out of any object, what then of this superfluous toy that Pheidippides’ father gives him? Now lodged between the boy and his environment is this premade object resembling those objects he himself creates in his play. The 347 n. 5, for discussion and Fittà (1998) 86 for the automaton in the Rijksmuseum. For terracotta figurines, see Fittà (1998) 59–65, 69–72, Neils and Oakley (2003) 302–3 (though for the difficulty identifying such objects as toys, see n. 1), and Sommer and Sommer (2015) 130–1; for yo-yos, see Beck (1975) 54, pl. 68, and Sommer and Sommer (2015) 127–8; for swings, see Beck (1975) 48, pl. 57, and Fittà (1998) 32–3; for see-saws, see Beck (1975) 48, pl. 57, and Neils and Oakley (2003) 274. 58 Emped. fr. 100 DK: ὥσπερ ὅταν παῖς κλεψύδρῃ παίζουσα διειπετέος χαλκοῖο. 59 For further discussion of goal-oriented play, see Chapter 7. For another DIY toy cart, cf. Plut. 57

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What Do Pleasure-Objects Do?

only difference seems to be that the manufactured object already is a plaything, a permanent sort of plaything, since what else can this gift be other than a toy? The toggling between “play” and “real” or “play” and “serious” is abrogated from the start. Similarly, this toy does not just cause problems for the play/real dichotomy, but also the dichotomy of playing/using. Pheidippides in playing with this “toy” is using it in exactly the way it was meant to be used: it is meant to be played with. Rather than causing an object to be pleasurable through play, the object has already been presented to him as a pleasurable plaything. The manufactured toy thus raises a different sort of problem from the naturally occurring plaything, and this same problem can be observed with even the simplest manufactured toy. Take, for example, the ball and the scene of Nausicaa and her friends playing in Odyssey Book 6: “Then when she and her attendants finished enjoying their food, they threw off their headscarves and began to play with a ball, and white-armed Nausicaa was the leader of the game/song.”60 What is this “ball” (sphaira) that they are playing with? Unlike the clothes that they had brought for washing, which too could have been played with, much as the boy playing with sand or Pheidippides playing with leather, the ball seems to have a different status of being, as if it were always already played with. It would seem that this object does not stop being a “plaything” after their game, nor was it something else before the game. The ball, unlike the sand or stick, never returns to “normal”, as it were: it is always an object of immediate pleasure. So there is a difficulty that arises with manufactured toys, not just of the complex variety (dolls, carts) but also of the simplest form (tops, balls): if these objects are manufactured to be toys, which is to say, pleasure-objects, are they really being played with in the same way that found objects are? If play is thought to be some mode which makes objects immediately pleasurable, even if these objects have no particular purchase on pleasure, how is it possible to play with an object which already is pleasurable precisely in the way play is supposed to make it? When one starts to consider the problem in this way, it can be seen that the problem runs even deeper than the manufactured toys which help to stereotype certain objects as “toys”: much of the same stereotyping can be observed with certain naturally occurring objects as well. Remarkably, objects like knucklebones and nuts also become manufactured as toys: there are glass Dion 9.2. Od. 6.99–101: αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ σίτου τάρφθεν δμῳαί τε καὶ αὐτή, | σφαίρῃ ταὶ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἔπαιζον, ἀπὸ

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and metal knucklebones, terracotta nuts, and many other striking examples. 61 This does more than suggest that the natural/manufactured boundary can be permeable: it reminds that certain naturally occurring objects can be stereotyped as toys, making it more and more difficult to see, for example, a knucklebone as anything other than a plaything. As soon as a knucklebone, for example, is culturally thought to be a plaything, the description of play has already become more complex than that moment, described throughout this book, of making any object in the environment an object of immediate pleasure.

Animate Playthings The problem of the “toy” is thus clear by this point, but, before considering it directly, it is worth adding one more element into this overview of ancient playthings: the animate “toy”. Since, as I have been arguing, play can make any object in one’s surroundings into a pleasure-object, can the same be said of animate objects—that is, objects with their own subjective world-views, needs, desires, and so forth? The answer is unquestionably “Yes”. Both athurma and paignion cover something like the English “pet”, at least inasmuch as pets are thought to be for the pleasure they bring: and here are included pet birds, pet monkeys, and even “pets” in the sense of “lovers”—something like the English “boy toy”. Yet “pet” is not quite the right translation, as Phylarchus, writing in the third century bce, shows. Phylarchus tells of a boy who received a baby eagle as a gift and treated it with such care that, as Aelian reports, “he was not, I suppose, nurturing the eagle as an athurma for play, but like a beloved or a younger brother”.62 The boy is not treating this animal as a mere “plaything”, but rather like many pet owners in antiquity, engaging with this animal in a way that far exceeds the subject-centered enjoyments of play. There is a much higher level of concern for the well-being of the “loved one” than the “plaything”, perhaps even an imagined subjectivity. The “plaything”, by contrast, is merely an object, with no other purpose than the playing subject’s pleasure. Galen mentions apes as making a funny “plaything” (athurma) for children in their play,63 and κρήδεμνα βαλοῦσαι· | τῇσι δὲ Ναυσικάα λευκώλενος ἤρχετο μολπῆς. For bronze and glass knucklebones, see Neils and Oakley (2003) 279; Nankov (2013) 277 for Hellenistic examples, Harlow (2013) 326–7 for Roman examples. For Roman terracotta nuts (as well as one carved from rock crystal), see Harlow (2013) 326–7. 62 Phylarch. fr. 61a FGrH (= Aelian NA 6.29): οὐ γάρ τι που ὡς ἄθυρμα ἐς παιδιὰν ἔτρεφε τὸν ὄρνιν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐρωμένου δίκην ἢ ἀδελφοῦ νεωτέρου, οὕτως ἄρα ὁ παῖς τοῦ ἀετοῦ προμηθῶς εἶχεν. 61

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What Do Pleasure-Objects Do?

paignion is used of a pet bird later by Pausanias: when Zeus was wooing Hera he turned himself into a bird to be her “plaything”.64 Although “pet” covers the range partially, the particular “delight” here at times verges close to “animate toy”—that is, a creature thought of purely in terms of the playful pleasure it might bring. Humans too can become “toys”, chiefly in an erotic sense. In Aristophanes’ Eccleziazusae, for example, one of the old women at the end of the play cries as her “boy toy” is taken away: “You will not take away my paignia” (922).65 In Anaxandrides’ Gerontomania, a character says, upon hearing the name Anteia in a discussion of various courtesans: “She was my plaything (paignion).”66 Later, in his Life of Antony, Plutarch provides the Latin translation for this term paignion (59.8): “Sarmentos was a boy among the ‘playthings’ of Caesar, which the Romans call ‘delicia’.”67 It should be mentioned, however, that human “toys” are not always necessarily for erotic play: Philo, for example, mentions a mentally disabled man who was the “plaything” (athurma) of boys: they would dress him up as a king and pretend to be his devoted guards and citizens.68 The moral problem involved in treating animate beings as objects of immediate pleasure was not lost on thinkers of antiquity. Bion of Borysthenes, for example, living in the fourth/third century bce, captures it well: “When children play by throwing stones at frogs, the frogs, no longer playing, actually die.”69 No animal is born as an object of entertainment for another, Bion seems to be saying, but in the eyes of the playing subject these animals can be seen only as pleasure-objects. An absence of sympathetic feeling can be fatal, often amounting to cruel torture: so, for example, a game mentioned by Aristophanes and later discussed by Pollux and others, melolonthe, consisted of tying a winged Gal. UP 1.22: ἄθυρμα γελοῖον παίζοντων παίδων, cf. Philost. Im. 2.17.13; Eubulus fr. 114 KA (= Athen. 12.519a); Pind. Pyth. 2.72-3. Cf. Lazenby (1949) 247–8. 64 Paus. 2.17.4: ὅτε ἤρα παρθένου τῆς Ἥρας, ἐς τοῦτον τὸν ὄρνιθα ἀλλαγῆναι, τὴν δὲ ἅτε παίγνιον θηρᾶσαι. 65 Eccl. 922: ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἄν ποθ’ ὑφαρπάσαι-/ο τἀμὰ παίγνια. Paignia is probably plural by analogy with paidika (“boy-lover”, which may involve paidikon, “having to do with play (paidia)”, as much as paidikon, “having to do with children (paides)”). 66 Gerontomania fr. 9 KA: καὶ τοῦθ’ ἡμέτερον ἦν παίγνιον. 67 Plut. Ant. 59.8: ὁ δὲ Σάρμεντος ἦν τῶν Καίσαρος παιγνίων παιδάριον, ἃ δηλίκια Ῥωμαῖοι καλοῦσιν. 68 Flacc. 36–9, which resembles the game Pollux reports was called basilinda at 9.110–11. Cf. the game described at Her. 1.114–5, discussed in Chapter 7. 63



Animate Playthings

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animal to a post—likely an insect, but a small bird is not to be excluded—and watching it try to fly away, spiraling the string around the post until it becomes stuck.70 The animal here would seem to be nothing more than an animate toy, and whatever suffering it clearly undergoes is not felt by the playing subject. This is not to say that the player is blind to that suffering: on the contrary, the suffering creates pleasure for those who play. Much like the suffering that occurs in comedy, where the very reactions and struggles are not catalysts for sympathy but laughter and enjoyment, the suffering of the winged animal—so long as one is playing—is pleasurable and thrilling. As Bion points out, the suffering is real, yet since it is treated as something for the sake of pleasure—that is, the animal is an object of play—the reactions and suffering become themselves sources of entertainment rather than genuine concern. Comparable scenes of animal torture for entertainment—for example, a child holding a tortoise upside down over a snapping dog—are not infrequent in artistic representations, and might be included here under the rubric of “animate playthings”.71 The play mode of viewing and engaging with animate objects is thus no different from that mode which engages with inanimate objects: these playthings are simply for their immediate pleasure, and whatever responses the animate object makes in reaction to this play—struggles, winces, cries, and so forth—only adds to that pleasure. This is not because there is anything inherently pleasurable about struggles, winces, and cries, but because the play mode, which can delight in anything, does not exclude suffering as an object of pleasure. On the contrary, the pleasure often seems to increase with the intensity of the suffering, as comedy so often demonstrates. Should technology allow humans to create life, there is little evidence to suggest that they would not continue to use at least some of those creations in this way—that is, as objects of immediate pleasure—and so continue a long-established mode which necessarily overlooks the small fact of another’s subjective existence, and, as Bion says, the reality of another’s suffering. This is, after all, what one needs to do in order to play. Bion fr. 76 Kindstrand = Plut. De soll. anim. 7.965a–b: τὸν γὰρ παίζοντα καὶ τερπόμενον οἶμαι συμπαίζουσι δεῖν χρῆσθαι καὶ ἱλαροῖς, οὐχ ὥσπερ ὁ Βίων ἔλεγε τὰ παιδάρια παίζοντα τῶν βατράχων τοῖς λίθοις ἐφίεσθαι, τοὺς δὲ βατράχους μηκέτι παίζοντας ἀλλ’ ἀληθῶς ἀποθνήσκειν. 70 Cf. Ar. Clouds 763 with schol. ad loc; Poll. 9.124–5; Herod. Mim. 12.

69

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What Do Pleasure-Objects Do?

Found Objects vs. Manufactured Toys Grammatically speaking, a paignion (“plaything”) ought simply to be a thing that is played with (paizō), just as a game (paidia) ought simply to be an instantiation of play.72 Once a child starts playing with sand, or dirt, or potsherds, or sticks, those objects become something different from what they had been before: they become playthings, and so objects of immediate pleasure. When the child stops playing, these objects return to their original state—that is, “just” sand, dirt, potsherds, and so forth. As I have been arguing, play can make anything into a pleasure-object, and, when it does so, that object becomes, for a time, a toy. Yet, as emerged in the overview, the picture becomes more complicated when we consider manufactured toys, which do not behave in the same way as found objects. For one, the toy does not become a “plaything” once the child starts playing with it: the manufactured toy already is, and always was, a “plaything”. When Aphrodite gives the marvelous ball to Eros as a gift, that ball is meant to be a plaything and serves no other purpose. Unlike Empedocles’ water-clock, which was manufactured to be a useful time-keeper only to be transformed by the child into a temporary toy, the manufactured ball was never meant to have any other use than its play. Similarly, the toy cart that Strepsiades purchased for his son is not made into a plaything through his son’s playing with it: it already was a plaything. The cart was sold and purchased as a plaything, it was given as a plaything, and it was received by the child as a plaything.73 If play in these cases does not create the manufactured toy, what exactly happens when children like Eros and Pheidippides play with their gifts? Rather than creating these playthings in the moment of play—as is often the case with sticks and stones—it is as if these children are entering upon games already being played. Aphrodite, for example, does not give Eros a ball as some static object for which Eros must discover certain forms of play. Rather, the ball, she says, can be used for games like ourania—throwing the ball to the sky and catching it—and, presumably, a number of other games that culturally pre-exist the actual object, or even, in most cases other than Eros, the actual child. Similarly, Pheidippides does not really discover the toy cart’s uses for play and games, as if the object were ever something other than a plaything. Instead, when For the torture of the tortoise, see Beck (1975) 50, pl. 60, and Fittà (1998) 66. For depictions of children playing with their pets more generally, cf. Beck (1975) 49–50, pls. 58–60, Fittà (1998) 65–9, Neils and Oakley (2003) 280–1, with 282 for a cockfight (cf. Fittà 1998, 123–7), and Sommer and Sommer (2015) 131–9.

71



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Pheidippides rolls the cart around the house, races it outside with friends, and loads small objects onto it, he is largely engaging in play activities that have already evolved around that particular object. Rather than transforming a toy cart into a plaything, he is playing with it in the way that it was meant to be used, just like Eros and his star-ball. Plato suggests much the same idea in the Laws. It will be remembered that, when Plato’s Athenian describes the toys that caretakers should give to children, he says that these toys “turn” the children’s pleasures in a certain direction.74 He means that children naturally play, and so the delights of play are already present; no toy or caretaker is needed to bring that about.75 Yet, if the caretaker inserts a toy between that child and its played environment, those naturally occurring pleasures can be manipulated and “turned” in whatever direction the caretaker might like. Like Pheidippides’ toy cart and Eros’ ball, a toy shovel is likely to cause the child to engage in digging games, a toy hammer is likely to cause that child to engage in hammering games, and so forth. The tendency—and it need not be anything more than a tendency—is to play certain games with certain toys, and the consequence of this is that toys appear to be able to “turn” play in certain directions, as if the toy were another playmate in the ongoing game.76 Plato’s view might even apply to younger children, even though it would seem that infants technically cannot know the difference between manufactured toys and other objects. In the Politics, Aristotle describes a toy called the “clapper” (platagē), invented, he says, by a certain Archytas: Children should have some occupation, and a good one is thought to be the platagē of Archytas, which is given to children in order that by using this they do not break anything in the house. For a young child is unable to keep still: this platagē is fitting for very young children, while education (paideia) is the platagē for older children.77

For paidiai as “Games”, cf. Crates’ comedy of that name (27–29 KA, Poll. 9.115; see Bonanno 1972, 19–54, 117–22, and Storey 2011, 200–9, 222–5, for discussion). 73 Stereotyped found objects like knucklebones can often straddle this divide, e.g., at Ar. Wasps 293– 6, discussed above, where they are considered as potential gifts. 74 See Laws 1.643c (διὰ τῶν παιδιῶν ἐκεῖσε τρέπειν τὰς ἡδονὰς καὶ ἐπιθυμίας τῶν παίδων), with Introduction and Chapter 2 for discussion. 75 For play as naturally occurring see, e.g., Laws 7.794a, with Chapter 1 for discussion. 76 This need not be overly restrictive: children still can do whatever they like with any object, whether it be a found object or a manufactured toy. Yet, if there is a tendency to play with manufactured toys in certain ways (i.e., to roll the toy cart, to shovel with toy shovel, etc.), that suffices for the Athenian’s notion that toys “turn” the pleasures of play in certain directions. 77 Arist. Pol. 8.6, 1340b25–31: ἅμα δὲ καὶ δεῖ τοὺς παῖδας ἔχειν τινὰ διατριβήν, καὶ τὴν Ἀρχύτου 72

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What Do Pleasure-Objects Do?

The infant child does not need this platagē in order to play; any object in the house can be employed by the child for making loud, pleasurable banging noises. But this is precisely the problem: like Bion’s frogs, household items have a habit of breaking when treated as objects of play, so what is needed is a third object of sorts inserted between the child and its environment. The child’s play thus gets “turned”, as Plato says, because the games played with the “clapper” are largely predetermined: the child shakes the platagē violently, makes loud sounds with it, and feels it crashing power. Yet, unlike the other objects of the house, the platagē is meant to be a plaything. The child is not discovering the playful possibilities for a found object, but simply using a manufactured toy as it is meant to be used. When it is noticed that toys often invite players into certain games, many of which pre-exist the actual toy—for example, the ball and the game ourania—it reminds that games too often pre-exist any one moment of play. Although fiddling with a stick or throwing nuts at a tree might be called a “game”, inasmuch as it is a bout or instantiation of play, many games have recognized rules and names, and, along with that recognition, a cultural history. Pollux, Suetonius, and other ancient scholars studied and wrote about these games, while earlier writers attempted to imagine these games’ historical points of origins.78 But what is important to notice is that these games, by pre-existing any one moment of play, necessarily direct that play in certain directions, much like the toy, or like another player. So Herodotus describes the invention of certain games: they were created as a “remedy” (akos) to distract the Lydians from their hunger during a famine; so Sophocles’ character describes games as being invented as a “remedy” (akos) for soldiers’ potential “idleness” (argia) between battles.79 When playing such games, these players are not creating some new type of play but are entering games that are already established. Another player in some unfelt past has already decided the rules, goals, and objects, while the present players need only play along. Toys and games thus appear to be intertwined: toys can invite players into certain games, and games often involve temporary or permanent

πλαταγὴν οἴεσθαι γενέσθαι καλῶς, ἣν διδόασι τοῖς παιδίοις, ὅπως χρώμενοι ταύτῃ μηδὲν



Conclusions

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playthings, much in the way that Walton describes with his “props”.80 It is important to keep this relationship in mind, because the more established manufactured toys and games become, so too the more obscure their mutual interdependence. Unlike found objects, the manufactured toy becomes, both grammatically and conceptually, more than a “playobject”. As was seen above, toys are not just played with, but bought and sold (so Strepsiades and the toy cart), given and received as gifts (so Aphrodite and the toy ball), appraised and evaluated for educational merits (so Plato’s Athenian), and much else. The toy, unlike the found objects, can be object to all these actions other than play as a toy. In other words, the manufactured toy, unlike the found object, does not need to be played with in order to be a plaything. Yet the toy’s interdependence with ongoing games reminds what would be missing if such a toy were only bought, sold, appraised, and so forth, but never actually played with. To be part of ongoing games is the toy’s function: it suggests these games and facilitates these games. This is a feature that is not shared with found objects, even if these too can be temporary toys. With the found object, I suggested that the act of play causes the thing to become a plaything, an object of immediate pleasure, a toy— something that cannot happen with the manufactured toy, which always already was a plaything. And yet the act of play nevertheless changes the manufactured toy: play activates the toy, since the games suggested by the toy can only lie dormant until a player comes along and plays them.

Conclusions It is sometimes lamented that scholars who study play in the abstract do not pay enough attention to the concrete games and realia of play. Caillois, for example, critiques Huizinga in this vein, as do more recent theorists, like Galloway and Ensslin.81 Even if a game, as other languages καταγνύωσι τῶν κατὰ τὴν οἰκίαν· οὐ γὰρ δύναται τὸ νέον ἡσυχάζειν. αὕτη μὲν οὖν ἐστι τοῖς νηπίοις ἁρμόττουσα τῶν παιδίων, ἡ δὲ παιδεία πλαταγὴ τοῖς μείζοσι τῶν νέων. Cf. Huffman (2005) 302–7 and Dasen 2017 for discussion. 78 Cf. Poll. 9.94–129, Suet. Peri Paid. Taillardat; for earlier writers, see below. 79 Her. 1.94 and Soph. fr. 479 TrGF. 80 The resemblance with Walton’s (1990) “props” (with the critiques in Introduction and Chapter 3) does not run deep. The weakness of the mimetic position is immediately seen with toys like balls and tops, as opposed, e.g., to dolls and carts. If a doll prompts a mimesis (“make-believe”) of mother and child, what mimesis is a ball prompting? The child is not “imagining” anything other than the ball game, and this raises questions about whether “imagining” mother and child—and so, mimesis—is the right description of the mother/child doll game after all. Another difference is

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What Do Pleasure-Objects Do?

remind, is just a particular instance of play—a “play bout”, a token of type “play”—once a game is established it quickly becomes something much more than a mere play bout.82 This seems to be an intuitive feature of deverbative nouns in general: once a noun assumes its own existence, it becomes an object to other verbs, and so more than that initial verbobject. In terms of games, they are not just “played” but regularly bought, sold, designed, marketed, advertised, and much else. Contemporary game scholars, wishing to do full justice to this concept “game”, are thus understandably unwilling to reduce “games” to “play”, even if the two are clearly interrelated. The same may be said for toys: to study “toys” as simply “objects of play” or “playthings” is to limit a rich social field of buying, selling, designing, marketing, moralizing, prohibiting, and so forth, to a monolithic moment of play. And yet, as with other deverbative nouns, there is no escaping that verb, “play”. Just as songs are sung, and dances are danced, games are played, not in the way that games are bought, sold, and marketed, but in some more essential way, as if, when we sing a song, dance a dance, and play a game, those objects, however broadly they have expanded outside the play context, momentarily return to their original status as a redundant internal object: we are really just singing, dancing, and playing. Manufactured toys qua “playthings” behave similarly: inasmuch as they are established as toys, their existence ranges far beyond the found object, which is only a “plaything” during the time of its brief employment. However, although the manufactured toy can be bought, sold, and appraised as a plaything, when it is being played with, it too is almost indistinguishable from that found object which was simply an extension of the play: the player is playing with a plaything, yes, but can be more succinctly described as just “playing”. Considering that toys are thus in some sense redundant, we might ask: do children need toys to play? Plato would certainly answer in the negative, as would other ancient thinkers. Like Epictetus’ child, children can be perfectly happy playing with potsherds, dirt and sticks, since the world is their plaything. On the other hand, depriving a child of toys is much like depriving an adult of art. Adults too can play on their own, creating their own pictures, stories, and music. But it is immediately apparent how desolate this would be: monotony and boredom would be the fate for all but the most overflowing geniuses. This desolation that, while Walton includes everything as a “prop”, from tree trunks, to sculptures, to paintings, to theatrical plays, Greek grammar suggests there is a significant distinction between playing a



Conclusions

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illuminates a key social role for toys and art: neither toys nor art are required for play, but both widen our world to the games that other people play and have played, which—whether or not they are better than anything we could invent ourselves—are enjoyed as a social engagement, saving us from that potential boredom, monotony, and solitude of playing only on our own. If children, when playing with a toy, are entering upon games already begun rather than creating games ex nihilo for themselves, it suggests that toymakers do not just create static objects waiting to be touched. Toymakers invite us to play their games with them, and, when we do, it is as if we are playing with the toymakers themselves.

chapter 5

Aristotle’s Demotion of Play

Twice Aristotle considers the telos of human activity, and twice he insists that this telos cannot be “play” (paidia). In the Politics he claims that the goal of work is not play but leisure, while in the Nicomachean Ethics he claims that the activity of the good life is not play but contemplation, which is the only truly “leisured” activity (skholastikon).1 In both passages Aristotle is arguing against an unnamed group of people who esteem play as the telos of life, and in both passages he adamantly rejects this view.2 But what is the difference between leisure and play for Aristotle? As Solmsen once argued, Aristotle himself explains the difference clearly enough: play is for the sake of work, while work is for the sake of leisure.3 That is, play provides relief from work but is not the telos of that work; instead, leisure is the telos of work. This is lucid enough in the abstract, but the difficulties arise when one considers the distinction with concrete examples. After all, Aristotle does not conceive of different types of activities as “leisure” activities and “play” activities, as though philosophy and music were a form of “leisure” while rolling dice and throwing balls were a form of play. Instead, as is seen in Politics 8, he considers some activities, like music, to be both a form of play and a form of leisure.4 This presumably means that some activities can both provide relief from work (play) and be the goal of that work (leisure); it all depends, it seems, on one’s reasons for engaging in an activity.5 But resolving the question purely in terms of intentionality Pol. 8.3, 1337b35–1338a22 and EN 10.7, 1177b22, respectively. Cf. EN 10.6, 1176b9–28, and Pol. 8.5, 1339b31–40. 3 Solmsen 1964. For “work for the sake of leisure,” see Pol. 7.14, 1333a30–36, 7.15, 1334a14–16, and Eth. Nic. 10.7, 1177b4–6; for “play for the sake of work,” see Pol. 8.3, 1337b37–42; cf. EN 10.6, 1176b32–1177a1. 4 For music as a form of leisure, see 8.3, 1337b27–32 (σχολάζειν) and 1338a21–2 (τὴν ἐν τῇ σχολῇ διαγωγήν); for music as a form of play (παιδιά), 8.5, 1339b15–42. 5 Cf. Pol. 7.14, 1333a9–11. 1

2

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Paidia vs. Skholē: Convergence from Divergent Etymologies

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does not do justice to Aristotle’s distinction, because there are other factors that must be considered, not least the various faculties involved in the activities of play and leisure.6 As I will argue in this chapter, Aristotle demotes Plato’s play by making it exclusively an activity of the body. Play not only provides relief from the toils of embodied existence (like sleep), but arises out of the body as a necessity of sorts (also like sleep). Leisure, by contrast, when discussed in terms of the goal of life, becomes so idealized that it is not just free from the constraints of labor but free from the constraints of the body as well. I begin this argument by comparing the parallel word developments of paidia and skholē into the fourth century, where they become rivals for the good life in Aristotle. I then consider who Aristotle is reacting to when he so adamantly insists that play cannot be the goal of life: is it Plato in the Laws, hedonist philosophers like Aristippus, the “common man”? This leads to the discussion proper of the Aristotle passages, which consider the difference between leisure and play, mostly from the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, but other texts as well. The origin of the play/ leisure distinction, I argue, is to be found in Aristotle’s theology: since the best life resembles the divine life, the best life is free from bodily activities like play. Further, the “bodily” of “bodily play” can be taken in a more radical sense: like sleep, play is defined not by the soul’s functioning but by the absence of such functioning, an absence which allows the body its own consequent motion.

Paidia vs. Skholē: Convergence from Divergent Etymologies Considering the different etymological starting points for these two words, paidia and skholē, it may not be immediately obvious how they, in the fourth century bce, could become candidates for the same position, namely the goal of work. While, as has been seen, paizō, “to play”, derives from the word pais, “child”,7 skholē (“leisure”) emerges from an entirely different region of thought—not in concepts of children but in concepts of time. “Free time” seems to be the meaning of skholē originally, with

Cf. Gauthier and Jolif (1958–9) ii.872–9, especially 873 ad 1177a6–9, regarding “plaisirs corporels”, and 879 ad 1177a21–2 (“plus une faculté est immatérielle, moins elle comporte de puissance, et plus continûment par conséquent elle peut s’exercer”). 7 Beekes (2010) ii.1142–3; Chantraine (1999) 849; Frisk (1960–70) ii.462–3; Meerwaldt (1928) 160–5; Chapter 1 for discussion. 6

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Aristotle’s Demotion of Play

emphasis on the “having” of that time, as its root suggests.8 It does not appear convincingly in Greek until the fifth century, and for Pindar and Aeschylus it is a word which is primarily temporal: one either has skholē (free time) to do something, or one has no such time (askholazō). Pindar does not have time, he tells us—or would need much more time (makroteras…skholas)—to count up all the bronze prizes which were set beside a racecourse.9 Aeschylus’ Danaus in Suppliants commands “Do not waste time”, “Do not delay”, (mē skholaze, 209), and later, after Aeschylus, Prometheus, chained to the rock, remarks “I have rather more time than I might like”, although here already skholē may be communicating something more than just “time”.10 Anastasiadis in his excellent article on skholē’s development is finely attuned to the way that “attention necessarily shifts from the abstract significance of skholē to the various aspects of its use”, and this is especially the case for the philosophers at the end of the century, where the issue of free time and its proper employment becomes increasingly a subject for debate.11 Antisthenes in Xenophon’s Symposium claims that he has the most precious possession, leisure, and then goes on to describe the philosophical content of that leisure.12 Socrates in Xenophon’s Memorabilia argues that skholazein cannot mean “do nothing” since everyone is always doing something (even rolling dice is doing something, he says).13 Instead, he claims, skholazein should be envisaged as a sort of selfimprovement or capacity for self-improvement. Plato’s characters also recognize the importance of skholē: in the Theaetetus, skholē is that Beekes (2010) ii.1439: “Properly ‘holding back,’ derived from the aor. stem σχ- (see ἔχω) with a suffix -λ-, with a thematic vowel -o- after verbal nounds like βολή, στολή, γονή, etc.” Chantraine (1999) 1083: “On rattache le mot σχολή ‘arrêt’ à l’aoriste σχεῖν ‘arrêter’, mais ni la suffixation ni le vocalisme ne sont bien clairs: le rapprochement avec βολή, στολή, etc., n’éclaire pas grand chose…” Frisk (1960–70) ii.841: “Vom Aor. σχ-εῖν (s. ἔχω) mit λ-Suffix, wobei sich der Themavokal nach den zahlreichen Verbalnomina mit wurzelhaftem -o- (βολή, στολή, γονή, usw. usw.) richtete.” Anastasiadis (2004) 60: “[A]lthough its etymological relationship with the verb ἔχειν is obscure, σχολή may be understood as equivalent to ‘possession’, in this case ‘of time’…” Cf. Kullmann (1996) 104. 9 Nem. 10.45: ἀλλὰ χαλκὸν μυρίον οὐ δυνατόν / ἐξελέγχειν—μακροτέρας γὰρ ἀριθμῆσαι σχολᾶς. Cf. Anastasiadis (2004) 60: “[I]n fact, in all cases, Pindar appears merely to be referring to the temporal context either of a performance of his poetry or of his personal commitments; that is, the poet ‘has not got time’ to expatiate into perorations (Nem. 10 and Pyth. 8) or he regards his duty towards Thebes as more imperative than the ‘lack of time’ due to his commitments (Isthm. 1).” Cf. Welskopf (1962) 11–17. 10 PV 818: σχολὴ δὲ πλείων ἢ θέλω πάρεστί μοι. 11 Anastasiadis (2004) 61. 12 Xen. Symp. 4.44: τὸ ἁβρότατόν γε κτῆμα, τὴν σχολήν. Cf. Anastasiadis (2004) 66. 13 Xen. Mem. 3.9.9: cf. Solmsen (1964) 202–4 and Anastasiadis (2004) 67. 8



Paidia vs. Skholē: Convergence from Divergent Etymologies

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prerequisite freedom from constraint which philosophy requires.14 But even here the term does not shift too far from the central meaning of “free time”. With Aristotle, however, there is a notable break. As Anastasiadis has shown, Aristotle builds a minor industry around this term, coining new words like aposkholazō and enskholazō, replacing the potentially negative modifier skholaios with the newly coined, positively charged skholastikos, and applying, for example, adjectives like askholos not to modify people but activities—a linguistic feature not found before Aristotle.15 Aristotle’s verbal restructuring seems to be part of his more general project to elevate leisure to become not a prerequisite for the good life but the activity of the good life itself. “Happiness seems to lie in leisure,” he reports in the Nicomachean Ethics.16 Although this passing endorsement is not necessarily Aristotelian doctrine, the related premise that happiness does not exist in play certainly is.17 Although “play” and “leisure” emerge from two different sources—the one from the conceptions of children, the other from a perceived scarcity of time—by the fourth century both terms had expanded to such an extent that they could compete for the same territory of the good life, namely that segment of life which is not itself work but is the goal of that work. The question raised by Anastasiadis’ important study is why Aristotle devotes so much effort to restructuring the concept of leisure. Although Anastasiadis explores well leisure’s opposition to idleness (argia) and work (askholia), he does not have space to mention that opposition which, as will be seen, is surely the most important one for Aristotle: leisure vs. play (paidia). It seems that Aristotle restructures and expands the concept of leisure primarily in reaction to a certain conception of play,

Plat. Theaet. 172c–d; cf. Stocks (1936) 177–8, Solmsen (1964) 205–6, and Anastasiadis (2004) 67–8. Anastasiadis (2004) 69–72, at 69: “Certainly, Aristotle did much to invest the concept of σχολή with positive connotations and to idealize it; indeed, its elevation to a supreme good was accompanied by such a systematic structuring of its meaning that it acquired the form of a minutely elaborated deontological framework.” Cf. Stocks (1936) 182 and Mikkola (1958) 70 for using the changing meaning of σχολή in Aristotle as evidence for Jaeger’s theory of Aristotle’s development. 16 EN 10.7, 1177b4: δοκεῖ τε ἡ εὐδαιμονία ἐν τῇ σχολῇ εἶναι, lending support to his view of eudaimonia. Solmsen (1964) 204–5 cautions well not to interpret this statement “too narrowly as a philosophical dogma” but, rather, as something closer to ἔνδοξα; at other times he is not so cautious (cf., e.g., his first sentence: “In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle declares: δοκεῖ τε ἡ εὐδαιμονία ἐν τῇ σχολῇ εἶναι and uses this proposition to decide that man’s highest happiness lies in the contemplative rather than in the active life”). 17 Emphatically at EN 10.6, 1176b27–8; cf. Pol. 8.3, 1337b35. Discussion of these passages is below. 14 15

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not revamping leisure as a telos or highest good in a philosophical vacuum, but rather as a response to something.

Evaluating Play before Aristotle “Drink, eat, play”: so the fourth-century bce historian Aristoboulos writes was inscribed on the tomb of the legendary hedonist king Sardanapalus.18 Similarly, the fourth-/third-century bce poet Phoenix of Colophon puts into the mouth of the dead king Ninus the sentiment that, now dust, he has nothing but “how much [he’s] played, how much [he’s] sung, and how much [he’s] loved”.19 Although both Aristotle and Plato mention unnamed groups of people who suppose that “play” is the ultimate telos of life, Aristotle specifically indicates tyrants and their courts as examples. 20 He may have had in mind here the court of Dionysius II, among others21: Aristippus of Cyrene, the philosopher most associated with radical hedonism, is alleged to have claimed that he went to the court of the Syracusan tyrant for the sake of “play”,22 while the fourth-century hedonist Polyarchus, in his positive description of the luxuries of Dionysius II (and the king of Persia), contrasts well with Aristotle’s negative depictions of tyrants’ paidia (discussed below).23 Nor is this a fourth-century Greek phenomenon: Simonides, who is known to have enjoyed the patronage of tyrants, famously claimed that one should “play in life and not take anything whatsoever seriously”.24

Aristoboulos FGrH 139 F 9a = Ath. 530c: ἔσθιε, πῖνε, παῖζε. The sentiment is common in Greek poetry (cf. Amphis Gunaikokratia fr. 8 KA = Ath. 8.336c; Ion Chi. 27.7 IEG; Lattimore 1962, 260–3), so it is as likely a projection onto the East as an inheritance from it. Sardanapalus has been connected to Ashurbanipal (668–627 bce), and Esarhaddon (681–669), but neither perfectly fits the Greek profile. 19 Phoenix Iambs fr. 1 (CA 231–2) = Ath. 530f: ὁκόσον ἔπαισα χὠκός᾽ ἤεισα / χωκόσσ᾽ ἐράσθην. 20 Pl. Leg. 7.803d2–4; Arist. EN 10.6, 1176b12–28 (where tyrants are singled out; cf. Pol. 8.5, 1339b31– 40). 21 Cf., e.g., Halliwell (2008) 309 n. 166, regarding Philip II of Macedon. 22 Diog. Laert. 2.8.80. Regarding Aristippus the Elder and Aristippus the Younger and questions of attributions of Cyrenaic hedonism, cf. Mannebach 1961, 114–18, and Tsouna-McKiharan 1994, 377–82. 23 Aristoxenus fr. 50 Wehrli = Ath. 12.545a, with Huffman 2005, 307–22, for commentary and discussion. Other positive descriptions of tyrants’ pleasures which read well against Arist. EN 10.6, 1176b12–28, are Theophrastus’ On Pleasure (fr. 551 Fortenbaugh = Ath. 10.511c–d) and Heraclides Ponticus’ On Pleasure (fr. 39 Schütrumpf = Ath. 512a–b). For a hedonist position which rejects play, cf. Callicles at Pl. Gorg. 485b2–c1. 24 Simon. 646 PMG: παίζειν ἐν τῷ βίῳ καὶ περὶ μηδὲν ἁπλῶς σπουδάζειν. Cf. the late fifth-century vases depicting personified Paidia at Shapiro (1993) 180–5; Prodicus’ allegory too (Xen. Mem. 2.1.21–34) has Eudaimonia mistaken for a life of softness (with Shapiro 1993, 62). 18



Evaluating Play before Aristotle

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As others have argued long ago, however, Aristotle’s concept of “leisure”, his “élaboration nouvelle”,25 most noticeably responds to the concept of “play” found in Plato’s Laws.26 “Play” is central to the Laws—not just in terms of Plato’s aesthetics, as I discussed in previous chapters, but in terms of the Laws’ thematic issues of legislation and education. JouëtPastré, for example, writes: “Play constitutes the best means of education to the point of covering the very concept of education” and thus “one cannot legislate without thinking or rethinking the notions of play.”27 Earlier Gundert, it will be remembered, envisioned Plato’s entire corpus developing around the increasing importance of play in his thought, finally culminating in its role in the Laws, as a sort of communion with the divine.28 It is worth examining one of the central passages here before turning to Aristotle (Laws 7.803d–e): Now, I suppose, people think that serious activities should be for the sake of play: for they think that matters of war, although serious, ought to be arranged for the sake of peace. But the study of war turned out to be neither play nor education which has ever been worthy of the name (nor is, nor will be [worthy])—namely, the things which we claim to be most serious of all. Indeed, it is the life of peace that everyone should live as much and as well as possible. What, then, is the right way? In certain forms of play life ought to be lived—sacrificing and singing and dancing—with the result that one can make the gods propitious, and ward off enemies, victorious in battle.29

Although some find a contradiction in the fact that Plato “can in one and the same breath say” that life should be spent playing the most beautiful forms of play “and declare his view to be the opposite of that which Gauthier and Jolif (1958–9) ii.869. Solmsen (1964) 197–8, esp. 207–14 (214 for a comparative diagram); Gauthier and Jolif (1958–9) ii.867: “Il semble qu’il faille y voir avant tout une critique de la façon dont Platon, au livre VII des Lois, aborde la description de la vie de loisir. Cette vie apparaît à Platon comme une sorte de grand Jeu…” Cf. Koller (1956) 29. 27 Jouët-Pastré (2006) 12: “Le jeu constituerait le moyen par excellence de l’éducation au point de recouvrir la notion même d’éducation.” And, a few lines down (emphasis in the original): “l’on ne peut légiférer sans penser ou re-penser la notion de jeu.” 28 Gundert (1965) 191–215. 29 Cf. 7.803a–c with Jouët-Pastré (2006) 15 and Ooms (1956) 2. νῦν μέν που τὰς σπουδὰς οἴονται δεῖν ἕνεκα τῶν παιδιῶν γίγνεσθαι· τὰ γὰρ περὶ τὸν πόλεμον ἡγοῦνται σπουδαῖα ὄντα τῆς εἰρήνης ἕνεκα δεῖν εὖ τίθεσθαι. τὸ δ’ ἦν ἐν πολέμῳ μὲν ἄρα οὔτ’ οὖν παιδιὰ πεφυκυῖα οὔτ’ αὖ παιδεία ποτὲ ἡμῖν ἀξιόλογος, οὔτε οὖσα οὔτ’ ἐσομένη, ὃ δή φαμεν ἡμῖν γε εἶναι σπουδαιότατον· δεῖ δὴ τὸν κατ’ εἰρήνην βίον ἕκαστον πλεῖστόν τε καὶ ἄριστον διεξελθεῖν. τίς οὖν ὀρθότης; παίζοντά ἐστιν διαβιωτέον τινὰς δὴ παιδιάς, θύοντα καὶ ᾄδοντα καὶ ὀρχούμενον, ὥστε τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἵλεως αὑτῷ παρασκευάζειν δυνατὸν εἶναι, τοὺς δ’ ἐχθροὺς ἀμύνεσθαι καὶ νικᾶν μαχόμενον. 25

26

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makes paidia the end of life”, there need not be a contradiction here.30 As other commentators have seen, the thrust of the paragraph is that play is the best way to spend one’s life.31 The Athenian accepts the view fully that so-called serious activities like war and work stand in relation to peace and play as a means to an end; his only correction is that play itself is the “most serious” or “most important” matter of all. Rather than imagining these citizens as playing with a “serious purpose”,32 one should take quite strictly the fact that Plato chose a result and not a purpose clause here. Gaining divine benevolence or superiority in war is not the purpose of the play, but the “natural result” of such play, as England rightly explains. He writes: “When we come to the statement of what men ought to do, it is that they ought to think play itself the important thing, and not any object that may be secured by it.” It is almost a mystical imperative that the Athenian is offering here in his moment of inspiration: play well, play with all your spirit, and everything else in life will work itself out.33 A life spent in play, then, for the Athenian in Plato’s Laws, is the best life. This includes the religious festivals, the dancing, the singing, the enjoyment of music, the watching of dramas, and so forth. It is what brings man closest to the divine, which is the only truly serious thing. Although Aristotle may also have other philosophers in mind who claim that the best life is to be spent in play—philosophical texts now lost to us—he clearly opposes the view that play might constitute the best life. A return to Simonides’ injunction that one ought to “play in life and not take anything whatsoever seriously” does not suit his palate, and he explains why on a number of occasions.

Aristotle’s Views on Play Aristotle’s most systematic refutation of the view that play constitutes the best life appears in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics. Returning to the idea of eudaimonia, the happiness that constitutes the best life, he bulletpoints the criteria for its top-ranking position: it is an activity (energeia), not a state (hexis), so someone sleeping or in a vegetative state does not have eudaimonia. More importantly, though, eudaimonia is an activity

32 33 30 31

Solmsen (1964) 210. England (1921) ad 803d2; de Vries (1949) 24 n. 18. Solmsen (1964) 210. England (1921) ad 803d2, emphasis in the original. Cf. Psalm 149 for a similar idea of delighting a god through dancing and song.



Aristotle’s Views on Play

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chosen for its own sake, not an activity chosen out of necessity or for the sake of some other good. With this formulation, his thought immediately turns to play (paidia), and naturally so: play too, after all, is chosen for its own sake and not out of necessity or for the sake of some other good. Aristotle writes, “[One should also consider here] the pleasurable activities of play: for they are not chosen for the sake of other things.”34 What separates one autotelic activity (play) from another autotelic activity, the activity of eudaimonia? Aristotle explains: some people think that happiness lies in play because tyrants direct their resources toward it. But tyrants are powerful, he says, not virtuous: “If these men, having no taste of pure and free pleasure, flee to the pleasures of the body, it must not be supposed because of this that these pleasures are the most choiceworthy.”35 What is striking about this line is the immediate equation of “play” with “pleasures of the body”. While some pleasures are “pure and free”, other pleasures are “bodily, somatic”. Play falls into the latter category, and so he concludes that “happiness cannot be in play after all”.36 Aristotle continues with his second reason: it would be childish and foolish to imagine that one ought to work and toil in life simply “in order to play” (tou paizein kharin, b30), but instead one should, as Anacharsis says, do the opposite: play in order to engage in serious matters. This feels more like a statement of opinion than a reason on Aristotle’s part, but what follows is more explanatory: “For play is similar to rest, and since people are unable to toil continuously they require rest. Rest indeed is not an end: for it arises for the sake of activity.”37 Here again his explanation is implicitly directed to the limitations of the body. While in the first argument Aristotle presented play as a sort of bodily pleasure, here he is presenting it as a bodily necessity. Just as one cannot toil continuously but requires rest as a matter of physical necessity, so too one requires play, which is either a form of rest or similar to rest.38 EN 10.6, 1176b9–10: καὶ τῶν παιδιῶν δὲ αἱ ἡδεῖαι· οὐ γὰρ δι’ ἕτερα αὐτὰς αἱροῦνται. EN 10.6, 1176b19–21: οὐδ’ εἰ ἄγευστοι οὗτοι ὄντες ἡδονῆς εἰλικρινοῦς καὶ ἐλευθερίου ἐπὶ τὰς σωματικὰς καταφεύγουσιν, διὰ τοῦτο ταύτας οἰητέον αἱρετωτέρας εἶναι. He continues: “For in fact children think the things esteemed among them are the best. It is reasonable indeed, just as different things seem worthy for children and men, so too for base and reasonable men” (καὶ γὰρ οἱ παῖδες τὰ παρ’ αὑτοῖς τιμώμενα κράτιστα οἴονται εἶναι. εὔλογον δή, ὥσπερ παισὶ καὶ ἀνδράσιν ἕτερα φαίνεται τίμια, οὕτω καὶ φαύλοις καὶ ἐπιεικέσιν). 36 EN 10.6, 1176b27–8: οὐκ ἐν παιδιᾷ ἄρα ἡ εὐδαιμονία. 37 EN 10.6, 1176b34–1177a1: ἀναπαύσει γὰρ ἔοικεν ἡ παιδιά, ἀδυνατοῦντες δὲ συνεχῶς πονεῖν ἀναπαύσεως δέονται. οὐ δὴ τέλος ἡ ἀνάπαυσις· γίνεται γὰρ ἕνεκα τῆς ἐνεργείας. 38 For earlier versions of the idea, cf. Her. 2.173 (Amasis and the bow) and Mnesith. fr. 45 Bertier = Ath. 11.483f (τὸ μέντοι κωθωνίζεσθαι διά τινων ἡμερῶν δοκεῖ μοι ποιεῖν τινα καὶ τοῦ σώματος κάθαρσιν καὶ τῆς ψυχῆς ἄνεσιν).

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Aristotle proceeds to add two short additional arguments about how serious things are better than playful things,39 but returns to the body for his final refutation of paidia: Anyone can enjoy the bodily pleasures, a slave no less than the best man; and no one would attribute happiness to a slave, unless he would also attribute to him the political life. For happiness does not exist in such pastimes, but in virtuous activities, as was said earlier.40

This final rebuttal, like the first, is explicitly focused on the body: play is a “bodily pleasure” which even a slave can enjoy. The connection between play and the body is not an obvious one, perhaps, for us (is the “play”, for example, of verbal banter a bodily pleasure?), but it is obvious enough for Aristotle to return to on a number of occasions: play arises out of bodily necessity (just like the need for rest), and its pleasures are somatic pleasures. In the Politics, Aristotle’s view of play is fairly consistent with the Nicomachean Ethics, although the differences that arise from introducing a second “leisure” term (diagōgē) are too often overlooked.41 For one, it is not quite right to say that Aristotle opposes paidia to skholē in the Politics.42 Rather, he asks “Doing what should one engage-in-leisure (skholazein)?” and rejects the content of paidia in favor of the content of I will return to these play vs. serious sentences in Chapters 7 and 8. EN 10.6, 1177a6–11: ἀπολαύσειέ τ’ ἂν τῶν σωματικῶν ἡδονῶν ὁ τυχὼν καὶ ἀνδράποδον οὐχ ἧττον τοῦ ἀρίστου· εὐδαιμονίας δ’ οὐδεὶς ἀνδραπόδῳ μεταδίδωσιν, εἰ μὴ καὶ βίου. Οὐ γὰρ ἐν ταῖς τοιαύταις διαγωγαῖς ἡ εὐδαιμονία, ἀλλ’ ἐν ταῖς κατ’ ἀρετὴν ἐνεργείαις, καθάπερ καὶ πρότερον εἴρηται. 41 E.g. Solmsen 1964, who omits διαγωγή from his leisure/play discussion. The primary difficulty in defining these “leisure” terms is that both terms can denote, in Aristotle, the overarching category “free time / passing of time” and, once narrowed, the potential content of that overarching category. For διαγωγή as “passing of time” (i.e., the overarching category), cf. ΕN 4.8, 1127b34 (διαγωγῆς μετὰ παιδιᾶς); for διαγωγή as intellectual cultivation (i.e., the content of that time), cf. Pol. 8.5, 1339a25–6 (πρὸς διαγωγήν…καὶ πρὸς φρόνησιν); for σχολή as “free time”, cf. Pol. 8.3, 1337b34–5 and, as the content of that time, cf. EN 10.7, 1177b16–24, where activities other than θεωρία are marked as ἄσχολοι. The two terms are paired at Pol. 7.15, 1334a16–17 (σχολὴν καὶ διαγωγήν) and swapped at Pol. 8.3, 1338a10 (πρὸς τὴν ἐν τῇ διαγωγῇ σχολήν) and 1338a21–2 (πρὸς τὴν ἐν τῇ σχολῇ διαγωγήν). 42 E.g. Solmsen (1964) 216 (“To find a content for σχολή which he has so strictly set apart from ‘play’”), 219 (“a rigid distinction between παιδιά and σχολή”), and 204 (“Aristotle’s distinctions between σχολή which is to be put to ‘constructive’ use and παιδιά whose purpose is confined to relaxation”); cf. 214 n. 87. But Aristotle’s conception of “leisure vs. play” cannot be reduced to the opposition of σχολή vs. παιδιά. In Pol. 8.3, 1337b33–1338a30, e.g., Aristotle is grasping for a term, or set of terms, to replace “play.” He is in effect asking “Doing what should one leisure?”, and answering it with “leisure” but avoiding the sophistical error of using the same word twice (cf. Soph. el. 13.173a32–40). 39

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diagōgē (also often translated as “leisure”).43 Nevertheless, the treatment of play is familiar: It cannot be play. For then it would follow for us that play is the goal of life. But if this is impossible, and rather play must be used in times of work (for a laborer needs rest, and play is for the sake of rest: work occurs with labor and strain), because of this, play must be brought in at the right moment, since it is being added for medicinal purposes. For such movement of the soul is relaxation, and because of the pleasure, rest.44

All of this is consistent with the characteristics of play in the Nicomachean Ethics: play is a necessity due to the strain of work, and a form of rest because of the pleasure it brings. The new feature here which is suggestive of the bodily elements of play is the idea of “medicine”, that play is a sort of “medicinal remedy” (pharmakeia). Although it is true that he is specifically saying that play relaxes the “soul” here rather than calling it a somatic pleasure as in the Ethics—and this is something that will be returned to later45—for now it is enough to acknowledge this new addition to Aristotle’s embodied conception of play: that it is a sort of medicine. He reiterates the medicine analogy later on: “For play is for the sake of rest, and it is necessary that rest be pleasurable: for it is a remedy (iatreia) for pain arising through toils.”46 Similarly, he groups play and rest (anapausis) with sleep and drunkenness, inasmuch as they too are To fasten σχολή and διαγωγή with different denotations, as, e.g., Lord (1982) 56–7 does (cf. Nightingale 2001, 167), is likely misguided considering the slippery nature of the terms themselves (see above n. 41; cf. Kraut 1997, 144). That said, διαγωγή may have connotations of selfimprovement (the “leading” ἄγω- root suggestive of motion/change, shared with education’s ducere) which σχολή’s static root lacks (cf. Chantraine 1999 s.v. ἄγω: ἀγωγός qui conduit, ἀγωγή conduite); LSJ s.v. διαγωγή I.2 for instructional uses; Anastasiadis 2004, 72, glosses διαγωγή as “cultivating the mind”. 44 Pol. 8.3, 1337b35–1338a1: οὐ γὰρ δὴ παίζοντας· τέλος γὰρ ἀναγκαῖον εἶναι τοῦ βίου τὴν παιδιὰν ἡμῖν. εἰ δὲ τοῦτο ἀδύνατον, καὶ μᾶλλον ἐν ταῖς ἀσχολίαις χρηστέον ταῖς παιδιαῖς (ὁ γὰρ πονῶν δεῖται τῆς ἀναπαύσεως, ἡ δὲ παιδιὰ χάριν ἀναπαύσεώς ἐστιν· τὸ δ’ ἀσχολεῖν συμβαίνει μετὰ πόνου καὶ συντονίας), διὰ τοῦτο δεῖ παιδιὰς εἰσάγεσθαι καιροφυλακοῦντας τὴν χρῆσιν, ὡς προσάγοντας φαρμακείας χάριν. ἄνεσις γὰρ ἡ τοιαύτη κίνησις τῆς ψυχῆς, καὶ διὰ τὴν ἡδονὴν ἀνάπαυσις. 45 See below n. 70. Even if this passage does not reflect the hylomorphism of De Anima the soul– body should nevertheless be treated as a composite. Cf. Cael 2.1, 284a32–4, where it is the ensouled body, not the body alone, which requires ἄνεσις. Further, the predicate position of ἀνάπαυσις in the Cael. passage makes clear that the ἀνάπαυσις of the soul is the ἄνεσις of the body (and, one would suspect, vice versa as well). Both the body and soul, as a continuous entity, need ἀνάπαυσις/ἄνεσις due to enforced motion. 46 Pol. 8.5, 1339b15–17: ἥ τε γὰρ παιδιὰ χάριν ἀναπαύσεώς ἐστι, τὴν δ’ ἀνάπαυσιν ἀναγκαῖον ἡδεῖαν εἶναι· τῆς γὰρ διὰ τῶν πόνων λύπης ἰατρεία τίς ἐστιν. 43

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pleasurable and bring occasional pauses to anxiety (merimna).47 But considering the above passages, it seems that Aristotle is grouping together bodily pleasures here: the pleasures of play are categorized with the pleasures of drunkenness, rest, and sleep. A similar connection between play and sleep is made in the Rhetoric as well, where he notes that both are pleasurable, inasmuch as they are not engaged in under compulsion.48 He returns to the issue of those who make play the highest end of life at Politics 8.5: But it has happened that people make play their end. For the end also has perhaps a certain pleasure, but no ordinary one; and people, seeking this pleasure, confuse it for that one (i.e. the pleasure of play), because it has a certain similarity to the end of actions. For the goal is not chosen for the sake of anything which will be, and such pleasures are not chosen for the sake of anything which will be, but for the sake of that which has been, i.e. labor and pain. This is the reason—someone might reasonably suppose—why they seek to achieve eudaimonia via these pleasures.49

Once again Aristotle is here observing the confusion of eudaimonia with the pleasures of play: there is the pleasure that occurs when one reaches the completion (or perfection) of actions, and then there is the pleasure that occurs to break up actions (i.e., the labors and pains which have been). Play provides pleasure of the latter variety. Perhaps the pleasure that arises in contemplating a math problem, for example, is not the same pleasure as the glass of wine to relax from the labors of said math problem.50 In any case, this more perfect pleasure need not be a concern for now. What is more important is to notice the pleasures of play once again being strongly tied to issues like labor and pain. Just like the sleep which necessarily breaks up labor—for continued labor is impossible,51 Aristotle says—play and its pleasures function similarly. Pol. 8.5, 1339a16–19, asking whether music should be for the sake of play: πότερον παιδιᾶς ἕνεκα καὶ ἀναπαύσεως, καθάπερ ὕπνου καὶ μέθης (ταῦτα γὰρ καθ’ αὑτὰ μὲν οὐδὲ τῶν σπουδαίων, ἀλλ’ ἡδέα, καὶ ἅμα παύει μέριμναν, ὥς φησιν Εὐριπίδης). 48 Rh. 1.11, 1370a14–16: τὰ δ’ ἐναντία ἡδέα· διὸ αἱ ῥαθυμίαι καὶ αἱ ἀπονίαι καὶ αἱ ἀμέλειαι καὶ αἱ παιδιαὶ καὶ αἱ ἀναπαύσεις καὶ ὁ ὕπνος τῶν ἡδέων· οὐδὲν γὰρ πρὸς ἀνάγκην τούτων. 49 Pol. 8.5, 1339b31–40: συμβέβηκε δὲ τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ποιεῖσθαι τὰς παιδιὰς τέλος· ἔχει γὰρ ἴσως ἡδονήν τινα καὶ τὸ τέλος, ἀλλ’ οὐ τὴν τυχοῦσαν, ζητοῦντες δὲ ταύτην λαμβάνουσιν ὡς ταύτην ἐκείνην, διὰ τὸ τῷ τέλει τῶν πράξεων ἔχειν ὁμοίωμά τι. τό τε γὰρ τέλος οὐθενὸς τῶν ἐσομένων χάριν αἱρετόν, καὶ αἱ τοιαῦται τῶν ἡδονῶν οὐθενός εἰσι τῶν ἐσομένων ἕνεκεν, ἀλλὰ τῶν γεγονότων, οἷον πόνων καὶ λύπης. δι’ ἣν μὲν οὖν αἰτίαν ζητοῦσι τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν γίγνεσθαι διὰ τούτων τῶν ἡδονῶν, ταύτην εἰκότως ἄν τις ὑπολάβοι τὴν αἰτίαν. 50 On different pleasures, see EN 10.5, 1175a21–1175b29. Cf. Rorty 1974, Bostock 1988, Taylor 2003, and Strohl 2011. 51 EN 10.6, 1176b34–1177a1. 47



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This is the central point to convey here in these passages: for Aristotle, unlike Plato, play is emphasized as an embodied activity.52 Its pleasures are bodily pleasures and it arises from bodily necessity. His limitation of play does not necessarily arise from the types of activities considered play, although this too might be influential. In the Rhetoric, for example, he lists “knuckle-bones, ball-games, dicing, and board-games” as well as “hunting” and “outdoor sports” as forms of paidia, but these are specifically competitive forms of paidiai, where winning is the source of pleasure.53 Elsewhere, verbal (likely sympotic) banter, children’s activities, and music are also paidiai.54 Since, as has been seen, music can constitute both leisure and play, it would appear that the activities themselves do not necessitate Aristotle’s corporal perspective. The immediate difference seems to be rather the circumstances and goals in which these activities are engaged in, as Aristotle writes.55 This, then, is the major shift from Plato that Aristotle makes.56 While in the Laws play becomes something of a highest good—Plato’s Athenian envisions citizens spending their lives in play, specifically singing, dancing, and feasting, with the outcome that the gods are propitious and their lives are improved—Aristotle’s play is lowered into the body and degraded thereby.57 There is something spiritual in Plato’s play: gods play, humans play, and, most importantly, humans become closest to the divine when they play. Aristotle deletes all of this, and centers this activity of play in material existence: the only communion occurring with Aristotle’s play is communion with the body. Even slaves can do it, after all; even animals can do it, as he shows elsewhere, where paizō has that bodily sense of sexual frolicking (HA 572a30). Although Plato never explicitly discusses whether or not play is bodily, in the Laws the Athenian’s god plays (Leg. 644d, 803c). Since the Athenian also suggests that the soul exists as an entity preexistent to bodies (not an Aristotelian position in the passages discussed below), and that this god is one such soul, one may argue that play is in fact not bodily for Plato (Pl. Leg. 10 for the demonstration of the existence of god via the primacy of the soul, with Solmsen 1942, 136–7; cf. Mayhew 2008, 119–38). 53 Rh. 1.11, 1371a2–6. 54 For banter, see EN 2.7, 1108a13–26, 4.8, 1127b33–1128b9 (with formal discussion of τὰ ἀστεῖα at Rh. 3.11, 1411b22–1413b2); for children playing, see Pol. 7.17, 1336a21–30; for music, see Pol. 8.5, 1339b15–42. 55 Pol. 7.14, 1333a6–11. 56 This is not to give the impression of a synchronic snapshot of “Aristotle” free from the inconsistencies of his developing ideas, but simply to observe that these texts regarding play and relaxation read well against each other, and reveal certain strands of thought that persist through the various phases of his thinking. 57 Note that, while children can play in Aristotle (e.g., Pol. 7.17, 1336a21–30), they do not engage in leisure (e.g., Pol. 8.5, 1339a29–31, the word for “leisure” here being διαγωγή). Presumably, children must master their bodies first. 52

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Why Not “Play”? Instead of the popular formulation (reported and nuanced by the Athenian in the Laws) that one ought to engage in serious activities for the sake of play activities, Aristotle claims that one ought to work (askholein) for the sake of leisure (skholazein).58 Play meanwhile is demoted to an activity which is for the sake of work: it breaks up the work like a round of solitaire, but is not itself the goal of that work. The goal of work can only be leisure, he says. Why does Aristotle degrade play in this way? It is tempting to suppose that paidia as a word is simply too pejorative for Aristotle. This is not just its etymological and associative relationship to children, but because it is often co-occurring with words like “rubbish” and “nonsense”—that is, worthless activities and worthless utterances.59 Perhaps the term, due to its necessary opposition to the “serious” (spoudaios), cannot help but carry with it some in-built denigration.60 For Aristotle to claim that those who need not work for a living spend their lives in “play” would be potentially insulting to non-laborers and laborers alike.61 Instead, one needs a term of greater distinction, in Bourdieu’s sense of the word, to describe this activity of the upper classes which is not work and, further, distinguishes itself by not being work. Such activity also distinguishes itself from the common play of slaves, for example, who might enjoy rolling dice or ball games.62 One might be led to assume that, from this basic reaction against the pejorative nature of the word paidia, Aristotle developed his idealized notion of leisure with all the innovations which Anastasiadis has well shown. This would suggest that the leisure/play distinction is ultimately so much philosophic hot air: leisure is play, and any perceived difference is due to the mystifications of ideology.

Arist. EN 10.7, 1177b4–6, Pol. 7.14, 1333a35–6, 7.15, 1334a14–16; Solmsen (1964) 214. E.g., Pl. Prt. 347c–d and Cri. 46d with Kidd (2014) 43–50. For play as a term of devaluation, see Chapter 8. 60 This is clearly what the Athenian in Laws is struggling with at 7.803d–e, quoted above; cf. Arist. EN 10.6, 1176b24–1177a6. For the opposition of playful and serious, see Chapters 7 and 8; cf. Halliwell (2008) 19–38. 61 Aristotle is well aware of the economic substructure supporting leisure: see, e.g., discussion of the increased leisure after the gain in wealth from the Persian Wars at Pol. 8.6, 1341a28–32; cf. Stocks (1936) 179–80, Welskopf (1962) 213–77, and Demont (1993) 214–30. 62 For dicing as παιδιά, see Rh. 1.11.14, 1371a2–6. Cf. Pl. Leg. 7.820c, where dice-playing is described as (unworthy) leisure, with Solmsen (1964) 203 n. 43. Note that Aristotle’s first example of a leisure activity (διαγωγή) opposed to play (παιδιά) is a symposium (Pol. 8.3, 1338a21–30), which, after all, is traditionally a site of “play” (see above Chapter 1 n. 4 and cf. EN 4.8, 1127b33–1128b9). 58

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On the other hand, one might suppose that Aristotle found it useful to separate those activities which provide relief from work—for example, a round of solitaire—from those activities which are the goal of work— which is, one might suppose, not a round of solitaire. The distinction for Aristotle, I would suggest, is philosophical rather than sociological, but it is a distinction which originates not in the consideration of two separate types of activities but out of consideration of what the best life is, and especially who is actually most capable of the best life.63 I propose Aristotle’s rationale proceeds as follows: what is the best? It is better to live than to be dead, better to be immortal than mortal, and so forth: the sort of reasoning he uses, for example, to explain the existence of the sexes in the Generation of the Animals.64 The truly best life is the life that the god leads, and any discussion of what is the best life for humans must be the one that resembles that divine life as closely as possible. How does god spend eternity? Not surprisingly, this question appears in his discussion of the best life at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics. After dismissing “play” as the best life, he argues that eudaimonia exists in contemplation (theōria), and soon turns to the life of the gods to support this view. He writes, “For the gods are considered to be especially blessed and happy (eudaimones): but what sort of actions should we assign to them?”65 It cannot be a life of virtuous deeds, or economic interaction; this would be absurd (10.8, 1178b10–20). What could it be except spending eternity in a state of contemplation?66 Thus, just like lower organisms, who aim at divine immortality via copulation and reproduction in On the Generation of Animals, so too, here, the act of contemplation is essentially mimetic of this immortal, divine being. He writes: If the mind is something divine for man, so too the life of the mind [i.e., contemplation] also is divine for the life of man. One does not have to, as some advise, think human thoughts since one is human, nor mortal This is not to say that the philosophical and sociological explanation are mutually exclusive, but that the sociological description occurs at too broad a level to capture the interesting details of the philosophical description. 64 GA 2.1, 731b20–1, regarding why there are two sexes (διὰ τί δὲ γίγνεται καὶ ἔστι τὸ μὲν θῆλυ τὸ δ’ ἄρρεν), with the following answer: “Soul is better than body, and a living thing is better than a lifeless thing because of its soul, and being is better than not being, and living better than not living. These are the reason for the generation of animals…” (βέλτιον δὲ ψυχὴ μὲν σώματος, τὸ δ’ ἔμψυχον τοῦ ἀψύχου διὰ τὴν ψυχὴν καὶ τὸ εἶναι τοῦ μὴ εἶναι καὶ τὸ ζῆν τοῦ μὴ ζῆν—διὰ ταύτας τὰς αἰτίας γένεσις ζῴων ἐστίν). For Aristotle’s standpoint of “the whole natural world… pulling itself up by its bootstraps in the interests of maximum godlikeness”, see Sedley (2010) 10. 65 EN 10.8, 1178b8–10: τοὺς θεοὺς γὰρ μάλιστα ὑπειλήφαμεν μακαρίους καὶ εὐδαίμονας εἶναι· πράξεις δὲ ποίας ἀπονεῖμαι χρεὼν αὐτοῖς. 66 EN 10.8, 1178b21. 63

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Aristotle’s Demotion of Play thoughts as a mortal, but as much as possible to achieve immortality and to do everything toward living according to the best thing in us.67

“To achieve immortality” as much as possible (athanatizein)—this is the action of contemplation. It is a bodiless activity, one where man is not worn down by engaging in it (10.7, 1177b22). The activity of contemplation requires no material things—in fact, they are an impediment (empodia, 10.8, 1178b4)—although he repeatedly reminds that such material things are needed to maintain one’s bodily, mortal existence (e.g., 10.9, 1178b33–5). What is play but one of these bodily necessities, as has been seen, like food and sleep, which are not necessary for the divine being, but are necessary for embodied existence? Thus, at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes his final statement on eudaimonia by opposing two autotelic activities which bring pleasure. Paidia, as I have been arguing, is an embodied activity, and arises out of bodily necessity like other forms of rest, while contemplation is a disembodied activity, an activity of a bodiless, soul-less god, who is simply pure mind (nous).68 The reason for this rejection of play is that the best life ought to resemble the life of the deity, and so the best activities of that life ought to resemble activities which are most free from the body and its constraints.

Embodied/Disembodied The observation that play is “bodily” for Aristotle is not a wholly new one,69 but neither is it a stopping point for the investigation. What does it mean for play to be “bodily” and, by contrast, what does it mean for leisurely contemplation to be “disembodied”? Humans have bodies, after all, and so contemplation for humans would appear to occur by means of some sort of material faculty (for example, via employment of the eyes, heart, and so forth). If this is so and leisurely contemplation is no less “bodily” than play, what use is the embodied/disembodied distinction? EN 10.7, 1177b30–4: εἰ δὴ θεῖον ὁ νοῦς πρὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον, καὶ ὁ κατὰ τοῦτον βίος θεῖος πρὸς τὸν ἀνθρώπινον βίον. οὐ χρὴ δὲ κατὰ τοὺς παραινοῦντας ἀνθρώπινα φρονεῖν ἄνθρωπον ὄντα οὐδὲ θνητὰ τὸν θνητόν, ἀλλ’ ἐφ’ ὅσον ἐνδέχεται ἀθανατίζειν καὶ πάντα ποιεῖν πρὸς τὸ ζῆν κατὰ τὸ κράτιστον τῶν ἐν αὑτῷ. 68 For this idea of divine νοῦς as something immaterial and immortal, see below n. 71. 69 Cf. Gauthier and Jolif (1958–9) ii.873 ad 1177a6–9 (“les ‘jeux’ auxquels il pense surtout dans ce chapitre sont les jeux grossiers des viveurs, qu’on peut ranger dans la catégorie des plaisirs corporels…”) and Kraut (1989) 236 (“When he discusses the place of amusement in a good life (10.6), he clearly has physical pleasures in mind (1176b20–1, 1177a6–7)…”). 67



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As a first step, it must be recalled that the salient opposition for Aristotle here is not between soul and body but between the soul–body composite and mind (nous).70 It is nous which is immortal, immaterial, and divine,71 and nous which engages in the activity of contemplation (which is the only true leisure).72 The perhaps unsatisfactory answer to “How can an embodied being engage in a disembodied activity?” is precisely what Aristotle says: inasmuch as that being is divine (i.e., has nous), so much does it engage in a disembodied activity.73 What wears down the human contemplator is not the slight impurity of the contemplative action itself,74 but likely everything else occurring during the mind’s activity: the body’s breathing, digesting, the heart’s beating, and so forth.75 Play’s distinction, however, lies elsewhere. If play is somatic only vis-àvis divine noetic contemplation, it cannot be differentiated from any other embodied activity in Aristotle, whether that activity be eating, breaking a resolution, or deciding a course of medical treatment.76 “Bodily” in this sense77 is simply too broad to provide any defining ­characteristic for play. A stronger sense of “bodily”, however, can be found in Aristotle’s category, which covers activities like play, sleep, and By the time of the hylomorphism of the De Anima, to separate the soul from the living body as two different entities is meaningless (e.g., De an. 2.1, 412b6–9): soul is the organizing principle (εἶδος, “form”) that gives shape and identity to the body’s matter as a living, moving human. Excellent overview of dualist and non-dualist interpretations of Aristotle’s psychology in Shields (1993) 157–81. Aristotle’s remark at Pol. 8.3, 1337b35–1338a1 (see above n. 45) regarding the movement of the soul conflicts with and is likely earlier to the hylomorphism of De Anima (how can a soul qua form undergo change, κίνησις, if a form is that which persists through change? Cf. Part. An. 640b22–9, Metaph. 1041b6–9, with Nussbaum 1984, 201). Cf. Somn. et Vig. 454a8–10 for motion of the soul (ἡ λεγομένη αἴσθησις ὡς ἐνέργεια κίνησίς τις διὰ τοῦ σώματος τῆς ψυχῆς ἐστι) and Ph. 7.2, 244b11–12 (ἡ αἴσθησις ἡ κατ᾽ ἐνέργειαν κίνησίς ἐστι διὰ τοῦ σώματος, πασχούσης τι τῆς αἰσθήσεως), with Menn 2002, 83–102. 71 On Prayer fr. 49 Rose (= F 67,1 Gigon); Protrep. B28, Β108 Düring (= fr. 73.7, 73.47 Gigon) with Gauthier and Jolif (1958–9) ii.875 ad EN 10.7, 1177a15–16; De an. 1.4, 408b18–9, 408b24–5, 408b27–9, 2.2, 413b24–7, 3.5, 430a10–25; cf. Part. An. 2.10, 656a3–8; Gen. An. 2.3, 736b27–8; cf. Jaeger (1948) 334, who nevertheless argues that “the ideas about Nus are earlier” than the rest of the De Anima. 72 EN 10.7, 1177b4–24. This equation of “leisure” and “contemplation” in the Politics is more difficult: cf. Nightingale (2001) 168 and Solmsen (1964) 211–12. 73 EN 10.7, 1177b26–1178a2. 74 So Gauthier and Jolif (1958–9) ii.872. 75 But cf. PA 4.10, 686a27–32, DA 1.1, 403a8–10, 3.7, 431a16–17, for the roles he eventually finds for the body in noetic functioning, with Caston (1996) 42 n. 47; cf. DA 429a7–8 on the effects of sleep and disease on νοῦς with van der Eijk (2005) 176 n. 21. 76 For these Aristotelian examples, see EN 7.3, 1146a20–1, 7.10, 1151b17–22, 3.3, 1112b4, although he has no need to refer to them as “bodily”. 77 I.e., in the sense of the soul–body composite and its functioning. 70

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intoxication: anesis (relaxation). During anesis the soul is not functioning in any proper sense, but resting from its functions, as if the battery-pack of the soul–body composite were temporarily switched off and the body alone remained in free fall. Anesis, as has already been discussed, is necessary for all ensouled creatures, because soul-driven motion requires rest; this idea is found not only in the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics but also in works like On the Heavens and On Sleep.78 The necessity of relaxation is not difficult to understand but a problem arises when one attempts to explain how it actually works. If the functioning of an ensouled body creates fatigue and so must relax, how can that act of relaxation be construed in such a way that this anetic motion, qua motion, does not create further fatigue? If, for example, play resembled the other activities mentioned above—that is, choosing a form of treatment or changing one’s mind—such play might be described as a series of telos-oriented actions: moving a game piece, throwing a ball, or making a certain pun. Play, after all, certainly appears to consist of such actions. However, for Aristotle, this is a false appearance: if play were like these other activities, far from offering relaxation (anesis), play would be creating further fatigue, and so in fact demanding, not providing, relaxation. Aristotle offers a solution to the problem by noting that not all motions of the soul are caused by the soul’s functioning. In his discussion of sleep, for example, he notices that if soul-driven locomotion were to stop temporarily, this would not necessarily mean that locomotion itself stops.79 One might illustrate this with his example of the fainting spell (leipopsukhia)80: if someone falls down upon losing consciousness, that person is still in motion, as it were, even though the soul is not causing that motion. Similarly, in On the Heavens he hypothesizes that celestial For the explanation of sleep as arising because of the inability of animals to function continuously (the same reasons given for play, above), see Somn. et Vig. 454a26–32, 454b4–9, 458a25–32; for sleep as an ἄνεσις, at Cael. 2.1, 284a33–4; cf. Pol. 8.5, 1339a16–17, Rh. 1370a14–16, where sleep is compared to play; cf. Cael. 2.6, 288b13–17; at Somn. et Vig. 454b27 he reverses his usual terminology (sleep becomes a “fettering”, δεσμόν, waking an ἄνεσις), but this is for the sake of the momentary analogy. For the coupling of ἀνάπαυσις and ἄνεσις, cf. EN 7.7, 1150b17–18, Cael. 2.1, 284a32–4; although the terms are “close to synonymous” (Halliwell 2008, 310 n. 120), ἀνάπαυσις may be the more colloquial term (cf. Somn. et Vig. 455b21), while ἄνεσις, if not more scientific, connotes motion more effectively than the static ἀνάπαυσις. 79 Insomn. 459a24–33; cf. Gallop’s (1996) 89–91 helpful gloss: “Just as objects can continue in motion, even when what started them is no longer in contact with them, so can qualitative change be transmitted. Thus, perceptual remnants can persist when the sense-organs are no longer active.” 80 Somn. et Vig. 455b4–8, 456b13–15. 78



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objects, if soul-driven, would require anesis.81 Part of the absurdity here lies in the fact that such celestial objects would suffer the same fate as the man losing consciousness: they would be observed in a state of free fall. In both scenarios, the ensouled body still moves even if the functionalities of that soul are temporarily discontinued. This rather minor observation is the key to explaining how anesis works. If one considers, for example, that most important form of anesis, sleep, it is clear that it must be described as a cessation of the soul’s functioning82 because its necessity lies in that fact: the soul cannot function continuously but necessarily requires anesis/anapausis. However, the dreams that arise during sleep appear to be the soul still functioning. That is, during one’s sleep one still “hears” and “sees” dreams. This creates once again the problem of anesis: if the soul is truly still functioning during sleep, sleep would not create relaxation or replenishment but, instead, only further fatigue. Aristotle’s solution lies in the argument that although it appears that the soul is still functioning, it in fact is not. Like the bodily motion described above, where the soul-driven object is falling rather than holding course, the perceptions that the senses have already perceived when awake continue their motion when asleep.83 This motion, however, is not caused by the functioning senses since these functions of the soul have stopped. Instead, the motion is like that of “a river”, as Aristotle repeatedly says:84 refluxing, swirling in eddies, moving a considerable amount in its own sort of free fall, although the soul is not the immediate cause of that motion. Play can be described similarly. Although Aristotle never discusses play in On the Soul or the Parva Naturalia, his thoughts on play can be translated into psychological terms via this persistent strand of anesis. Like dreams, play is not telos-oriented but arises out of past experience. As Aristotle writes in the Politics, play originates in the labors and pains “which have been”, having its telos, as it were, in the past (8.5, 1339b31–40, quoted above). Like a cord which has been stretched (sunteinō/epiteinō, Cael. 2.1, 284a27–35. Cf. Kidd 2016 for discussion of epitasis and anesis in this text. But not all the soul’s functions: its vegetative functions, e.g., are still active—in fact, even more active—during sleep (455a2–3). The focus is on the perceptive functions of the soul, which appear to stop during sleep (e.g., 458a28–9). 83 Insomn. 459a26–8; 459b5–7; 461b21–2. 84 Insomn. 461a8–11 is the most important passage (ὥσπερ τὰς μικρὰς δίνας τὰς ἐν τοῖς ποταμοῖς γινομένας) but river terminology appears throughout: in sleep, e.g., perceptions are carried inward by the reverse flow of heat (παλίρροιαν, 461a5–6); cf. the parallel movement of the “exhalation” of food, which causes sleep (ἀνάγκη γὰρ τὸ ἀναθυμιώμενον μέχρι του ὠθεῖσθαι, εἶτ᾽ ἀντιστρέφειν καὶ μεταβάλλειν καθάπερ εὔριπον, 456b20–1). 81

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etc.), the soul/body must return to its natural state, and that process of return is relaxation (anesis). As with dreams, play may appear to be the normal functioning of the soul (one is moving game pieces or making the pun), but it cannot be: if it were, the soul would be becoming more, not less, fatigued. Instead, the soul, as it were, is rewinding in the opposite direction, much as he describes sleep.85 The movements of anesis arise not from “what will be” but from “what has been”. This is why Aristotle takes pains to distinguish the “play-lover” (paidiōdēs) as “soft” (malakos) rather than “lacking in self-control” (akolastos), even though, as he claims, it would appear to be otherwise (EN 7.7, 1150b16–19). When considered in these terms, the distinction becomes clearer: while the akolastos “pursues” excessive pleasures, the malakos is not in fact “pursuing” that direction at all, but instead “relaxing” in that direction.86 There is no telos-oriented pursuit involved, because this suggests the very telos which play lacks. Play is not a forwardmoving, telos-oriented activity any more than sleep is; rather, it is a relaxation necessarily consequent upon such telos-oriented activities.87 Thus, play is bodily in a stronger sense than the contrast with the divine, noetic contemplation alone would provide.88 Play, like dreams, is the physical result (a reflux, a falling object’s return to earth, etc.) of souldriven motion being temporarily discontinued: the bodily motion continues in the wake of (some part of ) the soul’s absence. This is an unavoidable Thus dreams can only incidentally contain portents of the future. Insomn. 459a23–459b23 and Div. Somn. 463b1–22; cf. 462a9 for κινήσεις φανταστικαί. For Aristotle’s non-teleological view of dreams, cf. Gallop (1996) 28–38 and van der Eijk (2005) 179, 204 (cf. van der Eijk 1994, 54–62). 86 ὁ μὲν τὰς ὑπερβολὰς διώκων τῶν ἡδέων…ἀκόλαστος (7.7, 1150a19–21). δοκεῖ δὲ καὶ ὁ παιδιώδης ἀκόλαστος εἶναι, ἔστι δὲ μαλακός. ἡ γὰρ παιδιὰ ἄνεσίς ἐστιν, εἴπερ ἀνάπαυσις· τῶν δὲ πρὸς ταύτην ὑπερβαλλόντων ὁ παιδιώδης (7.7, 1150b16–19). Cf. Aspasius ad loc., who suggests that the παιδιώδης cannot bear the laboriousness of maintaining “seriousness” (διὰ γὰρ τὸ μὴ ἀνέχεσθαι τὴν σπουδὴν ὡς ἐπίπονον οὖσαν ἀεὶ παίζει καὶ ἔστιν ἄνεσις ἡ παιδιά). 87 This is not to say that conscious decisions cannot occur during play (for Aristotle’s “ethics of play”, e.g., see EN 4.8, 1127b33–1128b9, with Halliwell 2008, 307–3) but, rather, that such decisions cannot be the defining characteristic of play, inasmuch as it is play (otherwise play could provide no ἄνεσις). Cf. Aristotle’s discussion of the role of such decisions during dreams at Insomn. 462a15–31: as van der Eijk (2005) 186 notes well, these co-occurrences during dreams do not characterize dreams “in so far as” (ᾗ, 462a30) they are dreams (cf. Van der Eijk 1994, 50–1, 140–2, 245–8). 88 As often in Greek thought, the psychological runs parallel to the celestial (see, e.g., Skemp’s 1942, 3–5, 38–46, discussion of Alcmaeon and Plato’s Timaeus). Aristotle’s difference between θεωρία/σχολή and παιδιά resembles the difference between the continuous circular motion of the immortal αἰθήρ in Cael. 1.2–4, 2.1, which is never fatigued, and the bouts of ἐπιτάσις and ἄνεσις motion which all mortal bodies must engage in at Cael. 2.6 (see Kidd 2016 regarding the translation of ἐπιτάσις and ἄνεσις here). Aristotle abandons such notions of circular motion of the mind, e.g., in De an. 1.3, 406b26–407b11 (cf. EN 7.14, 1154b26–8). 85



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conclusion to reach regarding play, sleep, and other forms of anesis, because, if these forms of motion were actually soul-driven, anetic activity would provide no rest. Instead, what appears to be soul-functioning is nothing of the sort: during anetic activity the motion that occurs in the soul–body composite is not occurring due to the soul’s functioning, but rather occurring due to a reflux or rewind of previous soul functioning. Play is thus “bodily” in a higher degree than most human activities: it, like sleep, is defined not by the soul’s presence but by its temporary absence.

Conclusions Aristotle twice rejects the view that play is the ultimate activity of the good life—once at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, once at the end of the Politics. The reason he does this is not because of the particular activities covered by paidia (for music can be both play and leisure), nor even the potentially negative connotations of the word itself. Rather, it is due to the fact that the truly best life is the life of the mind, a life altogether free from the body (although Aristotle is always quick to remind that such a life is not open to humans on any continual basis). Play, on the other hand—which, again, encompasses sympotic banter, music, dancing, and dice-games—is located in the body, as a sort of bodily necessity. The truly happy life is free from such bodily necessities, and thus is free from play. If this is so, it is worthwhile to conclude by asking: what exactly would be missing from such an ideal life free from play? What would a life of pure contemplation look like? Aristotle’s idealized god, eternally motionless, in some ways resembles the Speusippus whom he mentions in the Rhetoric. This man, unable to move, was reduced to the activity of his mind: “The man was not able to be calm,” Aristotle writes, “because he was fettered by fortune in a five-tubed disease,” which Cope and Sandys gloss as “his body was now paralysed, and motionless as if he had been fastened in the stocks or pillory” (thus “five-tubed”), while “his mind [was] as restless and excitable as ever”.89 Speusippus’ fate betrays the potential pitfalls of divine motionlessness, summed up well by the fettered Prometheus, who had rather “too much leisure”.90 Rh. 3.10.7, 1411a21–3: καὶ τὸ Πολυεύκτου εἰς ἀποπληκτικόν τινα Σπεύσιππον, τὸ μὴ δύνασθαι ἡσυχίαν ἄγειν ὑπὸ τῆς τύχης ἐν πεντεσυρίγγῳ νόσῳ δεδεμένον. Translation and comment from Cope and Sandys (1877) ad loc. 90 Cf. Judt 2010’s one solace for his tortured nights of motionlessness: “To scroll through my life, my thoughts, my fantasies, my memories, mis-memories, and the like until I have chanced upon events, people, or narratives that I can employ to divert my mind from the body in which it is encased.”

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However, the limitations of Aristotle’s god extend beyond the lack of physical locomotion. It might seem that in being limited to contemplating what is, he is, more importantly, unable to contemplate what is not. The metaphor behind contemplation, after all, is vision: one can only see what one can see, that is, one can only see what exists. In play, however, one is not “seeing” at all; instead, at least as Aristotle portrays it, one is blindly being driven forth by the body as it relaxes from the cumbersome labors of the past. The telos of such movement cannot be envisioned because the telos has already been. Aristotle’s god, paralysed not only in physical motion but mental motion as well, is a far cry from where Plato leaves things in the Laws. There his god spends eternity not alone, in endless contemplation, but inhabiting a quasi-reality full of countless playthings, paignia, including us humans, which he proceeds to play with for his own form of eternity.91 The activity of play, not contemplation, creates the things that do not exist, and, further, allows one to interact with those things that do not exist. Aristotle would probably agree to some extent,92 but he would make one important distinction. In such play, the body’s role is no mere instrument moulding the clay and brandishing the wand for play’s unreal creations. Instead, it is the very source of those creations and mistakes, which the truth-seeing nous cannot see. Thus, when humans playfully create their falsehoods, it is not in communion with the divine being, as the Athenian in Plato’s Laws suggests, but simply arising out of those necessary pleasures that the body demands. Leg. 1.644d, 7.803c, 10.903d. See Chap. 6 for play vs. mimesis in Aristotle; cf. Heath (2009) 55–9 for the role of the non-rational for Aristotle in poetic technique.

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Play vs. Mimesis in Aristotle’s Aesthetics

In the last chapter, I argued that Aristotle demoted play to the margins of the good life rather than keeping it at its center. Certainly not the goal of work, play was reduced to a temporary respite from it—something like a catnap—so that the worker could operate more effectively after a brief unwinding. Unlike Plato’s Athenian, Aristotle insisted that life should not be spent in play; such a goal would be too “childish” (paidikon), he writes. Instead, life should be spent engaging in some other non-work activity pursued for its own sake—for example, “contemplation” (theōria) in the Nicomachean Ethics or “leisure” (diagōgē) in the Politics. What is the consequence of this demotion of play for Aristotle’s aesthetic thought? As was seen in Chapter 2, Plato, in his late works, set “play” as a category embracing all “art” in the modern sense—painting, sculpture, music, poetry, theater, and so forth—both in mimetic and non-mimetic forms. If Aristotle were to maintain this hierarchy, art, inasmuch as it is play, would have to be downgraded to a rather marginal and unimportant area of life alongside kottabos, dice-games, and other such pastimes. Instead, Aristotle abandons Plato’s model, suggesting, for example, in the Politics that although mousikē can be enjoyed simply as “play” (paidia), it also can be engaged in for higher purposes, namely education and leisure. This rescues art and music from being marginalized along with play, since mousikē can now be appreciated outside of play contexts, and, furthermore, it is most valuable when experienced in this way.1 This separation of art and play, however, creates a new problem for Aristotle. If play is no longer essential to art, and the highest forms of artistic appreciation do not involve play at all, how can Aristotle explain Far from marginal, music qua leisure pursuit is potentially a significant part of the good life. For “work for the sake of leisure”, see Pol. 7.14, 1333a30–6, 7.15, 1334a14–16, EN 10.7, 1177b4–6; for music as a form of leisure, see 8.3, 1337b27–32 (σχολάζειν), 1338a21–2 (τὴν ἐν τῇ σχολῇ διαγωγήν). Cf. Koller 1956, Kraut (1997) 180–4, 199–201, Depew 1991, Simpson (1998) 257–8, Nightingale (2004) 240–52, and Destrée (2013) 316–19.

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Play vs. Mimesis in Aristotle’s Aesthetics

art’s pleasures? For Plato, play became the connecting link, but for Aristotle, that connection is no longer viable, since play can only offer a single, somewhat marginal, context for enjoying mousikē. But without play, how can Aristotle explain the pleasures of art? Although there are likely a number of relevant passages, the most explicit discussion, and the one most prominently discussed, comes from the Poetics. In a muchdebated paragraph, Aristotle explains that when viewers look at a mimesis like a painting, there is a certain recognition of the mimesis’ relationship with lived experience (“this is that”), and this recognition or “learning” (mathēsis) is pleasurable. Learning, not play, thus becomes the pleasure source: when viewers engage with art, they register “this is that”, and in that moment of learning there is a little burst of pleasure. Yet, as I will argue in this chapter, Aristotle’s pleasurable “learning” can only provide a weak replacement for Plato’s play. This is why Plato’s Athenian in the Laws dismisses learning’s pleasures as irrelevant to the particular pleasures of art, and also why modern interpreters, when they try to offer a more compelling account of Aristotelian mimesis, end up smuggling play back into the discussion. I begin the chapter with a brief overview of Aristotle’s reduced role for play in the appreciation of mousikē, and then turn to the Poetics passage to consider Aristotle’s pleasures of learning as an alternative to Plato’s play. Interpretation of this passage is highly contentious, so I offer two competing views, what I call the “minimizing” and “maximizing” views of mimetic learning. In the minimizing view, the cognitive pleasures of registering “this is that” are no different from the cognitive pleasures that arise from any representation, whether it be a medical model or a map. In engaging with a mimesis, we connect the representation to what is represented (“this is that”) and, by doing so, reap the inherent pleasures of learning. The problem is that in this interpretation Aristotle draws no real boundary around artistic representation at all. A sculpture is no different from a medical model, a painting no different from a map, a drama no different from an airline attendant’s safety instructions: all representations are pleasurable in the same way, since all are pleasurable qua mimesis. In the maximizing view, by contrast, the landscape painting can indeed be differentiated from the map, but, rather surprisingly, the way this boundary is drawn is via play. Aristotle, according to the maximizers, is not discussing just any mimesis, but focused on a subset, namely artistic mimēseis, and this subset is related proportionally to the mimēseis of childhood play. That is, the pleasures of artistic mimesis are different from other representations in just the same way that the pleasures of



Mousikē ’s Reduced Room for Play

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mimetic play are different from other representations. This is tantamount to saying that the unique pleasures of art just are the unique pleasures of play. But can play be read into this passage of Aristotle’s Poetics, where he never explicitly uses the term—especially when, as has been seen, he reports a good deal about play elsewhere? I will suggest that it cannot. All that remains, for better or worse, is the rather unsatisfying minimal account of Aristotelian mimesis, despite the allures of more maximizing versions. Ultimately, however, even if the maximizing interpretation turns out to be the correct one, it simply means that Aristotle has not escaped Plato at all. He rejects play throughout his corpus, thereby abandoning the late positions of his teacher. But then in the Poetics, when faced with the difficult prospect of needing to differentiate artistic mimēseis (sculptures, paintings) from non-artistic mimēseis (medical models, maps), he has no choice but to surreptitiously return to play, without ever explicitly acknowledging as much. Mimesis, he would be saying, is simply not enough to explain art’s pleasures. As Plato had noticed, something more is required.

Mousikē ’s Reduced Room for Play Is mousikē for the sake of “education” (paideia), “play” (paidia), or “leisure” (diagōgē), Aristotle asks in the Politics. After dealing with its role in education, he turns to play: Is mousikē for the sake of play and rest, just like sleep and drunkenness? These are for their own sake and not counted among serious things but pleasurable ones. They give a break from life’s worries, as Euripides says. That’s why sleep, drunkenness, and music are all put in a category together and people engage in them similarly. Dancing too is placed in this group.2

Unlike “education”, where music would fill some role in inculcating moral values, and unlike “leisure”, where music would play an even more “serious” role,3 play covers that area of music which, it seems, is just Pol. 8.5, 1339a16–31: πότερον παιδιᾶς ἕνεκα καὶ ἀναπαύσεως, καθάπερ ὕπνου καὶ μέθης (ταῦτα γὰρ καθ᾽ αὑτὰ μὲν οὐδὲ τῶν σπουδαίων, ἀλλ᾽ ἡδέα, καὶ ἀναπαύει μέριμναν, ὥς φησιν Εὐριπίδης [Bacch. 378]· διὸ καὶ τάττουσιν αὐτὴν καὶ χρῶνται πᾶσι τούτοις ὁμοίως, ὕπνῳ καὶ μέθῃ καὶ μουσικῇ· τιθέασι δὲ καὶ τὴν ὄρχησιν ἐν τούτοις. The key passages for music as paidia are Pol. 8.3, 1337b27–1338a6, 8.5, 1339a11–33, 1339b31–40. 3 “Leisure” is a goal of musical education, and goals are always more important than the means of attaining them (cf. EN 1.1, 1094a14–16, 1.2, 1094a18–22, with Kraut 1997 ad Pol. 1337b33–1338a1). 2

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Play vs. Mimesis in Aristotle’s Aesthetics

pleasurable. Like sleep and drunkenness, it is a pleasurable activity that is regularly enjoyed as a form of relaxation. It breaks up life’s labors, but does not qualify as a proper goal for life’s labors. Aristotle continues by asking why children should be trained to play musical instruments if the end is simply to enjoy musical performances as adults (1339a31–6). The kings of Persia, the Spartans, and Zeus himself never perform music, although they enjoy listening to music being performed by others. What’s more, the Spartans feel perfectly capable of “judging” such music, even though they are not educated to be trained musicians.4 Postponing such issues for later, Aristotle then returns to his question about music and play: although it is plausible for the young to be educated in music in order to enjoy music qua play as adults (1339b24–31), play cannot be music’s only purpose or, for that matter, pleasure. As will be remembered from the last chapter, he identifies a different sort of pleasure which, as he says, resembles that of play, and so is often confused with it: “Looking for this pleasure [i.e. the one that accompanies the goal activity], people confuse it with that pleasure [i.e. the pleasure of play]” (1339b33–4). This higher form of pleasure seems to be connected to the more “serious” role for music he envisioned at the beginning of the passage: if play, sleep, and intoxication cannot be “counted among serious things” (1339a18), perhaps this sort of musical engagement can. In many ways, Aristotle’s treatment of music as paidia is similar to that of Plato’s characters. They, it will be remembered, also describe mousikē in terms of pleasurable play. But there are crucial differences. The first is that Aristotle articulates the nature of this pleasure as a sort of “relaxation”: such play is much more passive than that found in Plato’s descriptions, even though both connect play to intoxication, and both seem to envision play’s pleasures as self-emanating.5 Musical play for Plato’s Athenian provided a “highly serious” purpose for life’s labors—he imagined his citizens devoting much of their lives to such play—while, for Aristotle, such play can only provide relaxation, and its purpose is simply to supply temporary refreshment for labor.6 Pol. 1339a42–1339b2: ταῦτα γὰρ τί δεῖ μανθάνειν αὐτούς, ἀλλ᾽ οὐχ ἑτέρων ἀκούοντας ὀρθῶς τε χαίρειν καὶ δύνασθαι κρίνειν, ὥσπερ οἱ Λάκωνες. By “self-emanating”, I mean that Aristotle sees play as a pleasurable unwinding from previous tension, and compares it to sleep and intoxication (see Chapter 5 for discussion). For Plato, play was “self-emanating” because of the heightened heat of childhood and intoxication giving rise to it (see Chapter 2 for discussion). 6 For “most serious”, see Laws 7.803d–e.

4 5



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The second difference lies in his treatment of children’s musical education for the sake of their play as adults. If it is true, as Peponi and others have argued, that this section is in dialogue with Plato’s Laws, where musical training for performance was treated as fundamental to citizen education, there is clearly some disagreement between the philosophers.7 For Aristotle, professionals perform while the audience listens and “judges” that performance. For the Athenian, some citizens perform, while other citizens engage as spectators: they are essentially taking turns. But this issue of performance betrays deeper differences in their conceptions of music. Aristotle takes a skeptical approach to technical training because the key role of his listener is “judgement”: if listeners can judge music properly without technical training, they do not require such training in their education at all. For Plato, however, it will be remembered that the activity of judgement was consigned to the city’s elders, who “judge” ahead of time whether a certain piece of music should be performed. The true engagement with mousikē for the Athenian was not to “judge” it, but to “play” it: even the spectators were described as “playing” along with the performers and, by doing so, awakened to the youthful memories of their past play.8 The final difference, however, is the one that is most significant here— namely the issue of that musical pleasure which is higher than the pleasure of play. For Plato’s characters, play provided the key to art’s pleasures: the pleasures of art and music just are the pleasures of play. For Aristotle, however, play provides only one possible connection to pleasure, and a lesser one at that.9 There are the pleasures of play and relaxation, but then there are also the pleasures that surround goal activities like contemplation. The two, he says, are easily confused: while most people only experience music as play and relaxation, he explains, this latter experience of music with its accompanying pleasures is available and, despite being undeveloped in these pages, appears to be the key to music’s more than Cf. Peponi (2013) 227–32; Pl. Laws 7.812b–c for kithara education. Aristotle may be focusing on instrumental music rather than choral training for the sake of argument: in order to counter the abstract argument that children should be trained to perform music for the sake of their adult paidia, he chooses the more vulnerable example of kithara performance. Such performances were traditionally assigned to hired performers rather than members of the symposium “unless they are drunk or playing” (Pol. 8.5, 1339b10). 8 Laws 2.657d–e with Chapter 3 for discussion. The point may be not so particular as it is general: we do not need to have performed that particular dance to be awakened to the memory of dancing, yet the bodily memory of dancing (i.e., “playing”, moving the body for the sake of pleasure) enhances the experience for us. 9 Pol. 8.5, 1339b33–4: ζητοῦντες δὲ ταύτην λαμβάνουσιν ὡς ταύτην ἐκείνην, quoted earlier. 7

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Play vs. Mimesis in Aristotle’s Aesthetics

marginal, even “serious”, role in life.10 Rather than indulging in music as if it were wine or sleep, the “more honorable” and “more serious” way of engaging in music is active, much as contemplation itself is active. Its accompanying pleasures reflect that different nature.11 Play thus still maintains a role in Aristotle’s aesthetics, but it is reduced, and no longer essential. Not only can one experience music without “playing”, but one can actually enjoy it as well. Further, this is the higher, preferable, and more serious experience of art, since it is an active engagement, while play, in Aristotle’s view, is always analogous to drunkenness and sleep, which can only offer the pleasures of relaxation. This break from Plato’s play, however, creates a new problem. If play is no longer the unifying explanation for the pleasures of art in its various media, and art is pleasurable outside the contexts of play, how can he explain the pleasures of art without recourse to the old category? Reasonably, Aristotle would remind that there are a number of potential pleasures involved in the experience of art: as Rorty writes, for Aristotle “tragic drama involves and conjoins so many different kinds of pleasure that it is difficult to determine which is primary and which accidental”.12 But among this wide variety of potential candidates for pleasure, there is one that is dwelt on at some length and, moreover, is prominently discussed by scholars. For Aristotle, art is mimetic, and inasmuch as it is a mimesis, it gives rise to a sort of pleasurable “learning”.13

The Pleasure of Learning As I suggested in Chapter 2, Aristotle’s ideas about mimesis may have developed from a discarded crumb from Plato’s table. The Athenian of the Laws, it will be remembered, wished to distinguish the pleasures of For diagōgē, cf. Lord (1982) 57 (“the leisured ‘pastime’ that constitutes the end of the best life”), Kraut (1997) 144, 178–9, and Nightingale (2001) 167, (2004) 248–50 (at 250: “The viewer of a musical spectacle can be a “contemplator” (theoretikos) of the beauty of events and characters and actions, as well as of artistic forms and structures”). See Anastasiadis (2004) 72 for diagōgē as “cultivating the mind”. 11 For “more honorable”, see Pol. 8.5, 1340a1; for “more serious”, see EN 10.6, 1177a1–6. For “serious things” being better than “play things”, see EN 10.6, 1177a1–6, with Chapters 7 and 8 on the nature of the word “serious”. Cf. Belfiore (1992) 47: “This means that the imitative crafts, for Aristotle, are not merely play and entertainment; they are closely connected with the end of human life, that for the sake of which all else is done. They are therefore among the most serious activities.” 12 Rorty (1992) 16. Cf. Gallop (1990) 148–9 on “proper” vs. “peripheral” pleasures, the latter including lyric (1450b16) and spectacle (1450b16–18). 13 Rorty (1992) 16, after listing a large palette of pleasures, reminds that the “most profound of our pleasures” is “the pleasures of learning”; cf. Arist. Pol. 8.1339b14–15 and Halliwell (1986) 62–81. 10



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mousikē from its educational features. To focus the idea, he approached it by way of analogy: although pleasures accompany eating and drinking, food and drink ought not to be judged by those pleasures but by the factor of health. Mousikē similarly should be judged by its salutary “correctness” (orthotēs) rather than the pleasures which accompany it. But before reaching that target of the comparison, he lights upon another analogy, learning (mathēsis): “And the element of delight, that is, pleasure, also accompanies learning; but it is truth which brings about learning’s correctness, benefit, wellness, and goodness.”14 Learning should be measured by the truth of its content rather than the pleasures it brings, just as food and drink should be measured by their healthfulness rather than the pleasures which accompany eating and drinking. This means that learning is being described as pleasurable, and, in fact, pleasurable in an analogous way to that of eating and drinking. Plato bypasses this “learning” as a possible explanation for mousikē’s pleasures and quickly moves to his more elaborate discussion of play, but it is remarkable to compare this discarded bit of aesthetic theory with the idea that Aristotle develops in the Poetics. For Aristotle too, learning (mathēsis) is inherently pleasurable,15 but the difference lies in his decision to elect rather than reject this learning as a central key to art’s pleasures: Everyone delights in representations. Proof of this comes from what happens in actual experience: we take delight in viewing really precise images of things that would be painful to see in and of themselves, for example the forms of revolting creatures and corpses. The reason for this is that learning is not only highly pleasurable for philosophers but also comparably pleasurable for everyone else, although they share in this to a lesser extent. This is why people take delight in seeing images, because it gives them an opportunity to learn and make sense of what each thing is, for example, that this person is that person.16

Aristotle is exploring something akin to the tragic paradox here: why do the very things that upset us in actual life bring pleasure in art? Revolting creatures and corpses would be painful to see in the real world, but, for Laws 2.667c: καὶ μὴν καὶ τῇ μαθήσει παρακολουθεῖν μὲν τό γε τῆς χάριτος, τὴν ἡδονήν, τὴν δὲ ὀρθότητα καὶ τὴν ὠφελίαν καὶ τὸ εὖ καὶ τὸ καλῶς τὴν ἀλήθειαν εἶναι τὴν ἀποτελοῦσαν. 15 Cf. Met. 1.980a22; Rhet. 1.11, 1371b4–10, 3.10, 1410b10–11. 16 Poet. 4.1448b8–17, emphasis added: καὶ τὸ χαίρειν τοῖς μιμήμασι πάντας. σημεῖον δὲ τούτο τὸ συμβαῖνον ἐπὶ τῶν ἔργων· ἃ γὰρ αὐτὰ λυπηρῶς ὁρῶμεν, τούτων τὰς εἰκόνας τὰς μάλιστα ἠκριβωμένας χαίρομεν θεωροῦντες, οἷον θηρίων τε μορφὰς τῶν ἀτιμοτάτων καὶ νεκρῶν. αἴτιον δὲ καὶ τούτου, ὅτι μανθάνειν οὐ μόνον τοῖς φιλοσόφοις ἥδιστον ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις ὁμοίωνς, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπὶ βραχὺ κοινωνοῦσιν αὐτοῦ. διὰ γὰρ τοῦτο χαίρουσι τὰς εἰκόνας ὁρῶντες, ὅτι συμβαίνει θεωροῦντας μανθάνειν καὶ συλλογίζεσθαι τί ἕκαστον, οἷον ὅτι οὗτος ἐκεῖνος… 14

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Play vs. Mimesis in Aristotle’s Aesthetics

some reason, when they are encountered as representations they become objects of delight. The reason, Aristotle explains, is not that the revolting creatures and corpses bring pleasure in and of themselves, but that they do so as representations. A mimesis causes the viewer’s mind to flicker between the representation and what is represented, register “this is that”, and experience pleasure in that moment of “learning”. In some ways, Aristotle’s treatment of the tragic paradox is similar to Socrates’ treatment in the Philebus. Just as Aristotle observes that in everyday life corpses and revolting creatures are unpleasant to look at, so Socrates observes that the sight of a friend being harmed in everyday life is upsetting. Yet in art, these same objects—the corpse, the friend being harmed— become objects of enjoyment. Why? To find a solution, both Socrates and Aristotle try to locate the source of pleasure somewhere else than in the painful objects themselves. It makes little sense to say that the sight of a friend being harmed is only painful and only pleasurable, just as it makes little sense to say that corpses are only revolting and only beautiful. Their solutions for the paradox, however, are markedly different. For Plato, the audience is not “learning” but “playing”, and this is what causes the art to become pleasurable. By playing, the spectators are, he says, “mixing” pleasure with their negative feelings: while it is painful to see a friend harmed in real life, those negative feelings can be played with—just as anything can be played with—and thereby become objects of immediate pleasure. Spectators desire the comic buffoon to fall down the stairs not because aggression itself is pleasurable but because playing with that aggression is. Similarly, Plato might describe Aristotle’s corpsepleasure as no more residing in the corpse itself than in the child’s stick or potsherd. Yet, in play, the spectator sees the corpse as pleasurable, just like the potsherd or stick. Since the example involves a depiction of a corpse, not an actual one, the performative context would seem to invite the spectator to such play, much as Plato’s Athenian described the theater.17 By contrast, in Aristotle’s solution to the tragic paradox, the spectator is not “playing” but “learning”, since the corpse depiction is a mimesis. This learning is pleasurable because all learning is pleasurable. Just as Plato’s play might be called upon to solve the tragic paradox of the corpse depiction, so As suggested in Chapter 4, there is a difference between found objects (here, an actual corpse) and manufactured objects (here, an artistic depiction of a corpse), with the latter suggesting certain games as if always already “in play”. A child playing with a corpse might poke it and prod it in a certain way, catching certain textures in the light, etc., and, qua bout of “play”, this may be called a “game”. Likewise, as suggested in Chapter 3, a depiction of a corpse producing just such a texture in the light might activate some such “game”, only now with key differences in the playing subject.

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Mimetic Learning: The Minimalist Reading

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too Aristotle’s mimetic learning may be called upon to solve the riddle about comedy and malice from the Philebus. For Aristotle, we might say, the reason why it is painful to see an affable person harmed in real life, but enjoyable to watch such a person harmed in comedy, is that, in the latter case, one experiences a pleasurable state of “learning” since the comedy is a mimesis. There is a cognitive flickering between the depiction (comic buffoon falling down stairs) and one’s actual experience of life (actual person falling down stairs), and this registering of “this is that” is pleasurable. Indeed, as Aristotle shows elsewhere, jokes too can be explained as a sort of “learning”.18 There would thus seem to be little need for “play” in Aristotle’s aesthetics: the pleasure of learning (mathēsis) provides a suitable key for art’s pleasures, and one need not look further for a pleasure source, as Plato’s Athenian felt compelled to do in the Laws. Some art, of course, might be engaged in for “play”—for example, listening to music to relax or mindless channel surfing—but Aristotle makes room for a more “serious” sort of engagement as well. Spectators make active, cognitive connections between the representation and the world being represented, and these connections produce their own sort of pleasures, quite different from Aristotle’s “relaxing” pleasures of play. Mimetic learning thus clearly has great potential to compete with, and even replace, Plato’s play as an explanation of art’s pleasures. But just how much potential it has depends on what exactly Aristotle means by mimetic “learning”.

Mimetic Learning: The Minimalist Reading Aristotle’s intention regarding mimetic “learning” in the Poetics is perhaps the most debated question of Aristotelian aesthetics, at least in recent decades. On the one hand, there are the “minimalist” interpretations of mimetic learning, which I will call the “minimizing” interpretations, and, on the other hand, there is what by default will have to be called the “maximizing” interpretations. 19 For the minimizers, the “learning” For asteia, see Arist. Rhet. 3.11, 1412a19–b32, with Schenkeveld 1994 and Kidd (2014) 124–32. For “minimalist” to describe more pared-down readings of mimetic “learning”, see Halliwell (2001) 92, (2011) 209 n. 2, citing Ferrari 1999, Budd (1995) 48–9, Tsitsiridis 2005, and Heath (2009) 62–8 (cf. Schiaparelli and Crivelli 2012). None of these uses the term “maximalist” vel sim., but cf. Ferrari’s 1999 description of the opposition’s “massively spiced version” of the key passage (at 185), earlier naming a “consensus” (at 182 n. 2) of Halliwell 1986, Nussbaum (1986) 378–94, Belfiore (1992), and much of Rorty 1992 (cf. Ford 2003). Since then, cf. Halliwell 2001, (2002) 151–206, and (2011) 208–36. I use these admittedly flippant terms to set up a clear dialectic on the issue that concerns me, not to suggest that the excellent treatments on either side are in uniform agreement.

18

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involved in the process of “this is that” consists simply of the pleasurable process of identifying certain objects in a painting with their counterparts outside the painting (“that is Hercules”, “this is a farmhouse”, and so forth). Just as one might point to a map or a medical model and say “this is that mountain” or “this is that organ”, so too one might point to other “imitations”, like paintings and sculptures, and say “this is that mountain” with a similar, if not identical, cognitive pleasure. As Schiaparelli and Crivelli write, “The enjoyable apprehension Aristotle has in mind is what we experience when in looking at Raphael’s painting of the School of Athens we recognize that this is Plato, this is Aristotle… [or when] we see a drawing of a lobster and recognize that these are the antennae, these are the chelae, this is the tail, etc.”20 This continuity between the artwork and the zoological or medical model is so pronounced, in fact, that some scholars even suggest that Aristotle is specifically discussing medical models in this passage (“the forms of revolting creatures and corpses”), not artworks.21 A modern reader might understandably feel some distaste for an interpretation that reduces the pleasure of mimetic art to some baseline recognition of identifying a person, place, or thing, in a representation. Can Aristotle really be so naïve? Does he really think that the cognitive pleasure of art amounts to nothing more than the recognition “this is a depiction of Hercules”, “this is a mountain”, and so forth? Although the minimizing view tends to deplete the potential riches of mimesis, it is worth considering its advantages as well. Aristotle, whose biological writings are central to his work as a philosopher, regularly viewed humans not as separate from the other animals but as one of them, differing not in kind but degree.22 It is thus significant that when Aristotle distinguishes humans from other animals, he does not say that they are the only animals to engage in mimesis, but they are the “most mimetic” of the animals.23 Elsewhere in the animal kingdom, he describes certain birds as dancing in imitation to the bird-catcher’s dance and certain parrots as mimicking human speech;24 he describes the anthus bird, which Schiaparelli and Crivelli (2012) 617. Cf. Else (1957) 128, Janko (1987) 74 ad 1448b10 (“Aristotle is thinking of diagrams of human and animal bodies, used in his lectures on biology”), and Gallop (1990) 162–7 (at 164, emphasis in the original: “By noting…that that is the kidney or the bladder, we can learn what each of those organs is”). Schiaparelli and Crivelli (2012) 617 are also drawn to this idea. Cf. Halliwell (2001) 89 for a response. 22 Cf., e.g., PA 686a25ff with Coles 1997 and van der Eijk (2005) 221–3. Cf. Tsitsiridis (2005) 445. 23 Poet. 4, 1448b6–8. Cf. Prob. 30.6, 956a14. 24 HA 8.12, 597b23–6. 20 21



Mimetic Learning: The Minimalist Reading

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can “imitate” horse sounds in order to scare them away;25 and describes hens as “imitating” their male counterparts after defeating them in a fight.26 In calling humans the “most mimetic” animal, there is a suggestion of continuity, not disjunction, in animal behavior.27 If all animals are mimetic, there is a certain clarity in understanding Aristotle to mean that all animals engage in “imitation”, rather than reserving the special meaning “representation” for humans. The same advantage of the minimizing view can be seen in its treatment of learning. Since Aristotle wishes to discern the pleasure of “learning” in art, there is a suggestion of continuity, not disjunction, between the pleasurable “learning” outside of art—for example, the grasping of a new mathematic proof, or a new bit of geography from a map—and the pleasurable “learning” in art.28 Whatever cognitive pleasures a viewer experiences in listening to music or looking at a painting, these ought to be, mutatis mutandis, recognizable as the same sorts of pleasures found in those other forms of learning. Those who insist on a minimal version of mimesis make that continuity clear by identifying the pleasurable “learning” of models and maps with the pleasurable “learning” of paintings and sculptures. These are not just distant varieties of “learning”; they are exactly the same sorts of “learning”. Yet, if this is all that Aristotle has in mind with mimetic learning, it is also clear why Plato’s Athenian would feel uncompelled to connect the pleasures of learning to the pleasures of art. Whatever the pleasures of art are exactly, they seem to be different in kind, not degree, from learning a new bit of geography on a map, even if one still experiences “this is that”. Such moments may bring certain pleasures (“aha!”), but are they really the same pleasures as those felt from the rhythms of music, the gripping storyline, or the landscape of a well-known view? Plato, at least, did not think so. If art is pleasurable by virtue of mimesis because mimesis is pleasurable by virtue of the “learning” it catalyzes, it is impossible to distinguish between an “artistic” mimesis—for example, a sculpture or a painting—and other sorts of mimēseis which entail “learning”—for example, a medical model or a map. All mimēseis involve “learning”, and, since HA 9.1, 609b16–18. HA 9.49, 631b8–13. 27 The key difference seems to be that humans, because of their higher faculties, do not just engage in mimesis but “learn” through those engagements (Poet. 4, 1448b6–8). To isolate this idea, what is desired is a sense of mimesis which provides a common denominator for both humans and non-human animals. 28 Cf., e.g., Ferrari’s (1999) description of mimetic learning of Poet. 4 as the “the lowest common denominator of the pleasure we take in fictions” (181, 185). 25

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all “learning” is pleasurable, they are pleasurable in the same way. Watching a drama is essentially the same as watching an airline attendant demonstrating safety features; dancing in a chorus is essentially the same as practicing a hoplite maneuver; listening to a song is essentially the same as listening to a hunter’s birdcall; and looking at a painting is essentially the same as looking at a map. If art’s pleasure lies in its status as a mimesis, there is no distinction between art and any other form of mimesis.

Mimetic Learning: The Maximizing Reading If a minimalist reading of mimetic learning is unable to differentiate artistic mimēseis from other sorts of mimēseis, what of the more expansive reading? For the maximizing view, “mimesis” and “learning” are considerably richer than the minimalist model would allow: mimesis covers “representation”, not just “imitation”, and “learning” involves not just identifications like “this is that mountain” but an open-ended sort of “learning”, better translated perhaps as “registering” or “understanding”.29 As Halliwell describes it, Aristotle’s concept of mimetic art focuses on “a cognitively grounded pleasure derived from recognizing the representational significance of a mimetic object”, and so “even the representation of painful or ugly objects can be aesthetically satisfying”.30 When spectators engage with an artistic representation, they are not “learning” in the sense of “learning new information” but registering something cognitively through a complex oscillation between lived experience—which includes sensation and emotion—and artistic depiction.31 The learning or registering “this is that” in reference to a map or medical model is therefore clearly different from the learning or registering “this is that” when engaging with a work of art: whereas the former learning is easily reduced to “information” (“this is that mountain”, “this organ is below that organ”), the latter is not. For mimesis as “representation”, see Kraut (1997) 193–6 and Halliwell (2002) 152–64; for the inadequacy of either “imitation” or “representation”, cf. Woodruff 1992; cf. Lucas (1968) 258–72. Halliwell (2002) 184. In the full quotation he is describing a “dichotomy” between “(a) cognitively grounded pleasures” and “(b) other pleasures that, thought linked to the experience of a mimetic work, are potentially independent of its representational character”, but it is the first part that is of interest here. 31 For non-information “learning”, see Halliwell (2001) 91–5 (at 92: “The first [mistake] is to reduce Aristotle’s point to one of ‘information’…”; at 93, emphasis in the original: “[I]n Poetics 4 Aristotle cannot mean to limit the cognitive process involved in experience of mimetic art to the simple registering of something already known… If he did, it is highly doubtful…whether he would call the process manthanein at all…”), (2002) 187–93. 29 30



Mimetic Learning: The Maximizing Reading

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The key move for the maximizer lies in understanding that Aristotle, at the beginning of the Poetics, is not discussing all forms of mimesis— which would include, for example, copies, models, counterfeits, and imitations—but is concerned specifically with, for lack of a better word, artistic mimesis.32 Aristotle never signals this explicitly, but the examples of mimesis he cites at the beginning—poetry, music, and dancing—suggest this reduced subset of mimetic practices, and he brackets this group similarly elsewhere.33 Moreover, this mimetic subset is signaled when he announces that “engaging in mimesis is congenital for humans from childhood and they differ from other animals by the fact that they are the most mimetic and make their first learnings through mimesis…”.34 Aristotle, according to the maximizing view, is referring not just to any sort of mimetic activity here, but specifically to the subset of children’s mimetic play: “By mentioning children’s mimesis Aristotle means to cite not simply copying but make-believe or playacting,”35 explains Halliwell. This means that Aristotle in the Poetics is not only reducing a wide variety of mimēseis to artistic mimēseis, but is also reducing the wide variety of childhood mimēseis to childhood’s mimetic play. In fact, one might say that these two reductions are in perfect proportion to one another. Support for this “make-believe” reading of children’s mimesis is offered by a passage from the Politics in which Aristotle, like Plato before him, writes that “most children’s games ought to be mimēseis of activities that will be engaged in seriously in the future”.36 Since this Politics passage Halliwell (2001) 88 (“The noun mimemata designates the entire class of mimetic works and performances considered as objects of pleasurable contemplation”), comparing Rhet. 1.11, 1371a31– b10, at 89 (“which brackets painting, sculpture and poetry together as species of mimesis, indicates that mimesis can create pleasure in objects not found pleasurable in themselves…”). Cf. Halliwell (2002) 205: “Equally, an Aristotelian answer to the question will have to refer centrally to pleasure, because pleasure, as opposed to a biologically necessary or practical purpose, is indispensable to the existence of all mimetic art.” 33 Poet. 1447a13–16 lists epic, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry and “most” of aulos and kithara music. At 1447a27 he adds dancing. 34 Poet. 4, 1448b5–9: τό τε γὰρ μιμεῖσθαι σύμφυτον τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ἐκ παίδων ἐστὶ καὶ τούτῳ διαφέρουσι τῶν ἄλλων ζῴων ὅτι μιμητικώτατόν ἐστι καὶ τὰς μαθήσεις ποιεῖται διὰ μιμήσεως τὰς πρώτας, καὶ τὸ χαίρειν τοῖς μιμήμασι πάντας. 35 Halliwell (2002) 178: “By mentioning children’s mimesis Aristotle means to cite not simply copying but make-believe or playacting…” Cf. Halliwell (2011) 208 (“children’s play”), 209 (“children’s play-acting”). 36 Pol. 7.17, 1336a33–4: διὸ τὰς παιδιὰς εἶναι δεῖ τὰς πολλὰς μιμήσεις τῶν ὕστερον σπουδαζομένων, with Newman (1887–1902) ad loc.: “Many of the games played by Greek children were ‘games of imitation’.” Cf. Pl. Laws 1.643b–c., Rep. 3.395c, Halliwell (2001) 88 translating mimēseis here as “mimetic role-playing”, and (2002) 178 n. 5 for a list of other moderns who connect art to children’s “imaginative make-believe”. For the dangers in too quickly conflating mimesis and play, see below. 32

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Play vs. Mimesis in Aristotle’s Aesthetics

connects child’s play and mimesis, there is good reason to think that Aristotle is thinking of play in the Poetics passage as well. A clear direction forward is thus in sight for the maximizer: with children’s play, a richer sort of pleasurable learning can be found than that promoted by the minimizers. Instead of the rather monotonous, often scarcely noticeable pleasure of labeling “this is that”, child’s play offers a complex variety of pleasures that nevertheless can be related to learning. Not only is it regularly noticed that children learn through their play, but, as Halliwell puts it, children’s play exhibits “a natural human propensity toward imaginative enactment of hypothetical realities, with a concomitant pleasure in learning and understanding…from mimetic activity”.37 What Aristotle has in mind with mimetic learning is thus not some simple form of labeling (“this is that mountain”) with accompanying baseline cognitive pleasure, but a series of pleasurable connections made—perhaps often simply felt—between the mimesis and lived experience. It is easy to see why the maximizing interpretation is so much more compelling than the minimizing one. While few would agree that the cognitive pleasure of art lies even partially in recognizing “this is that mountain” or “this is a sculpture of Hercules”, many would be sympathetic to a more open-ended form of “learning”. Indeed, articulating precisely just what one has “registered” in a pleasurable artistic experience allows ample space for pursuits like literary, art, and music criticism. Like Kant, who wished to draw a distinction between conceptual judgement (“this is a mountain”, “this is Hercules”) and aesthetic judgement (“this is x”, where x has no defined term and so allows for a “free play of the imagination”)38, Aristotle has in mind a mimetic learning that is not conceptual, but open-ended. Not only does the maximizing interpretation thus offer a version of mimetic learning that is specifically geared toward this subset of artistic mimesis, it offers a version that is decidedly agreeable to modern tastes. Despite these advantages, however, there are some problems. What does it mean to begin the Poetics with a reduced subset of mimēseis in Halliwell (2002) 179. Cf. Kant’s distinction between conceptual and aesthetic judgement (Critique of Judgement §§9–13; e.g., at §11, “ein ästhetisches und kein Erkenntnisurteil”) with Ginsborg 2013 [2005]: “So rather than perceiving the object as green or square, the subject whose faculties are in free play responds to it perceptually with a state of mind which is non-conceptual, and specifically a feeling of disinterested pleasure. It is this kind of pleasure which is the basis for a judgment of taste.” Cf. Halliwell (2002) 186 for the “stark contrast” between the “subjective and noncognitive” of Kant as to the “objectivist and cognitivist” of Aristotle.

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mind, without ever explicitly signaling this to the reader? It would mean that the question of interest—how can an artistic mimesis (e.g., a painting) be distinguished from a non-artistic mimesis (e.g., a map)?—is never addressed explicitly by Aristotle at all. Instead, he simply begins with a reduced subset of artistic mimēseis without ever seeming to notice the problematic boundary. One cannot help but feel cheated. To be told that the pleasure of art lies in the “learning” of mimesis, only to find that the objects in question have been reduced from the beginning exclusively to pleasurable mimēmata, is like being told that the sweetness of honey lies in its viscosity, only to find that the objects in question have been reduced to viscous substances that are sweet. Cheating aside, there is also the specific problem of sentence structure: if Aristotle, in the same sentence, can declare that humans are the most “mimetic” of all animals— which must mean “mimetic” in its broadest, non-artistic sense—and then that all humans enjoy mimēmata—which must mean “mimesis” in the secondary, reduced sense of “artistic” mimēmata—it means that he is required to switch meanings mid-sentence. These objections, however, are not so relevant to present purposes as the key role given by the maximizers to children’s play. When Aristotle says that children make some of their first learnings through mimesis in the Poetics, technically he could mean any type of mimesis—for example, simply copying a parent’s facial expression, gait in walking, or spoken words—and not the reduced subset of mimetic play. A child can learn how to tie shoes or button buttons by copying its parents without any conspicuous pleasure or play at all.39 However, if this Poetics passage is interpreted as referring specifically to play, there are profound consequences. Even though Aristotle believes that all learning is pleasurable, it is hard to deny that there is a palpable difference between mimetic acts like repeating a parent’s word or gesture for the sake of practice (or any other non-pleasure reason), and mimetic play, where the pleasure is foregrounded. Only in the latter case is the child repeating the parent’s word or gesture “for the sake of pleasure alone”, as Plato’s Athenian would say.40 To read play into the Poetics passage is to say that Aristotle tacitly Cf. Isoc. Ad Demon. 11 (μιμητὴν…τῆς πατρῴας ἀρετῆς). Regarding the mimesis involved in learning any new skill, cf. Halliwell’s (2002) 152–5 distinction between a doctor or builder’s craft and a poem or painting: the latter is “the bearer of an identifiable representational content” (154). A paidia model instead distinguishes the mimēseis of tekhnai as for the sake of some end, as opposed to those of play, which are for “pleasure alone”. 40 Cf. Halliwell (2001) 107 n. 45, emphasis in the original: “One thing that connects children’s

39

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acknowledges this rather different order of pleasure involved in just any mimetic learning—for example, the child’s copying a gesture, or practicing a word—and the pleasurable learning involved in children’s play. Such an interpretation requires a recognizable—and perhaps ­modern—conflation of play and mimesis. Regarding the Politics passage offered in support of the Poetics, children’s play is imagined to be essentially mimetic, exhibiting, again, “a natural human propensity toward imaginative enactment of hypothetical realities, with a concomitant pleasure in learning and understanding…from mimetic activity”.41 Children engage in make-believe or pretend play, and through that mimetic learning receive pleasure rewards. However, as I have been arguing, if one considers the concept of paidia carefully, play and its pleasures are not essentially mimetic, but only incidentally so. That is, Aristotle’s children, like Plato’s children, are not engaging in mimesis and deriving pleasure from the “learning and understanding” the mimetic engagement causes. They are rather pursuing their immediate pleasure, and, as a result, engaging in behaviors that resemble, but cannot be equated with, adult, “serious” behavior.42 After all, the younger a child is, the more difficult it becomes to describe its play as mimesis or make-believe: what does a playing infant know of the world it is allegedly imitating? One is faced with the paradox of an infant learning its first lessons about the world by playfully imitating the world it has already learned. If it could be demonstrated that Aristotle conflates play and mimesis in this modern way, and somewhere describes the pleasure of play as deriving from mimesis, there would be some more substance to the “child’s play” argument. But, as was seen in the last chapter, although Aristotle says a good deal about play across his corpus, he never equates play’s pleasures with mimesis. Instead, like many Greeks before him, he treats play simply as a form of pleasurable action, and, further, articulates its pleasure specifically as that of relaxation. For him, play’s pleasures are no more mimetic than the analogous pleasures of intoxication and sleep. To conflate play and mimesis for the purposes of assigning particular pleasures to art would require a rearticulation of mimetic learning as a form of “relaxing”. One might, for example, argue that connections simply occur to the passive, relaxing spectator, but such an argument would lose sight mimetic play to mimetic art is the experience of affective enactment…” Halliwell (2002) 179. For the example of the child playing with a toy shovel—who is not “pretending” to shovel or

41

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of Aristotle’s emphasis on relaxation itself being the source of pleasure, whatever connections may occur during that relaxation. The maximizing account of mimetic learning, although certainly more compelling as a theory of art than the minimizing account, requires Aristotle to believe in a form of play that conflicts with his general treatment of the term elsewhere. How can Aristotle demote play throughout his corpus—including in his discussions of mousikē—only to elevate it as the (implied) centerpiece of his aesthetics? How can he treat the pleasures of play as the pleasures of relaxation throughout his corpus, only to tacitly maintain that play’s pleasures are actually due to mimesis? Neither of these seem to be particularly compelling possibilities. Yet, without this conflation of play and mimesis, the maximizer cannot draw a distinction between artistic mimēseis and non-artistic mimēseis, since only the pleasurable mimēseis of play appear to underlie art’s relevant pleasures. Despite the allures of the maximizing view, it seems that, for better or worse, a more minimal account better fits Aristotle’s views on play and art. This means that his conception of mimetic learning, spare and minimal as it is, does not provide much of a replacement for Plato’s play after all.

Conclusions Aristotle’s mimesis, specifically his ability to connect mimesis to pleasure, can be seen as solving a problem left unsettled by Plato in the Republic. There Socrates showed a marked difficulty in connecting mimesis to pleasure: the father’s grief for his lost son is understandably not introduced as pleasurable—few sages can engage in life so theoretically—yet by the time one reaches the pleasurable grief of the tragic theater, the grief itself needs to be understood as pleasurable. This was not satisfactory then, nor was it later, which is why Plato, as was seen, retooled his ideas and introduced the category of “play” to articulate certain intuitions in a more satisfying way: grief itself is not pleasurable, but play can make any content, even grief, pleasurable. Thus, the pleasurable grief of the theater is something different from actual grief, except in those cases, as he says, where people treat life as theater.43 Since Aristotle militated against this promotion of play, he needed to solve the pleasurable grief of the theater in a different way, and found either a partial or total solution—depending on the modern “make-believe” shoveling, but simply shoveling “for pleasure alone”—see Introduction.

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Play vs. Mimesis in Aristotle’s Aesthetics

interpreter—in mimetic “learning”.44 Unlike an event of actual grief, one engages with an intentional mimesis of such an event, and, in the cognitive and emotional oscillations between the theatrical representation and lived experience outside of the theater, a third element arises. This third element is what Aristotle dubs “learning”, and this “learning” is what is pleasurable.45 This is certainly an improvement on the Republic, because Aristotle too is unwilling to elide actual grief with tragic pleasure, just as he is unwilling, in his example, to elide actual disgust with the pleasurable responses a painting of repulsive creatures might elicit. These responses are to be kept separate, and mimesis provides the perfect boundary between the two. Yet, as I have suggested, despite the improvements this makes on the mimesis of the Republic, in more than one way it falls short of Plato’s later views on play. Mimesis, after all, does not just build a useful boundary between the artwork and its content; it builds a boundary which extends across all non-art as well, dividing all imitations, copies, and representations from that which is being imitated, copied, and represented. Thus the problem becomes not “How can one tell the difference between a mimesis and the actual thing?”, but “How can one tell the difference between an ‘artistic’ mimesis and any other mimesis?”. If mimēseis give rise to learning (“this is that”) and this is true of all mimēseis, not just artistic mimēseis, art’s distinction is simply absent, unless one looks elsewhere for it in Aristotle.46 Alternatively, one can expand the concept of mimetic learning, as the maximizers do, and attach this special concept to a select subset of mimēseis, namely artistic mimēseis. What is remarkable is that those who wish to expand the purview of mimetic learning do so by bringing play into the discussion. Children’s Cf. Philebus 49e–50a with Chapter 3 for discussion. Plato also wrote a good deal about mimesis (often with non-aesthetic concerns: e.g., the nature of language in Crat. 423c–e, or (meta)physics in Tim. 39d–e, 48e–49a, 50c), but his interest in mimetic poetry and art had little to do with questions of why art is pleasurable, and everything to do with the specific question of how art can educate and inculcate good or bad morals (in, e.g., Rep. and Laws). I.e., mimesis did not provide the whole story of art for Plato, just the particular story he wanted to tell about education and psychological influence. For Aristotle, at least for some interpreters, mimesis threatens to become the whole story: it expands as a concept to explain art’s central experience of enjoyment, something which, as was seen, Plato’s mimesis could not do. 45 Cf. Kraut (1997) 195: “So even when our experience of music and poetry involves an element of painfulness, what we feel on balance is pleasure, because we have exercised our skill in making ethical judgements, and we take pleasure in such excellent activity.” 46 For studies on katharsis, cf. Sparshott 1983, Lear 1988, Ford 1995, 2004, Belfiore (1992) 337–60, Holzhausen (2000) 7–33, Donini (2008) xcii–cxx, Seidensticker 2009, Guastini (2010) 160–72, and Halliwell (2011) 236–65. See Heath 2001 for distinctions between the cognitive pleasure 43

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mimesis—which potentially could cover a vast range of mimetic activities, from repeating a parent’s word, gesture, or technique in handling a tool—becomes simply children’s play, and this conflated form of mimesis, that is, mimetic play, provides the explanation for art’s particular pleasures. Whoever makes this move towards play keeps good company: Plato had done the same. The reason for doing so is clear: mimesis—even of the learning variety, even of the pleasurable learning variety—does not intuitively feel equivalent to the experience of poetry, music, and other forms of art. No matter how pleasurable learning is, there appears to be a vital difference between “getting” the right pronunciation of a new foreign word or piece of syntax, and “getting” a joke or being moved by a piece of music or being taken in by a gripping story. But how to differentiate this latter set of mimēseis? As Plato’s characters suggested, “play” provides a helpful tool for drawing this particular pleasure boundary. I have given reasons why it seems unlikely that Aristotle had more than the minimal view of mimetic learning in mind, but even if the maximizing interpretation turns out to be the correct one of the Poetics, it simply shifts the burden onto Aristotle’s shoulders. Aristotle, who elsewhere marginalizes Plato’s play in favor of higher pursuits, would be smuggling play back in as the centerpiece of his aesthetics without ever explicitly acknowledging this for his students.

chapter 7

Serious Play as Goal-Oriented Play

In rejecting play as the activity of the good life, Aristotle reminds that “serious things are better than play things” and that the “good life is something done with seriousness not in play”.1 By contrast, the Athenian of Plato’s Laws arrived at the heady conclusion that play is the “most serious thing” and that “life ought to be spent playing”.2 Aristotle’s position appears to be that of common sense, Plato’s the self-consciously radical subversion. Since play is generally opposed to seriousness in everyday speech, it becomes awkward, if not unintuitive, to insist that play be taken seriously or be counted among the serious things in life. This spells a sort of doom for any role play might obtain in art and life, especially after Aristotle’s demotion. How can art be equated with play without thereby being discounted from the serious things of life? How can play itself be taken seriously without losing its status as play? In this and the next chapter, I will consider the meaning of this word “serious” (spoudaios in Greek) and explore the nature of the play/serious opposition in Greek thought. There are two aspects to the word that are worth separating before drawing them together again. On the one hand, there is the mode of being “serious”, which, in this chapter, I will argue essentially means “goal-oriented”. On the other hand, there is the evaluative meaning of “serious”, which often denotes something like “important” or “good”. I will deal with the evaluative denotation and its relationship to the “goal-oriented” meaning in the next chapter. But, for now, it is necessary to examine seriousness as a mode, consider how this mode is opposed to play, and, especially, ask how these two modes might be mixed (“serious play”) without undermining the play/serious opposition altogether.

Arist. EN 10.6, 1177a3–6, 1177a1–2. Pl. Laws 7.803d–e.

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Serious Play as Goal-Oriented Play

I begin by overviewing Greek words for “serious”, like the verb spoudazō, the adjective spoudaios, and the noun spoudē. The root of such words lies in the verb speudō, “to hasten (after some object)”, and this goal-oriented motion is reflected in these spoud- words, which so often involve engaging with things in a goal-oriented manner. One might, for example, be “serious” about a project, “serious” about getting revenge, or “serious” about living a noble life.3 When spoud- words are opposed to play (paidia), as they regularly are in Greek, the opposition can be articulated in terms of such goals: whereas “serious” action defers pleasure for the sake of some future goal, play indulges in immediate pleasure without any further goal at all. At the same time, it was natural in Greek—as in many languages—not just to oppose play and seriousness, but also to mix them together (“play seriously”, “be serious about one’s play”, and so forth). The idea seems to be that certain forms of play are more serious than others—with frivolous play on one end of the spectrum and serious play on the other—but what exactly does “serious play” mean? I will suggest that serious play can be understood as “goal-oriented” play. To explore this idea, I draw examples from Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes—where Parysatis is said to be “serious” about playing a dice-game with her son, the King of Persia—and from Herodotus’ Histories, where he describes the “king” game played by the young Cyrus and his playmates. What distinguishes more serious play from less serious play, I argue, is a certain commitment to longer-term goals. The game or play bout is not being recreated with each passing fancy, but being played according to the bounds of longer-term rules, goals, and commitments. What would make such games less serious, by contrast, is if these commitments were simply shed at a whim—for example, if the rules of Parysatis’ dice-game changed during rolls or if Cyrus’ playmates were adopting and discarding identities whenever they wished. Play can thus be more or less “serious”—and, conversely, more or less “playful”—depending on its level of commitment to longer-term goals. But, if this is the case, a final riddle emerges: how can serious play be differentiated from serious action more generally if both are distinguished by their “goal-oriented” nature? One might explain the difference via Huizinga’s “magic circle” or ethological notions of play as practice,4 but Xen. Cyr. 6.1.48; Isoc. 7.42; Soph. OC 1143, all discussed below. See Huizinga (1971 [1938]) 10–14 for the “magic circle” (for the Sanskrit term, 57), Burghardt (2005) 3–43 for a survey of ethological positions; cf. Groos (1899) for the influential play-as-­ practice theory, Caillois (2001 [1958]), who often cites Groos, for play as “separate” and “circumscribed” (9).

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Serious Play as Goal-Oriented Play

the problem becomes especially knotty when applying ancient concepts, where play is the enjoyment of immediate pleasure and serious action the deferral of that pleasure for some future goal.5 Is “serious play” some deferral of pleasure for the sake of immediate pleasure? Isn’t this paradoxical? Reading closely the Herodotus passage and others, I suggest that both serious play and serious (non-play) action are goal-oriented, but that the distinction lies in the origins of these goals. Serious action is set by a goal made from the standpoint of some perceived lack, while play’s goals are set from the point of pleasure’s fullness. Like dancers, players can realize that pleasure at each and every point of their movement, since the goal has no monopoly on that pleasure. Rather than pleasure being deferred by the goal, in serious play the goal is formulated by the pleasure itself.

Spoudē, Spoudazō, Spoudaios The Greek word for “serious” is regularly found in opposition to “play”. Lysias writes that the accuser in a certain lawsuit seems not to be serious (spoudazōn) but playing (i.e., joking, paizōn),6 Xenophon that the deeds worth noting of virtuous men are not just serious ones (ta meta spoudēs) but also those done in play (ta en tais paidias).7 When Socrates in the Gorgias suggests that rhetoric can help enemies flourish in their villainy, Callicles asks, “Tell me, is Socrates…being serious (spoudazei) or joking (paizei)?”,8 and this question—“Are you joking (paizeis) or being serious (spoudazeis)?”—is found frequently in Greek texts, even if one of the alternatives tends to be suppressed.9 Similarly, it was seen that Aristotle reports the popular formulation ascribed to the Scythian Anacharsis that The difference between “play” (παίζω) and “enjoy” (ἥδομαι vel sim.) seems to be that the pleasures of play precede the object’s identification: e.g., we must identify “food” before we can “enjoy” it as food. By contrast, we do not need to “enjoy” our food to “play” with it (for which, cf. Crat. Plut. 176 KA, Telecl. Amph. fr. 1 KA): it is not “food” we are playing, but whatever our play/pleasure wants this stuff to be. 6 Lys. 24.18: ὥστε μοι δοκεῖ ὁ κατήγορος εἰπεῖν περὶ τῆς ἐμῆς ὕβρεως οὐ σπουδάζων, ἀλλὰ παίζων. Cf. Ps.-Dem. Erot. 21.7. 7 Xen. Symp. 1.1: ἀλλ᾽ ἐμοὶ δοκεῖ τῶν καλῶν κἀγαθῶν ἀνδρῶν ἔργα οὐ μόνον τὰ μετὰ σπουδῆς πραττόμενα ἀξιομνημόνευτα εἶναι, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὰ ἐν ταῖς παιδιαῖς. Cf. Mem. 4.1.1: καὶ γὰρ παίζων οὐδὲν ἧττον ἢ σπουδάζων ἐλυσιτέλει τοῖς συνδιατρίβουσι. 8 Pl. Gorg. 481b: εἰπέ μοι, ὦ Χαιρεφῶν, σπουδάζει ταῦτα Σωκράτης ἢ παίζει. 9 Callicles repeats his question directly to Socrates (481c) as: πότερόν σε θῶμεν νυνὶ σπουδάζοντα ἢ παίζοντα; cf. Pl. Euth. 283b (παίζετε…ἢ…σπουδάζετε). For “Are you playing/joking?” with the alternative “serious” suppressed, cf. Men. Dis Ex. 60 (cf. Men. Sam. 139: Dem. Σὺ μὲν / παίζεις. Mosch. μὰ τὸν Διόνυσον, ἀλλ᾽ ἐσπούδακα), Achill. Tat. 6.13.1 (cf. Xen. Oec. 17.10.2, 20.29.2; Pl. Gorg. 500c, Theaet. 168c, Alc.I. 124d). For “Are you being serious?” with the alternative “play” suppressed, cf. Pl. Phdr. 236b. For the relationship between paizeis (joking/playing) and paizeis (mocking), see Kidd (2014) 105. 5



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one ought to play in order to be “serious”, in clear contrast to the no less popular notion that one ought to be serious in order to play.10 The opposition of play and serious is long-lasting in Greek: Athenodorus of Tarsus, for example, likely the tutor to the future Emperor Augustus, was said to have written a book entitled On Seriousness and Play.11 Although this opposition between “play” and “serious” is found in many languages, there are differences in the nature of the terms.12 The English “serious”, for example, borrowed from the Latin serius, ultimately arises from a metaphor of weight: “serious” things are “heavy” matters, weighted, as it were, with a certain importance.13 Greek, however, seems to rely on a metaphor of motion: spoudaios (“serious”) develops from the verb speudō, which means “to hasten” or “to hurry”.14 This speudic motion does not seem to imply just any form of increased speed—for example, it is not frantic darting or uncontrolled falling—but rather that exerted motion which intends toward some goal or object. When the verb is transitive, the object is the goal one is exerting oneself toward: so, for example, Solon writes, “some hasten (speudousi) after a mortar, others silphium, others vinegar”,15 while Pindar warns of higher goals: “Don’t, my soul, strive after an immortal life.”16 When the verb is intransitive, the goal is often left unstated, but no less felt: as the Achaeans prepare for battle in Iliad Book 4, the poet describes Agamemnon as neither “cowering nor unwilling to fight, but really zealous (speudonta) for glorious b­ attle”. 17 Here Agamemnon is not necessarily “hastening” or “hurrying”, but simply partaking of that mood which yields “hastening” and “hurrying”: one might EN 10.6, 1176b32–4. Cf. Pl. Laws 7.803d, Simon. 646 PMG, with Chapter 5 for discussion. Cf. Isoc. Hel. 11.6. 11 See Huffman (2005) 298–300, Hense (1907), for discussion, Praechter 1912 for the topos. Modern Greek expresses the opposition with αστειεύομαι vs. σοβαρολογώ. 12 As Huizinga (1971 [1938]) notes, this opposition between “play” and “serious” is found in many languages: 44–5 for Greek, Latin, Germanic, and Romance languages, where some languages express the antonym more “completely” (44) than others; 34–5 for the opposition in Japanese; Rosenthal (1975) 9 for Arabic. Cf. Halliwell (2008) 19: “A distinction between the playful and serious is probably available in all languages.” 13 Cf. Walde and Hoffmann (1930–54) s.v. serius, Pokorny (1959) 1150, and Schrijver (1991) 126. For an alternative derivation from sērus (“slow”), cf. de Vaan (2008) s.v. serius. 14 Beekes (2010) s.v. σπεύδω suggests the Indo-European *speud- “press, drive, hurry”; cf. Frisk 1960–70 (“intr. ‘eilen’”) and Chantraine 1999 (“se hâter, s’efforcer de, faire des efforts”). Gigon (1981) 7: “‘Spoudaios’ endlich hängt über ‘spoudē’ mit ‘speudein’ zusammen; das Verbum bedeutet zunächst ‘sich beeilen’, dann übertragen ‘sich ernsthaft um eine Sache bemühen.” Cf. Pollux 1.197, 3.149 (“quick, rapid, prompt” GE). 15 Solon fr. 39 West (IEG): σπεύδουσι δ᾽ οἱ μὲν ἴγδιν, οἱ δὲ σίλφιον | οἱ δ᾽ ὄξος. 16 Pindar Pyth. 3.61–2: μή, φίλα ψυχά, βίον ἀθάνατον σπεῦδε. 17 Il. 4.223–5: ἔνθ᾽ οὐκ ἂν βρίζοντα ἴδοις Ἀγαμέμνονα δῖον | οὐδὲ καταπτώσσοντ᾽ οὐδ᾽ οὐκ ἐθέλοντα μάχεσθαι, | ἀλλὰ μάλα σπεύδοντα μάχην ἐς κυδιάνειραν. 10

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call it “zeal” or “eagerness” (spoudē).18 Nevertheless, like goal-directed motion itself, there always seems to be an object or goal of this “zealous” or “eager” mood, an object toward which one is exerting oneself. Thus, when Agamemnon, a few lines down, begins to range through the troops, he encourages those who also are “zealous” (speudontas, 4.232), where “…for battle” is understood but not stated expressly.19 Nothing, it seems, will impede these men from fighting, since they are so “intent” on it. Since speudō so often denotes goal-oriented action, the verb often verges on something approximating “work”. Hesiod, for example, distinguishes the worker bees from the lazy drones: “All day until sunset they hasten (speudousi) laying the white honeycombs” (Theog. 597). Just as in certain passages in the Iliad, where mules “toil” pulling a ship beam down a mountainside (speudontessin, 17.745), or Hephaestus “labors” hard at Achilles’ shield (18.472, speudonti), the verb implies “work” in Hesiod’s passage as well. This exertion toward some goal, whether it be in the form of actual “hastening” or in the form of “working”, finds its mood in the noun spoudē, often translated in Homeric passages as “exertion”, “effort”, and so forth.20 The Achaeans persuade the implacable Achilles with “effort” (spoudē),21 Odysseus strings his bow without “exertion” (spoudē),22 and, when people speak with some purpose or goal, they are said to be speaking “in earnest” (apo spoudēs).23 The adjective and verb forms that develop from the noun spoudē are post-Homeric, but they continue to exhibit spoudē’s goal-oriented nature. When Theseus says, in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, “We strive (spoudazomen) to make our life illustrious with deeds”, he means that his goal is an illustrious life, and his efforts and deeds channel into that overarching goal. 24 When Abradatas takes Cyrus by the hand in Xenophon’s Cyropaidia and says, “Whatever projects I see you are focused on (spoudazonta), I will try to help as much as I am able”,25 he means that Cyrus’ For this word, see below nn. 20–3. Il. 4.232–3: καί ῥ᾽ οὓς μὲν σπεύδοντας ἴδοι Δαναῶν ταχυπώλων, | τοὺς μάλα θαρσύνεσκε παριστάμενος ἐπέεσσιν. 20 The noun spoudē occurs seven times in the Iliad (cf. aspoudi, “without effort or trouble”, at 8.512, 15.476, 22.304) and five times in the Odyssey. 21 Il. 23.37 (σπουδῇ παρπεπιθόντες); cf. Od. 24.119. Note that “with effort” often amounts to “hardly”, “scarcely”: cf., e.g., Il. 2.99, 5.893. 22 Od. 21.409; cf. Il. 13.687, where the Greeks hold off Hector with spoudē. 23 Il. 7.359, 12.233. 24 Soph. OC 1143–4: οὐ γὰρ λόγοισι τὸν βίον σπουδάζομεν / λαμπρὸν ποιεῖσθαι μᾶλλον ἢ τοῖς δρωμένοις. 25 Xen. Cyr. 6.1.48: καὶ ὅσα ἂν ὁρῶ σε σπουδάζοντα, συνεργὸς πειράσομαι γίγνεσθαι ὡς ἂν δύνωμαι κράτιστος. 18

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goals are now his goals and he will devote his energies to them. When Isocrates says that “it is fitting only for enemies to be serious (spoudazein) about taking revenge”, he means that only enemies, not fellow citizens, choose revenge as their goal, and devote their efforts, perhaps even a series of efforts, to it.26 Each of these characters has a certain goaldirected “zeal” or “seriousness” (spoudē), and they are “serious” (spoudaios) in that sense. At times, this goal-directed “effort” or “focus” can even visibly manifest itself, and so spoudaios can describe, as in English, the sober expression on the serious person’s face.27 The play/serious oppositions listed at the beginning of this section may thus be observed in a clearer light: when Lysias or Callicles ask whether their opponents are “being serious” or “playing/joking”, they are asking whether words are being spoken for the pleasure of it (i.e., “playing”), or for some longer-term goal beyond the words themselves. When Xenophon says that he considers it worthwhile to record not just the “serious” deeds of great men but their “play” deeds as well, he too means to distinguish those words and actions engaged in simply for pleasure, and those oriented toward some further goal, like virtue or knowledge. Finally, when Aristotle writes in the Nicomachean Ethics “The good life seems to be according to excellence: and this is something with seriousness, but not in play”,28 he seems to mean that if one wishes to live “excellently”, there needs to be a conception of “excellence” according to which one strives, as well as the ongoing zeal (spoudē) to attain that excellence. To what extent this formulation lies behind his spoudaios ideal (the “excellent” man) is contentious, but it is worth noting that even scholars who are skeptical about discerning “seriousness” in this ethical ideal remind that “it is plainly true that Aristotle’s view of living well is that it amounts to making a good job of one’s life (the reliance on the concept of ergon is not incidental)”.29 Indeed, Aristotle regularly formulates excellence (aretē) in the Nicomachean Ethics as a target or goal toward which Isoc. 7.42: τὸ περὶ τὰς τιμωρίας σπουδάζειν τοῖς ἐχθροῖς προσήκειν. Note that these are in contrast to the forefathers, who have, instead, arranged things with the goal of making citizens not commit crimes in the first place. 27 Cf. Xen. Cyr. 1.3.9, 2.2.16; Pindar 4.132 for a “sober” story. 28 EN 10.6, 1177a1–3: δοκεῖ δ᾽ ὁ εὐδαίμων βίος κατ᾽ ἀρετὴν εἶναι· οὗτος δὲ μετὰ σπουδῆς, ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἐν παιδιᾷ. 29 Taylor (1997) 246–7 on Sparshott 1994. Regarding, e.g., the spoudaios kitharist at EN 1.7, 1098a7– 11, cf. Sparshott (1994) 50 (“good guitar players work at it—they are serious about it”) and Frede (2008) 259: “We become good…kithara-players…by practicing well and bad ones by practicing badly.” Contrast Bostock (2000) 19–21 and Reeve (2012) 238–41. For studies on Aristotle’s spoudaios ideal, cf. Schottlaender 1980, Gigon 1981, and Gastaldi 1987. The evaluative meaning of spoudaios will be discussed in Chapter 8. 26

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one ought to strive.30 When he writes that the good life is to be engaged in with seriousness, not in play, he seems to mean that a life of play could never provide that conception of “excellence” according to which one ought to strive, nor the long-term zeal to pursue it. For him, as has been seen, play is blind to long-term goals, since it is only capable of following immediate pleasure.31 “Serious” and “play” clearly function as opposites in Greek, as they do in many languages. They define and contrast each other, and develop conceptually in tandem. Just as “play” is for immediate pleasure in Greek, so too “serious” connotes the deferral of that pleasure in favor of longer-term goals. It is possible to move the body “for the sake of pleasure alone”—for example, to “dance” (paizō)—and it is possible to move the body in a more serious way, for example, advancing on an adversary (with the goal of fighting and conquering that adversary). These are opposing motions, opposing sets of actions, and they define each other through that opposition.

Play that Is Serious Among modern play theorists, few observations are so hackneyed as the notion that play can sometimes be serious. Huizinga, for example, writes, “for some, play can be very serious indeed”, while Freud writes, “On the contrary, [the child] takes its play very seriously…”; Gadamer declares, “More importantly, in play itself lies its own seriousness, indeed a holy seriousness”, while Ensslin concludes, “Therefore, gameplay…can be and often is taken extremely seriously.”32 This awareness of a sort of “serious Cf. Arist. EN 6.1, 1138b21–34; cf. 1.2, 1094a23–4; 1.7, 1098a16–17; 2.6, 1106b8–16; 2.6, 1106b31–3; 2.9. See Kraut (1989) 327–34 for discussion. Cf. Rorty (1992) 5: “The kinds of actions that are centrally significant to a human life—serious (spoudaios) actions…—have a normative structure. Such actions and activities have an objective end or point: they can succeed or fail to realize that point.” 31 Elsewhere he discusses a sort of excellence in “play” (EN 4.8, 1127b33–1128b9), which roughly boils down to displaying good manners while jesting—but there is no contradiction here. What makes someone “excellent” in their play is their awareness of play’s extra-play dimension: one must avoid being a “buffoon” (the bōmolokhos, who is too addicted to joking) while also avoiding being a “boor” (the agroikos, who is unable/unwilling to joke at all). I.e., one is “excellent” with regard to how much play one allows oneself, but one is not attaining excellence through play itself: inasmuch as one is playing, one cannot be aware of any such “serious” target. Cf. Halliwell (2008) 307–31, Kidd (2014) 107–9 for discussion. 32 Huizinga (1971 [1938]) 5 (with a comma added for clarity); cf. at 20 (“But let it be emphasized again that genuine and spontaneous play can also be profoundly serious”), Freud (2012 [1908]) 214 (“Im Gegenteil, es nimmt sein Spiel sehr ernst”), Gadamer (1960) 97 (“Wichtiger ist, daß im Spielen selbst ein eigener, ja, ein heiliger Ernst gelegen ist”), and Ensslin (2014) 8; cf. Jouët-Pastré (2006) 13: “Que le jeu et le sérieux de la recherche philosophique ne soient pas toujours antinomiques chez Platon n’a donc pas été ignoré.”

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play” often tempts theorists to abandon the opposition of play and seriousness altogether. If play itself can be serious, perhaps “play” ought not to be opposed to “serious” after all. However, to abandon the play/serious opposition is to erase play’s most recognizable features. This can be observed most strikingly in Huizinga’s famous book. The more Huizinga incorporates seriousness into play and identifies play behind all culture—including, for example, law, religion, and warfare—the less culture actually resembles “play”.33 The reason is simple: play is intuitively associated with enjoyment, while lawsuits, prayers, and battles tend not to be. There is little sense in reminding defendants trying to save their property—or devout believers asking the gods for help, or soldiers whose friends have just been killed—that they are really just “playing”.34 These are all actions of grave seriousness, not at all associated with pleasure, and so not generally experienced as “play” no matter how many structural comparisons might be drawn between games and these other activities. Since enjoyment appears to be essential to play, there is little is to be gained, but much to be lost, in rejecting the play/ serious opposition. At the same time, Huizinga and the other theorists quoted above observe something important: certain forms of play appear to be more serious than others, which would suggest there ought to exist something like “serious play”. And, indeed, such mixtures are regularly found in ancient Greek: in Xenophon’s Cyropaidia, for example, Cyrus and Hystaspus discuss returning from a military campaign in a light-hearted, bantering way that Xenophon summarizes as “they were playing/joking (epaizon) such things in earnest (spoudēi) with each other”.35 In the Memorabilia, Socrates playfully expounds the story of Odysseus, Circe, and the swine as containing a moral lesson about sympotic overindulgence: “He’d make these sorts of jokes (epaizen) about these things while at the same time being serious (spoudazōn),” Xenophon writes. 36 Alcibiades, according to Plutarch centuries later, impishly explained as a For law, Huizinga (1971 [1938]) 76–88; for religious ritual, 15–26; for war, 89–104. Cf. Bronowski (2011 [1973]) 324: “You must see that in a sense all science, all human thought, is a form of play” (quoted at Guthrie 1975, 56). 34 Huizinga (1971 [1938]) is of course well aware of the obstacle—e.g., at 76: “At first sight few things would seem to be further apart than the domain of law, justice and jurisprudence, and play.” Yet there is no escaping the problem that the argument “all culture is play” is purchased at the price of the intuitive idea that play is enjoyable. 35 Cyropaid. 6.1.6: οἱ μὲν δὴ τοιαῦτ’ ἔπαιζον σπουδῇ πρὸς ἀλλήλους. 36 Mem. 1.3.8: τοιαῦτα μὲν περὶ τούτων ἔπαιζεν ἅμα σπουδάζων. For a possibly Socratic penchant for pigs in joking contexts, cf. Pl. Tht. 161c, Xen. Mem. 1.2.30, with Halliwell (2008) 295. 33

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schoolboy why Athenians should not play the aulos, although it would be acceptable for Thebans to do so: “Making such jokes (paizōn) while at the same time being serious (spoudazōn) Alcibiades freed himself and his schoolmates from aulos study.”37 Later still, the Widow of Ephesus in the novel Leucippe and Clitophon makes a pun on the word “cenotaph” in her hopeless attempts to seduce the steadfast Clitophon. This was not just a joke, the narrator informs us; she was “joking in earnest” or, more precisely, “playing with a serious intent” (epaize spoudēi, 5.14.4). Remarkably, almost all of the “serious play” mixtures in ancient Greek have to do with verbal play—that is, the “play” involved consists of jokes, silly stories, banter, tongue-in-cheek speeches, and so forth. What makes these verbal examples “serious” seems to be that they all contain some goal or intent beyond the jokes and silliness itself: Socrates really intends to teach something about sympotic indulgence, the Widow of Ephesus really intends to provoke more than a smirk from Clitophon, and Alcibiades really intends to make a point about aulos playing. Also remarkable is that in all these examples the goals lie outside of the “playing”: it is not that Socrates, the Widow of Ephesus, and Alcibiades are focused intently on “playing” as the theorists above suggest;38 it is that, while playing, they also have some extra-play, real-world goal. This is what makes their play “serious”. I will explore this notion of “serious play” in the next chapter, where the interest is in extra-play goals, consequences, and evaluations. But, for this chapter, it is necessary to focus on the sense of “serious play” suggested by the modern theorists quoted above, namely that a player can be “serious” about the act of play while playing. Plutarch illustrates something like this with an example from Persian gambling. In his biography of the Persian king Artaxerxes II, Plutarch describes how Artaxerxes’ mother, Parysatis, took her revenge on Artarxexes’ eunuch, Masabates, for mutilating the corpse of her favorite son. She knew that Artaxerxes enjoyed gambling and playing dice—this was one of their favorite pastimes together—so she set up a sort of con. She invited him to play a dice-game for 1000 darics and intentionally lost, pretending to be greatly upset by this. In the heat of Artaxerxes’ victory, she then invited him to play not for money but for eunuchs, and it Plut. Alc. 2.7: τοιαῦτα παίζων ἅμα καὶ σπουδάζων ὁ Ἀλκιβιάδης αὑτόν τε τοῦ μαθήματος ἀπέστησε καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους. Martin 2003 for context. 38 Perhaps, e.g., Socrates is getting caught up in his fanciful stories about Circe and Odysseus, or Alcibiades in his aulos story, or the Widow of Ephesus in endless exploration of -taph compounds. 37



Play that Is Serious

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was at this point that Parysatis became “serious” about playing (spoudasasa peri tēn paidian). She won the bet, chose Masabates as her prize, and, before Artaxerxes could realize her dastardly plan, had the eunuch flayed and impaled. What happens when Parysatis gets “serious” about this game? The two Persian royals have agreed that the terms of the wager are now eunuchs, not money, and so Parysatis “becomes intent on the matter and serious about the game—and since the dice also fell more or less well for her, she won”.39 There is a contrast being made here: in the previous round of gambling, although Parysatis is generally “terribly clever at gambling games” (deinē kubeuein, 17.2), she “allows [Artaxerxes] to win” (perieide nikēsai, 17.3). Νow, however, she is focused on winning, and so is “serious” in that sense. Whatever her talent is for gambling games—“terribly clever” could refer simply to her skill in throwing the dice, but, if a board-game is being referred to here, her “skill” may lie in this aspect of the game40—she is now using those “terribly clever” resources at full throttle in order to win. Her ultimate goal, of course, lies outside the game—she wants to win the eunuch in order to have him killed—but spoudazō here refers specifically to the game itself. Parysatis must first win the game before she can even think about those other goals, and when she earlier allows her son to win, despite presumably still being serious about those extra-game goals, she is not serious about the game at all. Now, however, she must focus all her resources on winning the dice-game itself. Only in that sense does she “get serious about the game”. Plutarch’s example is much closer to the sort of “serious play” the theorists at the beginning of this section have in mind. Sometimes the player is focused so intently on the play or game that the play itself seems to become “serious”, they suggest. So Parysatis focuses all her game-playing ingenuity at beating her son at the gambling game, and is entirely “focused” on this goal. So too, we might include the personified Paidia from the Metropolitan vase, who, it will be remembered, focuses intently on keeping the stick balanced on her finger: she too seems “serious” Plut. Art. 17.4: σφόδρα δὴ γενομένη πρὸς τῷ πράγματι καὶ σπουδάσασα περὶ τὴν παιδιάν, εὖ δέ πως αὐτῇ καὶ τῶν κύβων πεσόντων, νικήσασα λαμβάνει τὸν Μασαβάτην. Her victory, after all, only partly rests on the roll of the dice: “since the dice also fell well…,” Plutarch reports. For an alleged technique of rolling dice well, cf. Ovid Trist. 2.473–6, AA 2.204; for kubeuō involving not just dice-games but all gambling games—including board-games—see Pollux 7.206 with Kidd 2017a. For a typical ancient board-game played with dice and connected to gambling, cf. Schädler 2008 and Kidd 2017b.

39

40

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Serious Play as Goal-Oriented Play

about her play, and will not allow anything to distract her from her goal. Also worthy of inclusion may be the game Herodotus describes in his Histories, although the word “serious” is never actually used.41 When the future Persian king Cyrus was ten years old, Herodotus says (1.114): He was playing in the village…, playing in the road with other children his age. The children elected him to be the king of their game, this boy said to be the son of the cowherd. And he commanded some of them to build houses, and others to be guards, and a certain one of them, I suppose, to be the “Eye” of the King; to another he gave the honor of carrying messages—each one was assigned a job. Now, one of these boys who was playing with the rest—the son of Artembares, a man of repute among the Medes—did not do what Cyrus ordered him to do. Cyrus bid the other boys to seize him, they obeyed, and Cyrus, treating him very harshly, whipped him. As soon as the boy was released, he was in a state of indignation for having suffered things unworthy of his standing; he went down to the city and bewailed to his father what Cyrus had done to him— although he didn’t say “Cyrus” since this wasn’t his name yet, but rather “the son of the cowherd, Astyages”.42

This game appears to be a more detailed version of that which Pollux later reports Greek children played, basilinda.43 Although the boys here do not cast lots, as Pollux says, but elect the young Cyrus,44 the game is virtually identical to Pollux’ “king” game. The boys elect their king, and At Il. 11.562 there is the simile of children beating a donkey “intently” (σπουδῇ) with sticks, but there is no explicit reason to suppose they are playing. For children torturing animals in their play, see Chapter 4. 42 Her. Hist. 1.114: ἔπαιζε ἐν τῇ κώμῃ ταύτῃ ἐν τῇ ἦσαν καὶ αἱ βουκολίαι αὗται, ἔπαιζε δὲ μετ᾽ ἄλλων ἡλίκων ἐν ὁδῷ. καὶ οἱ παῖδες παίζοντες εἵλοντο ἑωυτῶν βασιλέα εἶναι τοῦτον δὴ τὸν τοῦ βουκόλου ἐπίκλησιν παῖδα. ὁ δὲ αὐτῶν διέταξε τοὺς μὲν οἰκίας οἰκοδομέειν, τοὺς δὲ δορυφόρους εἶναι, τὸν δέ κού τινα αὐτῶν ὀφθαλμὸν βασιλέος εἶναι, τῷ δέ τινι τὰς ἀγγελίας ἐσφέρειν ἐδίδου γέρας, ὡς ἑκάστῳ ἔργον προστάσσων. Εἷς δὴ τούτων τῶν παίδων συμπαίζων, ἐὼν Ἀρτεμβάρεος παῖς, ἀνδρὸς δοκίμου ἐν Μήδοισι, οὐ γὰρ δὴ ἐποίησε τὸ προσταχθὲν ἐκ τοῦ Κύρου, ἐκέλευσε αὐτὸν τοὺς ἄλλους παῖδας διαλαβεῖν, πιθομένων δὲ τῶν παίδων ὁ Κῦρος τὸν παῖδα τρηχέως κάρτα περιέσπε μαστιγέων. ὁ δὲ ἐπείτε μετείθη τάχιστα, ὥς γε δὴ ἀνάξια ἑωυτοῦ παθών, μᾶλλόν τι περιημέκτεε, κατελθὼν δὲ ἐς πόλιν πρὸς τὸν πατέρα ἀποικτίζετο τῶν ὑπὸ Κύρου ἤντησε, λέγων δὲ ου Κύρου (οὺ γάρ κω ἦν τοῦτο τοὔνομα), ἀλλὰ πρὸς τοῦ βουκόλου τοῦ Ἀστυάγεος παιδός. For reflections of “model elements of the Medo-Persian court”, see Asheri, Lloyd, and Corcella (2007) 160–1; Kurke (1999) 322–4 for coin imagery. For the game, see below. 43 Poll. 9.110–11: “Basilinda is when lots are drawn, and the ‘king’ gives the commands of what must be done, while the one who draws the ‘servant’ lot has to do whatever is commanded” (Βασιλίνδα μὲν οὖν ἐστὶν ὅταν διακληρωθέντες ὁ  μὲν βασιλεύς τις ὢν τάττῃ τὸ πρακτέον, ὁ δ’ ὑπηρέτης εἶναι λαχὼν πᾶν τὸ ταχθὲν ὑπεκπονῇ). Cf. Philo, Flacc. 36–9, Suet. Nero 35 (ducatus et imperia ludere). 44 Something that Cyrus reminds when called to defend himself: they thought me “best” for the role of king (115.2). 41



Play that Is Serious

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then, it seems, are at his mercy: the king chooses who will be builders, who will be bodyguards, who will be messengers, who will be, Herodotus suggests, the “King’s Eye”. To play the game is to obey the king. When one boy does what is understandable and plays the game according to his own rules, and not those of Cyrus, or perhaps protests the game altogether, standing, as it were, outside the game, he is punished. For this boy, the game is over: the physical pain and emotional insult are enough to cause him to go home and complain to his parents. Yet this serious extra-play consequence—which is analogous to the verbal banter above45—is not the only way that this game seems to be “serious”. Like Parysatis, who focused everything on playing the game, so too players like Cyrus were serious in their play. When called to be punished, Cyrus explains: “Master, I did these things to him with justice… While all the other boys did as they were commanded, this one was disobedient and had no justification for this; that’s why he received his punishment.”46 Cyrus is perfectly aware that they were all just playing a game (paizontes, 1.115.2), yet, inasmuch as all the players had committed to certain rules and strictures—this one is a bodyguard, this one is a builder, and everyone must do what the king commands—these rules and strictures cannot simply be abandoned. There is no winning and losing in this game, as there was for Parysatis’ game, yet the players are no less committed to their goals: the builder must build, the bodyguard must protect, and Cyrus must rule. These players are committed to their roles, and seem to be “serious” in their play. They are “focused” like Parysatis and the personified Paidia, and the duties of their assigned positions provide them with more than enough in-game goals to be serious about. By contrast, it is worth considering what might happen to the play in the “king” game if these overarching commitments were abandoned: now not just the disobedient boy, but all the children, shed their roles and adopt new ones. This child is not a guard, he is a baker, this one is not the “King’s Eye”, he is the king’s horse, and, now that it has become tiresome to be a horse, he decides to be the king himself. There is nothing to stop the children from playing in this way, after all; the roles and rules have always been merely I.e., just as Socrates’ playful story is consequential for its moral instruction, and just as the Widow of Ephesus’ playful pun is consequential for its expression of frustration, so too this boy’s game is consequential for the physical/emotional insult it has caused him. 46 Her. Hist. 1.115.2–3: ὦ δέσποτα, ἐγὼ ταῦτα τοῦτον ἐποίησα σὺν δίκῃ… οἱ μέν νυν ἄλλοι παῖδες τὰ ἐπιτασσόμενα ἐπετέλεον, οὗτος δὲ ἀνηκούστεέ τε καὶ λόγον εἶχε οὐδένα, ἐς ὃ ἔλαβε τὴν δίκην. 45

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Serious Play as Goal-Oriented Play

imagined roles and rules. Yet once those overarching rules, goals, and commitments are abandoned, and the children follow the course of whatever is immediately pleasurable (“I am not a king, I am a dragon!”, “I am not a guard, I am a baker!”), the play seems somehow to become more frivolous, which is to say, less “serious”.47 Instead of being committed to roles and rules, the children are simply following their fancy, reminding just how arbitrary the roles and rules had been in the first place. Parysatis’ dice-game might be analyzed similarly. The game’s overarching goal is to win, and the rules are established in order that there be a clear way to win—yet what would happen during the dice-game if it occurred to the dicers to abandon these arbitrary rules and goals, and begin throwing the dice at targets instead or make the board-game pieces start speaking to one another? These dicers are still “playing”, yet their initial goals and commitments have been abandoned, and with it that overarching element of the game’s “focus”. Parysatis is still playing with dice even when fooling around like this, but she is no longer “serious” about the game. So too with regard to the personified Paidia: what would happen if the stick is no longer something that must be balanced on the finger as long as possible, but rather an object to be twirled, or a sword to brandish, or a dancing partner? With each recreation of the play, the play itself seems to become more frivolous, silly, capricious—that is to say, less “serious”. If it is only via overarching goals and commitments that one can be “focused” or “serious” in one’s play, serious play would appear to be equivalent to goal-oriented play.

Serious Play vs. Serious (Non-Play) Action This formulation of “serious play” hopefully does justice to the idea that Huizinga, Gadamer, and others have in mind above. “Serious play” in their excerpts means something like “goal-oriented” or “focused” play. When Huizinga writes, “for some, play can be very serious indeed” he does not mean that play can sometimes have inadvertent “serious” consequences (although he would likely agree to this), but rather that some players are so focused on playing that the play itself seems to become “serious”. Similarly, Gadamer’s notion of “holy seriousness” is internal to the act of play: “In play itself lies its own seriousness,” he writes—not Gadamer (1960) 97 misses this aspect of play: for him, all play is “serious”, and only the “spoilsport” (“Spielverderber”) fails to take it seriously.

47



Serious Play vs. Serious (Non-Play) Action

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outside of play, although we might envision the possibility, for example, of an educator evaluating play from the outside as consequential and so a “serious” activity. So too, Ensslin envisions a causal relationship between the goal-oriented nature of games (“failure and success”) and gameplay’s “serious” nature: “Therefore gameplay…can be and often is taken extremely seriously.”48 The problem, however, is that if overarching goals distinguish serious play from more capricious, flighty forms of play, how is serious play to be distinguished from serious non-play action, which also is goal-oriented? This question is a knotty one no matter how it is approached conceptually—perhaps one might, for example, take recourse to Huizinga’s “magic circle” (there is a difference between the seriousness inside and outside the act of play) or ethological notions of play as practice (evolution confers pleasure rewards when we practice for real-world, “serious” engagements). 49 But the issue becomes especially difficult when applying ancient conceptions of the play/serious dichotomy. If play is a mode of immediate pleasure, while the serious is a mode of deferred pleasure (for the sake of some future goal), how is it possible to engage in the deferred for the sake of the immediate—that is, engage in “serious play”? This appears to be an obvious paradox. And yet, pleasure may provide the most natural way to articulate an initial difference between serious play and serious non-play action. If we consider one of Cyrus’ play-builders, for example, there seems to be an intuitive, experiential difference between play-building and actual building. Although an actual builder may enjoy the process of gathering building materials, preparing a space for the project, and erecting some sort of structure, it is not at all required that he do so. Far from it: pleasure is rarely associated with such manual labor. Further, even if we suppose a certain pleasure in completing a job, that deferred pleasure dangles as a mere “carrot” during the actual laborious process of building. Play, by contrast, seems to lose its identity if pleasure is absent for a long enough period: as soon as the building is felt to be laborious and no longer “fun” it is no longer felt to be “play”.50 Similarly, an interruption of the game before the goal is reached does not cause the unfinished game to be See above n. 32 for these quotations, this time with emphasis added. See above n. 4. 50 Gamers, e.g., refer to such in-game tasks that are repetitive and no longer fun as “grinding”: cf. Mäyrä (2008) 132. Ancient descriptions focus on the necessary presence of pleasure (perhaps the closest ancient equivalent to “fun”) in play. For the concatenation of pleasure and play, cf. Pl. Tim 26b–c, Critias 115b, Laws 1.636b–c, 7.819b; for the pleasure-based definitions of play, at Soph. 234b, Statesman 288, and Laws 2, see Chapter 2. 48

49

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Serious Play as Goal-Oriented Play

without enjoyment, as if the play-building had in fact been arduous labor all along. Instead, pleasure seems to be accessible at each and every moment during serious play, even though the play is goal-oriented. The same cannot be said for serious non-play action, where that pleasure, if it exists at all, seems so often to lie projected behind the deferred goal. If pleasure is not deferred in serious play but, rather, accessible at each and every moment, what is the nature of “goals” in serious play? The serious goal, after all, has stood in opposition to play’s immediate pleasures, yet now, play’s goals do not really seem to be deferring pleasure at all. The child building the sandcastle accesses enjoyment even if the end is not reached, and Paidia’s stick game is enjoyable even if the stick falls— which, of course, it must. Inasmuch as the activity is play, the pleasure is always at hand. Yet, if this is the case, in what sense can serious play be goal-oriented? The refrain that play can “make” a pleasure of goaloriented action—since it can make a pleasure of anything—does not seem to explain much. Nor does the phenomenon of describing a goal-­ oriented activity in hindsight as “just play” seem applicable, even if that retrospective description has a way of surrounding that past action with originally unintended pleasures.51 Since all bodily motion other than purely physical reflexes requires some sort of goal—for example, to move the arm there, to place the foot here—perhaps the simplest motions may provide some insight into these more complicated examples of king-games and play-building. As has been seen, “dance” is a regular denotation of paizō from the earliest examples of Greek, and so it is natural that both Plato and Aristotle articulate the movement of play as somehow imbued with pleasure from the start.52 For Plato, this play movement is an expression of paidia-joy, while, for Aristotle, it is motivated by “relaxation” (anesis), a sort of unwinding that is intrinsically pleasurable. Yet how can we distinguish this basic play-motion—for example, raising the arm in a dance-like motion “for pleasure alone”—from the (nearly) identical motion of raising the arm in order, for example, to reach some desired object at hand? For one, it might be noticed that the movement of the first, unlike the second, does not seem to be in the province of “Here is where I want to move my arm (and when I reach that goal there will be some pay-off)” but something more like “It feels good to move the arm in just this way”.

Cf. Pl. Crito 46d. For “play” as an evaluative term, see Chapter 8. For paiz- words denoting “dance”, see Introduction.

51

52



Serious Play vs. Serious (Non-Play) Action

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It is as if, in this play-movement, the player/dancer is, to use the common expression, “following their pleasure”. 53 The movement is not unconscious, yet implicit in “following one’s pleasure” is the idea that whoever usually leads is not the one leading this pleasurable motion. A useful analogue might be found in Plato’s opposition in the Laws of paidiai (“joys”) and phoboi (“fears”).54 It was seen in the Introduction that Greek “play”, unlike the English word “play”, covers a spectrum that ranges from internal mood to external manifestation, and functions in a way that is conceptually analogous to fear. Just as an emotion like fear (phobos) causes the body to move in certain ways (phobeomai, “to be routed”), the paidia mood (joy) causes the body to move in certain ways (paizō, “to dance”). The manifestation of fear—for example, the physical movement of being “routed” (phobeomai) by an enemy and fleeing for one’s life—is not the result of careful deliberation, and so people sometimes speak of “blind fear”.55 Yet neither is this fearful flight entirely unconscious—it is not some muscle reflex or act of sleep-walking. The fear-motion seems instead to lie somehow in between: in fear’s manifestation, the terrified person is not fully in control (whatever precisely that “control” is) yet, at the same time, is aware of the actions taking place. An ancient philosopher might explain this via the concept of “representations” (phantasiai): such fear engenders the representations (phantasiai) underlying this goal-directed movement—for example, the thoughtimages of being cut down by the enemy, being wounded or captured, and so forth—and so the motions that are manifested in fear might be described as motions catalyzed by those internal representations.56 Paidia motion and its peculiar goals may be helped along by this fear analogue. Self-motion would seem to be impossible without some sort of target or goal, but who or what is creating and presenting those goals? The idiom is more modern than ancient, when “following pleasures” tends to denote the “pursuit” of pleasures like food, drink, and sex (cf. Pl. Phdr. 251a, Protag. 354c, Rep. 586d, Laws 875b, Arist. EN 1152b20, 1153b30, 1154a28, Rhet. 1364b24, Arist. EE 1233b33, Aristox. fr. 50.11 Wehrli) rather than being motivated by the feeling of pleasure. But Aristotle comes close to this idea at ΕΝ 10.5, 1175a30–1175b1. 54 Pl. Laws 1.635b: see Introduction for various translations of this passage; cf. the “fear” potion imagined in 1.647e–648e in contrast to wine, which has the opposite effect. 55 For “blind fear” in Greek, cf. John Chrys. In Act. vol. 60, pg. 291, 50–1: ὑπὸ τοῦ φόβου δὲ τυφλουμένους. Cf. Soph. Trach. 21–5, Thuc. 2.87.4, with Konstan (2006) 142, 152. 56 Cf. Aristotle’s definition of fear at Rhet. 2.5, 1382a21–2 (“Let fear be a certain pain or disturbance caused by a thought-image (phantasia) of a future evil that is destructive or painful” (ἔστω δὴ ὁ φόβος λύπη τις ἢ ταραχὴ ἐκ φαντασίας μέλλοντος κακοῦ φθαρτικοῦ ἢ λυπηροῦ). Cf. De Anim. 1.1, 403a16–24, 3.9, 432b26–433a1. For a cognitive view of phobos, see Konstan (2006) 129–55; cf. Fortenbaugh (2002 [1975]) 12-16; for phantasiai more generally in Aristotle (a heavily debated term), see Nussbaum (1978) 221–69 and Caston 1996. 53

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Serious Play as Goal-Oriented Play

The distinction between the serious-motion of the arm and the playmotion of the arm may lie in these different goals’ origins. Unlike the “serious” motion of the arm, where the goal is formulated out of some perceived lack (“I need that desired object”),57 the “play” motion is formulated by the pleasure itself (“It feels good to move in just this way”). In this sense, players may be said to be “following their pleasure” in play. If such an account lies behind the simplest play-movements, it might be expanded to explain those more complicated forms of play, like the building project of the play-builder, or Paidia’s stick-balancing, or Parysatis’ dice-game. Just like the motion of the arm, where pleasure provides the goal (“It feels good to move in this way”), so too it is the pleasure that creates the goal of building the play-structure (“It feels good to be building just this structure”), the goal of balancing the stick (“It feels good to balance the stick in just this way”), the goal of winning the dicegame (“It feels good to engage with dice in just this way”, since trying to win the dice-game is equivalent to playing it).58 This may explain the reason why, during play—unlike serious non-play action—the pleasure appears to be accessible at each and every moment. Just as the dancer’s pleasure extends the arm (“It feels good to move in just this way”), the player’s most elaborate ideas in play originate from pleasure itself.

Conclusions As in many other languages, play and seriousness are in opposition in Greek: “Stop playing and be serious!” was as typical an expression in Greek as it is in English. But the way the opposition was conceptualized is slightly different, I have been arguing. The opposition is not quite “I’m really saying/doing this” (serious) as opposed to “I’m virtually saying/ doing this” (play). Rather, the primary sense seems to be “I’m saying/ doing this for some reason other than pleasure alone” (serious) as opposed to “I’m saying/doing this for pleasure alone” (play). Of course, this latter opposition can give rise to the former opposition—activities engaged in for pleasure alone easily mirror those same activities engaged in for reasons other than immediate pleasure—but it is worthwhile to keep the two formulations separate in order to appreciate the ancient nuance. Rather than relying on some concept of reality in which actors Spoudē itself is something like a goal-oriented mood (“eagerness”, “zeal”): cf. LSJ s.v. σπουδή III. Are players really following “pleasure alone” when they are in fact following the rules of a game or playing according to the strictures of another player? For discussion of this question, see Chapter 4.

57 58



Conclusions

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are acting, the ancient opposition offers instead a mode of engagement where pleasures are not immediate but deferred behind certain identified goals. The serious/play opposition is thus very close to the real/virtual opposition, but only the former insists on the critical role of the subject’s mode of engagement: reality in many ways might be seen as a result or construction of the serious mode. By contrast, in the real/virtual opposition, the subject—who no longer acts, plays, and engages, but simply views—is so unnecessary as to disappear from the opposition altogether. If the play/serious opposition is articulated in terms of pleasures and goals, a difficulty arises when trying to explain mixtures like “serious play”, which also occur in ancient Greek texts. The mixture is meant in two different ways, I have suggested. On the one hand, a player might take their play seriously while playing—for example, Parysatis, who engages all her resources and talents to win the dice-game with her son; or Cyrus, who has one of his playmates whipped for disobedience during the play. On the other hand, someone might also take play seriously from outside the act of play—for example, Xenophon relates that Socrates’ playful story about Circe and swine actually had a serious moral, and the narrator of Leucippe and Clitophon relates that the Widow of Ephesus’ silly pun about cenotaphs actually had the serious intent of expressing sexual need. This latter meaning of “serious play”—which requires thinking through the relationship between goals and evaluation—will be the focus of the next chapter. But it can nevertheless be seen for now that, in both types of “serious” play, it is possible to discern that underlying meaning of “goal-oriented” in the Greek word for “serious”. Whether the goal lies inside or outside the act of play, serious play is goal-oriented play. Considering the argument, it may be worth finishing the chapter by asking: isn’t all play in some sense goal-oriented (how else, after all, would a player move?) and so “serious”? Wouldn’t it be better to think of serious play as a spectrum—that is, while some play has longer-term goals and rules, and so feels more “serious”, other forms resist those longer-term goals and rules and so feel less “serious”? It is worth returning to those moments imagined at the opposite side of the spectrum, where play was felt to be more capricious, flighty, frivolous, and so less “serious”. I suggested that if Cyrus and his playmates abandoned the overarching goals and rules of their game and decided to become whatever they wished at any moment (the guard becomes a horse, the king becomes a baker, and so forth), the mood of the play would change. With each rejection of the overarching rules and goals, and each

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Serious Play as Goal-Oriented Play

recreation of the game, the play becomes more frivolous and capricious, and so somehow less serious. The difference between these two types of play is reminiscent of what I have suggested elsewhere is a notable difference between tragedy and comedy.59 As others have argued, both tragedy and comedy are forms of play, and so it makes little sense to say that comedy is more “playful” than tragedy; after all, in both cases we are said to be watching a “play”.60 Yet it should be recognized that these are different forms of play: in tragic forms of play, the rules and goals persist, even though those rules and goals are simply imagined, and so technically could be abandoned at any moment. For example, if one of the guards is “killed” in the king-game, he is really felt to die, and is mourned for this reason—sometimes with real tears. However, the instant that dead guard jumps up and announces “I’m alive again!”, thereby reminding that all of this has been simply play all along, the play becomes, as it were, more “comic”. 61 Similarly, although the play-builder might labor under the necessities of the king’s injunctions and the ongoing goal of the commanded structure, the moment that builder says “I’m not a builder, I’m a dancer!” or “I’m not a dancer! I’m a frog!” the play loses its tragic necessity and descends into comic foolery. This would suggest that there is something more than just a spectrum of shorter- and longer-term goals for less and more serious forms of play. It is rather that, at the comic end of the spectrum, there is an almost obsessive moment of recreation, or beginning again. The invitation to play (“Let’s play!”), in other words, does not just initiate a play bout separating subsequent action from the goal-oriented, serious mode of engagement. In comic forms of play the invitation “Let’s play!” occurs obsessively throughout: whatever necessities and rules are invoked at the beginning of a game—or even at the level of a sentence—are rejected over and over again in the excitement of starting a new game once more.62 Although Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy as a representation of spoudaia action is no less contentious than the interpretation of his spoudaios ethical ideal, there may thus be good reason to retain some sense of 61 62 59

60

Kidd (2014) 115–17. See, e.g., Silk (2000) 81. Cf. Ar. Frogs 170–9 for a lively corpse. Cf. Lowe (2000) 86–8 and Kidd (2014) 116.



Conclusions

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“seriousness” in tragedy’s spoudaia action, after all.63 But what is not explained by this idea of “serious play” is how such plays—whether tragedy, comedy, or some other genre—might be judged as something serious from outside the act of play. That is, when a critic, for example, describes a play as a “serious work of art” or a “serious piece of drama” this often has little to do with whether the drama is a comedy or tragedy. A tragic penny-dreadful might be felt unworthy of serious attention, while a comedy of Beckett or Ionesco often thought worthy of high seriousness.64 In such evaluative judgements, the notion of a “serious” play appears to indicate a play felt to be “worthwhile”, “important”, and “significant”, whether or not the players themselves are committed to overarching goals and rules within the play. What is this sense of “serious” play? And how might a word that apparently denotes “goal-oriented” be used to assert value? Like Aristotle’s spoudaios ethical ideal (see above n. 29), where it has become contentious to detect “seriousness” behind “excellent”, so, too, in the Poetics it is debated whether tragedy deals with “serious” (as opposed to “noble”) people and action. Golden 1965 argues against “serious action” offered by “nearly all…translators” (listed at n. 1, including Else 1957, 68–78, who rightly emphasizes the significance of prattontas at 1448a1 for the sense of spoudaios); see also Belfiore (1992) 99–107. Zanker 2000 emphasizes social status; Halliwell, in Halliwell, Russell, and Innes 1995, translates “elevated”, Kenny 2013 “superior” (cf. Armstrong 1999, 448–9); Janko 1987 uses both “good” and “serious” (at 71: “The epithet connotes a person we should take seriously in both social and moral terms”); Heath 1996 has “admirable” (but also “good”, “serious”); Mitsis (2007) 28–30 thoughtfully connects Aristotle’s ethical view regarding how “to achieve the happiness that is our natural telos” (28) and “[his] claim in the Poetics that plays should contain not all the events of a life, but only those that constitute a complete praxis” (29). Cf. Donini (2008) 39 n. 66 and Guastini (2010) 123–8. 64 Cf. Segal (2001) 431–52. The spoud- distinction is already observed at Arist. Poet. 1449b17–18 regarding good (spoudaia) and bad tragedy (περὶ τραγῳδίας οἶδε σπουδαίας καὶ φαύλης, οἶδε καὶ περὶ ἐπῶν), even though tragedy is distinguished from comedy as being a mimesis of spoudaioi people and action (sometimes translated as “serious”, sometimes as “noble”: see above note); cf. Arist. Poet. 1448a2, 1448a27, 1448b34, 1449b10, 1449b24. See next chapter for the connection between these denotations of spoudaios. 63

chapter 8

The Value of Serious Things before and after Death

Sometimes ancient philosophers imagine—or at least pretend to imagine for rhetorical purposes—that their lives would continue in much the same way after death as in life. The Socrates of Plato’s Apology, for example, imagines an underworld where he can converse philosophically with Homer, Hesiod, Ajax, and others: “The best part would be passing my time asking and questioning the people there just as I do here who among them is wise and who just thinks they are wise but really are not.”1 Later, the young Aristotle of the Protrepticus envisions the Islands of the Blessed: “In that place there would be no need of anything nor use for anything else, but only thinking and contemplating would be left, the very thing which we say is the best life also right now.”2 Just as contemplation is the most valuable or serious activity of premortem life, so too it is in the postmortem world. Yet the different realities of life and afterlife pose some problems for this seamless continuation of activity, and both philosophers betray an awareness of this elsewhere, either due to further consideration or different rhetorical contexts. The Socrates of the Phaedo, for example, suggests a significant problem for such an afterlife of philosophical inquiry: inasmuch as the mortal body, with its faulty senses and mindless appetites, creates the chief obstacle to true knowledge, the afterlife promises the full attainment of truth: “Thus freed from the mindlessness of the body and having become pure, we will—it’s reasonable to suppose—be among the pure and will know things through ourselves.”3 Somehow death promises the answers to our questions: that which is only half-glimpsed during life Pl. Ap. 41b: καὶ δὴ τὸ μέγιστον, τοὺς ἐκεῖ ἐξετάζοντα καὶ ἐρευνῶντα ὥσπερ τοὺς ἐνταῦθα διάγειν, τίς αὐτῶν σοφός ἐστιν καὶ τίς οἴεται μέν, ἔστιν δ᾽ οὔ. 2 Arist. Protrep. B43 Düring: ἐκεῖ γὰρ οὐδενὸς χρεία οὐδὲ τῶν ἄλλων τινὸς ὄφελος ἂν γένοιτο, μόνον δὲ καταλείπεται τὸ διανοεῖσθαι καὶ θεωρεῖν, ὅνπερ καὶ νῦν ἐλεύθερόν φαμεν βίον εἶναι. 3 Pl. Phd. 67a: καὶ οὕτω μὲν καθαροὶ ἀπαλλαττόμενοι τῆς τοῦ σώματος ἀφροσύνης, ὡς τὸ εἰκὸς μετὰ τοιούτων τε ἐσόμεθα καὶ γνωσόμεθα δι᾽ ἡμῶν. 1

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The Value of Serious Things before and after Death

is seen fully in the afterlife. The problem, however, is: now that the obstacles to knowledge are gone and the pursuit is over, what, then, is one left to do in the afterlife? The new vision is complete, and the dead, now in full knowledge, seem stuck in an endlessly present moment of knowing. This is echoed by Aristotle, who later implicitly renounces any notion of a human afterlife,4 but nevertheless continues the thought experiment of the different activities valued by mortals and immortals. It will be remembered that, at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, it struck him as absurd that an immortal god might attempt to live according to typical human values—for example, living virtuously, and aiming at pursuits valuable to humans like the political life.5 In the Metaphysics too, when he imagines his immortal god, this immortal being also appears to be stuck in an endlessly present moment of knowing.6 The mortal timescale is gone, and so too is the mortal time structure of learn now, know later. All that is left is the continuous knowing of the eternal present. Considering this shift of values according to different contexts (for example, what can serious pursuits like working hard for a promotion, saving for retirement, curing society’s diseases, and so forth, mean in the afterlife?), it is worth returning to the issue of play and its assigned role. Within the context of a premortem life, Aristotle’s rejection of play feels intuitive: “We also think that serious things are better than laughable and playful things, and the activity is more serious when it is of the better part and the better person; for the activity of the better [part or person] is always superior and more related to eudaimonia.”7 A life spent playing board-games or rolling dice simply does not seem serious or valuable enough to qualify as a good life. Many would feel that such a life would be meaningless, a waste of a life, a frivolous life, lacking perhaps in those overarching structures of long-term goals and achievements, or lacking perhaps in that emotional stake in longer-term values that confer some sort of meaning or interest in life. Yet although this may be intuitive according to the realities of the premortem world, what about the postmortem world? Pindar in one of his lost Threnoi reports the following picture of the afterlife: See Chapter 5 n. 70 regarding the hylomorphic soul. See Chapter 5 regarding the god’s activities. Cf. Ps-Arist. MM 1200b15 with Gigon (1981) 9. 6 Arist. Metaph. 12.9, 1074b15–35. 7 Arist. EN 10.6, 1177a3–6: βελτίω τε λέγομεν τὰ σπουδαῖα τῶν γελοίων καὶ μετὰ παιδιᾶς, καὶ τοῦ βελτίονος, ἀεὶ καὶ μορίου καὶ ἀνθρώπου σπουδαιοτέραν τὴν ἐνέργειαν· ἡ δὲ τοῦ βελτίονος κρείττων καὶ εὐδαιμονικωτέρα ἤδη. For the emphasis of the body in Aristotle’s idea of play (as opposed to the mind involved in noetic contemplation), see Chapter 5. For the soul being “more spoudaios” than the body, cf. Isoc. Antid. 250.2. 4 5

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The Value of Serious Things before and after Death For these people the sun shines down on the night there below, and their suburb lies in meadows of red roses and incense of shady…is heavy with golden-fruit trees, and some take pleasure in horses, others in playing board-games, others with their lyres, and among them lovely-flowered prosperity is in bloom.8

The struggles of life are at an end for these happy souls, and what remains is a life of eternal enjoyment: playing board-games, strumming the lyre, and riding horses.9 Without pressing Pindar’s word terpontai (“enjoy”) too much, it is natural to imagine enjoyments of the temporary sort, rather than insist on longer-term pursuits. That is, what the dead seem to be enjoying is playing board-games, not some longer-term pursuit like mastering the various techniques of board-game playing. They enjoy (terpontai) strumming the lyre, but there is no need to suppose that their enjoyment has to do with some long-term pursuit like becoming a lyre virtuoso. These latter enjoyments may be recognizable for mortal creatures (work hard now, enjoy goal later), but can they have any meaning for the creatures of the afterlife? A dead soul might devote ten years to becoming a board-game or lyre virtuoso, but what of the next ten thousand?10 At such timescales, an Aristotelian hierarchy of serious pursuits placed above play’s short-term pleasures no longer feels so intuitive. In Aristophanes’ Frogs the afterlife activity of the initiates is similarly described as play. Dionysus and his slave Xanthias descend into the underworld and encounter the chorus of initiates for the first time, and Xanthias says: “This is it, master! The initiates are playing here.”11 What is happening in the theater is that the chorus of initiates have just entered singing and dancing (“Iacchus! O Iacchus!”), and this verb paizō denotes that singing-dancing action. But this does not mean that these initiates are not really “playing”, and instead actually just “singing and dancing”. Rather, it means that this singing-dancing is precisely what one does Pindar fr. 129 Maehler 1989: τοῖσι λάμπει μὲν μένος ἀελίου / τὰν ἐνθάδε νύκτα κάτω, / φοινικορόδοις ἐνὶ λειμώνεσσι προάστιον αὐτῶν / καὶ λιβάνων σκιαρᾶν / καὶ χρυσοκάρποισιν βέβριθε / καὶ τοὶ μὲν ἵπποις γυμνασίοισι / τοὶ δὲ πεσσοῖς / τοὶ δὲ φορμίγγεσσι⌟ τέρποντα⌞ι, παρὰ δέ σφισιν / εὐανθὴς ἅπας τέθ⌟αλεν ὄλβος. For discussion, cf. Kirkwood (1982) 343–4, Lloyd-Jones (1985) 256, 277, and Cannatà Fera (1990) 163–94. 9 Cf. Kirkwood (1982) 344: “The pursuits of the blessed reflect the pleasures of the Greek aristocracy: horsemanship, athletics, draughts, and music.” Cf. Pind. Ol. 2.57–80, Pyth. 10.31–44. For garland-weaving as play, cf. Longus 1.9–11; for religious festivals as “play”, see Chapter 3 n. 12. 10 For Williams 1973, and the Czech play and opera on which it is based, 342 years is already enough. 11 Ar. Frogs 318–19: τοῦτ᾽ ἔστ᾽ ἐκεῖν᾽ ὦ δέσποθ᾽· οἱ μεμυημένοι | ἐνταῦθά που παίζουσιν. 8

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The Value of Serious Things before and after Death

when one is “playing” in Greek: in that overflow of pleasurable feeling, one sings, one dances, or, as Pindar writes, plays the lyre and plays boardgames.12 As in Pindar, so in Aristophanes, it seems: play is not just a temporary respite for typical premortem life structures, as if these dead souls were laboring during the day and playing to relax in the evening. Rather, the dead, since they are freed from life’s labors, are imagined leading lives of continuous play. It is always impossible to interpret with any certainty the meaning of grave goods, but it may be worth noting in this context that numerous graves of ancient Greek adults, and not just children, contain, for lack of a better word, playthings.13 In a grave from Attica dating to the mid-­ seventh century bce there is a small game-board with ten game pieces and a cubic die representing a backgammon-like game identified as pente grammai.14 Another early sixth-century burial in Kerameikos also contains such a game-board accompanied by cubic dice, and in Copenhagen there is another early sixth-century game-board from Athens, thought by many scholars to be a grave good.15 The Hellenistic period also offers a number of examples of burials with game-boards, dice, and game pieces. In Tomb B of Derveni, dated to the fourth century bce, some twenty glass game pieces and the remains of a gameboard made from wood were discovered,16 while elsewhere in Macedonia there is a discovery of a “rich male burial, identified as belonging to a senior Macedonian officer” along with weapons, crown, pottery, and “a See Introduction for this meaning of paizō. For a list of occurrences of paiz- words in the Frogs underworld, see Dover (1993) 57–9. 13 For various interpretations of these grave goods, cf. Vermeule (1979) 77–82, Garland (2001) 70–1 (but cf. Murray 1988, Draycott 2016 regarding the Classical Totenmahl reliefs), Morris and Papadopoulos (2004) 232–8, Whittaker (2004) 288–92, and Nankov (2013) 281; for children, cf. Beaumont (2012) 129–30, (2017) 265, and Sommer and Sommer (2015) 109–11. Kurtz and Boardman (1971) 209 write: “The number of apparently inappropriate offerings in burials are considerably reduced when we reflect that…adults keep their toys…” 14 See Schädler (2008) 176 for an image of this mid-seventh-century bce model of a gaming table with cubic die from Anagyros (National Museum, Athens); cf. Vermeule (1979) 80–2 and Whittaker (2004) 279 for descriptions and interpretations of the find; Kidd 2017b for further details of this widespread and popular board-game, perhaps best known from the Ajax and Achilles vase depictions (see especially the Brussels kyathos (Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire), mid-fifth century bce, depicted at Schädler (2008) 177). 15 For the early sixth-century bce miniature gaming table with die but damaged surface from the Kerameikos at Athens, cf. Whittaker (2004) 279–81 (280 for image) and Schädler (2008) 175; for the sixth-century gaming table (National Museum, Copenhagen) with nine parallel lines (Schädler 2008, 180, for image), Whittaker (2004) 279–81 (at 281: “The most likely assumption is perhaps that it also came from a grave”); Morris and Papadopoulos (2004) 232–9 for further discussion of such finds. Cf. Schädler (2007) 359–60 for a cross-cultural list of board-games found in burials. 16 Cf. Ignatiadou (1999) 513 and Nankov (2013) 280. 12

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The Value of Serious Things before and after Death

gaming board, with 52 glass and five bone pieces”.17 Ignatiadou reports early Hellenistic graves with cubic dice and game pieces, as well as a game-board from Thessalonike which is thought to be a version of the “Nine Men’s Morris” game.18 There are also numerous burials that include dice and game pieces but without the accompanying board, due partly, perhaps, to the decomposable nature of wood. One grave from Methone holds three bone dice, six blue opaque counters, and two translucent ones of different shades, while another grave in Sebaste contains five cubic dice, twenty-eight semi-translucent blue counters, and nineteen translucent ones—and there are many more such graves.19 An even larger number of graves contain knucklebones: in Hampe’s regional overview of graves with knucklebones, he writes: “Along with one, two, and three knucklebones, there are also very many higher numbers, such as 9, 17, 22, 32 knucklebones. Only a part of those come from child graves.”20 He specifies a man and woman buried together with 161 knucklebones, a woman with 230 knucklebones, and in Athens a man with 100 knucklebones under his head. One woman at Locri Epizephyrii was buried with 587 of them.21 Whether any of these grave finds can be directly connected to the notions of Pindar and Aristophanes, there seems to be a persistent notion, at least in the literary evidence, that play occupies not just some marginal role in the afterlife but, rather, becomes the activity of the afterlife. How is this possible, considering the general devaluation of play in everyday life? It seems that just as Aristotle observes the absurdity of an immortal god pursuing what mortals deem serious life pursuits—job Archibald (2011) 95. Cf. Nankov (2013) 280 n. 8. Ignatiadou (1999) 510; cf. Nankov (2013) 279 n. 6. For more such finds, cf. Ignatiadou (1999) and Nankov 2013 for Thrace. 19 Ignatiadou (1999) 514 with many more such examples. In Samothrace, Dusenbery (1967) 49 writes of an “astragal and two others [which] came with the counters from an Augustan grave” and that “[g]lass counters were found in a number of burials of various periods”. 20 Hampe (1951) 16: “Neben eins, zwei und drei Astragalen sind auch sehr viel höhere Zahlen vertreten, wie neun, siebzehn, zweiundzwanzig, zweiunddreißig Astragale. Nur ein Teil davon stammt aus Kindergräbern.” 21 Hampe (1951) 16, Kurtz and Boardman (1971) 208–9, Kurke (1999), Fisher (2004) 68; cf. Vermeule (1979) 232 n. 75. Why the large numbers? One can only speculate (Hampe 1951, 16, calls it “Astragalomanie”), but, if it does have anything to do with games, it is worth reminding that knucklebones were not just what one played with but one played for, as the weeping Ganymede from the Argonautica reminds (for which, see Chapter 4). To enter a game with hundreds of astragals suggests a sort of invincibility equivalent to playing poker with an endless pile of chips. 17 18



“Serious” for What?

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promotions, political office, retirement savings—so too many of the valued occupations of the premortem world appear to be absurd in the postmortem world. But if it is meaningless to work toward job promotions, political office, and retirement savings in the afterlife, what sorts of pursuits manage to win some sort of value? Like Pindar’s and Aristophanes’ souls in the underworld, for some it seems that all that is left are the pleasures of the moment, since longer-term pursuits have lost any recognizable longer term.

“Serious” for What? The purpose of this brief thought experiment regarding the change of values and pursuits according to different projected realities is to provide some perspective for the present inquiry into the “serious” and its evaluative sense. When Aristotle rejects play as the activity of the good life, he explains that both play and the activity of the good life are for their own sake, and both have the added element of pleasure, but, crucially, play lacks the element of “seriousness” that the good life enjoys. What is this “seriousness”, and why is it so crucial? It would seem that the “serious” confers some sort of value on life, but what exactly is the nature of that value? The question is especially important for this passage because Aristotle is often thought to switch meanings mid-sentence, moving from spoud- as “serious” to spoud- in its evaluative sense—that is, “good” or “excellent”. The activity of the good life, he goes on to explain, and as will be seen below, involves a “more excellent” (spoudaioteran) activity. There thus seems to be some relationship between the goal-oriented spoud- (“serious”) and the evaluative spoud- (“good, excellent”), but what is it exactly? As I suggested in the last chapter, if someone is “serious” about their actions they are not engaging in the action only so long as it is pleasurable—which is the province of play—but engaging in the action for the sake of some longer-term goal. However, there is an unavoidable aspect to the serious that would seem not to be reducible to a definition like “goal-oriented” at all. Often enough, spoudaios simply denotes something like “valuable”, “of value”, or even simply “good”.22 This is not some Aristotelian usage; the evaluative denotation of spoudaios—“good”, Cf. LSJ s.v. spoudaios II. 1, 2; GE s.v. spoudaios C.

22

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The Value of Serious Things before and after Death

“valuable”, “excellent”—whether referring to laws, lands, or something else, precedes Aristotle by over a century. Some things are spoudaios, it seems, not because they are “goal-oriented” but simply because they are “good”. Yet as I will argue, this evaluative sense of “serious” is nevertheless always meant as serious for something, especially serious for something in a projected real world. As the thought experiment about the afterlife above suggests, many such serious values do not remain stable when imagined into a different reality, and one reason may be that the evaluation of something as “serious” itself is pointing to some projected future. So, for example, a well-made shoe might be spoudaios in the sense of “excellent”, but this is “excellent” for a certain envisioned future where it might be worn and used, not unlike another typical Greek word for “good”, khrēstos.23 A piece of farmland might be spoudaios in the sense of “excellent”, but this too is “excellent” for a projected reality of seasons, harvests, and yields. Unlike play, whose values are limited to the pleasures of the moment, the evaluative denotation of spoudaios functions within a longer-term projected reality. Aristotle is thus not engaging in wordplay when he rejects play as not “serious”—something which the dictionaries suggest, and the scholars who insist on a separate evaluative meaning of spoudaios are forced to maintain.24 The “goal-oriented” sense, instead, is continuous with its evaluative sense. When something is evaluated as “serious”, a certain commitment is being shown regarding that object’s continuation into an envisioned future. As one philosopher puts it, who also studies the ways that values change according to different projected realities, there is “something approaching a conceptual connection between valuing something and seeing reasons to preserve or sustain it over time”.25 As such, it would seem that the evaluative denotation of spoudaios is not so far removed from the “goal-oriented” sense of the last chapter, after all. Even when spoudaios is being used as a term of evaluation, that evaluation is occurring under the assumption of a projected future full of implicit goals. For the spoudaios shoe, see Arist. EE 2.1, 1219a22–3. For a connection between spoudaios and khrēstos (also “good”, but often in the sense of “useful”, since khraomai means “use”), cf. Pl. Rep. 1.333e1–2: “Justice would not be particularly spoudaios if it happens to be useful with respect to useless things.” Cf. Dem. De falsa leg. 277 (σπουδαῖος καὶ πολλὰ χρήσιμος τῇ πόλει). 24 See below n. 29 and n. 40. 25 Scheffler (2013) 60. 23



“Serious” for What?

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I begin the argument by studying the word spoudaios as an evaluative term. Although the “excellent” (spoudaios) man assumes a certain historical significance in the fourth century, evaluative denotations had been current in the fifth as well, and the trajectory of the word’s evaluative sense, as has been argued before, should be understood as extending from things to people, not vice versa. Then I turn to the question of the relationship between the “goal-oriented” sense of spoudaios and the evaluative sense of “good”, “important”, focusing on passages which seem to use the word periphrastically. Behind many examples of evaluative spoudaios lies an often discernible spoudē (“seriousness”): the “good” object has a purpose, whether it is because the object’s maker was committed to that purpose to begin with, or because the object’s evaluator recognizes that purpose and, as such, its value. However, if we recall the afterlife thought experiment at the beginning, it must be remembered that the object or person is valuable for some projected context, and this is inescapable for the evaluative sense of spoudaios. At the end of the chapter, I consider the importance of this evaluative sense for play’s role in ancient aesthetics. In the last chapter, I argued that a distinction ought to be drawn between the “serious play” which occurs during play and the “serious play” which evaluates play from the outside.26 Only in the latter cases does “serious” assert some sort of value: the play is being seen from the outside as “valuable”, “of consequence”, and “important”. On the other hand, to evaluate something as “play” or “just play” from outside the act of play does the opposite: it deprives the action or object of potential value. This evaluative sense of “play” (and “serious”) helps to reveal play’s reduced role—and even the impossibility of maintaining a more central role—in aesthetics. Even if it could be agreed that play is a key activity of aesthetic experience, to name such activities “play” from the outside runs the risk of devaluing aesthetic experience itself. To say that art is “just play” is often tantamount to saying that art is not a serious or valuable thing, and so, not worthy of study. Yet this need not cause one to abandon play, as Plato had noticed. The act of play and the act of evaluation are simply two separate actions in one’s engagement with art.

Cf. Margalit (2018) 38: “It seems very possible for me to coherently and reasonably care greatly about the Spurs winning even without attaching any importance to the victory (‘It’s only a game’).”

26

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The Value of Serious Things before and after Death

“Serious” as an Evaluative Term When Aristotle rejects play as the activity of the good life he appeals to seriousness, but in two apparently different ways. The first was mentioned in the last chapter: “The good (eudaimōn) life seems to be according to excellence: and this is something done with seriousness, not in play.”27 This is that goal-oriented “seriousness” explored earlier: since the goal is excellence (aretē), one ought to strive after that excellence seriously (meta spoudēs), not follow the immediate pleasures of play. But his second sentence has a slightly different meaning of “serious”: “We also think that serious things are better than laughable and playful things, and the activity is more serious when it is of the better part and the better person; for the activity of the better [part or person] is always superior and more related to eudaimonia.”28 Here the issue is not so much that of intention and focus, but evaluation: what are the most important things in life? The “serious” things of life are better than the play things of life, just as the mind’s activity is more “serious” or “important” than other functions of the body. In the second part of the sentence, some translators discard the word “serious” altogether: Reeve, for example, suggests a “more excellent” activity, while Barnes and Kenny choose “more virtuous” activity.29 Yet even if one keeps “serious” for both occurrences of spoudaios here, as some do, it still does not seem to be meant in its sense of a mode or mood (i.e., goal-oriented), but in an evaluative sense (i.e., “good”, “excellent”). The activity of better people is “more serious”, in the sense of “more excellent”, “more virtuous”, or perhaps simply “better”. This evaluative meaning of spoudaios is well attested. When Theognis, for example, warns not to trust an unknown person when it comes to spoudaia matters, he means “important” matters, not “goal-oriented” matters.30 When Herodotus describes the three types of embalming on EN 10.6, 1177a1–2: δοκεῖ δ᾽ ὁ εὐδαίμων βίος κατ᾽ ἀρετὴν εἶναι· οὗτος δὲ μετὰ σπουδῆς, ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἐν παιδιᾷ. 28 EN 10.6, 1177a3–6: βελτίω τε λέγομεν τὰ σπουδαῖα τῶν γελοίων καὶ μετὰ παιδιᾶς, καὶ τοῦ βελτίονος, ἀεὶ καὶ μορίου καὶ ἀνθρώπου σπουδαιοτέραν τὴν ἐνέργειαν· ἡ δὲ τοῦ βελτίονος κρείττων καὶ εὐδαιμονικωτέρα ἤδη. For the emphasis of the body in Aristotle’s idea of play (as opposed to the mind involved in noetic contemplation), see Chapter 5. 29 Reeve (2014) ad loc. translates the last spoudaioteran as “more excellent”, with n. 831 saying: “Spoudaios, translated as ‘serious’ in the previous paragraphs, needs now, as subsequently, to be translated as ‘excellent’ (see I 7 1098a9)”. Irwin (1968) ad loc. translates it with two words, “more serious and excellent”; Barnes and Kenny (2014) ad loc. have “more virtuous”; Rackham (1934) translates “serious” throughout 1177a1–2. LSJ s.v. spoudaios A.II.2 suggests a “play on senses” in this passage. Cf. Chapter 7 n. 63 for similar debates regarding Arist. Poetics. 30 Theog. 65, 70, 116, 642–4. Cf. Her. 1.8.1 regarding Candaules entrusting Gyges with the “most important” (σπουδαιέστερα) matters; Ar. Lys. 96 (“important” glosses Henderson ad loc.), Aesch. Tim. 22.7; ironic at Hom. Hymn to Hermes 332 (σπουδαῖον τόδε χρῆμα θεῶν μεθ’ ὁμήγυριν ἦλθε, but cf. Allen and Sikes 1904 ad loc.: “The adjective is not Homeric”). 27



“Serious” as an Evaluative Term

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offer in Egypt, he explains that there is the cheapest way to do it, a midrange option, and then the “best” (spoudaiotatē) method.31 When he describes the positive effects of the Athenians’ democratic system—for example, their superiority in warfare—he explains that the Athenians “demonstrated that equality was a good thing (spoudaion khrēma) not in one way but in all ways”.32 The Scythian pastures he describes are, by contrast, not spoudaiai, that is, they are not of “good” quality for raising livestock.33 When Xenophon’s Socrates says that the reproductive materials of parents who are not in their prime are not spoudaia, he too means they are not “good” reproductive materials, while Plato’s Socrates, imagining the different honors and labors of different segments of society, explains that some honors may be “better” or “more important” (spoudaioterai) than others.34 In none of these examples does “goal-oriented” make for a good translation, since there is always some sort of evaluation taking place. Herodotus is not talking about goal-oriented embalming practices nor goal-oriented pastures; he is talking about “good” embalming and “good” pastures. Theognis is not talking about goal-oriented topics of conversation but “important” topics. Xenophon’s Socrates is not talking about “goal-oriented” reproductive material any more than Plato’s Socrates is referring to “goal-oriented” honors; they simply mean “good” reproductive materials and “important” honors. Spoudaios in these passages is thus not referring to some mood or mode (“goal-oriented”) but being applied as an evaluative term, which, like many Greek adjectives, may simply be translated as “good”. It is exclusively in this sense, after all, that Aristotle uses the word in the Categories, even, at one point, offering a definition: someone is called “excellent (spoudaios) by virtue of having excellence (aretē)” (10b7–8).35 As Gastaldi shows well, in the fourth century the word spoudaios comes to be used heavily to denote an “excellent” person, due perhaps to certain Her. Hist. 2.86: καὶ τὴν μὲν σπουδαιοτάτην αὐτέων φασὶ εἶναι τοῦ οὐκ ὅσιον ποιεῦμαι τὸ οὔνομα ἐπὶ τοιούτῳ πρήγματι ὀνομάζειν, τὴν δὲ δευτέρην δεικνύουσι ὑποδεεστέρην τε ταύτης καὶ εὐτελεστέρην, τὴν δὲ τρίτην εὐτελεστάτην… 32 Her. Hist. 5.78.2: δηλοῖ δὲ οὐ κατ᾽ ἓν μοῦνον ἀλλὰ πανταχῇ ἡ ἰσηγορίη ὡς ἔστι χρῆμα σπουδαῖον… 33 Her. Hist. 4.23; cf. 4.198.1. 34 Xen. Mem. 4.4.23 and Pl. Rep. 519d. Cf. Thphr. H.P. 5.3: τὰ σπουδαιότατα…τῶν ἔργων (GE s.v. spoudaios c. “the most valuable products”). 35 Ar. Cat. 10b7–8 in a grammatical rather than ethical context: “Someone is called spoudaios by virtue of having aretē” (τῷ γὰρ ἀρετὴν ἔχειν σπουδαῖος λέγεται). But cf. Ps.-Pl. Def. 415d11: σπουδαῖος ὁ τελεώς ἀγαθός· ὁ ἔχων τὴν αὑτοῦ ἀρετήν (the added αὑτοῦ seems closer to the Aristotelian notion of “excellence” according to function). 31

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The Value of Serious Things before and after Death

historical factors, for example, as a way to avoid the potentially negative valences surrounding the traditionally aristocratic kalos kagathos.36 Yet this should not, as Gastaldi also demonstrates, cause the reader to disconnect the word from its traditional resonances. The adjective, he writes, is “originally applied to objects, whose value and accuracy of execution is being emphasized”, and then becomes “inserted into a network of evaluative qualifications that pass from the ethical level to the social and political”.37 When the adjective is later applied to people, “the connection to spoudē is explicit”: “Spoudaios is defined as one who acts with care…and who by consequence obtains a positive evaluation.”38 Even as the substantive adjective later appropriates the range of the traditional kaloskagathos, the sense of spoudaios, due to “the mediation of spoudē” is “partly different”. As the usage in Xenophon suggests, “aretē, which the aristocratic conception considered an innate prerogative of agathos, is outlined now as a prize for effort, for ponos and epimeleia”.39 Gastaldi’s study is convincing in its mapping of a continuous range of meanings for this word. Rather than taking, for example, Aristotle’s definition of spoudaios in the Categories (“having excellence (aretē))” and cordoning off those usages that comfortably fit that definition from those that do not40—a practice, as was seen, that suggests Aristotle is engaging in wordplay during key arguments—he instead envisions an ongoing traffic between these various spheres of meaning: “The privileging of one of these multiple spheres of signification does not produce the See especially Theramenes’ remark to Critias at Xen. Hell. 2.3.18–19 with Gastaldi (1987) 67. But cf. Ps.-Arist. MM 1207b23–5 with Gigon (1981) 9. This usage can already be found at Her. 8.69 (regarding Artemesia). 37 Gastaldi (1987) 63–4: “L’assurgere di questo aggetivo, originariamente applicato ad oggetti, di cui sottolinea il pregio, l’accuratezza dell’esecuzione, a indicatore di portata semantica più vasta, inserito nella rete delle qualificazioni valutative che trascorrono dal piano etico, a quello sociale e politico, è un dato riscontrabile nei testi immediatamente precedenti o contemporanei al corpus, costitudendone pertanto un preciso orizzonte di riferimento.” 38 Ibid., 66: “[I]l nesso con spoude è esplicito. Spoudaios è definito colui che agisce con cura, dimostrando le proprie capacità, e che di consequenza ottiene una valutatione positive.” 39 Ibid., 68: “L’arete, che la concezione aristocratica considera una prerogative innata dell’agathos, si delinea ora come premio a uno sforzo, al ponos e all’epimeleia.” Cf. Dirlmeier (1999 [1956]) 284. Gigon (1981) 10 points to the three ways of becoming spoudaios at Ar. Pol. 1332a39 and writes: “Da ist deutlich, wie durch ‘spoudaios’ der allzu vage und vieldeutige Begriff des ‘agathos’ präzisiert werden soll.” 40 Golden (1965) 285–6 espouses this strategy, despite being aware of the range of “serious”, writing at 286: “In those contexts [in the Poetics] where ‘serious’ is a legitimate translation, it is always with the nuance found in such English expressions as ‘to take something seriously’ or ‘a matter of serious import.’ Here ‘serious’ means ‘of high significance’, expressing a principal quality of the arete of any thing or person.” 36



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cancellation of the other ones…”41 Demosthenes’ spoudaios slave (Phil. 3.31) is connected to Xenophon’s “excellent” politician (Mem. 4.2.2), who, in turn, is connected to Aristotle’s spoudaios ideal. However, is it really the case that the earlier evaluative sense of spoudaios focuses on technical accuracy and objects that are well crafted? This might work with regard to some examples, but what of Herodotus’ spoudaiai pastures, and Theognis’ spoudaia matters that are to be entrusted only to friends? Such objects appear to be evaluated along coordinates other than technical competence. Gastaldi’s notion is similar to Sparshott’s later connection of “serious” terms in Aristotle: “Only people who take a subject seriously, who study it and inform themselves about it and work at it, are worth taking seriously when that subject is pursued or practiced or discussed.”42 This too has a ring of technical competence about it: this person is evaluated according to the technical competence they have attained in the earnest pursuit of their craft. Yet what to make, then, of the evaluative sense of “serious” that, in the case of Herodotus’ pastures or Theognis’ conversation topics, seems to be irrelevant to issues of technical competence? It is worth turning to an example. In Plato’s Alcibiades, Socrates asks Alcibiades how he learned the difference between right and wrong, and Alcibiades eventually concedes that he learned it from everyday people at an age before he could even remember doing so. “If you were deferring to the authority of everyday people,” Socrates teases, “you take recourse to teachers who aren’t particularly spoudaious.”43 The word here is evaluative: there are good teachers (spoudaioi) and there are bad teachers (phauloi), and everyday people generally fall into the latter camp. When Alcibiades protests (“Aren’t everyday people sufficient teachers?”), Socrates answers: “These people can’t even teach what is good and bad in regard to playing board-games; and yet I think such topics are baser (phaulotera) than Gastaldi (1987) 104: “Il privilegiamento di una sola di queste molteplici sfere di significazione non produce la cancellazione delle rimanenti, solo un loro retrocedere su posizioni di sfondo, da cui continuano tuttavia a proiettare un intenso alone di allusività.” 42 Sparshott (1996) 50. Cf. Gigon (1981) 7: “Spoudaios selbst bezeichnet…auch den Menschen, der die Dinge Ernst nimmt, auf dessen Ernsthaftigkeit man sich verlassen kann; man weiß, daß er wichtige von unwichtigen Aufgaben unterscheiden und jede Anstrengung unternehmen wird, um die ihm zukommenden witchtigen Aufgaben bestmöglich zu bewältigen.” 43 Pl. Alc. 110e: οὐκ εἰς σπουδαίους γε διδασκάλους καταφεύγεις εἰς τοὺς πολλοὺς ἀναφέρων. For the attribution, see Denyer (2001) 14–26. In terms of Greek usage, the passage is important: the oppositions spoudaios/paidia and spoudaios/phaulos are elided here, showing that the meanings are not so separate as is often maintained (e.g. Gigon 1981, 7–8). 41

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The Value of Serious Things before and after Death

topics of justice.” 44 Here too is an issue of evaluation, much like Theognis’ “important” matters: some things are of high importance (issues of justice); other things are comparatively insignificant (issues of board-games). Although issues of technical competence are possible in regard to the good and bad teachers, they certainly vanish with regard to the distinction between board-games and justice. Yet, if the distinction is not one of technical competence and accuracy, what makes the “important” (spoudaios) matter “important”, and what makes the “insignificant” (phaulos) matter “insignificant”? Like Aristotle, Socrates is making a distinction between “serious” things (justice) and play things (board-games), yet Socrates here could choose any “insignificant” topic in contrast to the topic of justice: games are not the only thing that, when set next to justice, appear comparatively base. Some insight may be found in Plato’s Lysis. In this passage (219e), Socrates discusses the way people tend to value things, with the following scenario about a father and his son. If a father, who values his son above all other things, learns that his son has drunk poison and that wine will work as an antidote for this poison, will he not, in this moment, highly value that wine as well? And won’t he, in this scenario, also highly value the jar that holds the wine? Socrates’ interlocutor agrees on both points. So, Socrates concludes, “perhaps it is something like this: every such seriousness is not taken seriously with regard to those things that are prepared for something else; rather they are taken seriously for that thing for the sake of which everything else is prepared”.45 In this scenario, that is, there are a lot of things to be taking seriously and valuing highly: there is the wine, there is the jar, there is the son himself. Yet the values are relative: the father is not serious about the jar for its own sake but because of the life-saving wine it is holding; he is not serious about the life-saving wine for its own sake but for its ability to save his son; and so forth. In a life-saving situation, many objects can become “serious” and highly valued (e.g., the father might pay any price to keep the jar from breaking), but the nature of those values points to some further end beyond the Pl. Alc. 110e: οὔκουν τὰ πεττευτικά γε καὶ τὰ μη· καίτοι φαυλότερα αὐτὰ οἶμαι τῶν δικαίων εἶναι (with topics like justice being σπουδαιότερα in the following lines). Cf. Pl. Lach. 182e, Isoc. Antid. 250.4–8, 265.6–9, 267.5–6, 304.3–5. 45 Pl. Lys. 219e: ἢ ὧδέ πως ἔχει· πᾶσα ἡ τοιαύτη σπουδὴ οὐκ ἐπὶ τούτοις ἐστὶν ἐσπουδασμένη, ἐπὶ τοῖς ἕνεκά του παρασκευζομένοις, ἀλλ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἐκείνῳ οὗ ἕνεκα πάντα τὰ τοιαῦτα παρασκευάζεται. For the spoudaios–spoudazō link, cf. Rep. 10.608a (οὐ σπουδαστέον ἐπὶ τῇ τοιαύτῃ ποιήσει ὡς… σπουδαίᾳ), Laws 803c (τὸ μὲν σπουδαῖον σπουδάζειν). For the iatric art as something spoudaios, see Laws 889d; for offspring being the most spoudaios thing, cf. Lyc. Leoc. 131–2. For the spoudaios being something “especially worthy of attention”, cf. Dem. Tim. 4.2. 44



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objects themselves. In fact, for many of these objects, their purpose is the very substance of their value: because they are needed for some further goal, these objects become highly valuable and are counted among the serious things of the imagined scenario.46 Might this help to explain the evaluative nature of spoudaios beyond issues of technical competence? Theognis explains that “important” matters (spoudaia) should be only entrusted to friends, and this is the sense in which Socrates’ wine-jar and wine would be spoudaios. The wine-jar might be perfectly shoddy in its construction, the wine altogether flavorless, but in the context of saving the son’s life both assume values of highest importance. They are spoudaioi because they are “taken seriously”, and they are seriously valued, as Socrates explains, because they are vital to some further, longer-term goal.47 Herodotus’ pastures are evaluated as spoudaiai in some such similar way: for all the future goals of raising and consuming livestock, spoudaiai pastures would be vital, while non-spoudaiai pastures would be worthless. Some such similar explanation seems to lie behind Socrates’ difference between an “important” (spoudaios) issue like justice and an “insignificant” (phaulos) issue like board-games. Like Socrates’ wine-jar, topics of justice are given value inasmuch as they are vital to a number of further, longer-term goals—for example, the functioning of a society, the preservation of friendships, the health of the soul. Board-games participate in no comparable network of goals and ends. Knowing what is good and bad for board-games may be important for playing board-games, Socrates seems to suggest, but little else. It is really an insignificant (phaulos) matter.

The Most Serious Things Socrates’ exploration of relative values in the Lysis, where wine-jars and wine are “taken seriously” and, as I have been suggesting, are “important” (spoudaios) for the sake of some further end, implicitly suggests, however, that relative values can only go so far. There must be some ultimate end that is not pointing to anything further: in Socrates’ example, the ultimate end appears to be the son’s life, which is for its own sake. The son’s life is not “taken seriously” for the sake of some further end; it is taken Cf. Pl. Laws 644d, where σπουδῇ τινι συνεστηκός is all but periphrastic for σπουδαῖόν τι. A similar periphrasis is felt at 797b: τὰ σπουδῇ κείμενα νόμιμα for σπουδαῖα νόμιμα (for which, cf. Xen. Mem. 4.4.14). 47 For the verb spoudazō in such evaluative contexts, cf. Arist. Poet. 1449b1 with Chapter 7 n. 45. 46

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The Value of Serious Things before and after Death

seriously and valued in and of itself. This designation of ultimate values, of course, must also lie behind Aristotle’s notion that “serious” things are better than “play” things: as he repeatedly stresses, the most important objects and activities are the ones that are for their own sake, not for the sake of some further end.48 If these ultimate ends too are “serious” and to be “taken seriously”—as I assume that they are—in what sense can they partake in this goal-oriented mood of spoudē? It would seem to be paradoxical that an intrinsic value be somehow goal-oriented. Here is where it becomes important to return to the afterlife thought experiments at the beginning of this chapter, where, it will be remembered, many “serious” values no longer seemed to maintain their value in the afterlife. “Serious” things like job promotion, political office, and cures for diseases clearly are felt to be more important than “play” things like board-games, dice, and knucklebones. But this, as was suggested earlier, is only in regard to the premortem world. In postmortem life, by contrast—as writers like Lucian love to show—these “serious” pursuits and “serious” things no longer appear to be so important after all.49 The job promotion or the political office—although valued in the context of a human life for the esteem it brings, the doors is opens, and so forth—in the afterlife appear to dwindle and deteriorate in value, as if, in the face of eternity (or some large stretch of time), they can only be insignificant, meaningless, even absurd. Why does this happen? Is it that one would be comfortable committing to a goal like promotion or political office for five years, but not five hundred? Or is it that a five-year commitment only seems like a major investment at the timescale of a human life, but not at huge timescales, where, once again, such investments appear to be no more significant than five minutes of game-play? As Scheffler argues persuasively, many values, even those usually thought of as intrinsic, quickly decay in significance when imagined into different contexts, especially contexts of radically different timescales. “Valuing,” he writes, “is a diachronic phenomenon… [O]ne acquires a stake in how things go, in whether what one values is realized or achieved or sustained”; and: “When we value something…we project ourselves into the future and invest ourselves in that future.”50 One might imagine that, in the case of the job Arist. EN 1.1, 1094a14–16, 1.2, 1094a18–22, 10.6, 1176a35–b6; EE 2.1, 1219a10–11; Met. 2.2, 994b9– 16, 5.16, 1021b29–30. Cf. Reeve (2014) 197: “The end (telos) is the best and last thing for whose sake all the other things are done.” 49 E.g., in his Dialogues of the Dead, Menippus, Charon, and Cataplus. 50 Scheffler (2013) 60–1. 48



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promotion and the board-game, the comparative values may thus no longer be so obvious in a setting where the timescale is drastically reduced, or drastically expanded. If there is no tomorrow, the value of the job promotion drops dramatically, all but disappearing, while the boardgame may quickly become the more attractive choice. Similarly, if there are an endless number of tomorrows, perhaps both the promotion and the board-game might be felt to be equally insignificant or differentiated only by their comparative immediate pleasures. The spoud- words studied in this chapter may help to articulate Scheffler’s connection between “valuing something” and “seeing reasons to preserve or sustain it over time”—at least in ancient Greek terms.51 Behind every act of valuing can be discerned an application of this goal-oriented-mood spoudē, which emotionally invests in some object’s ongoing existence.52 When Socrates says that justice is a more “important” (spoudaios) topic than board-games, it is as if he, in valuing one over the other, is making some investment in one over the other. In a future full of implicit goals, one might explain, knowledge of justice is vital: how else would we improve society? How else would we maintain our friendships? Knowledge of board-games, by contrast, is comparatively “insignificant” (phaulos), because they have little purchase on that projected goal-laden future. Knowledge of justice, not board-games, deserves the emotional investment of spoudē: if only one can be “preserved over time”, the choice is clear which is worth “valuing” or “taking seriously”. Perhaps the same may be said of many intrinsic values. Although the son’s life, in Socrates’ example, is valued for its own sake, it would seem that the act of valuing itself (or “taking seriously”) is undergirded by some assumed, projected future. The valued object (here, the son) requires a future time for its continued existence, and this emotional investment of spoudē is directed at that assumed future. It is a sort of value that is altogether different from the value of board-games, if “value” is the right word for the latter category. It is not the pleasure of the moment but a value that relies on a fairly concrete notion of future time for its very existence. Even intrinsically valuable activities, like contemplation, might be understood in this sense: inasmuch as the activity is valued or taken seriously, it is not being enjoyed simply for some Ibid., 60. Note the rearticulation of the Athenian’s discussion of “valuing” (timē, timaō) at 5.727a–730a as “taking seriously” (spoudē, spoudazō) at 5.743e.

51

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immediate pleasure (even if pleasure accompanies it) but being recognized as something worthy of continued investment, something that ought to be “preserved or sustained over time”.53 Might this explain why, for some, play becomes a central activity of the afterlife? It is not quite that play assumes a new serious value in the afterlife, but that the very notion of value or taking seriously becomes completely destabilized by the radically different timescales of the afterlife. “Eat, drink, play,” the tombstones command, even though, one might imagine, such a style of life could hardly leave one with enough money for a tombstone. 54 Initiates “play” in the underworld both in Aristophanes and Pindar, and in Polygnotus’ fifth-century painting the Nekuia some of the heroes appear to be trapped in an eternal game of playing dice, even though such eternal play and unstructured time may strike temporal creatures as more of a hell than a heaven.55 For creatures of this world, serious things are better than play things, as Aristotle says, and topics of justice are more “important” (spoudaios) than topics of board-games, as Plato’s Socrates says. But in another context, the hierarchy is no longer so obvious: without the time frame of human life, it becomes difficult to see how anything can be found to be “serious”, “important”, or “valuable” at all.56

Conclusions: Play’s Evaluative Denotation and the Consequence for Its Role in Aesthetics The evaluative denotation of “serious” alongside its descriptive “goal oriented” sense is reflected in its opposite, play. When Socrates, in the Crito, for example, considers what a previous philosophical conclusion would amount to if it were abandoned in the face of death, he asks: “Has it turned out to be obvious, after all, that we were just speaking for the sake

Pleasure itself can be valued (one might, e.g., want to pack a board-game for some future envisioned afterlife), but this is different from choosing pleasure in the moment: its “value” would be pointing to future enjoyment. 54 Lattimore (1962) 260–3, but add IG II2 4533, IMT Olympene 2726, TAM II 355, ΤΑΜ ΙΙΙ.1 922, and the fourth-century bce inscription discussed by Wörrle 1997, Draycott (2016) 254–6, and Lockwood (2016) 322–4; cf. Aristoboulos FGrH 139 F 9a = Ath. 530c: ἔσθιε, πῖνε, παῖζε; Phoenix Iambs fr. 1 (CA 231–2) = Ath. 530f10–11: ὁκόσον ἔπαισα χὠκός᾽ ἤεισα / χωκόσσ᾽ ἐράσθην. 55 Paus. 10.30.2, 10.31.1. For an overview and reconstruction of this painting, see StansburyO’Donnell 1990. 56 What is “excellent”, as even Aristotle himself suggests (above), is context-bound; cf. MM 1200b15 with Gigon (1981) 9. For metaphysical explorations of play, cf. Heraclitus fr. 52 DK, Pl. Laws 1.644d, 7.803c–e, 10.903d, Plotin. Enn. 3.8.1. 53



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of argument, and it was all really just play and empty talk?”57 He does not appear to be describing their past action as “play” in the sense of its mood—for example, that he and his friends had been literally playing, joking, and engaging in such conversation “for the sake of pleasure alone”. Instead, there is every reason to believe that these past conversations were highly serious in mood even if, in hindsight, such conversations are devalued as “just play”. This evaluative denotation of play is noticeable too in Socrates’ summing up of mimetic art in the Republic as just “play”, or his judgement of writing in Phaedrus as just “play”.58 In these cases, as was seen in Chapter 2, he uses the word “play” more to devalue these activities (“trifle”, “unimportant”) than to characterize their intention or mood. Mimetic poets may not believe that they are “playing” at all—indeed, they may take their labors very seriously—but from Socrates’ adopted perspective their activities and output can be seen as “just play”, or, as he glosses the word, “nothing worthy of consideration”. “Play”, like “serious”, is thus not limited to describing moods and modes: it also can serve as an evaluative label. If this is so, one might imagine profound limitations for any role that play could acquire in aesthetics. If “serious” often denotes “good” or “important”, “play” often denotes the opposite: “unimportant”, “without value”, “not worthy of consideration”.59 This would mean that works of art and theater too might be called “play”, not as a descriptive term characterizing the mood or mode of artists creating their artworks, but as a term of devaluation. It was already seen how Socrates in the Republic sums up the mimetic art as “play” much as he devalues writing as “play” in the Phaedrus, but this pejorative sense of play can be observed in other authors as well. Much later, for example, the mysterious critic behind On the Sublime uses “play” in this pejorative sense. Discussing writers who attempt to be inspired in their writing, but ultimately fall flat, he explains: “Although such writers think they are inspired, they are not inspired but just playing.”60 The distinction does not seem to be one of intention and mood, as if sublime writers experience divine inspiration, while lesser writers only fool around for fun. Rather, both groups engage in roughly the same behavior—an attempt at inspired writing, as he Pl. Crt. 46d: νῦν δὲ κατάδηλος ἄρα ἐγένετο ὅτι ἄλλως ἕνεκα λόγου ἐλέγετο, ἦν δὲ παιδιὰ καὶ φλυαρία ὡς ἀληθῶς; for play’s pairing with nonsense, cf. Prt. 347c–d with Kidd (2014) 43–50. 58 Pl. Rep. 10.602b; Phdr. 276d–e. 59 Note the gloss (μηδὲν…ἄξιον λόγου) at Rep. 10.602b (τόν τε μιμητικὸν μηδὲν εἰδέναι ἄξιον λόγου περὶ ὧν μιμεῖται, ἀλλ᾽ εἶναι παιδιάν τινα καὶ οὐ σπουδὴν τὴν μίμησιν). 60 Long. Sub. 3.2: πολλαχοῦ γὰρ ἐνθουσιᾶν ἑαυτοῖς δοκοῦντες οὐ βακχεύουσιν ἀλλὰ παίζουσιν. 57

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explains—but only the first group succeeds. Just like the past philosophical conversations that become play in hindsight no matter how serious the conversations originally were, so too these “inspired” passages, no matter how earnestly written, appear to the sensitive critic as mere “playing” or “trifling”. When applied in its evaluative sense, “play” has the ability to diminish any activity’s value, regardless of the original intentions of that activity. If this is the case, it becomes clearer why the word paignion, which comes to attach itself to certain literary genres and lighter fare, often carries a whiff of devaluation about it. Gorgias, for example, writing in the fifth century, famously sums up his Encomium of Helen as “praise for Helen, but a paignion for me”.61 He means to say that the speech was a “trifle” and he wrote it just to entertain himself. Yet there is more to the word paignion here than intention and mood: there is a palpable element of depreciation. This speech is not one of his more “serious” and “important” works, he seems to be saying; it is not some grand masterpiece he is committing himself to, like Thucydides’ “possession for all time”. 62 Rather, Gorgias, with the lightest of touches, offers his speech as something to take or leave, as if little labor were expended, or as if it would cause him little grief if the speech were indeed treated like a trifle. Whether the depreciation is meant in earnest is beside the point: the word paignion suggests that if Gorgias had some grand masterwork in mind to commit himself to and base his reputation on, the Encomium of Helen is not it. Many ancient authors have paignia ascribed to them. Crates the Theban, Aratus, and Philetas of Cos are said to have written paignia, and the name even at one point gets attached to Theocritus’ Idylls.63 Like Gorgias’ encomium, the works seem to be presented as lighter engagements. No doubt part of the title may have to do with the tone of the work—they are not “serious” in mood in the way tragedy is serious in mood. But there is a suggestive evaluative element as well: such works are

Gorg. Hel. 11.21 DK: ἐβουλήθην γράψαι τὸν λόγον Ἑλένης μὲν ἐγκώμιον, ἐμὸν δὲ παίγνιον. Τhuc. Hist. 1.22.4. 63 For Crates the Theban (fourth/third century bce), see Diog. Laert. 6.85; for Aratus, see fr. 111 SH; for Philetas, see frs. 10–13 CA; for Theocritus’ pastoral paignia, see Aelian Nat. Anim. 15.19; cf. also Monimus of Syracuse, fourth century bce (Diog. Laert. 6.83); Thrasymachus A1 DK (= Suda s.v. Thrasymachus); cf. Ps.-Democritus’ Paignia (magical spells, Democritus fr. 300.19 DK) and the obscure paignia genre attributed to Salpe (Ath. 7.322a; Bain 1998 and Davidson 2000, 43–4, for discussion), apparently related to the paignia of Mnaseas of Locris/Colophon and Botrys of Messene (Ath. 7.321f–322a). 61

62



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meant to be taken as inconsequential, not particularly significant, and so identifiably “light”. The word even comes to be attached to a certain genre of mimes by the time of Plutarch;64 such mimes, he explains, were full of scandalous buffoonery and “not fit even for slaves to watch.”65 But what may connect all of these paignia mimes is their professed lack of value: they are “light”, that is, “just” entertainment without any further consequence demanded either by author or audience. This is not to say that “play”-words only attach to “light” theater or “light” art. As has been seen, the word is often used without any evaluative denotation at all.66 Yet sometimes there is a noticeable encroachment of play as an evaluative term, and this denotation severely limits the possibilities for play as an aesthetic category. How can art be called “play” without being thereby devalued? Or to put it more precisely, how can art be called “play” without the pejorative aspect of play creating confusion as to just what is being described? There seems to be no way of avoiding the notion that defining art as (just) play would cause art to become “just entertainment” or “just amusement”. Yet usually, both in antiquity and today, there is a general feeling that art ought to be treated as something worthy of deeper consideration, something, for lack of a better word, that is “serious”. It thus becomes interesting to observe the forms that “serious play” might take. To return to the examples of “serious play” mentioned in the last chapter, where the serious aspect is not within the act of play but evaluative from outside the act of play, one may recall Socrates’ “playful” story of Odysseus, Circe, and the swine in the Memorabilia: “He’d tell these playful stories (epaizen) about these things while at the same time being serious (spoudazōn),” Xenophon writes.67 That is, Socrates’ stories were not “just play” but also contained serious lessons of some sort, in this case a lesson about sympotic overindulgence. It is the moral lesson that is spoudaios (serious, important), and so both imparted with, and For paignia as mimes, see especially Davidson 2000, who includes Gnesippus (fifth century bce; Ath. 14.638d), Laevius’ Erotopaegnia (early first century bce), Glauce of Chios (Hedylus 10 GP with note ad loc.), Suet. Aug. 99 (= Com. Adesp. fr. 925 KA), and a metatheatrical reading of Ar. Ecclez. 877–1111. The last word of Longus’ novel (paignia) may also have metapoetic resonances considering the novel’s relationship to mime (for which, see, e.g., Morales 2004, 71–2). 65 Plut. QC 712e: τὰ δὲ παίγνια πολλῆς γέμοντα βωμολοχίας καὶ σπερμολογίας οὐδὲ τοῖς τὰ ὑποδήματα κομίζουσι παιδαρίοις…θεάσασθαι προσήκει. 66 See Introduction and Chapter 2. Davidson (2000) 43 n. 3 argues that LSJ s.v. paignion A.III.2 is mistaken regarding Pl. Laws 816e (a theatrical play, not just a comic play): cf. Plut. Solon 29.7, where paidia is practically the English theatrical “play”; a “dance” at Pl. Laws 7.796b (paignia enoplia). 67 Mem. 1.3.8: τοιαῦτα μὲν περὶ τούτων ἔπαιζεν ἅμα σπουδάζων. 64

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The Value of Serious Things before and after Death

worthy of, spoudē (seriousness, commitment). One might compare the spoudaia topics of Theognis, or the “more important” (spoudaiotera) topics of justice that Socrates promotes in the Alcibiades (110e). The moral import of Socrates’ story is its takeaway, its longer-term value, Xenophon seems to be suggesting. This occurs not just at the level of a story, but at the level of a joke. When Plutarch’s Alcibiades, for example, makes jokes about the use of the aulos in Athenian education, his underlying criticism was taken seriously enough that he and his companions were freed from aulos study altogether. It seems here that there is an aspect to the joke that is valuable inasmuch as it is pleasurable—namely the playful aspect of the joke— and then there is an aspect to the joke that links up to longer-term values and goals of the outside world—namely the serious aspect. Alcibiades was asserting important and relevant points about the role of the aulos in education, even though he was, on the surface of it, joking or playing.68 Serious play in this evaluative sense of “serious” would thus seem to separate the pleasure of play from its evaluation or judgement. Socrates’ companions, in listening to his stories, play and enjoy that play, but the judgement—the decision whether that play is to be evaluated as “serious” (worthy of further consideration) or just “play” (unworthy of further consideration)—is a separate act altogether.69 From the outside, or perhaps from hindsight, Socrates’ companions connect Socrates’ stories to real-world concerns, extracting nuggets of wisdom applicable to real life. Like the audiences imagined via certain mimetic conceptions of art, Socrates’ listeners relate his stories to their own real-life experiences, concerns, and goals—at least, inasmuch as they are taking these stories seriously. By contrast, if Socrates’ stories were “just play”, there would be no such perceived connection or applicability, and his stories would approach those generic paignia, thought to be little more than “trifles”. If, as I have been arguing in this chapter, the word “serious” (spoudaios) suggests a sort of value that is based on real-world existence and realworld goals, it would seem to be impossible to evaluate art or take it seriously without that assumed substructure. The connection of art to life and the “seeing reasons to preserve it over time” relies on an assumed Plut. Alc. 2.7: τοιαῦτα παίζων ἅμα καὶ σπουδάζων ὁ Ἀλκιβιάδης αὑτόν τε τοῦ μαθήματος ἀπέστησε καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους. 69 Contrast the judgement “This is play” as a mood/mode (“We are now engaging in an activity for pleasure alone”) and the judgement “This is play” as an evaluation-for (“That play had no educative value / no moral takeaway / no contribution to the art form”).

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ongoing reality as a precondition for evaluation. This is not quite saying that art necessarily must be connected to life—it is perfectly possible simply to “play” art and enjoy that play—but rather that it is impossible to evaluate art, to assert value in art—just as it is impossible to assert the value of anything—without connecting it to ongoing temporal life. We might play and pursue pleasure alone in the experience of art, but as soon as we stop playing and try to explain what has happened from an outside perspective, as soon as we wish to decide—even during the course of the play—whether and what aspect of this activity is valuable, we are evaluating things for the world outside the play, and so, of course, no longer playing.

Conclusions: Toward a Pleasure-Model of Play

The kernel of the argument I have been pursuing over these past eight chapters is that ancient Greek conceptions of play (paidia) were slightly different from our own contemporary notions. Play today is often thought to be a certain set of actions that produce a joyful feeling, but Greek play, by contrast, was often thought to be a joyful feeling that manifests itself in certain actions. This minor tweak in terms results in some fascinating ramifications. It invites not only a comprehensive reconsideration of play itself but also, inasmuch as questions of aesthetics have been traditionally intertwined with play, a reconsideration of those traditional aesthetic questions. In the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2, I explored this difference in terms. Chapter 1 emphasized psycho-physiology because, if pleasure is producing the activity “play” rather than vice versa, it becomes necessary to understand where that pleasure is thought to be originating in the first place. The heightened state of pleasure shared by children and intoxicated adults offers an answer: people act differently under the influence of pleasure, and this type of pleasure-action is regularly described as “play” (paizō). This psycho-physiology provides context for Plato’s own late turn to play, discussed in Chapter 2, where he defines play not as a mimetic activity but an activity engaged in “for pleasure alone”. What he means by this, as was seen in the Laws, is that, if someone moves their voice for pleasure alone, they are “singing” (a traditional denotation of paizō); if they move their bodies for pleasure alone, they are “dancing” (also a traditional denotation of paizō). Unlike other activities motivated by some expectation of a future pleasure reward, play activities are motivated by, and so suffused with, pleasure itself. This is what Plato means by “pleasure alone”. This new arrangement—where pleasure catalyzes, rather than is catalyzed by, these various activities like dancing, singing, theater, and other constituents of “the arts”—raises a series of questions which I engaged 



Conclusions: Toward a Pleasure-Model of Play

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with in the chapters that followed. What does it mean for a spectator to “play”? While dicers and dancers are observably “playing”, spectators tend not to move their bodies at all. This question was addressed in Chapter 3: via Plato’s Philebus and Laws, I suggested that when players “play” games, they inhabit their bodies and move their “selves” in that game.1 Spectators, by contrast, “play along” with the on-stage actors, but with the proviso that such play lacks a moving body, and so, a projected self. What role is left for art objects if play can turn anything into a pleasure? This question was addressed in Chapter 4: although the child, through play, can turn anything in its environment into a pleasure-object, the toy invites the child to play certain games; as Plato says, it “turns” the child’s pleasures in a certain direction. The art object, by analogy, does not so much catalyze pleasure as invite the viewer to play certain games, “turning” the pleasures of play brought to it. How does this explanation of play engage with more traditional mimesis-based theories of art? This question was addressed in Chapters 5 and 6. Aristotle demotes play from its ­elevated position in late Plato, but without play he has difficulty explaining how artistic mimēmata differ from non-artistic mimēmata. Play can help to resolve this problem, as Plato recognized. How can we explain “serious” play if play is about immediate pleasure? This question was addressed in Chapters 7 and 8. In Chapter 7, I argued that a player might be serious—that is, “goal-oriented”—within the play, and a spectrum must be u ­ nderstood between “serious” and “frivolous” forms of play. However, it is also possible for someone to be serious about play outside the act of play, and this evaluative notion of “serious” was explored in Chapter 8. A “serious” work of art cannot be elided with the notion that tragedy is a more “serious” genre than comedy: the latter involves the “serious” or “goal-­oriented” commitments of the player within the play (Chapter 7) while the former involves the outside evaluations of a “serious” or “goal-­oriented” world (Chapter 8). This slight modification in conceptions of play, then, results in nothing short of a new history of ancient aesthetics. Play is not only a feature of modern aesthetic thought, but has been established and debated since antiquity. Moreover, despite Collingwood’s notion—that “comparisons have often been made…between art and play” but “have never thrown much light on the nature of art” since “those who have made them have As discussed in Chapter 3, 94–6, the “self ” need be nothing more than the one committed to for “pleasure alone”; see below regarding the difference between pretending to be a queen and being a queen so long as it is pleasurable to be so.

1

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Conclusions: Toward a Pleasure-Model of Play

not troubled to think what they meant by play”2—ancient philosophers thought deeply about play, and offered compelling accounts. These accounts of play were rooted in the Greek spoken by everyday people, since, as was seen, art had often been conceived of as play from the times of the Homeric epics onward. What are the consequences of ancient paidia for play theorists of the 21st century? I will suggest three takeaways. The first will likely not provoke much of a surprise. Play theorists from Huizinga to Spariosu often speak of a “play concept” which is applied to, and studied in, different cultures.3 For ancient Greece, for example, this “play concept” was allegedly divided into paidia (non-competitive play) and agon (competitive play).4 But what is this “play concept”? Isn’t it simply the English word “play” (or some modern European equivalent) that emanates from a particular cultural context? If so, why should a word from the 20th and 21st centuries dominate the terms of a cross-cultural discussion? An ancient Greek no doubt would find it puzzling that an agon (“competition”) is really just “play”, and rightly counter by claiming that it is we who do not have full access to the “play”, that is, the paidia “concept”. “Enjoyment”, they might say, is actually at the heart of the paidia concept, “jewelry” is actually the same thing as a “toy”, and “dancing” a foremost example of playing. So, the first takeaway is something that has long been urged in other fields: crowning the English word “play” as the “concept” that other cultures partially or fully partake in can only lead to blind spots.5 The second takeaway has to do with this blind spot. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “play” once meant “enjoyment, pleasure, joy,

One of the two epigraphs to this book. For such “comparisons…sometimes amounting to identification”, cf. Schiller’s (1967 [1794]) fourteenth and fifteenth letters (94–109), Schlegel (1962–74 [1809]) v. 30, Schleiermacher (1984 [1819]) i.xii (16–17), xvi (21–2), xix–xx (26–7), Spencer (1895) II.627–47 §533–40 (inspired apparently by Schiller’s Spielbetrieb at §533, II.627), and Pater (1980 [1873]) 119: “[O]ften such moments are really our moments of play…” For various interpretations of Kant’s “free play of the faculties” (“probably the most central notion of his aesthetic theory”), see Ginsborg (2014) 2.3.2. 3 Huizinga’s (1971 [1938]) initial sensitivity (e.g., 28: “We can only start from the play-concept that is common to us, i.e. the one covered, with slight variations, by the words corresponding to the English word “play” in most modern European languages”) seems to fade from view as the arbitrary English “play” becomes play itself (e.g., 31: “[T]he Greeks…failed to perceive the essential play-element in the latter [i.e., agon] very clearly”). Cf. Spariosu (1982) 14: “As has often been remarked, there is no single word in Greek which will cover all the aspects of the play-concept.” 4 Cf. Huizinga (1971 [1938]) 30–1 with reference to Bolkestein’s (1937) 26 earlier critique of this idea; cf. Spariosu (1982) 14–21. 5 See, e.g., Wierzbicka 2013. 2



Conclusions: Toward a Pleasure-Model of Play

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delight”, but this denotation has fallen out of use.6 How might we see “play” differently if we began to think of it as ancient Greeks often seem to have done, namely a pleasurable internal state giving rise to certain activities rather than a set of certain activities that give rise to pleasurable states? For one, our definitions of play might become a little less cumbrous. Huizinga, for example, defines play as: a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious”, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.7

He continues to identify further “basic aspects” like contest and representation, and his full definition continues for over a page. Caillois too offers a similar sort of list, allowing for six essentials to play. Play is “an activity which is essentially” (1) “free”, (2) “separate”, (3) “uncertain”, (4) “unproductive”, (5) “governed by rules”, and (6) containing “make-believe”.8 He proceeds to establish four categories of games— agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry, and ilinx (games that induce a whirling sort of feeling)—and suggests that they be cross-cut by two poles of play, namely ludus (rule-bound play) and paidia (free play).9 It is interesting that Caillois chooses the Greek term paidia for a sort of free play that precedes all of these elements in his intricate taxonomy. But he does not attempt to explain how play in all its complexity develops and subdivides from this initial form of children’s free play. Play is simple at first, he seems to suggest, and then it becomes complex in all of these varieties, and these varieties are just as essential to his definition as whatever that chronologically earlier free play was.10 Might the ancient idea of play as a pleasure-mode offer a way of ­viewing these lists more holistically? Instead of listing the variety of causes for enjoyment in play—make-believe, competition, whirling, and OED II.6.b. Huizinga (1971 [1938]) 13, continuing from there with the features of “contest” and “representation”; cf. the definition at 28, where he adds a “feeling of tension” and “joy”. 8 Caillois (2001 [1958]) 9–10. 9 Ibid., 12–26. 10 Ibid., 27 for paidia; at 29: “At this point the contradictory roads of agon, alea, mimicry, and ilinx begin to bifurcate.” Cf. Sutton-Smith (1997) 230 regarding his own “heteroglossia of possibilities”, which “falls far short of a full accounting”. 6 7

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Conclusions: Toward a Pleasure-Model of Play

so forth—what if these were seen rather in the reverse, not as causes of enjoyment but effects of enjoyment? Take, for example, the notion of play as not “serious”. As was seen in Chapter 7, an ancient Greek might parse the opposition as activities that are engaged in for immediate pleasure, that is, play, and activities that are engaged in for some deferred pleasure or goal, namely serious activities. If someone builds a structure for the pleasure of it, they are playing. If they build for some reason other than pleasure, they are building seriously. If this is accepted as a plausible parsing of the play/serious opposition, it is only a small step to explain the often appended feature of makebelieve or mimesis.11 When players build some structure, they are not pretending to build, nor engaging in some make-believe of building, nor imitating some serious builder. They are simply building for the pleasure of it. Yet, as I have suggested in this book, inasmuch as they are building for pleasure, their play activity incidentally mirrors more serious forms of building, and so, from the outside, it might be seen as a mimesis. 12 Similarly, when someone plays a queen in a game or on stage, it is not that they are imitating some queen or pretending to be a queen or engaging in make-believe; they simply are a queen, so long as it is pleasurable to be one. Although mimesis is not the intention of the play, mimesis nevertheless occurs incidentally: from the outside, that play-queen mirrors those actual queens who commit to their roles in more permanent ways. It would thus seem that the ancient idea of play as a pleasure-mode has some potential to simplify our own definitions, or at least make some useful connections between the different strands. On the other hand, it could be objected that any claim to unify play or locate some essence of play is an inherently weak, even misguided, position. When Wittgenstein, for example, wished to illustrate his preference for “family resemblance” over “essence”, he turned to games: “Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games’. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?” he asks.13 There is no essential element to games, he argues, rather: “if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that”.14 One would do better, he suggests, by considering such classes in terms of See Gadamer (1960) 103 for “darstellende Spiele”, Caillois (2001 [1958]) 19–23 for mimicry; cf. Moseley (2016) 17: “Play is also bound up with make believe…” 12 See Introduction, 17–19, Chapter 6, 157–8. 13 Wittgenstein (1958) I§66. See Suits (2014 [1978]) 1–2 for response, 37 for definition. 14 Ibid. 11



Conclusions: Toward a Pleasure-Model of Play

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“family resemblances” rather than searching for some common thread which unifies them all. In attempting to unify a list like that of Caillois’ or Huizinga’s, then, there is the possibility of heading in the wrong direction. Complexity, not simplicity, promises the more accurate account of family concepts like “play”. And yet there is something pleasing about engaging with a clear and unified argument, rather than the blurred multiplicity of a list.15 As the philosopher Charles Larmore suggests, “the human mind hankers after simplicity” and seems “inclined by nature to find intellectual pleasure in tidy systems that subsume the many under the one”.16 So rather than reducing “play” to a monist position, the goal may be rather to express a single aspect as clearly as possible in order that it engage with other aspects in the ongoing conversation.17 Gadamer, for example, starting from another etymology—namely the etymology for the German word for “play”, Spiel—fashions a very different theory: “The back-and-forth movement is obviously so central to the definition of play, that it makes no difference who or what is carrying out this movement.”18 How does paidia, a pleasure-model of play, engage with Gadamer’s model of play? How does it explain aspects that his model cannot, and how does his model explain things that the pleasure-model cannot?19 What I hope to have offered with this book is another word, another idea, to communicate with other words and ideas. E.g., Moseley (2016) 15–17 comes strikingly close to Plato’s chap. 2 position (e.g., at 16, “play activates music…”), but this argument suffers from an unfocused notion of play in the following pages (17–66; explicitly at 16: “Play’s resistance to definition is one of its defining qualities”). Cf. Hein’s (1968) 71 conclusion more generally: “Our understanding of art and of aesthetic experience might profit from an elaboration and clarification of the concept of play.” 16 Larmore (1997/8) http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR22.6/Larmore.html (accessed 6/26/18); cf. Larmore (2017) 19–22, specifically critiquing Wittgenstein at 20–1. 17 Cf. Larmore (2017) 22: “Wir müssen lediglich erkennen, dass jedwede philosophische Theorie auf bestimmte Aspekte ihres Gegenstands trifft, denen sie bestenfalls nur schwer Rechnung tragen kann, und dass es sich mithin bei der Wahl zwischen Theorien immer um das Abwägen des Für und Wider handeln muss. Zudem hat es keinen Sinn, die Schlüsse, die wir dann ziehen, nur halbherzig oder ausweichend zu vertreten. Es gilt vielmehr, die Ansichten, die uns im Großen und Ganzen am besten begründet erscheinen, gerade deshalb für wahr zu halten und sie demnach dezidiert auszuarbeiten, damit ihre Stärken und auch Schwächen deutlich werden.” 18 Gadamer (1960) 99: “Die Bewegung des Hin und Her ist für die Wesensbestimmung des Spieles offenbar so zentral, daß es gleichgültig ist, wer oder was diese Bewegung ausführt.” 19 See Chapter 4 for the problem of restricting a notion of play to playing pre-existent games (as Gadamer 1960, 97–103, does), and Chapter 7, 179–80 for the problem of seeing all play as “serious” and losing sight of more frivolous forms of play (e.g., Gadamer 1960, 97: “Nur der Ernst beim Spiel läßt das Spiel ganz Spiel sein. Wer das Spiel nicht ernst nimmt, ist ein Spielverderber”). It is also unclear how mimetic games (“darstellende Spiele”, 103) emerge from (or if he means them to emerge from) the play he discusses at 99–102 (e.g., “das Hin und Her einer Bewegung…die an keinem Ziele festgemacht ist, an dem sie endet”, 99), or how the “relaxation” (100) of play relates to its “joy” (109). 15

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Conclusions: Toward a Pleasure-Model of Play

The third and final takeaway has to do with present-day questions about the boundaries between traditional categories of art, on the one hand—for example, painting, sculpture, drama, and film—and, on the other, more recent arrivals to the scene, especially the multi-billion-dollar industry of digital games. Digital game theorists naturally have questions posed by modernity, not antiquity. They ask, for example: how do digital games resemble or differ from traditional categories of art, or sometimes they ask, more concisely, “Are games art?”20 How are game narratives different from the narratives found in novels and other forms of fiction?21 In what sense can the modern notion of “aesthetics” be applied to games?22 As the point of departure, “art” tends to be located on one side of the equation, “games” on the other, and naturally so: digital games emerged in a society that held—and generally continues to hold—the two separate.23 But if we draw the clock back far enough, it might be asked whether these two categories were always so hermetically sealed from one another. Greek, after all, comfortably calls both “play”. Might a time be imagined when games and art were seen as continuous, as variations on a single theme, rather than generically different? Keeping that question in mind, it is worth ending with a final image from archaic Greece that tantalizes with its permeable boundaries. In the eighth book of the Odyssey, the Phaeacians entertain Odysseus with music, dancing, and athletic events. After Demodocus sings his song about Ares and Aphrodite, King Alcinous suggests they turn to a dance performance: Then Alcinous told Halios and Laodamas to dance on their own, since no one rivalled them. So they took in their hands a beautiful, red ball—the one that the expert Polybus had made for them. One of them threw the ball up to the overshadowing clouds, bending backward, and the other leapt high up from the earth, easily catching it before touching the ground. After they tried out throwing the ball straight up, they began to See, e.g., Niedenthal (2009) passim regarding the recurrent question in his field: are games art? Cf. Kirkpatrick (2007) 75: the computer game “stands somewhere between the traditional ‘game’, which structures play, and the aesthetic object or ‘artwork’”; cf. Jenkins 2005, Pearce 2006, and Bittanti and Quaranta 2006. 21 See, e.g., Juul 2005 and Ensslin 2014. 22 See Niedenthal (2009) 5, Kirkpatrick 2007, and Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca (2016) 121– 55. 23 Cf. Andrews (2007) 58, regarding “more exploration of the meeting ground of poetry (and other arts) with games”, and Ensslin (2014) 7: “[T]his book seeks to correct the widely held view that games and literature do not really go together.” 20



Conclusions: Toward a Pleasure-Model of Play

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dance, taking turns in rapid succession. The other young men clapped to the beat standing around, and a great noise arose.24

What exactly are the Phaeacians—or better, what exactly are we—watching here? On the one hand, it is clearly a dance performance: Alcinous tells Laodamas and Halios “to dance”, and the two are said to be engaging in some sort of competitive “dancing”.25 On the other hand, it looks like something of a ball game, something like a game of “catch”, or perhaps the game later ancient scholars report was called ourania.26 The interest, however, lies not in defining exactly what is taking place here in English terms—that is, whether it is properly a “dance”, a “juggling act”, a “ball game”, or a “competitive sport”—but in discerning the arbitrary lines that English draws between these various entertainments. What, after all, separates a game of catch from a dance? Earlier in the Odyssey, when Nausicaa and her friends play a ball game, there is a similar fusion, where the word molpē, a word which usually means “song”, is used to describe their game.27 Does molpē refer to the song these girls are singing when they play? Or does it refer to the game? Or does it refer to both? Like Laodamas and Halios’ dance-game, Nausicaa’s song-game occupies a certain in-between space.28 Such dance–game mixtures invite the modern reader to engage in certain thought experiments: what is it to watch two players play a ball Od. 8.370–80: Ἀλκίνοος δ᾽ Ἅλιον καὶ Λαοδάμαντα κέλευσεν / μουνὰξ ὀρχήσασθαι, ἐπεί σφισιν οὔ τις ἔριζεν. / οἱ δ᾽ ἐπεὶ οὖν σφαῖραν καλὴν μετὰ χερσὶν ἕλοντο, / πορφυρέην, τήν σφιν Πόλυβος ποίησε δαΐφρων, / τὴν ἕτερος ῥίπτασκε ποτὶ νέφεα σκιόεντα / ἰδνωθεὶς ὀπίσω, ὁ δ᾽ ἀπὸ χθονὸς ὑψόσ᾽ ἀερθεὶς / ῥηιδίως μεθέλεσκε, πάρος ποσὶν οὖδας ἱκέσθαι. / αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ δὴ σφαίρῃ ἀν᾽ ἰθὺν πειρήσαντο, / ὠρχείσθην δὴ ἔπειτα ποτὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ / ταρφε᾽ ἀμειβομένω· κοῦροι δ᾽ ἐπελήκεον ἄλλοι / ἑστεῶτες κατ᾽ ἀγῶνα, πολὺς δ᾽ ὑπὸ κόμπος ὀρώρει. Garvie (1994) 313–14 for translating ταρφέ᾽ ἀμειβομένω as “passing it [the ball] frequently to each other”. 25 Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth (1988) 372 ad 370–80 (= Hainsworth 1982, 280) note the vigor of Homeric dancing, citing Wegner (1968) 65–8 for artistic depictions, but add: “Nothing quite matches the audacity of the performance here described.” Cf. Laser (1987) 92–3 for connections to the Dipylon inscription and Egyptian art. 26 For which, see Poll. 9.106 and Chapter 4, 107–8; cf. Garvie (1994) 312. 27 Hom. Od. 6.101. Stanford (2004 [1948]) ad loc. (“rhythmical ball-play controlled by a tune”); Garvie (1994) 106–7 and Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth (1988) 299 ad loc. for Aristarchus’ view. Cf. Merry, Riddell, and Monro (1886) on μολπῆς at 101: “The Schol. interprets “τῆς παιδιᾶς” (‘the game’)… But there is no reason to doubt that it was accompanied with a measured chant and a dance movement, to which the throwing and catching of the ball kept time”, comparing the dance-game of Laodamas and Halios. Laser (1987) 91: “Da der Begriff μολπή neben Spiel und Tanz auch Musik umfaßt, hat man sich das Spiel der Mädchen als einen Reigen vorzustellen…” 28 Cf. Carystius of Pergamum fr. 14, FHG 4.359 (= Athen. 1.24b), regarding women of Corcyra still in his day singing as they played ball (ἔτι καὶ νῦν σφαιριζούσας ᾄδειν), and Athen. 1.14d–e regarding dances with balls. 24

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Conclusions: Toward a Pleasure-Model of Play

game and at what point would one feel comfortable calling it a “dance”?29 What exactly is the difference between watching a ball game and watching a dance performance? If ballet dancers began to compete with each other regarding who could jump higher, would the dance become a game? If the ball players were suddenly to forget how their game is to be won, yet continue to play, would it become a dance? Winning and losing seem to offer a crucial distinction between games and art, even though not all games can be won and lost, and even though, for most languages, the word “game” simply denotes an instantiation of play. But if the paidia pleasure-mode is what connects these activities—in all cases the player is pursuing “pleasure alone”, as Plato might say—winning and losing do not so much seem to be the purpose of games, as rather their easiest and most obvious closural device.30 Laodamas and Halios are dancing and they are playing a game, yet for Greek only one word would be needed to describe this activity. Once upon a time, it seems that games and art were not so categorically separate as they are today, and if there is a desire to unify them or see their connections, one way to do so is by exploring those past cultures that saw the two as one.31 The ancient idea of paidia, as I hope to have shown in this book, is one such example, offering new visions of a surprisingly ancient future. Cf. Merce Cunningham’s articulation of non-mimetic dance (Atlas 2001, 9:40): his dancers “are, rather than being someone, doing something”. Similarly, most competitive games reduce the possibilities of play, not just shedding the mimetic potential (or “being” someone for the sake of pleasure) in favor of a series of actions (or “doing” something for the sake of pleasure) but reducing a potentially large number of actions to a simple few (cf. Galloway’s 2006, 2, definition of games as “actions”). 30 Cf. Lowe’s (2000) 31–35, 54–60, connections in terms of “endgame” and Upton (2015) 183–98. 31 Cf. Ensslin (2014) 1: “I propose that future experimental creative practices in digital media will give rise to an ever-growing body of hybrid artifacts that blend verbal and other arts with videogame technologies. This fusion is urgently needed…” For recent hybrids involving dance, see Miller 2017. 29

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Index

Achilles Tatius Leucippe and Clitophon 5.14.4, 170 Aeschylus Prometheus Bound 818, 124 Suppliants 209, 124 Theoroi fr. 78c TrGF 50–2, 102 afterlife activities in the, 182, 196 play in the, 13, 187, 197 Anaxandrides Gerontomania fr. 9 KA, 114 Apollonius of Rhodes Argonautica 3.126, 105 Argonautica 3.132, 100 Argonautica 3.137–41, 108 Aratus paignia attributed to, 200 Archytas of Tarentum the mechanical pigeon of, 110 the platagē of, 117 Aristoboulos FGrH 139 F 9a = Ath. 530c, 126 Aristophanes Clouds 763, 115 Clouds 861–81, 109, 111 Eccleziazusae 922, 114 Frogs 230, 7 Frogs 318–19, 5, 184 Frogs 388, 8 Thesmophoriazusae 1227–8, 8, 56 Aristotle Categories 10b, 191 Historia Animalium 572a, 133 Metaphysics 12.9, 1074b, 183 Motion of Animals 701b, 110 Nicomachean Ethics 3.2, 1111b, 41 Nicomachean Ethics 7.7, 1150b, 140 Nicomachean Ethics 7.15, 1154b, 37

Nicomachean Ethics 10.6, 1176b, 37 Nicomachean Ethics 10.6, 1176b–1177a, 128–30 Nicomachean Ethics 10.6, 1177a, 162, 167, 190 Nicomachean Ethics 10.7, 1177b, 122, 125, 135 On Memory and Recollection 449b, 41 On Memory and Recollection 450a–450b, 40 On Memory and Recollection 450b, 40 Poetics 4, 1448b, 149 Politics 7.17, 1336a, 155 Politics 8.3, 1337b–1338a, 122, 131 Politics 8.5, 1339a, 132, 145 Politics 8.5, 1339b, 131, 132, 146 Politics 8.6, 1340b, 117 Problemata 30.1, 954b-955a, 39 Protrepticus B43, 182 Rhetoric 1.11, 1371a, 133 Rhetoric 2.5, 1382a, 177 Rhetoric 2.12, 1389a, 10, 21 Rhetoric 3.10, 1411a, 141 Aristoxenus fr. 50 Wehrli, 126 Athenaeus Deipnosophistae 12.530c, 5 Athenaeus of Attalia, 43 Athenodorus of Tarsus On Seriousness and Play, 165 athurmata, 9, 12, 98, 100–2 as jewelry/trinkets, 11, 98, 101 as toys, 100 difference from paignia, 104 etymology of, 100 Bion of Borysthenes fr. 76 Kindstrand, 114 board-games, 171, 183, 194 found in graves, 185



Caillois, Roger, 1, 119, 207 Callimachus Epigrams 14 GP, 103 Epigrams 54 GP, 109 Iambs 12.33, 103 children and memory, 28, 40 in relation to intoxication, 10, 21, 26, 34, 37–40, 47, 78, 94 in relation to play, 20, 23, 29, 37, 48, 63, 77, 91, 98, 105, 109, 114, 117, 120, 155, 172, 204 psychology of, in Stoic thought. See Chrysippus of Soli, on children psycho-physiology of, in Aristotle, 37–43 psycho-physiology of, in Plato, 29–36 terminology of, 22 Chrysippus of Soli on children, 44–7 Clement of Alexandria Protreptikos 2.17-18, 100 contemplation (theōria), 122, 135, 137, 141, 148, 182, 198 Crates Comicus Paidiai, 116 Crates the Theban paignia attributed to, 200 dancing as play, 7, 9, 56, 64, 69, 80, 127, 168, 176, 185, 210 dice (kuboi) as playthings. See playthings, dice (kuboi) as found in graves, 185 dice-games, 170, 186, 198 Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers 2.8.80, 126 Diogenes of Apollonia D44 LM = A19 DK, 28 dolls. See playthings, dolls as drunkenness. See intoxication Empedocles fr. 100 DK, 111 Ephippus fr. 7 KA, 7 Epictetus Discourses 3.13.18–19, 24, 106 epithumia (desire for pleasure), 16, 17, 42, 45, 71, 90 Erinna SH 186–92, 110 eudaimonia, 4, 12, 37, 128, 132, 135, 183, 190 Euripides Auge fr. 272 TrGF, 101

Index Bacchae 160–5, 7 Bacchae 867, 8 Hypsipyle 752d, 100 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 77, 168 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 169, 175, 209 Galen on children, 45 On Exercise with the Small Ball, 108 On the Use of the Parts of the Human Body (UP) 1.22, 113 games, 29, 61, 118–20, 155, 163, 205, 207, 210 as instantiations of play, 3, 116, 120, 212 as more than instantiations of play, 118, 120 basilinda (king-game), 172 digital games, 210 of ball. See playthings, balls as of dice. See dice-games ostrakinda, 105 Gorgias Encomium of Helen 11.131–2 DK, 200 Groos, Karl, 1 hedonism on tombstones, 126, 198 Heraclitus fr. 52 DK, 21, 198 fr. 117–18 DK, 26 Herodas 3.55, 79, 110 Herodotus Histories 1.94, 118 Histories 1.114–15, 172 Histories 2.86, 191 Histories 2.173, 129 Histories 4.23, 191 Histories 5.78, 191 Hesiod fr. 10a.19 M-W, 8 Shield 277–84, 8, 56 Theogony 597, 166 Hippocrates On Regimen 1, 28 On the Sacred Disease 14, 2–4 Homer Hymn to Apollo 200–6, 7, 56 Hymn to Demeter 16, 102 Hymn to Hermes 32–52, 100 Iliad 4.223–32, 166 Iliad 14.413, 108 Iliad 15.361–6, 106 Odyssey 6.99–101, 112, 211 Odyssey 8.370–80, 108, 211



 Homer (cont.) Odyssey 15.416, 101 Odyssey 15.460–3, 101 Odyssey 23.134, 8 Odyssey 23.146–7, 7 Huizinga, Johan, 1, 119, 163, 168, 169, 174, 175, 206, 207 imagination, 16 inscriptions with “play”, 8, 198 intoxication giving rise to play, 35, 48, 78 Isocrates Areopagiticus (7).42, 167 judgement, 60, 147, 156, 181, 202 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 156 knucklebones (astragaloi) as playthings, 104, 110, 113, 186 found in graves, 186 komboloi beads, 102 leisure as goal of work, 122 etymology and development of word, 123–6 skholē vs. diagōgē, 131 vs. play, 122, 128–33 Longinus On the Sublime 3.2, 199 Longus Daphnis and Chloe 1.9–11, 100, 184 Daphnis and Chloe 4.40, 59, 201 Lysias On the Refusal of a Pension (24).18, 164 make-believe, 14, 16, 50, 91, 155, 158, 207, 208 mimesis and “learning” (mathēsis), 144, 151–9 as incidental to play, 18, 92, 158, 208 as not intrinsically pleasurable, 51, 73 as pleasurable without play, 151 vs. play, 14–19, 208 vs. play for Aristotle, 144, 148–51, 155, 157–9, 160 vs. play for Plato, 51, 57, 65–9, 72 Mnesitheus of Athens, 36 mousikē in relation to play, 9, 55, 62, 69, 144, 148 music as form of play, 7 nēpios, 24

Index ornament and design, 56, 57, 69, 93 Paidia depicted on Metropolitan Museum Vase, 4–5, 172 personified, 4, 102 paidikos phthonos (playful malice), 11, 76, 85–8, 89 paignia, 9, 98, 102–3 as hors d’oeuvres, 103 as jewelry/trinkets, 11, 98, 103 as “light” writing, 200 as toys, 102 difference from athurmata, 104 paizō etymology of, 20 paralysis of contemplative knowing, 142 of spectators, 81, 96 Pausanias Description of Greece 10.30–1, 198 pets. See playthings, animate Philo Against Flaccus 36.4, 114 Philostratus Heroicus 45.4.3, 110 Phoenix of Colophon Iambs fr. 1 CA 231–2, 126, 198 Phylarchus fr. 61a FGrH, 113 Pindar Nemean 10.45, 124 Olympian 1.15–17, 8 Threnoi fr. 129 Maehler, 184 Plato Alcibiades 110e, 193 Apology 41b, 182 Critias 116b, 56 Crito 46d, 54, 199 Gorgias 481b, 164 Gorgias 521e–522a, 31–3 Laws 1.635b, 5, 177 Laws 1.643a–d, 14–15, 17, 61, 62, 117 Laws 1.644d, 110 Laws 1.644e, 102 Laws 1.645d, 63 Laws 1.645e, 35 Laws 1.646a, 35 Laws 2.653a, 63 Laws 2.653d–e, 64, 65, 67 Laws 2.655a–b, 63 Laws 2.657d–e, 77–81 Laws 2.659e, 30, 61



Index

Laws 2.664e, 34 Laws 2.666a, 34 Laws 2.667b–668b, 62, 65–7 Laws 2.673d, 36 Laws 7.794a, 29 Laws 7.797a–c, 61 Laws 7.803d–e, 127, 162 Laws 8.844d–845d, 105 Laws 10.889c–d, 57 Lysis 219e, 194 Phaedo 67a, 182 Phaedrus 276d–e, 53, 199 Philebus 47d–50e, 11, 81–9, 95 Republic 10.602b, 53 Republic 10.604d–607a, 72, 75, 90 Sophist 233d–235a, 51–4, 60 Statesman 288c, 9, 54–6, 57, 60 Theaetetus 172c–d, 125 play as an emotion, 1 as bodily activity, 123, 129–33, 137–41 as category embracing “art”, 7, 50, 54–6, 148, 159, 201 as dancing. See dancing, as play as festival, 79, 127 as for “pleasure alone”, 7, 16, 50, 55, 59, 68, 70, 88, 93, 94, 106, 157, 168, 178, 199, 204 as goal-oriented, 13 as joy/delight, 2–6, 98 as relaxation, 137–41, 146, 159, 176 as singing. See singing, as form of play as singing and dancing, 8, 69, 127, 185 as term of evaluation, 189, 198–203 goal-oriented, 163, 174, 179, 205 See also serious (spoudaios), mixed with play in relation to mousikē. See mousikē, in relation to play in the afterlife. See afterlife, play in the of children. See children, in relation to play of spectators, 11, 72, 76, 77–81, 88, 96, 147, 150, 205 opposed to fear, 2, 5, 177 opposed to seriousness. See serious (spoudaios), opposed to play personified. See Paidia, personified vs. leisure. See leisure, vs. play vs. mimesis. See mimesis vs. play playthings, 11, 15, 97–9 animate, 99, 113–15 balls as, 107, 112, 133, 210 clappers (platagai) as, 117 dice (kuboi) as, 107, 109, 170, 174, 185, 198 dirt as, 23, 97, 106, 116 dolls as, 103, 110



found objects as, 107 hoops as, 109 in relation to works of art, 120 knucklebones as. See knucklebones (astragaloi) as playthings manufactured, 107–13 manufactured vs. found objects, 111–13, 116–19 nuts as, 24, 105, 113 pessoi (board-game pieces) as, 109, 186 potsherds (ostraka) as, 23, 105, 106 rattles as, 109 sand as, 100, 105 see-saws as, 111 shells as, 103 spinning tops as, 108 sticks as, 104 stones as, 104 swings as, 111 terracotta figurines as, 111 toy carts as, 109, 111 wind-up toys as, 110 yo-yos as, 111 pleasure alone vs. non-play pleasures, 10, 59 Plotinus Enneads 3.8, 198 Plutarch Beasts are Rational 989e7, 103 Cons. ad Ux. 608d5, 103 De Tranq. An. 469d4, 103 Life of Alcibiades 2.7.1, 170, 202 Life of Antony 59.8.4, 114 Life of Artaxerxes 17.1–5, 170–1, 174 Table Talk 712e, 201 Pollux Onomasticon 9.103, 105 Onomasticon 9.106, 108 Onomasticon 9.125–6, 115 Posidonius On the Passions, 43 relaxation (anesis), 12, 43, 137–41, 146 Sappho 44 PLF, 101 serious (spoudaios) as evaluative term, 202 as goal-oriented, 12, 18, 162, 165, 174, 179, 187, 190, 197, 205 as term of evaluation, 162, 181, 195 etymology and development of word, 168 mixed with play, 13, 162, 174, 181, 201 non-play action vs. serious play, 164, 174–8 opposed to phaulos, 195, 197

 serious (cont.) opposed to play, 6, 12, 30, 37, 129, 134, 164, 167, 169, 178, 198, 208 Simonides 646 PMG, 126 singing as form of play, 8, 56 as play, 64, 69, 127, 185 Solon fr. 39 IEG, 165 Sophocles fr. 489 TrGF, 118 Oedipus at Colonus 1143–4, 166 Stesichorus PMG 232, 7 symposium play in relation to the, 21 Theognis Elegiac Poems 65, 190

Index Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War 1.22.4, 200 History of the Peloponnesian War 2.53.4, 42 toys. See playthings, athurmata, paignia tragedy and comedy, 82 as more and less “serious” play, 180 of life, 82, 88 tragic paradox, 11, 75, 84, 90–4, 150 Walton, Kendall, 6, 91–4, 119 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 208 Xenophon Cyropaidia 6.1.6, 169 Cyropaidia 6.1.48, 166 Memorabilia 1.3.8, 169, 201 Memorabilia 3.9.9, 124 Memorabilia 4.4.23, 191 Symposium 1.1, 164 Symposium 4.44, 124