Your Dog is Your Father: The Deceptive Simplicity of Eristic in the Euthydemus

Your Dog is Your Father: The Deceptive Simplicity of Eristic in the Euthydemus

What is particularly striking about the opening exchanges of the Euthydemus between Socrates and Crito is that they seem to establish the setting and characters of the dialogue concretely—Socrates and his attractive young friend Clinias meet the well-known brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus at the Lyceum and ask them to display what Crito calls their “particular wisdom,” and what they call simply “virtue.” However, within these first few pages of dialogue, we already begin to sense something about the brothers that makes them difficult to pin down. When Crito asks, “Where do they come from, and what is their particular wisdom?”, Socrates is vague on their origins—they are from both Greece and Italy, and at the time of the dialogue, they are exiles with no proper city (271c). Thus, they seem to be from everywhere at once. Their “particular wisdom” turns out to be quite unparticular as well—Socrates claims they can win any fight, making them, one would assume, wise at everything. Whereas both Socrates and Crito dwell on the physical and character descriptions of Clinias and even Ctesippus, the brothers, who are ostensibly the primary focus of the dialogue, are given no personal description at all (271b, 273a). Indeed, when Ctesippus takes up a tirade against them in the Lyceum, he is completely unable to identify them, addressing them as, “men of Thurii or Chios, or from wherever and however you like to be styled” (288b). In his frustration at their elusiveness, he articulates this very unnatural ability of the brothers to be from everywhere and argue any position, and quite accurately compares them to Proteus, the shape-shifter (288c).

Moreover, the brothers are interested in hiding their past occupations in order to appear to be purely teachers of “virtue,” as Euthydemus insists (273d). Socrates makes a point of reminding both the audience in the Lyceum and Crito that the brothers achieved their reputation as teachers of military combat and rhetoric (271d-272b, 273c). Euthydemus is eager to belittle these skills, laughing when Socrates praises them and calling them “diversions” to his main interest (273c). However, Socrates does not discard them as easily, and in his later conversation with Crito, he praises the brothers as “all-round fighters” and considers their skill at eristic to be the “finishing touch to pancrastic art,” implying that we must view it in concert with their previous interests in order to understand what is so striking about it that it should motivate Socrates to want to seek out their tutelage (272a).