Early Socratic dialogues: Ion

Do poets know what they are talking about?

Modern statue of Plato at the ancient site of the Academy in Athens, photo by the Author.

Who is the better teacher of a life worth living, a poet or a philosopher? To modern ears this sounds like a very strange question, and yet it is the one underpinning a short, delightful, and controversial early Socratic dialogue by Plato, entitled the Ion.

Ion was a rhapsode, a professional who specialized in declaiming one of the epic poets, in his case Homer, as well as in analyzing and explaining the pertinent poetry to the general public—an early form of literary criticism, if you will.

In the dialogue Socrates takes Ion to task, playing skeptic to the rhapsode’s claim that he possesses a special skill (tékhnē), that effectively allows him to compete with sailors, generals, and even philosophers. Near the beginning of the dialogue we get a classic example of Socratic irony as the two characters meet:

[Socrates]: I must confess, Ion, I’ve often envied you rhapsodes your art, which makes it right and proper for you to dress up and look as grand as you can. And how enviable also to have to immerse yourself in a great many good poets, especially Homer, the best and most inspired of them, and to have to get up his thought and not just his lines! For if one didn’t understand what the poet says, one would never become a good rhapsode, because a rhapsode has to be an interpreter of the poet’s thought to the audience, and that’s impossible to do properly if one does not understand what he is saying. So all this is worth envying.

[Ion]: True, Socrates, true. At any rate, I find this side of my art has given me a lot of work, and I reckon I talk on Homer better than anybody. [530]

Ion is clearly not in a modest mood, and completely oblivious to Socrates’s irony. He continues:

[Ion]: (My dear) Socrates, it’s well worth hearing how splendidly I have embellished Homer. I think I’ve got to the point where I deserve to have the homeridae crown me with a golden crown.

[Socrates]: Yes indeed, and one day I’ll find myself time to listen to you. For the moment, however, answer me just this … [531]

After this preliminary skirmish, Socrates gets down to business, inquiring into the nature of Ion’s alleged skills—besides the recitation and interpretation of Homer.

Key to understanding what is going on here are a couple of important background facts. First, the rhapsodes of the time claimed, as we shall see in a moment, that their expertise went well beyond poetry and literary criticism. They were in the business of explaining to people how to do all sorts of special tasks that were described in the epic poems, including, for instance, skillfully navigating a vessel, or guiding an army into battle.

This sort of claim is outrageous on its face, but one may reasonably wonder why it bothered Plato. To grasp that, we need a second piece of crucial information: one of the skills that the rhapsodes allegedly got from their study of epic poetry concerned ethical matters. That is, they claimed to also be in the business of teaching people how to live a good life.

In the 5th century BCE there were two other groups of people staking the same claim in what we would call the marketplace of ideas: the Sophists and the philosophers. Sophists like Protagoras of Abdera and Georgias of Leontini were asking for exorbitant fees in order to impart all sorts of knowledge, including of the moral kind, to well off Athenians and wealthy individuals all over the Greek world. One such Sophist, Hippias, boasted of having made the incredible sum of fifteen thousand drachmas, that is, thirty years’ wages for a skilled craftsman, in a single visit to Sicily.

Plato regarded both rhapsodes and especially Sophists as unwelcome competitors, as people who either didn’t know what they were talking about (the rhapsodes) or who were really rhetoricians who didn’t care about the truth (the Sophists). It’s not by chance that we have Platonic dialogues bearing as titles the name of all three of the Sophists I just mentioned.

Rhapsode, by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. Image from Wikimedia, CC license.

A bit later in the Ion we get to a crucial exchange:

[Socrates]: And when you make a judgement about military matters, do you judge in virtue of your skill in generalship, or in virtue of the skill that makes you a good rhapsode?

[Ion]: There’s no difference, so far as I can see.

[Socrates]: No difference? How on earth can you say that? Are you saying that the skill of a rhapsode and the skill of a general are one skill, or two?

[Ion]: One, I think.

[Socrates]: So, anyone who’s a good rhapsode is in fact a good general too?

[Ion]: Certainly, Socrates.

[Socrates]: Now then, are you, as a rhapsode, the best among the Greeks?

[Ion]: By a long chalk, Socrates.

[Socrates]: So, as a general too, are you the best among the Greeks?

[Ion]: Have no doubt of it, Socrates; that too I learnt from the works of Homer. [541]

Plato here is highlighting just how ridiculous the claim to knowledge that the rhapsodes are making truly is. By extension, not only rhapsodes are not good generals (or sailors, or whatever else they claim to be), but they are also not good teachers of ethics. If you want become eudaimon, the implicit message is, forget poets and rhapsodes (and, of course, Sophists) and come to the philosopher’s school.

That said, Socrates does concede that rhapsodes and poets are producing something good: poetry. They do so, according to their own statements, because they are “possessed” by the gods, who inspire them to write and recite. For instance, the Iliad famously begins with:

Sing, Goddess, of Achilles’ rage,

Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks

Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls

Of heroes into Hades’ dark,

And left their bodies to rot as feasts

For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.

Begin with the clash between Agamemnon—

The Greek warlord—and godlike Achilles.

In some translations, “goddess” is rendered “muse.” The muses were nine divine entities (Calliope, Clio, Polyhymnia, Euterpe, Terpsichore, Erato, Melpomene, Thalia, and Urania) who inspired poetry, songs, and myths. The word has a Proto-Indo-European root that literally means “to put into one’s mind,” just like Socrates concedes happens to Ion.

Hesiod and the Muse, by Gustave Moreau, 1891, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Image from Wikimedia, CC license.

At the end of the dialogue, Socrates confronts Ion with a choice that forces the rhapsodes to admit that he is good only and specifically at reciting and interpreting Homer, and even that is because he is “possessed” by the divine spirit of the poet, that is, not really because he has any skill of his own:

[Socrates]: So, if you do have skill, and as I remarked just now, your promise of an exhibition is just a trick on me, you’re not playing fair. However, if you do not possess skill, but it is because of divine dispensation and because you are possessed by Homer that you say a lot of fine things about that poet, in a state of ignorance, as I said was your condition, then you are not unfair. So, choose which alternative you prefer: to have us think of you as an unfair fellow, or as a divine one?

[Ion]: There’s a lot of difference, Socrates: it’s a much finer thing to be thought divine.

[Socrates]: Well then, let’s grant you this finer status in our eyes, Ion: as a eulogist of Homer you are not skilled, but divine. [542]

Modern philosophers, thankfully, don’t have to defend themselves from poets and rhetoricians as Plato did, but the fundamental questions raised in the Ion remain strikingly relevant. Today’s debates about expertise often echo Socrates’s probing of Ion’s credentials: we see this in disputes over who gets to speak authoritatively about climate science, public health, or economic policy. The rhapsode’s claim to universal competence based on literary knowledge mirrors how we sometimes see public intellectuals leveraging expertise in one domain to pronounce on entirely different fields. Meanwhile, Socrates’s distinction between technical skill (tékhnē) and divine inspiration offers an intriguing lens for understanding our contemporary tension between quantifiable, empirical knowledge and more intuitive or creative forms of understanding.

When we consider the rise of artificial intelligence that can produce poetry, art, and even philosophical arguments, we might ask whether these systems possess true skill or are merely sophisticated forms of “divine possession”—channeling patterns from their training data much as Ion channeled Homer (according to Socrates). The dialogue’s ultimate message remains profound: genuine wisdom begins with the humility to recognize the limits of our knowledge, and the most dangerous kind of ignorance is the kind that masquerades as expertise. In our age of information overload and algorithmic authority, Plato’s ancient skepticism about unexamined claims to knowledge feels less like historical curiosity and more like essential intellectual hygiene.