Callicles versus Socrates or the Practical Life of the Politician and the Contemplative Life of the Philosopher

Nowhere in his corpus, except for Gorgias, Plato allows such a rude and blunt critic of contemplative philosophy as Callicles speaks so forcefully and raises the most profound and enduring challenge to Socrates' philosophic life. Such a challenge was not something new in the fifth and fourth centuries BC and Callicles' not fewer than four quotations from Euripides' lost play, Antiope, witnesses Plato's awareness of the significance and commonality of this ongoing debate. Through a detailed discussion of Antiope's debate between Zethus and Amphion and Calicles opening rhesis, the paper investigates the complicated relationship between these two temporally and stylistically different expressions of one debate, concluding that Plato's owe to Euripides's Antiope is more than just quoting a few passages almost verbatim. Callicles, whether a historical person or a literary invention, doesn’t just represent a fragment of Plato himself—a frightening vision, perhaps, of what he might have become without Socrates. Rather, it is a mouthpiece for Plato's inner resistance to the way that Socrates' way of philosophic life, correcting it and finally making it compromise with the more active life manner of a politician, as in Euripies’ Antiope.