The Berkeley Plato

The Academy was a functioning gym when Plato set up a philosophical school there, yet few scholars have taken this setting into account when interpreting Plato’s philosophical project. What, after all, could training for the body have to do with ideas of the mind?⁶ An archaeological discovery in the basement of a women’s gym in Berkeley, California, addresses this question. In 1902, a benefactor purchased a collection of antiquities for the University of California, Berkeley, including a portrait herm. This sculpture form most often depicted the god Hermes by way of a flat narrow stone surface for an inscription with a head and shoulders mounted on top, to which a phallus was attached more or less where one would expect relative to the statue’s head. Herms were everywhere in ancient Greece, and often used as signposts. (Hermes was the patron god of travelers.) At gyms they were also used to display portraits honoring the local gymnasiarchos: the person in charge of managing the finances, staff hiring, and general operation of a gym. This particular herm bears the inscription “Plato, son of Ariston, the Athenian,” along with two quotations from Plato’s works (fig. 4). For its first century at Berkeley, it was dismissed as a modern forgery, in part because of the asymmetry of its ears, and placed in a gym basement.

In 2002 archaeologist and Berkeley professor Stephen Miller revisited the herm as part of the research for his groundbreaking book, Ancient Greek Athletics. Through chemical analysis of the herm’s marble, iconographical analysis of the bust’s ribbons and headband, and stylistic analysis of the inscription’s font style, Miller argues that this was not a modern forgery but, rather, a Roman copy (perhaps from the early second century CE) of a Greek portrait herm of a gymnasiarchos. Whereas previous art historians saw its mismatched ears as a sign of a sloppy forgery, Miller argues that the one larger ear is, in fact, the mark of an active boxer who has developed cauliflower ear from repeated punches. In short, an ancient statue of Plato has been hiding in plain sight, one that depicts him as an athlete and the head of a gym.⁷ If Miller is right, Plato was not an observer on the sidelines in the company of athletic trainers and music teachers; he was actively hiring, managing, and training with them. The Berkeley Plato’s two inscriptions point to central philosophical ideas we will turn to in part 2.

The first inscription reads, “Every soul is immortal.” This is a key idea in several of Plato’s so-called middle dialogues. The chronology of Plato’s works is controversial, yet it is possible to separate them into three rough categories.⁸ In the early or Socratic dialogues, the Socrates character uses a method of cross-examination (elenchos) to question others about moral terms. The efforts all end in perplexity (aporia), as we saw in part 1. Scholars take these dialogues to reflect the project if not the actual words of the historical Socrates. In the middle works, the Socrates character uses a method of hypothesis to defend theories about the soul’s immortality and the human mind’s ability to engage with immaterial realities such as numbers. Scholars see this middle Socrates as a mouthpiece for Plato’s own ideas. In the late dialogues, Plato, still speaking mostly via the Socrates character, criticizes ideas set out in the middle dialogues. The soul’s immortality is central to the middle dialogues’ thinking about psychology, ethics, and knowledge. It is through this immortality that the human soul shares in the divine.

The second inscription reads, “Blame the one who makes the choice. God is blameless.” This comes from the end of Republic.⁹ The context is a myth about the afterlife and reincarnation. The choices human individuals make during life shape their character. When it comes time to be born again, character guides each individual’s choice of lives. While a god may oversee the process, it is up to human individuals to choose. Those who are taken in by superficial considerations of wealth, power, pleasure, and so on lead lives of misery as a result. Those who choose more wisely go on to live lives akin to the gods’. Taken together, these quotes point to the idea driving Plato’s ethics, that human happiness involves becoming “like a god.”¹⁰

What are the gods like? For the ancients, the question has an obvious answer: images of the gods were everywhere. The gods look like beautiful, healthy, youthful athletes. In this, they are perhaps not so different from the students at Plato’s philosophical gym. As with music, the long jump, and swimming, Plato and his contemporaries saw such beauty as a matter of proportion. Whereas athletic events let numbers play out in time, ancient sculpture, like practices in modern bodybuilding that it inspired, let numbers play out in space, through the proportions between parts of the body, as set out in the sculptor Polykleitos’s guide, the Canon of Polykleitos.¹¹

How does one become like a god? Through a proper regimen of gym exercise and diet, individuals may sculpt their bodies to approach divine proportions. In Plato’s time, such considerations fell under the single umbrella of therapy (therapeia). According to one scholar of ancient medicine, the line between drug prescriptions and food recipes was blurry.¹² To us, blurring the distinction between cooking and medicine degrades the medical art, yet it has the advantage of integrating concerns for health into everyday life in ways that resemble modern efforts in preventative medicine. How do individuals sculpt their souls to approach divine proportions?¹³ For this, Plato looked to physical training for guidance. He lays out the most elaborate parallel at Gorgias 462a-466a: the art of gym exercise (gymnastikē) creates health in the body, and when we become physically ill, the art of medicine (iatrikē) restores bodily health. Likewise, the art of politics (politikē) creates health in the soul, and when we become spiritually ill, the art of justice (dikaiosunē) restores spiritual health.¹⁴

Talk of spiritual or mental health has an intuitive appeal that has lasted through the centuries. To put these analogies into practice, however, requires us to cash out the metaphor. First, what does it mean for the soul to take on divine proportions? Since Plato takes the soul to be immaterial, it cannot embody numbers in the literal way that the body can. Second, Plato’s ideas about bodily health and spiritual health do not run simply on parallel tracks: they interact with each other in complex ways. Sorting these issues out is a central task of Plato’s psychology and moral philosophy, which we will address throughout part 2. In doing so, we must be careful not to allow modern assumptions about the nature of health, medicine, and training to distort our understanding of Plato’s argument. Before turning to his works, therefore, let us take a brief excursion into the field of medicine as Plato knew it.

The Hippocratic Corpus

The Hippocratic Oath remains the single most famous medical text to this day.¹⁵ Its traditional author, Hippocrates, was a fifth-century BCE physician. The collection of sixty or so medical treatises attributed to him is known as the Hippocratic corpus, though scholars believe that many if not all of these works were written by people other than Hippocrates.¹⁶ The works themselves reflect the agonistic spirit of Greek culture, as physicians compete against each other in a lively “medical marketplace.”¹⁷ Many texts within the corpus set out theories by explicitly rejecting alternative perspectives, some of which can be found elsewhere in the corpus. What is worse, given the habit of doctors throughout history to find their own views in the thought of their predecessors, we are often unsure of which century a given work was written in.¹⁸ Despite these inconsistencies, we can still trace some general themes.

In approaching ancient medical texts, we must distinguish between what we might call an ontological view of disease and a view of disease as imbalance. In the first case, disease is, or is caused by, a foreign thing that does not belong in a person’s body: a cancer, virus, bacteria, parasite, and so on. Treatment, in this scheme, involves getting rid of what does not belong: killing it with drugs or removing it from the body. In the second case, disease is at root an imbalance among things that do belong in the body: glucose, electrolytes, water. Treatment, in this scheme, is a matter of somehow adjusting levels until things are back to where they should be.

In very broad terms, Western medicine today defaults to the ontological view, while Eastern medicine defaults to the imbalance view. Ancient Greek medicine has more in common with Eastern medicine than with its Western counterpart today. There are exceptions. The Greeks had an ontological conception of disease: some illnesses were explained by the presence of a spirit (daimōn), which could be removed through religious rituals.¹⁹ However, the Greeks tended to contrast such ideas with scientific or “rational medicine,” which focused on keeping the body in balance.²⁰ To lay out this mode of thought, let us look at three works in the Hippocratic corpus that likely date back to Plato’s time.²¹

The first treatise, “Nature of Man,” opens by arguing against the view that the body is made either of a single element—earth, air, fire, or water—or of a single bodily compound—blood, bile, and so on (“Nature of Man,” 1–2). To account for observed phenomena, the author argues, the body must be composed of multiple substances (3), which he identifies as blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Health consists in having these “humors” in balance, and illness arises when any of them shifts into excess or deficiency (4). How does this happen? Humors can be mapped out on the axes of hot/cold, dry/wet. If we find ourselves with an excess of phlegm in the winter, it is because phlegm is cold and winter is a cold season (7). Summer is warmer, so our blood increases. Why do people get depressed in the fall? That is when black bile is on the rise. (The English word melancholy is taken directly from the Greek for “black bile.”) In addition to seasonal disorders, lifestyles and airborne epidemics also cause illness (9). In these cases, patients should either change their lifestyle or breathe less air. The general strategy behind these suggestions is treatment by opposites.²² If someone is too sedentary, make them exercise. If someone eats too little, feed them more. When illnesses are located in a particular spot in the body, you can adjust the humoral balance by strategic bleeding, and the author helpfully lays out which veins to cut for which treatments (11). Urine provides a window into the body’s inner balance (12–14), and is used to explain why athletes’ flesh goes soft when they give up their athletic lifestyle (12). As Brooke Holmes puts it, “The Hippocratic body is fundamentally dynamic, animated by forces in an agonistic relationship with one another and always engaged with a teeming mass of external forces (winds, foods, etc.) that it struggles to resist or conquer.”²³

The second treatise, “Regimen for Health,” builds on this general theory to describe plans for preventative medicine, with a recommendation to counteract or compensate for whatever season one is in as a way to retain balance: drinking more liquids during dry seasons and so on (1).²⁴ The author takes into account individual body types (2–4): people with dry skin should generally drink more liquids; people needing to lower their weight should exercise on an empty stomach and eat while out of breath (4). In addition to cutting veins, adjusting diets, and exercise regimens, there are drugs for restoring balance: emetics to make you vomit and enemas to give you diarrhea (5). The author also has advice on child development, noting, “Babies should be given their wine diluted and not at all cold” (6). The work closes with instructions for what exercises best fit each season of the year and how to respond to problems such as exercise-induced diarrhea (7). While the details of Hippocratic medicine may strike us as silly, we can at least appreciate the systematic way in which ancient doctors wove together theory, observation, and practice.²⁵ What is more, the emphasis on preventative medicine sets concerns for diet and exercise at the heart of medical science: in addition to all its other roles, the ancient gym served as a medical site.

The third treatise, “Airs, Waters, Places,” sets such thinking within the framework of environmental and social determinants of health. Such thinking sits at the cutting edge of current medicine and social justice work today.²⁶ Heightened rates of diabetes in certain minority populations, for instance, have been shown to result from restricted access to quality diet and higher consumption of fast food.²⁷ High rates of COVID-19 infections among African Americans resulted not from genetics but from a combination of chronic stress, socioeconomic disparities, and a greater number of people living in multigenerational households.²⁸ Hippocrates embraces similar thinking, looking not to innate differences between populations but to ways in which environmental factors and cultural customs (nomoi) shape the illnesses, body types, and even moral character of people living in different places. When it comes to prevailing winds (3–6), cities facing north or south will suffer from extremes of temperature. Eastern winds produce moderate climates, making for the greatest health. Western winds, by contrast, introduce too much variability and cause health complications. In terms of water sources (7–9), ground springs facing east provide the purest and most temperate water. Rock springs, stagnant water, and rivers fed from multiple tributaries all introduce complications. Astrological events, such as the rising of the Dog Star or the two solstices, also signal complications, not for any religious reason, but because they mark seasonal transitions in hot and cold, wet and dry (10–11).

Having laid out these general principles, Hippocrates applies them to different regions of the known world (12–24). Scythia in the north is too cold, thus encouraging weight gain. Egypt in the south is too hot, encouraging sinewy bodies (18–19). Greece occupies a balanced Goldilocks zone, encouraging a robust physique. Yet even moderation can be taken too far. Asia, or the Near East, enjoys the most temperate climate, making for abundant crops and men “well made, large and with good physique” (12). Yet the too slight variation in Asia’s climate accounts for these same men’s “mental flabbiness and cowardice” (16). Custom (nomos) compounds the problem, as Asia’s monarchs discourage general populations from developing bravery. Greece, meanwhile, enjoys the overall temperate climate of Asia, while the seasonal variation of Europe produces people with a “fierce, hot-headed and courageous” temperament. Custom further strengthens this, as democracy and other forms of self-rule encourage risk taking, which leads to the “brave, warlike nature of Europeans” (23). It is easy to dismiss Hippocrates’s Eurocentrism as simply a form of cultural bias. Yet, like social justice movements today, Hippocrates does not attribute racial difference to the nature of people but to a combination of environment and custom. His goal in all of this is to help overcome challenges to specific demographics through artful city planning (10) and context-specific regimens for health.

Hippocrates’s theory had staying power.²⁹ Well into the nineteenth century, barbers bled people for medical purposes (as advertised by the red stripe of a barber’s pole). Even today, folk wisdom about wet feet causing the flu can be traced back to Hippocratic humoral theory. Modern Western medicine made great strides in the twentieth century by setting Hippocratic thinking aside and focusing on ontological conceptions of illness. The price of that shift was overspecialization, which led doctors who fixed one problem at times to cause another.³⁰ As we move further into the twenty-first century, medical professionals are starting to argue for more holistic approaches.³¹ Even though we typically think of that as an Eastern focus, ideas about balance and holistic treatment sit at the start of the West’s own rational, medical tradition.³²

With this, we have set the stage for approaching Plato. While an athlete and gymnasiarchos himself, Plato did not write on physical health at length. Ideas from medicine and training, however, inform his thinking on a wide range of issues. By reading Symposium’s discussion of erotic love (erōs) against a Hippocratic background, we can see how one of the work’s characters, the doctor Eryximachus, provides crucial insights for understanding the work as a whole (chapter 6). This goes against the grain of most scholarship, which sees Eryximachus as merely a comic interlude. And by reading the dialogue against the embodied rhythms of the ancient long jump, we may see how the discussion of lofty ideas in Symposium’s second half is a natural outgrowth of the earthy ideas that lead up to it (chapter 7). In this, Symposium provides a warm-up, as it were, for Republic’s more elaborate attempt to spell out the virtues and their cultivation in terms of mental health and spiritual exercise. Republic 2–4 returns to the gym as a site of moral education, this time defending a theory of a three-part soul, which, like a Hippocratic body, must be brought into balance with itself through a regimen of musical and athletic training (chapter 8). Republic 5–7 opens by asking whether women, whom Socrates sees as just as fit as men to rule, should receive the same course of nude education at the city’s gyms. Like Symposium, this line of inquiry closes by employing ideals of embodied proportionality to set traditional gym training within a lofty and elaborate course of study through which individuals may come to understand the abstract principles that structure physical and political activities (chapter 9). Republic 8–10, finally, looks to Hippocratic thinking on social determinants of health, arguing that virtue, as a form of mental health, requires a dynamic balance between the individual and his or her broader environment. The work closes, once again, looking to the human soul’s connection to immortal realities, as summed up in the Berkeley Plato’s second inscription (chapter 10).