Challenge

Their task then became radically challenged. The Stranger introduced complexity by including in their purview ‘a certain other very large crowd of people who had just loomed into sight’.Footnote ² It was not any ‘crowd’ he spied but in a political sense the ‘populace, mob’ (LSJ, ὄχλος, s.v.). It was the crowd, the dialogue will later acknowledge, that rhetoricians had the ability to persuade for belief through telling myths but not to reason for morality through teaching ethics (304d; Plato, Gorgias 455a). The Stranger called them ‘egregiously unnatural’, ‘a motley group’ (trans. mine). For he observed a teeming crowd of mixed oddities, shape-shifters like mythical hybrids or natural contortionists. He named them quasi lions, centaurs, and satyrs, and he described the last creatures as octopuses, although they have been misunderstood as chameleons in conjectured translations.Footnote ³ ‘They are a motley group as they just now appear to me. For very many seem like lions changed from men, and centaurs, and resembling other such kinds; and very many satyrs, and the soft and changeable beasts that quickly assimilate their shapes and movements to other things’ (trans. mine).Footnote ⁴ That motley group in the shapes of animals and hybrids (291a–b) differed from the clearly visible and loudly vocal human claimants to the role of the statesman who had confronted the initial dialectic of the dialogue (267e–268a). It now became difficult to divide from the statesman the members of this newly emergent group because its shape-shifters were disguised and changing.

The motley has been recognized as comprising sophists. The task of the discussants in the Statesman became ‘how to divide the “sophists” who are concerned with the affairs of cities, a various, weak and versatile group (291b–c), from the statesman whose expertise they lay special claim to rival’.Footnote ⁵ Their ambiguity has been unmasked as deceitful, as categorized collectively by sophistry. The motley has been interpreted politically in political science as a ‘literary device’ that resembled participants in existing factionalist constitutions. Those oligarchs, democrats, and tyrants were criticized as remote from the statesman as humans are from a god. Their sophistry failed the statesman’s ‘rule of knowledge’ and explained the philosopher Socrates’ sentence of death.Footnote ⁶ This present article, ‘Plato’s Motley’, an intellectual and cultural history as different from political analysis, focuses on the problem of deception, in continuity with Plato’s Sophist, his prior dialogue. It presents new linguistic and literary scholarship on the figures of the motley as cultural embodiments of appearance versus reality. Plato’s philosophy argued for a distinction between those two realms, with reality as the understanding of the intellect and appearance as the perception of the senses. A famous illustration of his theory was his allegory of the cave in the Republic (514a–520a), another political dialogue. It described chained prisoners who could only perceive vague shadows and sounds as copies of the real objects that were solely known by reason. The Stranger of his Statesman also resorted to figurative language by glimpsing the motley to embody the distinction between appearance and reality.

‘Plato’s Motley’ demonstrates how Plato appropriated the lion, centaur, satyr, and octopus of popular knowledge and imagination to make vivid his criticism of sophistry. It displays his skill as a rhetorician in his use of the esteemed quality of vividness (ἐνάργεια) (277c). The dialogue denigrates rhetoric as sophistically displaying appearances, in contrast to philosophy as reasoning towards the reality of the statesman. ‘Plato’s Motley’ discovers through research their appearances in classical sources, notably as guises of Odysseus, the wily hero/antihero. This article revises the conjecture – from then known zoological evidence – that its last animals are chameleons, identifying them as octopuses. All four creatures of the motley did not ‘quickly exchange their shapes and capacities for action with each other’, as supposed.Footnote ⁷ Plato was describing the extraordinary natural ability of the octopus to blend with its natural environment in order to avoid detection, whether as predator or prey. Its camouflage emphasized the common purpose of the motley creatures as deception. This revision recalls the octopus’ metaphorical camouflage for Odysseus’ escape from divine predation in Homer’s epic (Od. 5.424–34). Its metaphorical octopus coordinated in Plato’s artistry with other literary associations of the lion, centaur, and satyr, with Odysseus as the archetypal wily hero/antihero. This article also researches literary evidence that suggests social groups the Statesman might have imagined by its similes of the motley.

It also significantly treats the motley as the Stranger’s designation of a ‘chorus’, in the context of Greek drama. It unmasks for the first time the motley’s supreme sophist as the Archon Basileus, the king-priest by lot, who supervised Athenian religion and drama. It explains him as the supreme ‘wizard’ of the sophists. As a human being, the Archon Basileus is investigated here from historical knowledge of his role from the Athenian Constitution and from the record of Plato’s personal appointment to the privileged public duty of a choral leader. The identification of the Archon Basileus, together with his subordinate priests and seers, contributes Plato’s valuable assessment of that official of Athenian civic religion and festival as deceiver.

Plato was no disinterested spectator among the festival crowds. He actively contributed his property, the Academy, with its produce of wood and oil, for the relay torch race among the ten city tribes that initiated the Great Panathenaea, the principal religious festival. That public race began at his Academy’s altar erected to Prometheus, in celebration of his gift of fire to humans, where the flame for the torch race was lit. The grove dedicated to the goddess Athena at the Academy provided the wood for the ten torches. The race was run from Prometheus’ altar at the Academy, which lay beyond the city walls, down the broad Dromos road into the city, through its northwest Dipylon gate, and onto the Acropolis. The Athenian Constitution (56.3) recorded that the Archon Basileus supervised the solemn procession the following day. Bearing a newly woven robe for Athena’s cult statue, it proceeded to her altar on the Acropolis where the winning torch of the relay race ignited its sacrificial fire for the hecatomb of bulls.Footnote ⁸ Athens held games during the Great Panathenaea festival every four years, with novel contests in male beauty and armoured dance added to the team and tribal events, such as the relay torch race. Its prizes were painted amphoras of olive oil, as Pindar’s Nemean Ode sang (10.35).Footnote ⁹ The olive oil was pressed from Athena’s sacred grove in Plato’s Academy and assessed by the Archon Basileus, the king-priest by lot.Footnote ¹⁰ Although there is no record of whether the Archon Basileus, as supervisor of the Great Panathenaea, was present at Plato’s Academy as the officiant for its inaugural event, Plato was recognized by its participants as an involved citizen. This historical evidence brings Plato alive as personally concerned with the correct observance of religious festivals under the supervision of a civic official, who he thought should be truthful not sophistic.

Plato’s intrusion of the motley into his Statesman was a clever ploy. He argued its collective rhetorical similes to expose sophistry as an invalid sighting of the truth. The creatures of the motley only ‘appeared’ (φαίνεται) to the Stranger, and they only did so ‘just now’ (ἄρτι) (291a–b).Footnote ¹¹ They were transient appearances characterized rhetorically by similes as human males who were like lions, centaurs, satyrs, and octopuses. They were unlike the realities of the many groups of men in the city whom the philosophical investigation had so far discerned. The motley of the Statesman encapsulated the lengthy deliberations of the Sophist, Plato’s immediately prior dialogue. The Sophist had introduced the Eleatic Stranger as a philosopher, who then led a dialogue with Theaetetus about how to distinguish a sophist from a philosopher and a statesman (217a). They proposed to undertake that difficult task by a method of division (218c–236d). They began by introducing the model of a fisherman because of some commonalities with a sophist since both were hunters. A sophist was basically a predator. As an acquisitor (219a–c), he was a coercive hunter of living creatures (219c–d), particularly wealthy youths (222a). His socialization with them under the pretence of ‘excellence, while exacting a fee in the form of hard cash’ defined sophistry (222e–223a). Sophistry, in brief, was ‘lesson selling’ (224e). The discussants summarized the sophist as: first, ‘a hunter of young, rich individuals who takes fees’, next, ‘a sort of importer-exporter in dealing with lessons for the soul’, then ‘a retailer dealing in these same things’; ‘a lessons-salesman who deals in his own lessons’ and ‘a sort of athlete in the expertise of verbal combat, set apart by his skill in disputation’; and finally ‘a cleanser in relation to the soul of beliefs that prevent it from learning’ (231d–e).Footnote ¹²

The Sophist likened the sophist to a ‘beast’ (θηρίον) that was ‘complex: not one to be caught with one hand, as they say, but needing both hands to capture’ (226a).Footnote ¹³ The men of the motley sighted in the Statesman, too, all resembled beasts: quasi lions, centaurs, satyrs, and octopuses (291a–b). The Sophist had recommended being on guard against ‘similarities; for similarity is the most slippery of kinds’. Its example of similarity was animalistic, the wolf versus the dog as wild versus tame (231a).Footnote ¹⁴ The ‘beast’ in the Sophist as θηρίον (226a) was a word Plato wrote frequently in his dialogues. It could denote an animal generally, but it especially meant a hostile wild animal that was hunted. It also named in drama the fabulous centaurs and satyrs (LSJ, s.v.; Lex. Platonicum, s.v.) who appeared in the Statesman in its motley group. Its final type, the octopuses, were explicitly called beasts (θηρία) (291b). The Sophist also ventured into the realm of magic, as will the Statesman, by claiming that the sophists in their lessons ‘bewitch (γοητεύειν) the young’ with words remote from reality (234c). The Stranger there asked directly whether the sophist was ‘a sort of magician, insofar as he’s a producer merely of imitations of actual things’. Theaetetus agreed. ‘We must put him down as a magician’ (γοήτων) (235a).Footnote ¹⁵ Plato’s Gorgias (483e–484a) on the nature of true rhetoric had employed that diction, and the Stranger in the Statesman repeated it to expose the master of the motley chorus (291c) as a magician.

The Stranger’s designation of ‘a motley group’ (Πάμφυλόν τι γένος) (291a) recalled Herodotus’ Histories on how the tyrant Cleisthenes of Sicyon renamed the Dorian tribes as the Pamphuloi to segregate from them his own tribe, the archelaoi, as rulers. The tyrant mocked the Sicyonians by revising the grammatical endings of their animal names to ‘Swinites’, ‘Assites’, and ‘Porkites’ (5.68.1).Footnote ¹⁶ Amid the Athenian populace the Stranger spotted many odd creatures but qualified his initial glimpse. ‘It is a class mixed out of all sorts or so it seems to me as I look at it just now’ (119a–b).Footnote ¹⁷ He identified there ‘males’ of the human species as bipeds, unlike the three beastly quadrupeds and the octopod.

The identities of those misfit creatures mingling with the Athenian populace were easily recognizable. None were civilized. They were intruders upon the city from their native habitats in the wild, whether on land or at sea or in the playing fields of the imagination. They were all predators, as physical aggressors or immoral beasts, dangerous to the safety and virtue of the Athenian people. They were double deceivers since their disguises allowed them to attack without notice then to slip again unnoticed into the crowd. Yet all were very familiar from nature and from art. They were cultural types for deliberate deception. They shared the cunning of mythological Prometheus, who tricked even Zeus, and of literary Odysseus, the inconstant hero or villain of the Homeric epics. As predators, they were bestial versions of sophists, whom the Stranger had in the Sophist (219e–221d, 23d) characterized as hunters.

The Statesman concerned not only civic divisionFootnote ¹⁸ but also civic deception and how to recognize it in order to reject it. The discussants’ initial logical division of creatures into two had failed to isolate the statesman from his subjects (385d). To achieve that goal the discussants had to reckon more than numbers, then articulate more than names. They had to progress beyond mathematics and beyond grammar to rhetoric. They had to engage the figurative so as to discern the realities of the motley beneath their appearances. The Statesman indulged in rhetoric by alluding to literary masterpieces to expose popular deceivers. The Stranger had already resorted to rhetoric to compose an etiological myth to explain their initial philosophical model of the herdsman as anachronistic. That story had introduced the topic of deception through Hesiod’s myth of Prometheus’ trickery of Zeus over dividing the portions of the sacrificed carcass into flesh or bone (268d–247e). After some better success than dialectic at naming the civic groups, the Stranger introduced the motley group to expose the duplicity by which something appeared to be something else. That duplicity complicated their task of dividing the statesman from all others. The method of division was confronted by the obstacle of deception.

Lion

The lion, the first creature discerned in the Stranger’s motley, was a bestial predator. The lion figured in Greek literature and art. The lion was characterized in Aristotle’s contemporary Account of Animals as ‘noble and brave and high bred’. That character was distinguished from animals that were ‘ferocious, aggressive, and stubborn, e.g., the wild boar’ (1.2 488b).Footnote ¹⁹ The lion was also notably variable, however. It was ‘very dangerous while feeding’ but ‘very gentle’ when sated. Among its familiars it was ‘very playful and affectionate’, but either as predator or prey its behaviour varied from lunging fiercely to walking away (8.44 629b).Footnote ²⁰ The lion thus fit the character and behaviour of the motley creatures the Stranger spied as changeable. The lion of Plato’s Statesman was a fictional import, in descending literary grandeur from epic, legend, and folklore. The Stranger said that the motley group merely ‘appeared’ to him as such and such, and that many of its males were ‘similar’ to lions.

The lion’s skin was legendary in Apollodorus’ Library (2.5.1) as the task and the prize of the first labour of Herakles, the complex Greek superman whose triumph over impossible challenges uniquely won him immortality. His first labour, slaying the Nemean lion, was frustrated by its tough hide, which proved impenetrable to and invulnerable by his arrows. Even after he had strangled the beast to death with his bare hands, Herakles’ efforts to skin it with his knife, then a stone, also failed. The goddess Athena advised him to flay the lion with its own claw as his tool – which he did successfully. Herakles shouldered its pelt back to the city only to be banished from its gates by the king who had enjoined the labour. The intervention of Athena about the successful tool ensured the popularity in Athens of Herakles’ labour of strangling the Nemean lion.Footnote ²¹ It was the most portrayed of his twelve labours and indeed the most portrayed scene in all Greek art.Footnote ²²

Although the lion’s skin worn by Herakles symbolized heroic courage, it could also be put on by others in pretence of courage. Herakles’ attribute became philosophical when Socrates donned the lion’s skin in Plato’s Cratylus, his dialogue on the importance of naming. Socrates put on the lion’s skin to examine the natural correctness of the noble words for virtue, such as prudence, sagacity, righteousness, and knowledge. As he declared his own need for courage, ‘I have put on the lion’s skin so I must not flinch’ (411a; trans. mine). But in the end he confessed that he could not believe in his own wisdom and called for an examination of his sayings by others. ‘For the worst of all deceptions is self-deception. How can it help being terrible, when the deceiver is always present and never stirs from the spot?’ (428d).Footnote ²³ The quasi lion of Plato’s Statesman also alluded to other deceivers. Folklore told of donning the lion’s skin to pretend a courage not naturally possessed. ‘The Ass in the Lion’s Skin’ of Aesop’s Fables (139) betrayed its real identity and stupid character by opening its mouth to bray rather than roar. The lesson was that probing beneath the surface was necessary for the discernment of true identity.

Centaur and Satyr

The centaurs and satyrs whom the Stranger of Plato’s Statesman also spotted in the motley (291b) were imaginary hybrids of a man and a horse. They were moralistic types of sensual bestiality. A centaur was triply ambiguous: as immortal or as intermediate between immortal and mortal; as a hybrid of human and animal bodies; and as a beneficent agent of the arts and crafts, or as a sensual and violent aggressor. Centaurs were typically bellicose, a role especially popular in Athens, where their battle with the Lapiths was sculpted on the south metopes of the Parthenon to display the barbarians versus the civilized. But there was an egregious centaur. Chiron was the legendary ancestor of a class, the doctors, whom the discussants of Plato’s Statesman had acknowledged as contenders for their model herdsman (267e–268a). Doctors were beneficent heirs of Chiron’s expertise. However, that egregious centaur would not have appeared to the Stranger of the dialogue as other centaurs did. For Chiron was depicted with human forelegs and feet, and only the hindquarters of a horse to distinguish his civility, as quasi human, from the raw bestiality of the typical wild centaur. Chiron was the privileged son of Kronos, the primordial god of the Statesman’s etiological myth (269a), thus an immortal. Chiron’s divine instructions greatly benefited heroic mortals.Footnote ²⁴ Among his beneficiaries was notably the physician Asclepius, to whom Chiron taught his healing arts and with whose later shrines he was associated in myth and cult.Footnote ²⁵ Asclepius’ cult in his sanctuary at Athens honoured him as the prime healing god, meriting a sizeable chryselephantine image, and drawing a large following. His shrine was endorsed and controlled by the city, despite the protests of its Heralds.Footnote ²⁶

Doctors were an ambiguous class, however, as the Stranger in the Statesman exposed their good or bad behaviour towards their patients. He considered doctors a class of experts who presided over life-and-death situations, therefore in whom the trust of the people was essential. It did not matter whether the doctor’s station was rich or poor, whether his treatment was with the patient’s consent or not (whatever painful remedy he applied), whether he followed written rules or not, or whether by reducing or fortifying the patient in the process, ‘so long as they are in charge of us on the basis of expertise’. That expertise was for the amelioration and preservation of the patient’s body. The Stranger declared that norm of expertise ‘the only correct definition of medicine’, and furthermore the model for ‘any other sort of rule whatsoever’ (293b–c).Footnote ²⁷ The exemplary good doctor had a practical wisdom sensitive to the case of each individual patient and he responsibly changed his prescriptions as his health changed (295c–d, 296b). The ‘doctor worth many others’ was the sole Homeric citation (Il. 4.194–220; 11.413–505) in the Statesman (297e). It honoured Machaon, a son of Asclepius, who had acquired his pharmacological knowledge from Chiron the beneficent centaur.

However, there could be comparatively bad doctors (297c–298b). Doctors could be practitioners of the legacy of the good centaur Chiron, or they could be like the typical herd of centaurs who destructively galloped and trampled as runaways from medical expertise. For those deviant doctors, the Stranger proposed no change of name, such as an ancient precedent to ‘quack’ (OED). Those who failed to adhere to the best medical standards were still called ‘doctor’ although they could be derided in the developing Hippocratic writings as ‘ignorant’ and deceived and suffer some loss of reputation. In public, foolish and incompetent healers were the butt of comedies, as in Aristophanes’ jokes.Footnote ²⁸ The very name of the class, doctors, like the word ‘centaur’, was thus deceptive. Doctors were initially listed in the Statesman as a class who contended to be equal to or better than the model herdsman for the statesman (267e). In the dialogue’s ensuing nominal divisions doctors became the norm for caring for the people of the city (293c). Yet in the end they were eliminated for the role of the statesman doubtless because the dialogue demonstrated their behavioural inconsistency for good or ill. While the true doctor acted only for the amelioration and preservation of the patient’s body, the false doctor treated and saved his patients arbitrarily. He extorted expenses for his own self-aggrandisement, and even killed patients for money as hired to do so by relatives or enemies.Footnote ²⁹ That division of doctors in the Statesman was thus not dialectical or nominal but ethical.

The satyr or Silenus of the Statesman’s motley (291b), also a hybrid horse-man like the centaur, violated Plato’s philosophical ideal of prudence, as did bad doctors. Satyrs embodied socially irresponsible behaviour by their cowardice, theft, mischief, and licentiousness.Footnote ³⁰ They were well known from the cast of the satyr plays performed in Athens during the City Dionysia festival in honour of Dionysius, god of wine. Although the choruses of satyr plays featured comic elements promoting laughter, they were written by tragedians and performed by tragedians. There was no crossover to comedy either by composers or actors. Socrates in Plato’s Republic (III 395a–b) pronounced it impossible to breach the convention by which the same men could not write both genres successfully.Footnote ³¹ Socrates himself was in Plato’s Symposium compared to the satyrs Marsyas and Silenus for his laughably ugly appearance, coarse speech, and animalistic sexual and drunken behaviour (15a–b). Yet in contradiction Socrates was also believed to conceal surprisingly within himself philosophical arguments that were not only sensible but also virtuous.Footnote ³² His behaviour was ambiguous.

Octopus

The Stranger indicated for the motley not general ‘animals’ (ζῷα) but θηρία, ‘the hunted’ or ‘the fished’ (291b). The last of its creatures were ‘the soft and many changeable beasts’ (τοῖς ἀσθενέσι καὶ πολυτρόποις θηρίοις) (trans. mine). Their activity described the unique camouflage of octopuses for ‘quickly they assimilate their shapes and movements to other things’ (ταχὺ δὲ μεταλλάττουσι τάς τε ἰδέας καὶ τὴν δύναμιν εἰς ἀλλήλους) (trans. mine). Aristotle’s Account of Animals did include the chameleon, which has been conjectured to be Plato’s reference.Footnote ³³ But science even then disproved the conjecture (2.11 503a–b). The chameleon did not match the Stranger’s physical description of the beast or cohere with his philosophical argument. The adjective ἀσθενέσι there means ‘soft’ not ‘weak’, that is, boneless. A chameleon, in contrast, is not ‘soft’ but hard as a vertebrate with a bony spine and ribs. It is not ‘swift’ (ταχύ) either, as the Stranger said, but rather as Aristotle recorded ‘very sluggish indeed, like the tortoise’. Although the chameleon darkens in colour when inflated, the change is not true camouflage but is ‘like that in a crocodile or other animals’ (2.11 503a–b).Footnote ³⁴

Aristotle twice named the Stranger’s last beast among the bloodless types. His Account of Animals popularly called them ‘Softies’ (τὸ τῶν καλουμένων μαλακίων) (4.1 523b).Footnote ³⁵ The cephalopods comprise in modern taxonomy the only species of animal that truly camouflages. As both predator and prey, the cephalopod camouflages its shape and properties to blend in with its immediate physical environment. The ruse is to escape detection. The name cephalopod literally means ‘head foot’. In modern taxonomy cephalopods comprise the largest class of marine molluscs (Mollusca), from the Stranger’s classical Greek word for ‘soft’ (μαλακός; Lat. mollis). These are the cuttlefish, the squid, and the octopus. Their shape is commonly defined by a head around which mantle, or sac, are directly and distinctively attached eight feet, or in modern usage ‘arms’, and for the octopus also two tentacles.Footnote ³⁶ Cephalopods are invertebrates, meaning boneless, thus soft-bodied, as Plato’s Statesman said (291b). It was Aristotle’s Account of Animals that first identified the types common to shallow Mediterranean waters.Footnote ³⁷ He called them πολύποδες, from ‘many’ + ‘feet’ (4.1 524a). But it was not historically factual, as traditionally thought, that Aristotle only learned abstract philosophy at Plato’s Academy, then later after his teacher’s death researched animal nature in his own Lyceum. Students at the Academy actively studied natural philosophy.Footnote ³⁸ And the octopus was certainly common local knowledge.

The Stranger described the movements of the octopus to conform its bodily shape and natural properties to its immediate environment. As he described the phenomenon, his first, emphatic word was ‘swift’ (ταχύ) (291b). In modern scientific report the change happens in less time than the blink of an eye, or one-fifth of a second. Plato would not have known the modern scientific quality of ‘rapid adaptive coloration’ by the millions of chromatophoric organs that opened or closed in a millisecond to create on the octopus’ skin bumpy patterns for camouflage and communication. Nor would Plato have known the modern science of the octopus’ calculation of its need for such change. That was the method by which its head perceived an imminent threat, observed its immediate surroundings, and transmitted neurons in its soft mantle and flexible arms to change its bodily shape.Footnote ³⁹ Yet the instantaneous speed of the octopus’ phenomenal change would have been ordinarily observable by Plato and others as now visible but suddenly not. As the Stranger of his Statesman observed those shape-shifters, cephalopods altered their bodily forms by quickly conforming to the shape and property (ταχὺ δὲ μεταλλάττουσι τάς τε ἰδέας καὶ τὴν δύναμιν) of their surrounding for a mutual resemblance (εἰς ἀλλήλους) with it.

A unique characteristic and astonishing behaviour of its camouflage is its change of bodily colour, which ranges naturally from drab to jewel-like tones, and even to transparency and luminescence.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Stranger’s material description in the Statesman of a cephalopod’s change of shape and property or quality lacked explicit mention of colour. However, a change of colour was implied by his notice of its change of shape and property to blend in with marine environments: the white-grey-brown of sand, mud, or rocks, and the hard substrate of the sea floor; or green vegetation such as seagrasses; or the intense vividness of another sea animal, the corals of the Mediterranean – that is, for Greece, in the Ionian Sea and the North Aegean Sea.Footnote ⁴¹ Aristotle’s Account of Animals explicitly reported that the octopus hunted crabs and other shellfish and often small fishes by ‘changing its colour and make it like whatever stones it is next to’ (8.37.622a; 8.37.662b; 4.1.525a).Footnote ⁴² In modern science the octopus is regarded as ‘charismatic’ for its colour, behaviour, and stratagems. Its shape-shifting universally designates octopuses as the ‘masters of camouflage on this planet’. In addition to its tactics of shape-shifting and coloration, the octopus also escapes catch by emitting an erratic ink jet. Its behaviour has been dubbed ‘protean’ after Proteus the unpredictable Greek sea god. The octopus can mix its behaviour of colouration, signals, and movements up to ten times in thirteen seconds.Footnote ⁴³ Even without that precise scientific calculation, Aristotle accurately reported not only the octopus’ camouflage of colour, shape, and property but also its escapist emission from a sac in its head of an inky jet when alarmed (4.524b; cf. 8.622a).

Those ‘softies’ were commonly known. Aristotle wrote in Account of Animals about an ordinary encounter. A man could put his hand into shallow waters near the shoreline and touch a large octopus at its surface. In its ‘stupidity’, as he supposed, an octopus even approached the man’s hand. And alone among the cephalopods the octopus ventured visibly out of the water onto dry land to walk on surfaces rough enough for traction (8 622a; 4 525; 8 662b).Footnote ⁴⁴ The octopus was often scooped up in nets with the inshore fish regularly caught.Footnote ⁴⁵ Plato knew about netting them. He had described it in the Sophist (220b–221a) whose speakers divided fishing into two methods. One was striking the solid flesh of fish with a hook on a line or with a trident. The other was capturing marine animals in various enclosures such as nets. The octopus, a gelatinous shape-shifter swimming in water, was harder to detect and target than prey on land because of its singular camouflage among rock and vegetation.

The Greeks favoured fish in their diet and characterized urban fishmongers as ‘crafty charlatans and tricky merchants, for at the marketplace in Athens an octopus cost four obols of the six obols a day that was the wage of a skilled laborer’.Footnote ⁴⁶ At Greek suppers and banquets the small octopuses or their tentacles were fried or grilled sizzling hot and served in a batch as appetizers or sides, while the larger octopuses provided main dishes to accompany bread, the dietary staple.Footnote ⁴⁷ The octopus of Plato’s motley as a deceiver was popular knowledge.

Shape-shifters

The Stranger in the Statesman identified the ‘motley group’ as ‘the chorus around the affairs of the city’ (291a, b–c) (trans. mine). The discussants of that dialogue had acknowledged very many, indeed ‘tens of thousands’, who claimed to share the statesman’s role of caring for the city (268b–c).Footnote ⁴⁸ The Stranger recognized among the motley the behaviour of deceivers which, at an impending threat to their safety by another predator, could quickly disappear into the cover of the surrounding crowd. His final simile, the octopus, in particular could quickly emerge from within safe cover to prey on unsuspecting victims. That simile of the octopus blamed a character type, unlike his similes of the lion, the centaur, and the satyr, which were culturally associated with the social groups of warriors, doctors, and performers. The quasi lions and centaurs also shared a certain character that the octopus exemplified. The octopus was established in literature as generally proverbial for ‘clever and adaptable’ persons. Pindar’s Hymns (fr. 43 apud Athenaeus 12.7) counselled his son to dwell in foreign cities with an adaptable mind, like the skin of a fish changeable amid the rocks, by agreeing with the present company but not when they were absent. Clearchus’ On Proverbs (2) cited an unnamed author similarly on the octopus: ‘With the cunning of the polyp, my son, mighty Amphilocus, adapt thyself to the people in whatsoever country thou come.’ Another author recommended the octopus as a model for adapting to the dispositions of different friends. ‘Maintain the disposition of the crafty octopus, who assimilates its aspect to the rock to which it clings’ (Theognidea 215–16). Such adaptability was considered prudent. ‘Follow one model one day, and the next, adopt another color: sophia prevails over inflexibility.’Footnote ⁴⁹ The octopus exhibited in Greek culture a natural cunning that was manifest in human affairs as a devious manipulation and exploitation of forces that were uncontrollable directly. Such were the warrior’s stratagems, the pilot’s steerings, the sophist’s ploys, the banker’s and the merchant’s skills, and the politician’s assessments. All were types of deception.Footnote ⁵⁰

Odysseus

Among the cephalopods, the octopus was of primary significance in the Statesman because of its exploitation of Odysseus’ strategic grasp for survival. Odysseus prevailed by imitating an octopus against his enemy the god Poseidon, who appeared in the guise of an overwhelming wave. Sophocles’ tragedy Iphigenia (fr. 307) specified the imitation of Odysseus as like the behaviour of an octopus: ‘In dealing with your husband, know how to change the colour of your true thoughts, like a polyp on a rock.’Footnote ⁵¹ That specification mattered because Odysseus was the Greek cultural epitome of cunning. His epic stories were a subtext in the Statesman for the motley group in their disguises. Plato’s many characterizations of Odysseus in his dialogues, thirty-seven mentions, were as versatile as his argumentative purposes. They could approve of Odysseus’ skills of adaptability and invention towards philosophical and rhetorical methods, or they could criticize his versatility as deceptive. Odysseus’ quality of wiliness did not commend him to Plato as a model for a political ruler.Footnote ⁵² However, the scholarly interpretations of Plato on Odysseus have missed his disguises in the Statesman’s motley, with its particular evidence. In that motley the quasi lion, centaur, and octopus were all Homeric guises of Odysseus, the ultimate wily one. As for the satyr, Odysseus debated mortality with a young satyr in Euripides’ Cyclops, a satyr play developed from the Homeric episode in which Odysseus cleverly escaped from a cannibalistic monster. Homer’s epic Odyssey was devoted singularly to Odysseus as a chief among the Iliad’s warriors, introducing him thus: ‘Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story / of that man skilled in all ways of contending / the wanderer…’ (1.1–2).Footnote ⁵³ Odysseus was in that verse πολύτροπος, literally ‘much-turned, i.e., much-travelled, much wandering’, an epithet extended metaphorically to ‘shifty, versatile, wily’ (LSJ, s.v.).Footnote ⁵⁴ That epic of Odysseus’ journey from foreign Troy to home at Ithaca lauded him as comparable ‘even to the gods’. It sang of him ‘playing the vagabond about the world / and no adventurer could beat Odysseus / at living by his wits—no man alive’ (19.267, 284–6).Footnote ⁵⁵

In Homer’s Iliad the majority of similes were of animals, and among them the lion excelled with fifty citations. The comparisons, both simple and developed, were naturalistic descriptions with symbolic meanings. Prominently the lion roared as a predator of domestic flocks and herds, although it was also a target of hunters. The plot of predator and prey was embodied as the marauding lion and his vulnerable victim, and it was principally developed in battle scenes of the warrior and the enemy. The lion was anthropomorphized in its appetite for food like a warrior’s desire for glory, so that both bestial and human wants drove the warrior.Footnote ⁵⁶ Warriors in turn were passionately lionized in their grieving and in their rage.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Iliad lionized in similes more than forty warrior heroes as ravenous for the kill.Footnote ⁵⁸ And those heroes could wear a lion’s pelt as they grabbed a spear.Footnote ⁵⁹ The epic detailed the marauding lion as menacing the sheep, but the community as rousing to join the shepherd to repel the beast. When confronted by a watchful shepherd and his dogs, the vulnerable lion would slink away. However, animals were fearful when they lacked a protector, so the lion preyed at night when their shepherd or herdsman failed to guard them, whether because he was untaught in fighting (15.632) or even away from the scene (15.325).Footnote ⁶⁰ That blame of slack or absent leadership was poignant for the Statesman, which introduced and developed its heuristic model for the statesman extensively as a herdsman of animals (261d–268c).

The Iliad compared Odysseus to a lion but once,Footnote ⁶¹ and that in the company of Diomedes, the revered warrior whose name means ‘god-like cunning’. So, ‘They made their way like lions through black night / towards kills and carnage, braving spears and blood’ (10.297–8).Footnote ⁶² The Odyssey, whose plot events postdate those of the Iliad, presented its comparisons with a lion progressively (4.332–40=17.124–31; 6.127–36; 22.401–6; 23.45–8=22.401).Footnote ⁶³ Only one lion simile in the Odyssey was not about Odysseus. It concerned Polyphemus, the cannibalistic Cyclops (9.288–93), in the scene that Euripides’ satyr play Cyclops developed.Footnote ⁶⁴ In another epic scene Odysseus’ son Telemachus hoped his father would take revenge on his mother’s suitors, like a lion returning to its lair (4.335–40=17.126.31). Two more similes concerned clothing for disguise. Odysseus was like a rapacious lion begging the virgin Nausicaa to cover his nakedness (6.130–6). Finally, Odysseus disguised in rags as a beggar dropped that costume and as a voracious predator stalked his wife Penelope’s suitors, his domestic enemies. Odysseus slew them ‘spattered and caked with blood like a mountain lion / when he has gorged upon an ox, his kill /with hot blood glistening over his whole chest, smeared on his jaws, baleful and terrifying—even so encrimsoned was Odysseus up to his thighs and armpits’ (22.402–6).Footnote ⁶⁵

His wife, Penelope, in a dream of Athena, called Odysseus ‘lion-spirited’ (trans. mine). The Odyssey also compared Penelope herself several times to a lion. Her epithet was intriguing since she was non-violent yet still deceptive like the Statesman’s motley. Her weaving, the classical female counterpart to male combat, was cunningly deceitful. She set up her loom as a ‘trick’ (δόλος) against her suitors for the day of Odysseus’ return home, as if a lion to his lair, to slaughter them.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Stranger’s extensive model for the statesman’s skill was declared and described, like Penelope’s craft, as weaving (287b–305e).Footnote ⁶⁷ And Plato’s Statesman concluded with approval of the description of the statesman as a weaver (311 b–c). Who, then, were the Stranger’s quasi lions in the motley? Warriors faking Odysseus’ heroism? Craftswomen like Penelope unravelling the civic tapestry, undoing her daily labour under cover of night? The Stranger said they were ‘males’, as consistent with men dealing with civic affairs (291a–c).

Odysseus’ guise as a quasi centaur was, like the shape of the Trojan Horse, the vehicle for his command of the Greek warriors sequestered within to breach Troy’s walls in military victory. The Iliad did not plainly tell of the conception and construction of that siege engine and its assault. However, there were three allusions to its tradition near the epic’s end: in the victory of its craftsman, Epeius (‘horse man’), at the funeral games of Patroclus; in King Priam’s instruction to his citizens to haul lumber into the walls without fear of ambush; and in the burial of Hector, a horse-breaker, who did not survive to break that wooden horse.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Odyssey recalled the cold nerve of Odysseus’ unwavering heart as he crouched inside the hollowed wooden horse, choosing the best men for battle and silencing their treacherous presence as Helen of Troy encircled their decoy (4.277–89).Footnote ⁶⁹ It sang of how the Trojans themselves dragged the great wooden horse into their city unawares, and how the Greeks led by Odysseus then piled out of its hollow belly to ambush them and sack their city (8.492–16). Odysseus bragged about his commandeering role among his chosen crew inside the horse. ‘The whole thing lay with me, to open / the trapdoor of the ambuscade or not’ (11.23–4).Footnote ⁷⁰ Odysseus bade the bard to sing that story (8.493–5) with the expectation that his deceptions would bring him honour for his strategy of an ambush rather than an open pitched battle.Footnote ⁷¹ The Trojan Horse was a man-made artifice. Its human head as the epic mastermind was Odysseus, who commanded his select crew inside its hollow body to invade the enemy city. He was like a centaur, but not a raw bellicose beast typical of that herd of quadrupeds. His role was artful and skilled like the egregious centaur, Chiron, whom the Iliad acknowledged as ‘the very best’ (11.832).Footnote ⁷²

Odysseus was associated with the satyrs of the Statesman’s motley through the popular plays of the Great Dionysia festival. Euripides’ Cyclops, the only extant complete satyr play, developed the episode of the Odyssey (9.106–566) in which the hero Odysseus outsmarted that monster. Euripides introduced to Homer’s plot the satyrs, who were sons of Silenus, a companion of Dionysus, the divine patron of the theatre. The cavorting satyrs in Euripides’ play were stranded in captivity to Polyphemus the Cyclops, as were Odysseus and his crew upon whom they depended for rescue. Odysseus did prevail by his cunning against the brute cannibal. Keen to plunder for his ship the monster’s provisions of food and to escape from his cave, Odysseus got Polyphemus drunk on wine and blinded his gigantic single eye by driving a stake into it. When questioned about who did the deed, Odysseus as a ruse called himself ‘No-man’ (μή τις), a play on his ‘cleverness’ (μῆτις) (9.405–14).

The precise association with Odysseus in the Statesman’s motley was the octopus because the words matched. The Stranger (291b) named ‘the softies’, the versatile octopuses, as the ‘many-turning beasts’ (πολυτρόποις θηρίοις). That characteristic was identical to the opening verses of Homer’s Iliad (1.1–2), which introduced Odysseus as πολύτροπος, or ‘much-turned’, for his wanderings and wiles. That epic’s unique simile of Odysseus and the octopus has been considered unusual because it was unparalleled with the Homeric actions.Footnote ⁷³ Yet it was a perfect characterization of Odysseus’ cleverness. Awash at sea, he was dashed by a surging wave against offshore rocks, which he tentatively grabbed for safe purchase. In Homer’s comparison, ‘An octopus, when you drag one from his chamber, / comes up with suckers full of tiny stones / Odysseus left the skin of his great hands / torn on that rock-ledge as the wave submerged him’ (5.424–34).Footnote ⁷⁴ The poetic sense imitated the phenomenon of the octopus’ camouflage, which blended the shape and colour of its body with the surrounding stones of the seabed or shoreline, then securely attached its arms and tentacles to a rock. The comparison previewed Odysseus’ escape from drowning by the wrathful vengeance of Poseidon, the sea god. Once grounded ashore after swimming there by his wits, Odysseus scooped up with his lacerated hands a pile of fallen leaves to hide underneath for a secure rest (5.481–91). Those incidents demonstrated his crafty resourcefulness in natural surroundings, at sea then on land.

Chorus

The motley of men as quasi beasts in the Statesman (291a–b) were paper cut-outs pasted there from literature. The Stranger judiciously discerned their choreographed duplicity for treachery against Athens by usurping the role of the true statesman. He continued the dialogue by announcing that he had finally identified those mixed creatures. Younger Socrates bade him: ‘Please explain; you seem to have something odd in view.’ The Stranger agreed: ‘Yes; for everyone finds things odd if they are unknown. And this is exactly what happened to me just now; in the moment when I first saw the chorus of those concerned with the affairs of cities I failed to recognize them.’ Younger Socrates asked: ‘What chorus?’ The Stranger replied: ‘That of the greatest magician of all the sophists, and the most versed in this expertise’ (291c).Footnote ⁷⁵ Who then in the Statesman was that magical, sophistic, expert teacher of the motley as a chorus?

The word χορός (‘chorus’) principally meant a ‘dance’, particularly that of a ‘public religious ceremony’; then ‘a choir, band of dancers and singers’ (LSJ, s.v.). Its mentality of traditional wisdom was not only political but also religious, in its ritual gestures and allusions to the gods.Footnote ⁷⁶ The chorus was an established feature of Greek drama, a mixed unit or corps of a dozen or more persons who commented on the plot. Its commentary was vocalized by a designated speaker, the chorus master or κορυϕαῖος (coryphaeus) who led their ritual actions. The members of the chorus were also costumed and masked and their individual identities were hidden.Footnote ⁷⁷ Because of those costumes and masks, Plato’s Laws (2.655d) called choral performances ‘imitations of character’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The anonymous costumes and masks of the chorus in theatrical performance were like the anonymous disguises in the Statesman of the motley of men as quasi animals or hybrids. Animal choruses were a feature of Greek drama, notably in Aristophanes’ innovative comedies, The Wasps, The Birds, and The Frogs. Lions prowled symbolically in tragedies such as Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Euripides’ Bacchae, but there were no lion choruses. There were no choruses of the hybrid centaurs eitherFootnote ⁷⁹ although there were several plays so entitled.Footnote ⁸⁰ Nor were there chorusing octopuses. However, there was a chorus of satyrs in Euripides’ Cyclops that protested its captivity to the monster Polyphemus and that celebrated Odysseus’ rescue of them to join his crew shipboard.Footnote ⁸¹ The satyr was a figure in Plato’s Symposium, where the politician Alcibiades exploited satyric motifs to compare snub-nosed Socrates to a Silenus figure.Footnote ⁸²

The civic official in the Statesman behind the theatrical scenes was the Archon Basileus, the king-priest by lot, whom the discussants had scrutinized just before the Stranger noticed the motley. The Stranger had declared the need to investigate ‘both these king-priests by lot, and their subordinates, and also a certain other very large crowd of people, which has just become visible to us now that the previous ones have been separated off’, the motley group. He named the motley a ‘chorus’, ‘that of the greatest magician of all the sophists, and the most versed in this expertise’ (291c).Footnote ⁸³ The Stranger’s association of the king-priests by lot with the motley mattered because he implicated the Archon Basileus as the sophist who taught that crowd, or chorus. According to the Athenian Constitution, a playwright seeking the performance of his work asked the Archon Basileus for a ‘chorus’. The institution for the performance of the tragic dramas, which included the satyr plays, was the χορηγία (chorēgia). The Archon Basileus chose from among the wealthiest Athenian citizens three men to be a chorus leader χορηγός (chorēgos). Their role was to finance the tragic choral and dramatic performances during the city’s religious festivals. Each chorus leader recruited candidates and paid their expenses, employed their trainer, and provided the venue and materials for their performance. The appointment of the chorus leaders and their ensuing competition accrued prestige and power.Footnote ⁸⁴

Plato knew that institution personally because he himself was approved by the Archon Basileus as a chorus leader (chorēgos). His prestigious appointment was for a certain competition, the boys’ dithyrambic contest at the Dionysia or Thargelia.Footnote ⁸⁵ The chorus leaders for those boys’ competitions were nominated to the Archon Basileus by the ten tribes and put on by each of them according to the Athenian Constitution (56.3). That same document reported that the Archon Basileus administered the festival contests, with the Panathenaea second only to the circuit of the Panhellenic Games.Footnote ⁸⁶ Plato as a chorus leader for a boys’ contest was thus ultimately subject to him for that festival event. Plato, as a philosopher, staged the portico of the Archon Basileus in Athens as the setting of his early dialogue Euthyphro, a conversation between the philosopher Socrates and the seer Euthyphro about holiness and unholiness. The laughable seer of that dialogue personified an impending debasement of Athenian civic religion by the incursion of mystery cults to foreign deities. The portico in which the pair debated piety displayed the Athenian Calendar of Sacrifices with the religious obligations, by which norm Socrates would within only weeks be tried and sentenced to death for impiety.Footnote ⁸⁷

The Stranger identified the motley as a ‘chorus’ of ‘the greatest magician of all the sophists, and the most versed in this expertise’ (291c).Footnote ⁸⁸ There were multiple chorus leaders (chorēgoi) who supplied costumes and masks. As the Athenian Constitution recorded, three were appointed by the Archon Basileus for tragic performances, including the satyr plays. Five were nominated by the Athenian tribes for comedic performances, with the Archon Basileus as the receptor of those nominations (56.3). Plato himself was also a festival chorus leader for a boys’ contest at the Thargelia, an Athenian agricultural festival. The only individual the Stranger could have meant as the sophistic teacher of the motley was the Archon Basileus, who himself elected the chorus leaders and received the tribal nominations.

The Archon Basileus principally supervised the festival contests of the great Panathenaea, which featured the Homeric epics to which the Statesman alluded. Every four years, episodes or scenes from those epics were recited competitively in sequential relays in rhapsodic style. Plato recorded the import to Athens of Homer’s poetry and also the current requirement of that festival recital.Footnote ⁸⁹ Although the recital was central to that greatest of Athenian festivals, the epics were not presented as religious truth but as foundational history, not like Hesiod’s Theogony about gods but about humans.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Homeric recitals, with their guises of Odysseus to which Plato’s motley alluded, linked the Archon Basileus, as their supervisor, to the history of human origins. He was the official behind the scenes of the civic festivals with their theatrical performances, recitals, and contests.

Wizard

The Stranger’s name γόης, ‘sorcerer, wizard’ of the motley chorus was more specific than the name μάγος, ‘magician’ (LSJ, s.v.). Herodotus’ Histories had reported, without conviction, the attested tale about the Neuri as ‘wizards’ (γόητες) because they became wolves for several days annually then reverted to their former human shape (4.105; see also 2.33). In Aristotle’s Account of Animals, the wolf, with the leopard, exemplified the animal that was always wild, never tameable. It was at enmity with other carnivores, such as ass, cattle, and fox, and it killed domesticated flocks and even hunted humans. Aristotle’s treatise grouped animals by disposition, with the wolf exemplary as ‘thorough bred, wild and scheming’ (1 488a–b).Footnote ⁹¹ Herodotus’ report of the human-beast exchange of wizards, the Neuri, for predation as wolves offered some precedent for the Statesman (291a–b) where male Athenians resembled deceptive animals. Plato also wrote γóης in his Symposium about Love as a schemer, a weaver of stratagems, albeit as a life-long philosopher for beauty, good, and truth (203e; trans. mine). Plato’s Republic distinguished a craftsman who actually made something from a mere painter of it. Any claimant to universal expertise and knowledge was tricked by a ‘wizard’ (γóης) and imitator, who then tricked children and simpletons, who were removed from the truth (10.595a–598d).

The Stranger in the Sophist, the dialogue just before the Statesman, had already characterized the type as an artisan of imagery and fantasy. ‘The man really is a wonder, so difficult is he to make out—because even now he’s slipped away very effectively and cleverly into a form where there are no clear ways through for the hunter’. His discernment was an ‘extraordinarily difficult one. This whole matter of appearing and seeming, but not being, and of saying things but not true things, has always caused puzzlement and confusion in the past, and it still does’ (236c–d).Footnote ⁹² Plato’s Republic, in questioning whether ὁ θεός was simple and true to form, wondered whether that entity was sophistical, ‘a wizard (γóης) and the sort who treacherously makes himself visible sometimes in one form, sometimes in another, and then again becoming himself, changing his appearance into many forms, then deceiving us and making us believe he has done so…’ (2. 380d).Footnote ⁹³ A wizard boasting of omniscience tricked the simpleton, who could not distinguish knowledge from ignorance, reality from imitation (10.598d). In the Statesman the shape-shifters of the motley, a political chorus taught by a wizard, were pretenders to the reality of a true statesman. They were sophists, just as the Stranger in the Sophist had already discerned their type. They persuaded many people of their unique possession of the statesman’s knowledge and skill for the civic good, but falsely so (292b).

The Stranger’s curious sighting of the motley followed immediately upon his exposure of subordinates to the wizardly Archon Basileus, who were diviners or priests. He had already noted in the Sophist (233d) that sophists in their pretence of omniscience taught lessons ‘in divine matters’ both earthly and heavenly.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the Statesman he acknowledged that certain men possessed a recognized expertise in divination as interpreters of the gods to humans. The class of priests, too, had a respected expertise, about the offering of pleasing sacrifices from humans to the gods and about petitioning from the gods beneficial gifts for humans. However, the Stranger pronounced of those subordinates that ‘the type of priests and seers is filled full of self-importance and gets a lofty reputation because of the magnitude of what they undertake…’. For the performance of the most important sacrifices was frequently assigned to the highest civic officers; indeed, ‘the most solemn and ancestral of the ancient sacrifices are assigned here to the person who becomes king by lot’ (90c, d, e, 281a).Footnote ⁹⁵ That person was the Archon Basileus. The Athenian Constitution stated that he was the most ancient of the Athenian officers of the state, and originally a king.Footnote ⁹⁶ In Plato’s time the Archon Basileus was a civic official, an Athenian citizen chosen by lot from among the tribes by rotation and subject to an examination for eligibility (55.1–4).Footnote ⁹⁷ The Stranger in the Statesman was not impressed with his civic status and popular reputation. That judgement may have reflected Plato’s personal dealings with him.

The Stranger had decided, ‘Well, then, we must look both at these king-priests by lot, and their subordinates, and also a certain other very large crowd of people’, the motley (290c, d, e; 291a).Footnote ⁹⁸ Those subjects were associated because the king-priest by lot, the Archon Basileus, governed as his subordinates the seers and the priests. And at the religious festivals he was the sophistic teacher of the motley chorus that connived to deceive the public with imitations of reality. The Stranger discredited the motley indirectly by discrediting directly their teacher as a sophist. In the Sophist, that type taught the skill of disputation about ‘divine matters, of the sort that are obscure to ordinary people’. The sophists also taught falsely about ‘laws, and everything to do with running a city’ (232b).Footnote ⁹⁹ The motley was the chorus of sophists who taught how to deceive by appearances, as their animal and hybrid guises forewarned about their cover-ups of reality.

The Statesman, in its conversation about politics between a foreigner and a youth, could be, like those characters of the motley, strange or immature. Perhaps Plato believed that civic dialogue required local and adult experience towards which his Statesman was a tutorial. A philosophical value of their dialogue, albeit argued rhetorically in similes, was its disclosure of the Stranger’s blurry sighting of the motley amid the definable populace. Their shape-shifting evasion of simple definition, thus their confutation of ordinary sensory perception, complicated and threatened the philosophical aim of dividing the statesman by definition from his subjects. The motley, composed of appearances rather than reality, imaged the problem of the incursion of sophistry on philosophy. The Statesman epitomized that problem under the ample cloak of the Archon Basileus as their supreme ‘wizard’. The images of the motley, because they were imaginary, needed to be unmasked rhetorically through the traditions of literature and art. The exotic lions, the fantastical centaurs and satyrs, and the tricky octopuses were common figures of duplicity that Plato chose for their vividness. That rhetorical quality delivered a powerful emphasis. The Stranger, as the protagonist of the Statesman, had acknowledged clarity (ἐνάργεια) as more effective in speech than even in art (277c). Plato cleverly unmasked sophists, who confounded by sophistry the philosophical definition of the statesman.