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Chapter 5 offers a new reading of the urn in Sophocles’ Electra, an object that casts Electra unexpectedly into the role of a mourning mother on the model of Niobe. Even before it materializes on stage, the urn stands for the already canonical tradition of “Electra plays,” inviting spectators to reflect on how Sophocles’ tragedy signals its reception and reshaping of earlier tragic material through props. Receptacles and their everyday function in preserving goods prove highly adaptable to the needs of tragic stagecraft and performance. Equipping both the dramatist and characters with a powerful tool for interrupting the linear flow of time, the urn exemplifies the malleability of the performance medium; its association with an actor named Polus, who reportedly substituted the ashes of his son for the empty stage urn in a 4^th century BCE performance of Electra, is emblematic of the close collaboration between tragic props and reception history.

The Gorgias seems to attack hedonism; the Protagoras seems to defend it. The resolution to this apparent inconsistency is to deny that the Gorgias attacks hedonism, in general. I argue that the target attacked in the Gorgias is hedonism of apparent pleasure: an ethical Protagoreanism.

This chapter begins with an analysis of Socrates’ entrapment of the rhetorician Gorgias, a discussion of Socrates’ interest in and use of rhetoric, and an assessment of Gorgias’ over-estimate of the power of knowledge. It focuses on Socrates’ dialogue with Polus, in which Socrates argues that tyrants have no power and that doing injustice is worse than suffering injustice. Behind these paradoxical claims lies a compelling critique of the confusions inherent in moral indignation and the irrationality of punishment that is retributive rather than aimed at curing the offender’s unhealthy soul. Power, as something good, requires knowledge; true virtue, as the health of the soul, is incomparably valuable, and all who fail to pursue it fail to understand its value.

In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates explains what it is to have a doxa, a judgement or belief. A doxa is a self-addressed affirmation or denial that comes into existence when, after giving a question thought, the subject settles on one answer. Two passages seem to conflict with this account of doxa. In the Gorgias, a belief is attributed to Polus on the strength of what he is committed to by his other beliefs. But Socrates is trying to show complexity in an apparently universal consensus on Polus’ side, and the point of the belief-attribution cannot be understood without recognizing that Socrates speaks of what other people, not only Polus himself, believe. In the Meno, a slave in the grip of perplexity is said to contain true doxai. But Socrates does not mean that the slave at that time believes the answer to the geometrical problem.