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Updated: May 15, 2025
When nothing means anything, laughter is the only human language left. The Cratylus is a similarly conceived diversion. Most of it is occupied with fanciful derivations and linguistic discussions of all kinds. It is difficult to say how far Plato is serious.
In accomplishing this great object, I have presented the reader in my notes with nearly the substance in English of all the following manuscript Greek Commentaries and Scholia on Plato; viz. of the Commentaries of Proclus on the Parmenides and First Alcibiades; and of his Scholia on the Cratylus; of the Scholia of Olympiodorus on the Phaedo, Gorgias, and Philebus; and of Hermeas on the Phoedrus.
THE NEW CRATYLUS; or, CONTRIBUTIONS towards a more ACCURATE KNOWLEDGE of the GREEK LANGUAGE. By JOHN WILLIAM DONALDSON, M.A., Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. A NEW SYSTEM OF LOGIC, and Developement of the Principles of Truth and Reasoning; in which a System of Logic, applicable to Moral and Practical Subjects, is for the first time proposed.
Socrates, when he departs from his character of a 'know nothing' and delivers a speech, generally pretends that what he is speaking is not his own composition. Thus in the Cratylus he is run away with; in the Phaedrus he has heard somebody say something is inspired by the genius loci; in the Symposium he derives his wisdom from Diotima of Mantinea, and the like.
"But if it be requisite to lay before the reader those dialogues out of many which principally unfold to us the mystic discipline about the gods, I shall not err in ranking among this number the Phaedo and Phaedrus, the Banquet and the Philebus, and together with these the Sophista and Politicus, the Cratylus and the Timaeus.
Had he been able to read Bonn, or had mastered the New Cratylus or the Varronianus of Donaldson, his versatile and sharp intellect might have sent forth a work of "winged words" of equal interest and infinitely more profound than the Diversions of Purley.
Consider the goddess Athene, who sprang armed from the head of Zeus, even as among the fables of the poor heathen folk of seas thou never knewest goddesses are fabled to leap out from the armpits or feet of their fathers. Thou must know that what Plato, in the 'Cratylus, made Socrates say in jest, the learned among us practise in sad earnest.
Rest were disposed to concede that it was just possible they might have what they called 'a spell of fair weather. Saturday was the general 'cleaning-up day' in the village the day when pails of water were set out in unexpected places for the unwary to trip over; when the old flagstones poured with soapsuds that trickled over the toes of too- hasty passers-by; when cottage windows were violently squirted at with the aid of garden-syringes and hose, and when Adam Frost, the sexton, was always to be found meditating, and even surreptitiously drinking beer, in a quiet corner of the churchyard, because he was afraid to go home, owing to the persistent housewifely energy of his better half, who 'washed down' everything, 'cleaned out' everything, and had, as she forcibly expressed it, 'the Sunday meals on her mind. It was a day, too, when Bainton, released from his gardening duties at the rectory at noon, took a thoughtful stroll by himself, aware that his 'Missis' was scrubbing the kitchen, and 'wouldn't have him muckin' about, and when John Walden, having finished his notes for the Sunday's sermon, felt a sense of ease and relief, and considered himself at liberty to study purely Pagan literature, such as The Cratylus of Plato.
In all three dialogues he is exerting his dramatic and imitative power; in the Cratylus mingling a satirical and humorous purpose with true principles of language; in the Parmenides overthrowing Megarianism by a sort of ultra-Megarianism, which discovers contradictions in the one as great as those which have been previously shown to exist in the ideas.
The whole may also be considered as a satire on those who spin pompous theories out of nothing. As in the arguments of the Euthydemus and of the Cratylus, the veil of irony is never withdrawn; and we are left in doubt at last how far in this interpretation of Simonides Socrates is 'fooling, how far he is in earnest.
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