The Meno and Homeric Virtue

I've been writing a lot (academically) about role-based virtue, it's an idea that excites me.  The idea might be summarized thusly: there is no full-stop virute or goodness, rather, evaluative concepts are, implicitly or otherwise, indexed to types of activity or to social roles. 

As it turns out, the bits and pieces of Homeric Greece we can put together seem to indicate that their society, like many contemporary ancient societies in the middle east and northern Africa, held this idea in some esteem.  In fact, they did not know of its contrary: virtue,or arete (ἀρετή) in Homeric greek, was meaningless when spoken of in an unqualified manner.  Rather, there was virtue-for-warriors, virtue-for-women, virtue-for-slaves, and so forth.  We (apparently) do not find the term ἀρετή appearing in an unqualified manner in Greek texts until two or three hundred years after The Odyssey and the Illiad.


So, when Plato has Socrates ask Meno (in The Meno) what virtue is, the question would probably have contained a culturally informed ambiguity that it does not have for us.  The first couple of times I read the Meno, I laughed inwardly at the first answer provided by the title character, which seemed obviously silly, like a set-up for the inevitable Socratic smack-down:

It is not hard to tell you, Socrates. First, if you want the virtue of a man, it is easy to say that a man's virtue consists of being able to manage public affairs and in so doing to benefit his friends and harm his enemies and to be careful that no harm comes to himself; if you want the virtue of a woman, it is not difficult to describe: she must manage the home well, preserve its possessions, and be submissive to her husband; the virtue of a child, whether male or female, is different again, and so is that of an elderly man, if you want that, or if you want that of a free man or a slave. And there are very many other virtues, so that one is not at a loss to say what virtue is. There is virtue for every action and every age, for every task of ours and every one of us--and Socrates, the same is true for wickedness.

I now realize that Meno is not simply spouting something he believes personally.  Rather, he represents, in the text, an ethical tradition of which Plato's intended readers would have been very aware.  Socrates, in his usual condescending an evasive way, tricks Meno into accepting the contrary proposition: that every virtuous man, woman slave and child has some property above and beyond the performance of their role that makes them virtuous or just. 

It is fair to say that this very conceptual shift has won the day, and that we are all Socratics now.  The dictionary is illustrative on that point: " 'Good'... the most general term of commendation."  But what if this concept is not like this?  What if it only appears to be so because of the distorting influence of Platonic-Christian morality?  What if, in spite of all appearances, the only coherent way to use evaluative concepts is by linking them, implicitly or explicitly, to a context?  What if Meno, while clearly wrong about certain details, is basically right?