EUTRAPELIA:
It is fortuitous gentlemen that on this Festival of the Themophoria, restricted only to women such as me, who pray for fecundity in the absence of a sportive spouse, you both experienced such a sudden thirst and stopped here to quickly quench your parched desires at the same tangled front curtilage of concupiscence.

    But now you have doused your burning torches in the same front stoop and satisfied your needs at the same gratifying outflow, will you not linger and entertain the entertainer with your wisdom and your wit before I leave for the temple to offer up a dove to the daughter of Chronos and you to offer prayers of gratitude to Mnemosyne?

TAURORHUPOS:
Indeed sweet madam, later I shall wend my weary way, towards the Shrine of Mnemosyne, for you have this day supplied a sensuous surprise I'll wish to muse about in the mellow years ahead. I'll offer a cock to mother Mnemosyne (or to one of her hetairistriai more like it) and trust that she'll supply a much-needed crutch for my later limp anamnesis, for she is the Titan of retrieval and the mother of the Muses.

    What say you good Leipoethos, shall we tarry and you can talk to us of the manners and morality of the people of your native Heiraphytna, that we may compare such with the usages of Athens? You are by all accounts a man of diverse appetites and are most knowledgeable in the use and usages of foreign parts both public and private?

LEIPOETHOS:
Agreed my friend Taurorhupos! Indeed lady Eutrapelia it is beyond my powers to summon up the water of wisdom from a dry well, but the good Taurorhupos here has an overflowing cistern of sapience, having sat at the feet of Socrates himself and soaked in the suds of his sagacity

EUTRAPELIA:
Splendid! See here! Watch me! I clap my hands both in joy at your assent to stay and to summon the wine-slave in one joyous synchronistic sound and felicitous movement of the wrists. Let me commence the moral quibble with a question the fish wives screech as I pass their stinking stalls:

'Morality? - May the Gods weep! You wouldn't know morality if you tripped over it in the agora would you harlot?'

   And they are right, for I know not what the true coinage of the word can be. Taurorhupos can you tell me what morality is that I might either mend my ways or make the beast with two backs with even more enthusiasm - whatever suits the outcome of the case?

TAURORHUPOS:
Morality is concerned with the distinction between good and evil or right and wrong; right or good conduct.

EUTRAPELIA:
But what is good and evil and right and wrong? Much as I delight in your company, my cursed salacious husband is waiting for winds from Samothrace in six weeks time. Such back-and-forth dialectical hopping from one semantic stepping-stone to another will never enable us to cross the river of recognition before his sterile shadow stains my senses, as the good demons of eudaimonia make good their escape through the window-casement. But before entering the moral maze to navigate the ginnals and find the gist of it, do we not need a thread like that which Ariadne gave Theseus, that we, crabbing backwards, may let unwind behind us through the misleading lexical labyrinth, so that we may navigate our way back out again?

LEIPOETHOS:
By Jove! The lady has equal talent above and below. And she is right, for in Heiraphytna it is considered good for a man to be cuckolded. He proudly wears a winged-phallus badge as a chlamys-pin at the right shoulder as an emblem of honour that others have considered his choice of spouse desirable, and complimented his connoisseurship in a confirmatory copulation.

    Yet here in Athens where Plato's forms of models rule the moral roost, the cuckold has the legal right to kill the offender if caught in the act, and in a back-street I once saw a man kill his wife's fleeing lover with a single blow of a corn-flail. We Lydians have our own version of morality and our ethical entrepot - but when in Athens don our moralistic motley and do as Athens does.  For me Protagoras spoke wisely saying:

'Man is the measure of all things--of things that are; that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not. (Kahn. 2000. p.721)

TAURORHUPOS:
Strange are the customs of the Lydians. But as the good Socrates said to Theaetetus during a similar quest for the meaning of knowledge not long before they condemned him to drink the cocktail of Nemesis:

'But the question you were asked Theaetetus, was not what are the objects of knowledge - but to find out what the thing itself - knowledge - is?
Plato.[Theaet. 146e.]

    Apply the same touchstone to our definition of morality. Your Heiraphytnaen cuckolds, cozening wives and betrayed Athenian husbands and their victims are merely objects of morality - not what the thing itself...morality...is.

LEIPOETHOS:
Cleisthenes created ten new tribes based on residence in the demes of Attica, and enrolled many aliens of base origin and crude beastly practices into these new tribes. Their evils caused uproar in the streets and many were put to death with great cruelty. Their holy men had committed ritual gross bestiality with a hundred oxen, afterwards the abused beasts were slaughtered and a ritual meal was held in which the multitude all joined with great celebration of this immorality. The hecatomb's organs of re-generation being specially favoured as a delectation. Indeed for them, not to participate in such immorality was immoral and a great insult to the gods.
[2] (Kitto. 1997. P. 110)

TAURORHUPOS: Only more examples... of alien ethics...

LEIPOETHOS:
But does not morality come in different Forms according to the inclinations and the appetites?  Is not morality a twice struck clumsily minted coin - legal tender on one face and a dud worthless mackle on the other? Right face up in a Lydian quayside mart or brothel and the basket of wriggling fish, or bed of writhing bawds or boys are yours. Place it wrong-side-up in an Athenian fish-crone's claw and she will scream for the moral magistrates? The two-way facing headed demiurge of the barbarian Italics Janus would be a suitable God of Greek Morality would he not, since for man to lie with a man in Greece is de rigour, but instant death amongst the Danubians?

    But though a foreign dud and alien sermoniser may be sham, they are authenticates of their own form of mintage and bon homme, though seen from Athens' forts the Form is base? Thus does a foreign visitant exist in compliance with two model Forms simultaneously, as do the Khoisoidae blacks of Southern climes. The women's buttocks puffed like Steatopygiac dough, are as if ebonised shelves to stage their womanly wares. The lips of Venus dangle round their knees - like lacquered, leather gewgaws all agape. Beautiful to Khoisoid men and bestial to the Greek, they drift in and out of beauty, from beast - to belle and back - as captured in each beholder's gaze. So if each and every object, artefact and human action have a Form - there must exist a form for authentic baseness or immorality, which if abroad - turned inside out - cuts a good kirtle in the correct moral clime?  There are many arcdegrees of actus-reus, from pure iniquity to mild Forms of immorality, where can be found ensconced and categorised, the overwhelming twittering millions of humanity - either permanently perched on some opinionated territorial twig, or swarming in flocks like senseless summer swallows, seamlessly blending with such passing naughty fancies as are thought appropriate to their evanescent appetites.

EUTRAPELIA:
But gentle Taurorhupos, why should morality be so difficult to define, when unschooled fish-crones would not make a misstep if they came across it in the streets?
 
    If morals are so easily distinguished, what were the outraged sensitivities of our Greekish youth, of which poor Socrates was accused of corrupting and for which he was tried and savagely condemned to drink poison? Why need we rack our brains for that which is common knowledge amongst plebeians and the hoi polloi and is quickly instantiated in public courts?

TAURORHUPOS:
Hold brave Leipoethos - let me take that elenchtic lunge upon my stout Socratic buckler! For Socrates and his proxy-amanuensis Plato, who smiles at the very mention of my name ( I know not why - perhaps its etymology?)  a Form exists for each matching type of thing in the cosmos. In the same way that we need a suitably struck coin to facilitate the enginery of easy exchange, so too we need an ideal representation or a proper Form for human beings, for human courage, for trees, for perfidy, for birds, boats, apples, colours, beauty, piety, goodness, morality and knowledge and there exists every type of ideational template imaginable in Plato's celestial commissary.

  The Form of the Good equals God, and the location where souls come into existence and forms exist is in a 'Platonic heaven' - a spiritual sunny dimension, accessed sometimes from caves, where the souls of the dead experience a renewed conjugation with the Forms. Particulars are objects that are involved in a Form, which provides the requisite existential condition for a particular to exist, and competently compose the potentiality of things.

LEIPOETHOS:
Such ethical pyrotechnics are fine within the protection of the Polis, but watch your step for sparks if setting sandal on a foreign strand. Particulars? Ah! Then tell me then Taurorhupos, if in place of my acknowledged degeneracy and sexual immorality - if by the brute force and ethical engineering in an epiphanic star-burst I became a moral person of unquestionable rectitude overnight, would my life in essence correspond to Plato's Form of Morality?

TAURORHUPOS:
Yes, I believe that would be the case and I am forced to deem that in the likelihood of such an event occurring that the mantle of morality would drift down from above and settle deservedly on your shoulders.

LEIPOETHOS:
But dear Taurorhupos - and speaking allegorically as Socrates liked to do - if - little by little I then retrogressed in the particulars of my moralistic Form to be once more a recidivated rake, would I tally with a new Form and does the default depot have 'ready-mades' or 'off-the-pegs' to serve the different diametrics of morality and immorality as one by one my particulars abandon their Parent-Form and float free of the moralistic mother-ship to sign-on with another ship of scruples of a less reputable set of sails? Remember. You admitted there is a Form for every cosmic element, artefact or human action? And what fitted Form perchance fulfils the monstrous self-importance of the 'Chalcedonian giant,' Thrasymachus, who in insulting Socrates called him 'a buffoon' and said of him: 'Whatever he was asked he would refuse to answer, and try irony or any other shuffle, in order that he might avoid answering?' [Plato. Rep. 337-338d.]

And yet I saw the same man give up his horse to a wounded veteran who limped in the rain?

TAURORHUPOS:
Yes, but though you jest at Socrates' Forms, have you not been acting like tom-fool Thrasymachus towards his target - employing scorn that you might screen your own hypothesis?

LEIPOETHOS:
A fair point friend - so here it is. The very reason of morality is to yield reasons which over-rule the reasons of self-interest in those cases when everyone's following of self-interest would be harmful to everyone. [3] (Sterba. p.110.)

    Now please identify where the border lies twixt one step or elevation on the Socratic interstellar semantic staircase, that leads upward from the Form of sheer immorality to the higher moral realm, and if the rungs are regularly arranged and spaced, so climbers or descendants may rest awhile to catch their unpardonable breath, and not be morally marooned and caught twixt Forms?

TAURORHUPOS:
Can you speak more figuratively in a flavour I can better delicately discriminate?

LEIPOETHOS:
I bespeak of the particulars and wonder at what precise stage one Form mereologically metamorphosises into another that is so similarly synonymous that the Areopagus and the regular magistrates or Archons would need to adjudicate on as to which was which? Do I speak clearly enough Taurorhupos?

TAURORHUPOS:
I can find no fault with your reasoning here.

LEIPOETHOS:
Then the so-called 'essential properties' of dove-hood are contemporaneous with - being a dove?

TAURORHUPOS:
That surely true.

LEIPOETHOS:
I claim the total essential properties or particulars of an entity - ARE the entity. We are our mixed modalities. We are what we are... or as Monophthalmos the navigator [he who bolts down the spinacia oleracea) says:

'I am what I am."

   Plato's Forms are ill-conceived generalities that mix, merge, slip, slide, commingle and connubilate like apprentices at a party. That which exists and the manner of its existing is too unstable to satisfactorily frame with serpentine abstraction, nor be rendered reliable with reificational representation.

EUTRAPELIA:
If a dove is stripped of properties, when comes the ontological apogee - when a dove is not a dove - or put another way - when is a moral person not in some way a moral person?

LEIPOETHOS:
The dead body of a mutilated dove is still 'a dead dove.' Even residual, isolated, miscreant's moral acts will qualify him for some morality by virtue of the one-form measure, whilst continuing his immoral/moral acts amongst the alien corn - he could qualify as the epitome of morality.

As Socrates reminded Euthyphro:

'You agreed that all impious actions are impious and all pious actions pass through one form - or don't you remember?'
Plato. [Euth. 5b.]


TAURORHUPOS:
But the dove Leipoethos - what of the dove?

LEIPOETHOS:
If we with surgical virtuosity, remove one by one the diminishing meros of its dove- like modalities, what remains would still be thought of and described as 'a dove.'
First goes its beak, and the modality of pecking, but it is still a dove that can't peck. We then remove its vocal-cords - it remains a dove that can't coo. Next we remove its legs - its stomach - eyes - wings - then we...

EUTRAPELIA:
Hold on! Hold on bold Leipoethos! We now have a peckless, voiceless, legless, stomach-less, flightless, featherless, blind dove - are you saying that the body and head that remain is a dove?

LEIPOETHOS:
Yes I am dear Eutrapelia, because if I asked you to take what remained out into the agora and put it out of its misery, or give it to some starveling I would say:
'Eutrapelia, please put down your weaving-work and take this thing out and destroy it?'

And you would reply:

'What is it Leipoethos?'

And I would reply,

'It's a poor bird that's been cut up'

And you would say:

'What kind of bird is it Leipoethos?'

And I would reply:

'A dove.'

EUTRAPELIA:
Ah! But Leipoethos, only you and I would know that the remaining carcase was that of a dove. - a wandering fish-hag who stumbled over it in the agora would not see it so, bereft as it was of its identifying particulars?

TAURORHUPOS: [drowsily]
That is true - it could be mistaken in the dark for a fresh ox turd or an old shoe lost by some drunken reveller. Would the 'keeper of forms' wrongfully connect it to the form that is the perfect prerequisite form of an old shoe or a fresh bovine motion?

LEIPOETHOS:
Exactly! The perfect Form is a fantasy. It is the particulars or properties by which we recognise an individual human or any other object, not by the looming featureless Form which is but a guide. Any Persian hoplite will confirm there is a line in any dismemberment, which if exceeded, renders the remains so nebulous of human shape and definition, we are no longer sure it belongs to the human biological group. And each new loss or acquisition of particulars, and each new differential from a standard type would require a new Form, and on and on into infinity till every object in the universe becomes the recipient and proud proprietor of a glinting necklace of incompatibilities, distinguished by their likeness to some vague common characteristic.

    Thus the fractious feuding Forms, ginned twixt competing national moralities and beliefs, whirled like forest-leaves, caught in a corporeal dust-devil of definitional detritus, division, disillusion, screaming semantic misunderstandings and toppling polis towers. Tossed within the innards of sinners and saints, who can redeem or destroy themselves with one great act of generosity or malice, whilst sinning or salving elsewhere in other social or family situations.

EUTRAPELIA:
So be it noble Leipoethos. For you the Forms are as dangerous as Greek Fire - is that your final case? But look! Your good companion Taurorhupos snores. I will call his slave and go to the temple where the torches burn brightly with that very naphtha. If you decide to stay this night I will bring hence some bright beams and renew our romance later, for our talk has found me newly inspirited.

If not farewell sweet friend - may the Gods of Heiraphytna protect you and keep you safe.

End.

References.
Note: All textual references to The Theaetetus, The Republic and Euthyphro used in this essay are Stephanus page numbers and refer to:.

Plato. 'Plato - The Collected Dialogues.' transl. F.M. Cornford. Hamilton. E.-Cairns.H. eds. 2005. Bollington Series. LXXI. Princeton University Press.

[1] Sterba James .'Ethics: The Big Questions.' 2004.  p.110. James. P. Sterba. ed. Blackwell Publishing. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford. England.