L’ape e la virtù: un esempio non neutro nel Menone

The bee and virtue: a non-neutral example in Plato’s Meno In this chapter I shall attempt to trace some of the symbolic meanings of arete in Plato’s dialogues, beginning not from those passages where specific mention is made of the term arete, but rather from ones in which it is referred to implicitly, through examples introduced into the discussion in a seemingly neutral fashion. It will be argued that these examples, which are only apparently neutral, evoke the most salient features of the concept whose definition – which is so hard to find, controversial, and refutable at an explicit level – can be inferred – at an implicit level – from images serving as symbols. The case considered here occurs in Plato’s Meno, where the example used to define arete is represented by the term melissa. Introduced by the word smenos, the image of the bee appears here in all its symbolic power.