Étienne Helmer Does the political regime feed and rear the citizens? Trophē in Plato’s Menexenus and his other political dialogues One of the main difficulties for any reader of Plato ’s Menexenus is to know how to read this very special dialogue among Plato’s works, especially its central fu- neral oration. Must it be taken seriously or is it only a parody written by Plato to make fun of the patriotic rhetorical speeches of his time? So far, most scholars have adopted one of these two opposite readings.¹ One of the most influential readers of the Menexenus in the last four decades, Nicole Loraux, has criticized such a strong polarization in favor of a mix of seriousness and playfulness typ- ical of Plato’s Socratic dialogues and,² I should add, of Plato’s ambivalent vision of the human condition.³ But does this serious playfulness only aim at under- mining or dissolving the rhetoric of funeral oration, as Loraux claims? Like other scholars in recent publications,⁴ I argue that such a reading un- derestimates the positive and philosophically political aspect of Plato’s funeral oration in the Menexenus. I take the topic of trophē to be a key element in dem- onstrating why the “serious vs. parody reading” should be abandoned and why Loraux’s merely critical or destructive interpretation, despite all its merits in many details, should be likewise relinquished: as a matter of fact, while Loraux’s interpretation of the “serious playfulness” of the Menexenus tacitly rests on the assumption of an ontological gap between Plato ’s best regime and the Athenian I am very grateful to Jan Maximilian Robitzsch, Andreas Avgousti, Harold Parker and Mark Zelcer for their helpful comments on different versions of this text.  For the list of names on both sides, see Daniel Engels, “Irony and Plato’s Menexenus,” L’An- tiquité Classique 81 (2012): 15.  Nicole Loraux, “Socrate contrepoison de l’oraison fune ` bre. Enjeu et signification du Me ´ nex- e `ne,” L’Antiquite ´ Classique 43.1 (1974): 172 – 211.  Each of us is “an ingenious puppet of the gods,whether contrived by way of a toy of theirs or for some serious purpose – for as to that we know nothing” (θαῦμα μὲν ἕκαστον ἡμῶν ἡγη- σώμεθα τῶνζῴων θεῖον, εἴτε ὡς παίγνιον ἐκείνων εἴτε ὡς σπουδῇ τινι συνεστηκός: οὐ γὰρ δὴ τοῦτό [644ε] γε γιγνώσκομεν). Plato, Laws I.644d8 – e1.  Nickolas Pappas and Mark Zelcer, Politics and Philosophy in Plato ’s Menexenus: Education and Rhetoric, Myth and History (New York: Routledge, 2014). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110575897-009