Chapter 2. Erato To Erato, the cicadas report those who have honored her in the affairs of love Phaedrus 259d “Athens, N.M. 1260. RF hydria. From Vari. Group of Polygnotos. 440–430 (Beazley). Third quarter fifth. SUBJECT: in the center, a seated woman reading from a book roll; on the left, a companion holds out a wreath; on the… Read more
Chapter 3. Calliope and Ourania … and to Calliope, the eldest, and to Ourania who comes after her (τῇ μετ᾿ αὐτῇ), the cicadas report those who spend their time in philosophy and honor the music that belongs to them—who most of the all the Muses have as their sphere the heaven (οὐρανόν) and the logoi, both divine and human, and utter the most beautiful voice… Read more
Chapter 4. The Muses and the Tree Having returned to Athens, Plato lived in the Academy, which is a gymnasium outside the walls, in a grove named after a certain hero, Hecademus, as is stated by Eupolis in his play entitled Shirkers “In the shady walks of the divine Hecademus.” Moreover, there are verses of Timon which refer to Plato “Amongst all of them Plato… Read more
Conclusion In the Introduction, I searched Plato’s corpus for what I called his “self-disclosures”: Plato consistently, albeit implicitly, refers to his dialogues as a form of mousikê, as opposed to other forms of discourse. The book’s four chapters focus on the Phaedrus with such a purpose in mind, and from a number of different perspectives suggested by Socrates’ meaningful mention of four Muses in the cicada myth. Read more
Appendix. Plato’s Self-Disclosures A Discussion of Gaiser’s Interpretation The present Appendix is designed to integrate my discussion of Plato’s self-referential statements and their references to Gaiser’s work, which my general Introduction builds upon. It is also intended as a tribute to what I regard as a milestone in Platonic studies. Four Self-Disclosures The sequence in which Gaiser (1984) examines Plato’s self-disclosures, i.e. those passages… Read more
Bibliography Acosta-Hughes, B., and S. A. Stephens. 2012. Callimachus in Context: From Plato to the Augustan Poets. Cambridge. Adkins, A. W. H. 1980. Review of Havelock 1978. Classical Philology 75:256–268. Adomenas, M. 2006. “Plato, Presocratics and the Question of Intellectual Genre.” In La costruzione del discorso filosofico nell’età dei Presocratici: The Construction of Philosophical Discourse in the Age… Read more
Preface Dedicated to the memory of Dorrit Cohn “You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” This little book reconsiders literary form in Plato from a methodological perspective. It inquires into Plato’s methods of writing and it addresses modern methods of… Read more
1. The Problem of Literary Form We rarely ask why Sophocles composed tragedies; Dickens, novels; or Dickinson, poems. These writers were presumably driven to these genres by psychological and cultural forces about which it would seem idle to speculate. When it comes to Plato, however, why he chose to write as he did has long been a serious question, becoming even more insistent in the modern era. Read more
2. Philosophical Rhetoric In a reexamination of the methodological limitations just introduced, this chapter poses a fundamental opposition between expository and literary paradigms of interpretation. I will begin by distinguishing several methods of interpretation by discipline and by their attitudes toward history, on the grounds that historical inquiry’s methodological focus on information (which we have already glimpsed in Szlezák’s subordination of Plato’s written texts to a historical… Read more
3. Literary Practice, Modality, and Distance The previous two chapters discussed hermeneutic problems and rarely touched on solutions. Positive goals conventionally associated with literary-rhetorical methods of reading were mentioned, but they remain to be explained more fully in the context of interpreting Plato’s dialogues. As I will continue to argue, a powerful teleological impulse directs readers to seek single-minded and persuasive arguments in works that are, nonetheless,… Read more
