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4. Hearkening to Kuśa and Lava and to Nala: Poetic Monarchs on the Ideal of Dharma in the Hindu Epics

4. Hearkening to Kuśa and Lava and to Nala: Poetic Monarchs on the Ideal of Dharma in the Hindu Epics The Hindu epics differ further from their Homeric counterparts by featuring rulers who are not merely similar to poets, but actually are poets. Yet these figures are not the heroes of the Hindu epics, despite resembling these leading men in their displacement from their sovereignties. In fact,… Read more

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Conclusion. Affirmative and Interrogative Epics

Conclusion. Affirmative and Interrogative Epics So far, I have discussed the Greek and Sanskrit epics largely separately. In Chapters 1 and 2, I examined the ways in which the Greek poems and their Sanskrit counterparts classified themselves, and I considered the effects that the reclassification of each pair of poems, as epics, had on their subsequent interpretation. In Chapters 3 and 4, I showed that each epic’s… Read more

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Chapter 2. Erato

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

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Chapter 3. Calliope and Ourania

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

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Chapter 4. The Muses and the Tree

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

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Conclusion

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

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Appendix. Plato’s Self-Disclosures

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

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Bibliography

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

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Preface

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

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Part I. Literary Form and Classical Rhetoric. 1. The Problem of Literary Form

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