CHAPTER I Sdkratikoi logoi: the literary and intellectual background of Plato’s work I, THE SOGRATIC LITERATURE We begin this study of Plato’s Socratic dialogues with a survey of what is known about other Socratic writings in the same period. That is not a familiar starting-point. In other fields, and notably in biblical scholarship, genre studies have become commonplace. Students of the New Testament, for example, have found it fruit- fal to compare the literary form of narrative and discourses in the different Gospels. It may come as a surprise, then, to realize that (as far as I can tell) there has never been a comparative study of the Socratic dialogue form.’ This may be due in part to the mi: taken belief that Plato was not only the perfecter but also the in- ventor of this form. But such was certainly not the case. Aristotle in his Poetics refers to the Sdkratikoi logoi (“Socratic discourses,” or “Conversations with Socrates”) as an established literary genre. And in his lost dialogue On Poets Aristotle is said to have named a certain Alexamenos of Teos as the originator of this genre.? Un- fortunately, nothing more is known of Alexamenos. What is known is that quite a number of friends and followers of Socrates celebrated his memory in literary form, after his death. Aside from Plato’s work, only the writings of Xenophon have sur- vived intact. Nevertheless, we have significant remains from at least four other Socratic authors: Antisthenes, Aeschines, Phaedo, and Eucleides. And we have at least anecdotal information concerning a fifth author, Aristippus. Until recently the fragmentary material for these other “minor Socratics” had rarely been studied with care. That situation has been altered in the last few decades by a 1. Perhaps the closest thing to a precedent is Hirzel (1895). For a modest start, see Kahn (1990). 2. Arist. Poetics 1447b11; De Poetis fr.3 Ross (=Rose? 72). 12 1. Sokratikoi logoi number of important publications, culminating in the moni mental Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae edited by G. Giannantoni It is now possible as never before to survey the Socratic literature. The results are of considerable interest for an understanding of Plato’s own work. There is no evidence that any of these writings were composed during Socrates’ lifetime. There were of course caricature por- traits of Socrates presented in Aristophanes’ Clouds, and in other fifth-century comedies now lost. Aside from this comic material, however, the Socratic writings known to us (including the dia- logues of Plato) all belong to the fourth century Bc, after Socrates’ death. The importance of this will become clear in a moment. Our aim in this first introductory chapter is, first of all, to sit- uate Plato in his own time and place, and thus to overcome what one might describe as the optical illusion of the dialogues. By this I mean Plato’s extraordinary success in recreating the dramatic atmosphere of the previous age, the intellectual milieu of the late fifth century in which Socrates confronts the sophists and their pupils. It is difficult but necessary to bear in mind the gap between this art world, created by Plato, and the actual world in which Plato worked out his own philosophy. That was no longer the world of Protagoras and Gorgias, Hippias and Thrasymachus. With the exception of Gorgias (who was unusually long-lived), these men were probably all dead when Plato wrote. Protagoras, in particular, must have died when Plato was a child, and the dia- logue named after him is situated before Plato’s birth. The intel- lectual world to which Plato’s own work belongs is defined not by the characters in his dialogues but by the thought and writing of his contemporaries and rivals, such as the rhetorician Isocrates and the various followers of Socrates. Our comparative survey of the Socratic literature is thus de- signed to correct the misleading historical perspective that is built into Plato’s work. But it can do more. At least one feature of the genre can be of decisive importance for an interpretation of Plato’s thought. This is the imaginative and essentially fictional nature of Socratic literature. 3. Giannantoni, Socratis et Socraticorum Religuiae (hereafter SSR), Naples, 1990, 4 volumes. See also the works by Caizzi (1964, 1966), Déring (1972), Ehlers (1966), Mannebach (1961), A. Patzer (1970), and Rossetti (1980). Important earlier work was done by Dittmar (1912) and Gigon (1947).The Socratic literature 3 Plato’s success as a dramatist is so great that he has often been mistaken for an historian. Hence the history of philosophy reports Socrates’ thought on the strength of Plato’s portrayal in the dia- logues. And it is not only modern scholars who fall victim to this illusion. Like Guthrie or Vlastos, Aristotle himself finds the histor- ical Socrates in the Protagoras and Laches; and the Stoics do much the same. Now Aristotle and the Stoics are interested in philoso- phy, not in history as such, and for them the figure of Socrates serves to define a certain position in a theoretical debate. But the modern scholars who follow in their footsteps claim to be writing history. And since they treat Plato’s literary creations as if these were historical documents, the result is a pseudo-historical account of the philosophy of Socrates. Even more unfortunate are the consequences for an understand- ing of Plato’s own work. In current English-language scholarship on Plato, the belief still prevails that the philosophy of Socrates is somehow faithfully represented in Plato’s earlier writings. And this supposedly historical datum is then used to define a distinct Socratic period in Plato’s philosophic development. It is not clear that such a belief in the historical fidelity of the dialogues can sur- vive a critical study of the Socratic literature. Hence, one function of my introductory survey is to undermine the foundations of the traditional view, insofar as this depends upon the assumption of an early Socratic period in Plato’s work. We can then proceed to develop an alternative view, resting upon entirely different assumptions. This enterprise of deconstruction is not the only insight to be gained from such a comparative survey. There is also the striking diversity to be found in the portraits of Socrates given by Ae- schines, Phaedo and Xenophon. These differ from one another as much as they differ from Plato, despite the fact that there is some- thing like a family resemblance that unites all four portrayals. This diversity points up what is peculiar to Plato’s version of Socrates and helps us bear in mind the distance between the literary and the historical reality. In addition, there is the important literary phenomenon known nowadays as intertextuality. We have at least two passages from Antisthenes and three from Aeschines that are so closely related to passages in Plato that it is natural to assume either that Plato is alluding to an earlier text or that the other Socratic author is responding to Plato. We can thus situate Plato