This paper does not aim to establish the ‘dramatic date’ of Plato's Gorgias, nor does it seek to establish with any precision the date at which Euripides’ fragmentary Antiope was written. Nor does it aim to show that Athenian anti-intellectualism had some fixed beginning and conclusion rather than persisting, in some fashion, as long as intellectuals frequented its public places. It does, however, have aims that may easily be mistaken for these. First, while Plato was not too particular about fidelity to a dramatic date, he frequently shows a strong desire to supply an intellectual background for the views that his characters will propound and the debates that follow from them. In the case of dialogues that employ a single interlocutor that certainly tends to produce a reasonably coherent dramatic date, but what matters to Plato is not so much fidelity to history as the appropriate intellectual context.
Debate continues as to whether the Didascalicus (or Isagoge, or Epitome) ascribed to Alcinous in the MSS. is a work of Albinus, the Platonist of the mid-second century A.D., pupil of Gaius and teacher of Galen. While there are similarities between the work and the paltry remains of Albinus, these are not sufficient to prove any more than that Alcinous was influenced by roughly the same kind of Platonism as Albinus was, and that he wrote in a style comparable at times.
This paper questions whether the relationship between Socrates and his young followers could ever have been treated by Plato in the same fashion as it is treated in the Platonic Theages, where the terminology of synousia is repeatedly applied to it. It argues that in minimizing the part played by knowledge, and in maximizing the role of the divine and of erōs, the work creates a 'Socrates' who conforms to the educational ideology of the Academy of Polemo in the period 314-270 B.C. I indicate how this may assist our understanding of Arcesilaus' Socraticism, and suggest ways in which the work may have found its present place in the corpus.
This paper argues that the six-book Republic used by the lexical author known as the Antiatticista is not, as hitherto conveniently assumed, our Republic arranged in fewer books, but a sub-final version lacking certain parts, most obviously VIII and most of IX, and possessing interesting variations. The argument rests on what would otherwise be a very high error-rate (38%) compared with the more reliable citations of other Platonic works, and with the citations of Herodotus and Thucydides. It demonstrates that VIII and most of IX belong stylistically to the opposite extreme from I, and may therefore be the last composed. It argues that the Platonic collection used by the Antiatticista antedates hiatus-avoiding dialogues, and belongs to a location other than Athens or Alexandria, and probably in Sicily or Italy. It concludes that one cannot trust any attempt to arrange our Republic by the notional six-book order.
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