Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition

This section publishes short essays exploring topics of interest to the profession. Submissions should run to no more than 1200 words. Diverse opinions and spirited exchanges are welcome. Contributions will be evaluated by the editor.

Presidential address to the American Philological Association December 1985 (condensed and adapted)

Plato's dialogues are works of fiction that, like life itself, present characters, ideas, and events that evoke different responses in different audiences.¹ The artistry with which the dialogues do this is the source of their endless fascination for a public far wider than the public for technical philosophy. In addition to being fundamental works in the history of thought, they are the creations of a great literary artist, using all the resources of a great literary tradition. They are as much a part of our literary tradition as the works of Homer, Vergil, and the Greek tragedians—and, in later times, Dante, Milton, Goethe—an inspiration and model for countless literary artists in prose and verse from antiquity to the present. And to the extent that they are works of art, they are inexhaustible—having different meanings (not necessarily mutually exclusive) for different people and different periods.

That Plato is a great artist is not news. What is surprising is that the dialogues are so rarely studied as works of art, with the interpretive tools of literary criticism. Until this is done in a much more detailed and comprehensive way than has been done so far, an important aspect of Plato's enterprise is being neglected, and our understanding of Plato is less complete than it must always and inevitably be.

We need to apply to the dialogues more of those "forms of attention," to use Frank Kermode's phrase, which are customarily given to the work of such writers as Vergil and others who combine poetic and philosophic craft and vision. We should see Plato as he saw himself and meant others to see him—as an artist, though of course not only an artist. He works within a great literary tradition with the assurance of a master and exploits for his own purposes that tradition's view of the human condition, making use of its resources of myth, legend, fable, conventional scenes, situations, and stories, and such artistic devices as direct and indirect literary allusion, imagery, word play, and dramatic, thematic, and imagistic systems. One favorite device that Plato borrowed from the Greek literary tradition is the description of a work of art within a work of art, technically known as ekphrasis. An important part of this talk will be a demonstration of ways in which Plato uses this device.

Not that Plato's use of one or another of these devices is completely unknown and unremarked. But relatively little has been done towards achieving a detailed and comprehensive view of Plato's practice as an artist. Such a view, I believe, would give us a fuller sense of what Plato himself thought was the scope and purpose of the dialogues, and might lead to a better understanding of his own views about the arts, and in particular of the paradox that vexes Platonic studies—his distrust and depreciation of poetry, the very art he practices so superbly and finds necessary for the presentation of his thought. Since in his discussions of mimesis he does not explicitly consider his own special mode of mimesis, we should look to his way of making use of artistic devices in the Republic as a possible source of insight. I do not propose answers to these controversial questions here but only to suggest an approach that if applied to a large number of dialogues might yield information on which answers could be based.

Such an approach would not be a substitute for other kinds of analysis, but a supplement and enrichment, in some cases a corrective of a too one-sided perspective. As I have already said, a literary text is inexhaustible and can therefore say different things to different people in different periods. Kermode claims that there is a "conversation" between these differing points of view "that...