Noble Lying and Democratic Rhetoric in Sophocles' Philoctetes and Plato's Republic

This article unsettles the traditional views about Sophocles' Philoctetes and Plato's Republic on the issues of noble lying and democratic rhetoric. I do this by delving deeper into 1) the Athenian democratic context in which both works are set or were staged, 2) the intertextualities between the two works, and 3) recent scholarship that reads both Plato and Sophocles against the grain of the traditional scholarship. This new reading allows us to understand Plato's infamous noble lie (gennaion pseudos) as a less anti-democratic teaching about ideal forms of rhetoric than it is normally taken to be.