Abstract

This thesis is an analysis and interpretation of Plato's use of Dionysos and the dionysiac in his dialogue . It is shown how several distinctively dionysiac phenomena are conflated by Plato as the specific context within which the dialogue unfolds. Dionysiac language and imagery is then employed within that context to further elaborate the symbolic significance of those features. Plato thereby sets up something of a dionysiac framework within which he can locate philosophy and relate it to other features of Greek culture. The main argument that is developed concerns Plato's articulation of a whole range of social dichotomies by means of the various structures of dionysiac religion that he employs. Dionysiac religion is rife with contradictions and contrasts, and some of these contrasts allow Plato to set up mutually exclusive classes of people who can then be identified with, or opposed to, the class of philosophers. These contrasting classes then reemerge within some of the speeches on Eros, where the various theories of the nature of Eros can be translated into theoretical accounts of the relationship between the philosophers and the demos. By focusing on the division of the polis in this way, Plato is able to reject the thesis that political community demands the type of uniformity traditionally demanded by the Greek polis and offers instead a theory of "unity-in-difference," which is to say, a theory that makes the justice and the unity of the polis dependent upon the entrenchment of a certain type of difference--philosophical difference. In particular, these two classes are distinguished by the discursive difference of logos and mythos, each irreducible to the other and yet each necessary for the existence of the good polis. The pure philosophical discourse of socratic conversation is thus radically opposed to the popular discourse of the stage by means of dionysiac symbolism. Plato's own dialogues then emerge from this dionysiac dichotomy as a third form separate from each of those and operating as an erotic bridge across the gap between them: it is a type of discourse that leads the reader out of the lower, mythical, public cosmological discourse of tragedy to the higher, dialectical, esoteric cosmological discourse of philosophy--but without invalidating the former