This volume contains the proceedings of a conference on the Presocratic philosophers Pythagoras and Heraclitus. Investigated by a team of international scholars are key problems in doxography, Pythagorean Communities, logos, harmony, psychology, flux, number theory, ethics, and theology. Designed for all students of ancient philosophy, this volume will spur further investigations into these cardinal concerns of early Greek scientific thinkers.

This is the first separate edition and commentary on Philodemos of Gadara since 1885, containing an introduction on Philodemos' life, poetic theory, metrical practice, and the place of the epigrams within the Greek Anthology. Thirty-six genuine and two spurious epigrams are printed with full critical apparatus, translation, and commentary. Also included is the text of a recently published papyrus containing traces of many known and previously unknown epigrams by Philodemos.

This text and commentary is the first to take account of all the manuscripts and to place the work in its historical and scientific context, as well as the first to describe its manuscript tradition.

In this wide-ranging volume of papers on Greek and Roman philosophy, a group of distinguished scholars has come together to honor Phillip Mitsis as a teacher, scholar, and colleague. Apart from examining a range of topics and philosophers that covers most areas of Classical philosophy and even beyond, the volume is particularly noteworthy for the variety of critical and philosophical methodologies it embraces. This reflects the honorand's belief that our understanding of philosophy and its relation to its own history must (...) be continually re-examined and that such examinations inevitably benefit from the mutual engagement of different traditions and styles of philosophical argument, even when they seem to conflict. While not explicitly setting up methodological debates, the volume manages to intimate the benefits of more polyphonic discussions by showing eminent practitioners of various approaches going about their craft and presenting their arguments in the spirit of a friendly gift, or philodorema. Edited by David Konstan and David Sider, the volume collects essays in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy by Pietro Pucci, Gerasimos Santas, David Sider, Darren Gardner, Nathaniel Nicol, Heather L. Reid, Carlo DaVia, Theodore Scaltsas, David O. Brink, Fred D. Miller, Jr., Paul Schollmeier, Enrico Piergiacomi, David Konstan, Jean-Philippe Ranger, Paul A. Vander Waerdt, Joseph G. DeFilippo, Jon Miller, Brad Inwood, Paul T. Keyser, Christos C. Evangeliou, David Robertson, Michael Erler, and Alain Gigandet. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary FormDavid SiderCharles H. Kahn. Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxi 1 431 pp. Cloth, $64.95.An enduring question in Plato studies is whether—and if so how—Plato developed as a thinker. A simple positive answer, as argued by Taylor and Burnet, has Plato starting out his philosophical (...) life as an associate of Socrates who adopted and portrayed his teacher’s ideas in the early dialogues (some few of them, in this reviewer’s opinion, perhaps antedating Socrates’ death). Then, upon further and continual reflection, of a Socratic sort no doubt, Plato slowly or quickly (some would mark the spot at Symposium 210a) began to espouse views never held by his rabbi. Or—as, e.g., Shorey and Cherniss would hold—Plato knew his own mind, if not at the very first then at least in his earliest published writings, holding to these same beliefs throughout his life.Neither position is intrinsically impossible or even unlikely. But faced with the various literary devices and philosophical ploys with which Plato shapes his dialogues, it is not surprising that developmentalists predominate over unitarians in Plato studies, each side generally content to leave the other alone in its ignorance. Now comes Charles Kahn to show how both sides may be right: while Plato the thinker behind the dialogues had firm views from which he rarely deviated throughout his life, he planned years in advance how these ideas would best be presented to the public, and in what order. It is, then, [End Page 624] only the dialogues that develop, according to a prearranged scheme that constitutes, as the subtitle has it, Plato’s “philosophical use of a literary form.” (Kahn’s review of the history of the dialogue form in chapter 1 is excellent, with especially valuable remarks on Antisthenes, but is not strictly necessary for his thesis.) This intriguing idea is worthy of Kahn, whose writings on pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, and beyond always command immediate attention and frequently become standard entries in later bibliographies. It is particularly noteworthy that in an earlier attempt at a different sort of reconciliation, Kahn—when all the rest of us believed that Empedocles wrote two major works, one “scientific” and the other “religious”—showed how these apparently different works in fact complemented each other. Now, after Osborne’s argument that Empedocles wrote but one poem has been proved correct by the Strasbourg papyrus, Kahn’s paper holds up remarkably well. Kahn’s own bibliography in the present volume also contains articles written as far back as 1983 (“Drama and Dialectic in Plato’s Gorgias,” OSAP 1:75–121) that not only maintain and develop the idea he is considering but also illustrate how a thinker can space out his already fully formed thesis in well-articulated units—just as Kahn argues Plato did over a large portion of his own oeuvre, specifically the eighteen dialogues from Apology to Phaedrus.It is not that there is no Socratic period, rather that it would now be limited only to the four dialogues Apology, Crito, Ion, and Hippias Minor (93). Hard-core developmentalists and unitarians will want to see whether Kahn can convince them to alter long-held views about so important an aspect of Plato’s dialogues and thought. To convince them, however, Kahn, like the developmentalists, should ideally present a case for the chronological order of composition and publication that depends solely upon external criteria, so as not to beg the question of how, in his own view, the dialogues were made to develop. (The unitarian view would remain theoretically unaltered were it to be proved that, say, Parmenides was written before Laches.) It must be said, however, that on this most essential point, Kahn has not altogether managed to avoid circularity. In part, this is because external evidence tells us very little about Plato’s intellectual development: the Seventh Letter is fascinating but short on details, and Aristotle’s account “is not historically reliable” (41 n. 10, developed further in chapter 3, where, amazingly, an account explicitly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Art of Plato: Ten Essays in Platonic InterpretationDavid SiderR.B. Rutherford. The Art of Plato: Ten Essays in Platonic Interpretation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: Duckworth, 1995. xv 1 335 pp. Cloth, $45.Richard Rutherford has given himself a difficult task: nothing less than a unified analysis of the form and content of several Platonic dialogues, without—as if this is not challenging enough—“losing sight either of his historical context (...) or [in a questionable disjunction] of the ethical, religious, and other themes which are central to his work” (viii). To those who think that the effort is not worth the candle because Plato’s worth as a philosopher is in no significant way enhanced by the literary trimmings, Rutherford wisely pays little attention, choosing rather to direct his book toward those among “academic and the general public” (viii) who (like this reviewer) are willing to believe that the message of a dialogue comprises more than the sum of its logical arguments.It will be seen that in my opinion Rutherford has largely succeeded, but in addition to the particular points raised below, two general criticisms can be made. The first is that by not demanding knowledge of Greek from his audience, Rutherford has cut himself off from what is often the most subtle, and hence the most telling, tool for analyzing the relation between form and content, namely the very language in which Plato has chosen to couch what may be at one and the same time both part of the argument and a more allusive framing element of his overall thesis. Well aware of this limitation, Rutherford does his best to mitigate [End Page 462] with occasional transliteration and explanation of the underlying Greek, but he clearly does not want to burden his Greekless reader with too much of this.A second general criticism is that Rutherford has not read (or reported on) too much of his fellow workers in the field of literary analysis of Plato. Nobody can be expected to have read everything written on Plato, but too many important articles have been omitted for Rutherford to claim that his book would not have been greatly improved had he spent more time on it (x). His wide reading of the philosophical side does not compensate for his not having worked his way through (at least) the Lustrum bibliographies of Cherniss and Brisson from 1950 to the near present.The ten chapters of this book (which cannot be treated in detail here) comprise two by way of introduction (“Problems and Approaches,” “Socratic Literature and the Socratic Question”) and, the heart of the book, eight which deal, in varying levels of detail, with twelve of the dialogues, five of them receiving a chapter each (Protagoras, Gorgias, Symposion, Republic, Phaidros). Much of the first two chapters contains matter not strictly relevant to the matter at hand, but even the section on Socratic literature other than Plato’s provides background with which to compare Plato’s treatment of the Socratic persona. They can confidently be recommended to students looking for an introduction to Plato’s writings fuller than that found in Guthrie but not as daunting as Friedlander’s first volume (which, however, is ultimately more satisfying). Especially praiseworthy are the sections devoted to the various historical problems and literary approaches to the dialogues. Further documentation, however, would alert the reader to alternate views. For example, Rutherford agrees with the majority of modern scholars (in opposition to all ancient views on the matter) that Plato did not write his dialogues before the death of Socrates; cf. L. Rossetti, “Logoi Socratikoi anteriori al 399 a.c.,” Logos e Logoi 9 (1991) 21–40, who reviews the evidence and concludes that, most likely, although Socrates’ dialogues were taken down for study (by others if not by Plato as well), it was not until the death of Socrates that people thought to publish them. One also misses any reference to the works of Paul Shorey in the section on the question of the unity versus the development of Plato’s thought (23–25).A more general criticism of the introduction is that several of the topics discussed are... (shrink)

In this paper I question the validity of the notion of "historical elegy" as a genre of classical Greek elegy. My approach is to view elegy as a whole in order to understand first how the Greeks themselves used the term "elegy" and then what we can learn of the contents of other classical elegies that touched upon historical subjects. I show that the Greeks never attached any descriptive label to "elegy," whether "historical" or otherwise, and that an elegy that (...) included historical matters could also incorporate myth and look forward to the future, while including as well themes now thought of as sympotic. (shrink)

In a well-known parable, told by Xenophon but credited by him to the sophist Prodicus, the young Heracles setting out on the road meets two women whose appearance turns out to be in accord with their characters and names, which are soon proclaimed by each to be Virtue and Vice. The former comports herself as a proper Greek woman should, ‘becoming to look at and freeborn by nature, her body (σῶμα) adorned with purity, her eyes with shame, her stature with (...) moderation (τὸ δὲ σχῆμα σωφροσύνῃ), dressed in white’ (transl. Mayhew). Vice, on the other hand, is self-absorbed and slutty: ‘well nourished to the point of fleshiness and softness, made up to appear whiter and redder than she was in fact’, τὸ δὲ σχῆμα ὥστε δοκεῖν ὀρθοτέραν τῆς φύσεως εἶναι, ‘with wide-open eyes, dressed to show off her ripeness, often checking herself out and seeing whether anyone was looking at her, often even looking at her own shadow’. (shrink)