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INTRODUCTION
tury, our modern conceptual framework allows scholars to distinguish,
if not to isolate, philosophical components from literary or dramatic
ones, but we should be clear that such categories would not have oc-
curred to Plato’s ancient audiences, nor would such distinctions have
been applied to “philosophy,” since philosophy would not yet have been
relegated to a narrow subject fi eld, or “discipline.”^1 Nor would it have
surprised Plato’s ancient audiences to fi nd yet another author writing
“conversations with Socrates” (sokratikoi logoi), since Plato is supposed
to have been a relative latecomer to a genre that could already count
half a dozen or more contributors by the time Plato threw his hat into
the ring, and since, in the ancient world, one would have written within
an existing genre, rather than attempting to be “original.”^2 However, it
certainly occurred to Plato to have Socrates in the Republic tell of an an-
cient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, a discussion that provides
a warrant for the distinction between philosophy and literature, which
would not be formalized until more than two millennia later. Scholars
have recently argued that it seems harder to believe that Plato was the
mere heir to this “ancient quarrel” than it is to believe that he “invented”
this “quarrel” (along with philosophy itself) as a way of setting philoso-
phy apart from other paths to wisdom.^3
Whatever the case, the dialogue form has the benefi t of showing
audiences something at the same time as the characters in these little
dramas tell them things. The conversations in Plato’s dialogues are of-
ten devoted to matters such as courage, wisdom, moderation, justice,
piety, virtue in general, and what human beings can know concerning
these matters. There are also discussions about what is right and good in
human life, about standards of measure and qualifi cations for judging,
about appearance and reality, and many other issues.^4
Readers new to Plato might next discover that most of Plato’s char-
acters are modeled on actual historical people, so they might try to
determine how closely, or in what specifi c respects, Plato’s characters
resemble what we know of the historical personae.^5 One might also no-
tice that certain dramatic clues permit Plato’s audiences to know (more
or less) when many dialogues were supposed to have taken place, and
all of the dialogues that supply such clues are set somewhere between
the middle and the end of the fi fth century b.c.e., almost a full genera-
tion ahead of Plato, who would have been only twenty-seven or twenty-
eight years old when Socrates drank the hemlock in 399 b.c.e.^6 Of the
thirty-fi ve dialogues attributed (at one time or another) to Plato, only
one explicitly states that Plato was in attendance. Only in the Apology
of Socrates does Plato write himself into the dialogue, but the fi rst-time
reader of the Apology quickly learns that Plato’s dramatic depiction of