William Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989); J. Waugh, “Neither Published nor Perished: The Dialogues as
Speech Not Text,” in The Third Way: New Directions in Platonic Studies, ed. Fran-
cisco J. Gonzalez (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefi eld, 1995), 61– 80; Elinor
West, “Plato’s Audiences, or How Plato Replies to the Fifth-Century Intellec-
tual Mistrust of Letters,” in Gonzalez, ed., The Third Way, 41– 60; Kevin Robb,
Literacy and Paideia in Ancient Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994);
Jesper Svenbro, “The Interior Voice: On the Invention of Silent Reading,” in
Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, ed. John Wink-
ler and Froma Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 366– 84;
K. Robb, “Orality, Literacy and the Dialogue Form,” in Plato’s Dialogues: The
Dialogical Approach, ed. Richard Hart and Victorino Tejera (Lewiston: Edwin
Mellen, 1997), 29– 64; Yun Lee Too, The Pedagogical Contract: The Economies of
Teaching and Learning in the Ancient World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2000).
Holger Thesleff, Studies in Platonic Chronology, Commentationes Hu-
manarum Litterarum 70 (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1982); Eric
Havelock, A Prologue to Greek Literacy (Cincinnati: Universit y of Cincinnati Press,
1971); and Gilbert Ryle, Plato’s Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1966).
According to Victorino Tejera: “Plato’s dialogues do contain overt or
covert hints—self-focusing devices as Umberto Eco calls them—about how the
reader or interlocutor is to take what will be said. Such hints, if they are to be
reliable pointers to the design of the work, must be internal (endogenic) to it.
They will override externally generated instructions about the work or its in-
terpretation offered by unreliable or partisan secondary sources like Diogenes
Laertius and the Hellenistic Pythagoreans” (Victorino Tejera, Rewriting the His-
tory of Ancient Greek Philosophy [Westport: Greenwood, 1997], 96).
Numerous references to hearing provide an obvious, though often over-
looked, indication of the particular orientation of this Pythagorean audience.
For a full exposition of how these narrative markers can guide a philosophical
interpretation of the Phaedo, see Anne-Marie Bowery, “Recovering and Recol-
lecting the Soul,” in Plato’s Forms: Varieties of Interpretation, ed. William Welton
(Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003), 111– 36.
Szlezák, Reading Plato, 28– 29.
Gary Scott, Plato’s Socrates as Educator (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2000), 193n6.
For example, these dialogues emphasize Socrates and his pedagogical
relationships, the sophists and their students, and the lover-beloved relation-
ship. Homeric allusions and the presentation of philosophy as an intellectual
and spiritual journey all fi gure prominently in the dialogues. Epistemological
problems associated with the dissemination of knowledge and the limitations
of human wisdom also make a prominent appearance, as do metaphysical con-
siderations of space and physical location, time, and temporality. I am currently
at work on two books, A Philosophic Muse: Plato’s Socrates as Narrator and The So-
cratic Epics: Telling Tales of Socrates, that explore these dimensions of the Platonic
dialogues.
