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INTRODUCTIONthat Socratic conversations (sokratikoi logoi) were already quite popular
as a genre when Plato decided to compose some sort of philosophical
works. No doubt, in his Academy, many other kinds of writing were
used: handbooks on rhetoric, and some standard problems and exer-
cises (something like the Dissoi Logoi) that one could work through to
perfect debating skills, develop logical acumen, and practice dialectic
(here understood as arguing the two sides of a thesis) or antilogia.^19
We know that mathematics was also an integral component of the cur-
riculum in Plato’s school. Yet Plato did not choose to write a geometry
textbook, or a logic workbook, or a catalogue of rhetorical examples or
analyses of oratorical styles, any more than he dedicated himself to com-
posing treatises on various topics. Instead he decided to try his hand at
sokratikoi logoi, though he was neither the fi rst nor the last to do so.^20 But
why did he choose to write the kinds of dialogues he wrote?
The availability of a genre is not a suffi cient explanation for an
author’s decision to write in the fi rst place. So although the “Socratic di-
alogue” was already fashionable among the fi rst generation of Socrates’
followers, Plato must also have wanted to communicate something in
some way. But in what way do dramatic works “communicate”? They cer-
tainly do not communicate in the same way as the writings of most mod-
ern philosophers communicate, employing the argumentative or expos-
itory essay to defend a thesis. It is not at all clear that a dramatist must
defend a thesis or take a position on some issue or other. Yet to acknowl-
edge that Plato did not invent either the genre in which the bulk of his
work is presented nor the character of Socrates, who appears in most of
these works, is not to suggest that Plato may not at the same time be the
master of the craft. Indeed, Nehamas suggests that this is part of Plato’s
seduction, in that readers regard his Socrates as the real Socrates, and
this allure is compounded for philosophers who see themselves as more
like Socrates than the interlocutors, when we are in fact positioned as
victims of Socrates’ impenetrability, just as much as Socrates’ interlocu-
tors are. Worse, as Jay Farness has noted, whereas one might assume that
Plato’s dialogues function to provoke one to reexperience the sting of
the gadfl y philosopher, as Friedländer suggested, many readers are, in
fact, comforted into complacency by the notion that Socrates doesn’t
really die insofar as his life has been transferred onto the stage of world
history by the Socratic authors.^21
When judging Plato’s dialogues against the other two extant ex-
amples of the genre, however, Plato’s dialogues are clearly superior
philosophically. Aristophanes’ comic lampoon of the philosopher, al-
beit a lampoon that rightly makes claims to its own kind of truth from
the perspective of the non-philosopher, bears little resemblance to a