IS THERE METHOD IN THIS MADNESS?
- For the recognition that the wreath of ivy and violets represents both
Dionysus and Athens, see Rojcewicz, “Platonic Love,” 111.
- Scott recognizes the grounding function of Alcibiades’ speech when he
writes: “It makes concrete and particular the Eros that had become quite ab-
stract in Diotima’s speech, and it returns the conversation to the everyday world
of human concerns.” See Scott, Plato’s Socrates as Educator, 120 – 21.
- Rosen contends: “The phrase ‘from left to right’ suggests that Aris-
tophanes is now between Agathon and Socrates.” See Rosen, Plato’s Sympo-
sium, 325.
- The deep and complex relationship between the Republic and Sym-
posium has been recognized by Strauss. See Strauss, On Plato’s Symposium, 19.
His student, Stanley Rosen, further determines the nature of this relationship
along the lines outlined here. See Stanley Rosen, “The Role of Eros in Plato’s
Republic,” Review of Metaphysics 18 (1965): 452–75.
- Because the dramatic date of the Republic is ambiguous, it remains un-
clear whether the “Glaucon” referred to in the Symposium is Plato’s brother who
appears in the Republic. Friedländer recognizes that the name “Glaucon,” even
if it is not Plato’s brother, calls the Republic to mind. He claims: “The scene at
the beginning of the Republic is reminiscent of the Symposium in its very words.”
See Paul Friedländer, Plato: The Dialogues, Second and Third Periods, vol. 3 (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 6.
- There is a long history of interpretations that fail to recognize the func-
tion of the playfulness of the Republic. One of the best expressions of this tradi-
tion is found in Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies, which sees the philosopher
king of the Republic as “Plato himself, and the Republic is Plato’s own claim for
kingly power.” Popper goes on to assert that the Republic is “meant by its author
not so much as a theoretical treatise, but as topical political manifesto.” See
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1943), 153. The presumption that the Republic is a political treatise
in the modern sense, or, more radically, a manifesto, are anachronisms that fail
to recognize the ambiguities Plato wrote into the text itself.
- These words: “ΔAllΔ eij dokei
,... ou{tw crh; poiein” are parroted in the
Symposium by Apollodorus’: “eij ou\n deikai; uJmi'n dihghvsasqai, tau'ta crh; poiein”
(173c).
- Plato, Republic of Plato, 441.
- John Sallis recognizes that Socrates establishes a community by turn-
ing force into persuasion. See John Sallis, Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic
Dialogues, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 322.
- Recognizing the importance of coercion at the start of book 5, Jacob
Howland suggests that Adeimantus and Polemarchus envision themselves as
the noble guardians who will receive the full pleasure of erotic procreation
in the city Socrates establishes in speech. See Jacob Howland, “The Republic’s
Third Wave and the Paradox of Political Philosophy,” Review of Metaphysics 51,
no. 3 (1998): 646.
- Philebus 48a– e.
