part II Early Imperial Reception of Plato

∵ Introduction: Early Imperial Reception of Plato

Part II of this volume deals largely with the imperial period up to around 200 CE. In the comparatively stable period that was instituted by Augustus, reinforced by Vespasian and preserved by the Antonine emperors, including Marcus Aure- lius Antoninus who was himself a Stoic philosopher of note, education in gen- eral flourished, being reinforced by those known as “sophists” and brought to its pinnacle in philosophy. It was generally those schools that best catered for the religious aspirations of the time that fared best, and none fared better than Pla- tonism, not simply because of its teaching but also because of a wide awareness of the richness of Plato’s dialogues. Plato was on the lips of a very wide range of educated persons, and their repeated allusions to Plato show not only their own erudition but also the literary knowledge of the audiences for which they were written. The audience members might have held the papyrus scrolls of Plato in their own hands, or listened to others reading them,1 or even watched drama- tized performances of them as a few literary and archaeological sources reveal.2 At the beginning of this period significant efforts were being made to offer people the tools for understanding Plato and philosophy more widely. No lon- ger was a philosophic education mainly the prerogative of those who could afford a prolonged stay in Athens, for the Second Mithridatic War had at very least interrupted the traditional schools there, resulting in something of a phil- osophic diaspora. While Athens remained a centre of note, others developed, fuelled by an unprecedented demand for access to this highest form of educa- tion. Nor did the teachers in one part of the Mediterranean world wish to lose sight of developments elsewhere. To begin the section Tarrant discusses some of the types of writing that were shaping Platonist education from early in the period. These included commen- taries of texts of Plato, handbooks of Platonic doctrines, and doxographic texts, and similar passages within texts, which presented the doctrines of various schools. He discusses the part played in the revival of Platonism by figures like Posidonius, Eudorus and Thrasyllus, all of whom were seemingly influential yet difficult to understand through a lack of surviving evidence would suggest. He notes some early steps in Platonic hermeneutics, and the links already

1 For the importance of the reading of and listening to texts at gatherings see Cambron-Goulet (2012), 212–13; Porphyry (V.Plot.) offers a list of authors whose commentaries or exegetical works (mostly presumably on Plato and Aristotle) were read in the school of Plotinus. 2 For the evidence see Charalabopoulos (2012), 104–255.