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Researches on the Clitophon Researches on the Clitophon Pietro Bertocchini, Università di Bologna, [email protected] 1 Status Quaestionis The Clitophon is a dialogue that belongs to the corpus of Platonic writings. However, it has been suspected of being spurious by many scholars. The modern debate began in 1809 when Schleiermacher took position against its authenticity. Since then, a lot of contributions on the topic have been released and a great number of hypothesis of attribution have been formulated. It is worth mentioning at least Grote’s thesis (1865), which speculates that the dialogue had been an introduction (later rejected) to the Republic, as well as Kunert’s essay (1881), which, for the first time, argued that the attack directed towards Socrates within the Clitophon was actually to be understood as directed towards the Socratic Antistenes. It was starting from this hypothesis that Slings (1999) formulated his proposition about the Clitophon in the end of his detailed commentary. According to him, the dialogue could be a literary pamphlet, i.e. a criticism of a specific genre of the Socratic literature that down- graded the philosophical research to a mere act of protrèpein (exhorting). On this basis, Slings claims to be persuaded of the authenticity of the text, though not without some reservations. Recently, there have been more scholars who have argued in favour of the Platonic authorship than not (cf. e.g. Bowe 2007). However, they have simply repeated – with some minor changes – the old interpretation of Socrates’ attack as a merely symbolic one. Neither before nor after Slings’ commentary (1999) has there been work that analyses in depth the language and style of the dialogue as an interesting field of inquiry for its uncertain attribution. Nonetheless, such an object seems to be the most reliable to base Clitophon’s accusation or defence on. I have therefore decided to focus my research on the linguistic and stylistic aspects of the text, aiming at proposing a new and updated analysis, alternative to Slings’ one. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis were conducted in my Master degree’s thesis. Herein I will especially concentrate on the quantitative aspect, though my research has been, so far, rather focused on the qualitative one. 2 Qualitative Analysis In the first place I approached the problem in a traditional way. In fact, I produced a com- mentary in which I stopped at every passage of the dialogue that was, each one for a different reason, suspected of not being Platonic. For every passage, I analysed the arguments - both in favour and against the authenticity - that were raised by the passage itself. This first stage of the research brought to attention that the reasons for concern are arguably more numer- ous and more serious than Slings had pointed out in his 1999’s commentary: some verb 177 178 P. Bertocchini phrases, single terms, or utterances of various lengths were found to be in contrast with the Platonic language as it is known from the other writings of the corpus. Moreover, a limited number of odd passages were identified as possibly caused by some clumsy imitation of other passages belonging to undoubtedly Platonic dialogues, and such a procedure could hardly be ascribed to Plato. Among the various aspects touched upon in the commentary, it is worth mentioning the problem of the potential date of the dialogue within Plato’s production. On this point, the conclusion that had already been reached by others – i.e. that the Clitophon needs to be grouped with the dialogues of the last period (Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus, Critias, Laws) – appeared to be confirmed and, in some cases, even reinforced by new evidence. Yet, the consistency of language and style thus found with these other Platonic writings did not seem sufficient to erase the suspicion of inauthenticity. 3 Quantitative Analysis Even though the analysis on the single dubious passages is far from being concluded (as therefore is the authenticity’s issue), I decided to undertake, in parallel to it, some stylo- metric researches aimed at gathering new evidence to be compared with that previously found1. Though during the qualitative analysis I had taken into consideration some spe- cific passages, at this second stage I tried to assess the overall features of the language and style. In other words, I looked for unperceived stylistic tics, typical constructions, and distinguishing marks, which even the most skilful forger would have trouble to perfectly reproduce. Had the Clitophon proved to be significantly different from the norm outlined by the other dialogues, it would have emerged as important evidence against authenticity. In order to be fully reliable, such a test should compare the dialogue under debate with all the other writings of the Platonic corpus2, or even involve one or more contemporary authors as terms of comparison (e.g. Xenophon, the orators). At this point of the research, however, this was not possible. Nonetheless, as an initial sample for developing some ex- ploratory researches, I was able to gain access to a corpus composed of 16 dialogues3, that is about one-third of the Platonic writings (having taken into account the different lengths of the texts). Among these, 13 are normally considered authentic, while 3 (Alcibiades II, Hip- parcus, Rival Lovers) are believed to be spurious by most scholars. Such a corpus was edited, on behalf of the “Laboratoire d’Analyse Statistique des Langues Anciennes” (LASLA) based in Liège, by Mauro Siviero, who manually4 assigned information to each word of every di- 1Platonic scholars long ago discovered the potentiality of statistical procedures. Yet, they have been mainly employed in the investigation of the long debated problem of the dialogues’ internal chronological order (cf. e.g. Campbell 1867, Ledger 1989, Brandwood 1990). As far as Plato is concerned, it is rare to see such procedures applied to questions of authorship attribution. However, an example of this can be found in Ledger (1989), who, among other important contributions, signalled that the Hippias Major and the Rival Lovers were stylistically closer to Xenophon’s writings than to Plato’s ones. 2On the contrary, a comparison with a corpus that comprehended only the dialogues purportedly belong- ing to the same period (Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus, Critias, Laws) would have proved to be useless for the question of authenticity. In fact, such a comparison would probably confirm some sort of resemblance between these texts and the Clitophon. Yet, as stated earlier, such a result would not be decisive. 3Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Parmenides, Philebus, Sympo- sium, Phaedrus, Alcibiades I, Alcibiades II, Hipparchus, Rival Lovers. 4The manually performed lemmatisation is one of the main qualities of LASLA’s corpus, together with Researches on the Clitophon 179 alogue, such as a) its lemma (attributed on account of LSJ9), and b) a symbol representing the grammatical category (or POS: Part Of Speech) to which the word belonged5. Once the same lemmatisation process was implemented for Clitophon’s text, it was possible to recompose a database with homogeneous features, comprehensive of 17 dialogues. Some new and automatically deducible information was then added to the already given one: c) word’s length; d) POS’ variability or invariability; e) lemma’s frequency within LASLA’s corpus. As this preparatory phase was concluded, I identified ten indicators6 in order to measure if and how Clitophon’s behaviour was inconsistent with the remaining 16 dialogues. Since the analysed features were unmarked linguistic traits, which are involuntary for the most part, it seems that the neutrality of the choice of the phenomena to be analysed has been partly granted. Even so, some part of subjectivity is clearly inescapable. The ten indicators can be summarised as follows: 1. Lemmata variety index. 2. Percentage of the six most frequent lemmata within LASLA’s corpus. 3. Average percentage of lemmata belonging to some specific POS (substantives, adjec- tives, verbs, adverbs) within LASLA’s corpus. 4. Coexistence ratio of variable and invariable words. 5. Average length (n° of letters) of the words. 6. Coexistence ratio of ὅς and ὅστιc. 7. Index of dissimilarity between POS frequency distribution of each dialogue and of LASLA’s corpus. 8. Index of dissimilarity between lemmata frequency distribution of each dialogue and of LASLA’s corpus. 9. Percentage of lemmata non occurring in other dialogues. 10. Percentage of three lemmata sequences non occurring in other dialogues. the annotation for each word of its respective part of speech (POS). For future research it would certainly be useful to gain access to the databases provided with all the dialogues. A database of this type is, for example, the one edited by Bombacigno as a part of Radice’s lexicon (2004). Even though in this case the lemmatisation was performed through semi-automatic procedures, the curators’ équipe assures to have manually intervened on each case the software was not able to solve. 5This information comes from LASLA’s official website. A detailed illustration of the criteria adopted by LASLA’s group is found in Denooz (1988, II-IV). 6Some others indicators were rejected as redundant since they measured the same phenomenon in two different ways. 180 P. Bertocchini 4 Length factor The results’ analysis and interpretation required taking into account the distortions that could derive from the extreme shortness of the Clitophon (1.564 words). In fact, among the writings included in LASLA’s corpus – together with those normally held to be spurious (Alcibiades II, Hipparcus and Rival Lovers which amount, respectively, to 4.211, 2.270 and 2.418 words) – the only one whose length is comparable to Clitophon’s length is the Al- cibiades II (1.650). The Crito (4.164 words), the Euthyphro (5.187) and the Apology (8.786) too can be grouped as relatively short dialogues if compared to the other nine, whose di- mensions are radically superior (they range from Sophist’s 16.199 words to Phaedo’s 22.440).
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