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What Is Socratic About the Pseudo-Platonica?

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What Is Socratic About the Pseudo-Platonica? chapter 7 What Is Socratic about the Pseudo-Platonica? Mark Joyal The Socrates of the pseudo-Platonic dialogues is, we find, on the whole Socratic rather than Platonic, both in characterization and in content of thought…. [These dialogues] tend to perpetuate the ear- lier and simpler portrait; and the pseudo-Platonic field gives little or no ground for superseding the old tradition, or for enhancing the personality and expanding the doctrine of Socrates to the scale of Plato’s own achievement. Tarrant 1938, 172–3 ∵ So Dorothy Tarrant’s conclusion to her examination of the works that form the subject of this chapter. It is a confident and seductively simple conclusion, but her confidence is at least partly justified. As we shall see, the Socrates of the pseudo-Platonica shows no interest in or adherence to those doctrines which are generally considered most distinctively Platonic, in particular the Forms and Recollection (anamnesis). But against what standard did Tarrant judge the pseudo-Platonic Socrates to be “Socratic”? She does not say explicitly, but we can assume she is thinking of the character who emerges mainly from Plato’s Apology and his early, aporetic dialogues.1 Most scholars today would be much more reluctant to disengage the Socrates thus constructed from the source of evidence on which that construction is based. Yet whatever else may be said of Tarrant’s study and conclusion, she deserves credit for taking a 1 Tarrant opens her paper (1938, 167) by observing that “discussion on the Platonic Socrates in relation to the historic Socrates has to some extent subsided in recent years,” and refers to G.C. Field’s articles on the subject published fifteen years earlier. It seems most probable, therefore, that she has in mind (and some of Field’s positions strengthen this inference) the debate stimulated by the heretical theories that John Burnet and A.E. Taylor held on the question of the historical Socrates (which Tarrant calls “a provocative one”). There is a clear, authoritative explanation and criticism of the Burnet-Taylor thesis in Guthrie 1969, 351–5. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004396753_009 212 Joyal synthetic approach towards the works which she classified as pseudo-Platonic, something which few others had done before her or have done since.2 Socratic studies have traveled far since Tarrant’s day, and in many different directions. An important development for the study of the Socratic tradition is a growing appreciation that the pseudo-Platonica may be more valuable to us, not less, for being fully extant and relatively early products of writers who are not Plato or Xenophon. The time therefore seems ripe for a fresh consideration of the pseudo-Platonic writings which focuses on the Socrates-characters who emerge from them. 1 Defining the Pseudo-Platonica Readers who are familiar with the topic of the pseudo-Platonica will know that this chapter carries with it a problem of definition which cannot simply be dodged. The works transmitted to us under Plato’s name—that is, the Platonic Corpus, organized into nine tetralogies—include several whose authenticity, for a variety of good reasons, is in serious doubt (hence their common label as Dubia). The ones over which there is, relatively speaking, the least dispute, though nothing near unanimity, are Alcibiades II (Alc. II), Hipparchus (Hipparch.), Amatores (or [Rival] Lovers: Amat.), Theages (Thg.), Minos (Min.), Epinomis (Epin.), and nearly all of the 13 Platonic Letters. Two others, Alcibiades (Alc.) and Clitophon (Clit.), have in recent years received a more spirited defense against a balance of opinion which has long favored a verdict of non-Platonic authorship.3 A few of these works—Epinomis, Alcibiades II, Hipparchus, and Amatores—even had their authenticity called into question by one or more ancient commentators,4 but as far as we can tell, it was only at the beginning 2 Her article has been considered significant enough to be reprinted in Patzer 1987 and Irwin 1995. 3 To cite only a few general books in English on Plato which examine the entire Platonic Corpus (all of which contain good summaries of the pseudo-Platonica): Shorey 1933, 415–32, rejects Minos, Hipparchus, Theages, Amatores, and wavers over Epinomis, Alcibiades, Alcibiades II, and Clitophon; Taylor 1949, 521–40, rejects all the foregoing, apart from Epinomis; Guthrie 1969, 470–74; 1979, 385–94, rejects Epinomis, Alcibiades II, Hipparchus, and wavers over the rest; Dillon (in Press 2012, 49–51) rejects Minos, Alcibiades II, Hipparchus, Amatores, and Theages, while Tarrant and Gonzalez (in Press 2012, 38–9, 44–5) are inconclusive, respectively, over Alcibiades and Clitophon. English translations of all these works are found most conveniently in Cooper and Hutchinson 1997, which adheres to the traditional tetralogical ordering of the Platonic dialogues. 4 A strong ancient tradition attributed the Epinomis to Plato’s student Philip of Opus; see Tarán 1975, 7–13; Brisson 2005: 21–3. According to Athenaeus (11.506c), “some” believed that .
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