The Socratic Dubia

Harold Tarrant University of Newcastle Australia

1 Introduction

It is hard to be sure about the authenticity of several of the dialogues within the Platonic corpus. Most of these employ as principal speaker, and seem genuinely interested in aspects of the historical or at least the Platonic “Socrates” and his methods, and my title refers to these collectively. I am neither claiming that they offer special insights into the historical Socrates, nor that they should always be treated as a group. Rather I would claim that there is some merit in examining them together from time to time, revealing their similarities, and discussing whether some or all might have found their way into the corpus by a common path. Any such examination would naturally include discussion of the portrait of Socrates that they paint, both collectively and individually. If these works were designed by or were given his approval then they have received the imprimatur of a follower of Socrates. If they have no close connection with Plato, nor with any other follower of Socrates, then they may rather be important as indications of what Socrates had come to mean for those who had not known Socrates themselves. The shape of the Platonic corpus, as we now know it, cannot with certainty be traced back before Thrasyllus (d. 36ce),1 but even then several works were already agreed to be spurious (dl 3.62).2 Several survive in the Appendix Pla-

1 I have treated Thrasyllus’ activities in Tarrant 1993, and I included the testimonia there. Mansfeld 1994 offered a different account on some matters; Sedley 2009 has published a papyrus that may well reflect Thrasyllus’ explanation of the second tetralogy (- --). I revisited several issues in Tarrant 2013a, while Brisson 2013 examines the relevant text of Diogenes Laertius with more interest in the interpretative than the historical perspective. My present position is that Plato’s work, including many dialogues not yet circulating, was arranged in the after Plato’s death, and was passed down, with some accretions, by those charged with keeping his books, until the break-up of the Academy in 88bce. The tetralogies represent Thrasyllus’ (or Dercyllides’) attempt to explain the order in which they had been transmitted, which had not been adequately explained before, and it may have involved slight changes of order, particularly in respect of and Erastae (on which see below). 2 The strong adverb homologoumenôs qualifies notheuontai (“are excluded as spurious”), imply-

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004341227_020 the socratic dubia 387 tonica, a collection of related works such as Axiochus and transmit- ted in some manuscripts. The existence of agreed spuria does not imply that everything within the Thrasyllan corpus was agreed to be genuine. The most important dialogue of which this was not so was the , which some sources ascribed to Philip of Opus, who is also credited with having prepared the for publication and arranged it in its present twelve-book form.3While the Epinomis does not employ Socrates as a speaker, some dialogues in which Socrates is the principal speaker are preserved within the corpus but were also questioned, and I would number among these Alcibiades ii, , and Erastae.4 Thrasyllus identified a polymath referred to in this last as , adding “presuming that the [Ant]erastae is by Plato,”5 a caveat implying that some others doubted its authenticity. We can perhaps guess why the last two of these works should have been doubted, for the interlocutors (as also in ) remain unnamed, contrary to Plato’s usual dramatically-inspired practice; and the second Alcibiades, apart from being a second dialogue with that title,6 has linguistic oddities (particularly the forms οὐθείς/μηθείς for οὐδείς/μηδείς) that suggest a different writing, editing, or transmission process from the rest of the corpus.

ing considerable consensus, at least by Diogenes’ time. In spite of some excellent work in this area by Müller 1975, we do not know the process by which such consensus had arisen, and it did not stop authors from referring to spurious works as “Plato’s” if it suited them. One work, the Halcyon, which was included in Diogenes’ list, has been transmitted to us both through some manuscripts of Plato and through those of , while according to Dio- genes (dl 3.62) Favorinus had regarded it as the work of the Academic Leon. It is interesting in that it is the sole surviving dialogue to make Socrates’ early friend (on whom see Brisson in this volume, p. 000) an interlocutor. 3 Evidence (e.g. d.l. 3.37, anon. Proleg. 24.13–16, cf. 25.6–7, and Plut. Moralia 370f) is available in an appendix to the edition of Tarán 1975. 4 Ael. vh 8.2 (Hipparchus), Ath. 11.506c (Alcibiades ii, then sometimes said to be by Xenophon); for Erastae read on. 5 See dl 9.37 = t18c. The work (on which see Peterson in this volume) was often known as Anterastae, meaning “”,and may today be referred to as Lovers or Rivals (Fr. Rivaux, It. Rivali); the caveat does not imply Thrasyllus’ own doubt (Peterson, p. 412). 6 There is also a second , but few now insist that either is spurious even though there is a simple reference to “the Hippias” at Ar. Metaph. δ.29, 1025a6, where the verb χωλαίνω (1025a10–11), otherwise absent from , picks up Hip. mi. 374c7 in the Platonic text; it has been suspected that such a reference would not have been made in this form if Aristotle had known two Hippias-dialogues (and hence that might be spurious), but see next note.