Chapter 2 The Explicit Narrator: Narrated Dialogues
1 Introducing the Narrated Dialogues
The Platonic corpus contains four narrated dialogues: the Charmides, the Lysis, the Republic, the Parmenides. They form a fairly homogeneous group. Their narrator is explicitly presented as the first-person narrator, who may or may not be Socrates,1 and each opens with an introductory episode of two clearly articulated stages. – In the Charmides, Socrates narrates how, (i) having returned from the army at Potidaea, he entered the palaestra of Taureas where he met Chaerephon and Critias, and how (ii) they introduced to him the beautiful Charmides on the latter’s arrival; this is followed by Socrates’ report of the conversa- tion that developed as a result of the encounter. – In the Lysis, Socrates narrates how (i) on his way from the Academy to the Lyceum he encountered Ctesippus and Hippothales, and how (ii) they led him to a newly established palaestra, where the boys Lysis and Menexenus were introduced to him; this is followed by Socrates’ report of the conver- sation that developed as a result of the encounter. – In the Republic, Socrates narrates how, (i) having arrived in the Piraeus in order to attend the festival of the goddess Bendidea, he and Glaucon ran into Polemarchus and a group of friends and were invited to join them in Polemarchus’ house, and how (ii) arriving there, they met other people, in- cluding the rhetorician Thrasymachus; this is followed by Socrates’ report of the conversation that developed as a result of the encounter. – In the Parmenides, Cephalus of Clazomenae narrates how (i) on arriving in Athens he and his compatriots met Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Agora, and how (ii) these two took them to the estate of their half-brother Anti- phon; this is followed by Antiphon’s rehearsal of Pythodorus’ story about Socrates’ encounter with the philosophers Parmenides and Zeno.
1 Socrates also appears as the explicit narrator in the narrated parts of the mixed Protagoras and Euthydemus; in the spurious Rival Lovers, Axiochus and Eryxias, as well as in the frag- mentary Alcibiades and Miltiades of Aeschines. The Parmenides and the narrated parts of the Phaedo and the Symposium are delivered by other first-person narrators. In Xenophon’s dialogues the explicit first-person narrator is always anonymous.
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Note that the transition from one stage to the other involves not only a spa- tial change (the Charmides being the only exception) and modification in the cast of characters, but also results in the introduction of the principal inter- locutor or, in the case of the Parmenides, the narrator of the main story. Char- mides, Lysis, Thrasymachus, Antiphon – all characters whose presence makes the ensuing conversation possible – only appear at the second stage. As we shall see immediately, such gradual unveiling of information (“zooming-in;” see above, pp. 20–21) is inextricably connected with the way the issue of narra- tive voice is approached in Plato’s dialogues. As for the closures, the Lysis and the Charmides bring the story back to the original act of narration, more precisely, to its second stage: the tutors of Lysis and Menexenus arrive and interrupt their conversation with Socrates; the dis- cussion between Socrates and Charmides comes to an end. The Republic and the Parmenides end abruptly, although at the end of its penultimate book the Republic supplies what looks like a formal closure.2 Plato was most probably not the first to compose narrated dialogues.3 Con- sider, for example, the following fragment from the Alcibiades, a lost dialogue by the prominent Socratic writer Aeschines of Sphettus:
We were seated on the benches of the Lyceum, where the judges organize the games, or a more substantial one from the Miltiades by the same author:
It happened to be a Great Panathenaic procession, and we were seated in the porch of Zeus the Liberator – myself, Hagnon the father of Thera- menus, and the poet Euripides – and … Miltiades approached us, seem- ingly on purpose.4
In both cases Socrates is the speaker, and the setting is highly reminiscent of the openings of Plato’s Charmides, the Lysis, and the Republic. The story’s presen- tation however is not nearly as elaborate as what we find in Plato: neither the two-stage exposition nor the gradual intensifying of suspense, both eventually
2 Cf. Annas 1981: 335: “Book 9 ends the main argument of the Republic, and ends it on a rhetori- cal and apparently decisive note;” similarly Halliwell 1997: 325. Contra Burnyeat 1997: 288–92; Schur 2014: 73. 3 Thesleff 1982: 199–210. Cf. Tarrant 2000: 217 n. 5: “other Socratics are likely to have anticipated Plato in the use of ‘narrated’ dialogue.” On the argument of Aeschines’ priority see now Pen- tassuglio 2017. On Plato and the “invention” of dialogue see also Chapter 3, Section 1. 4 ssr vi A 43 = Demetr. Eloc. 205; tr. C.H. Kahn; ssr vi A 76 = P. Oxy. 2889; my translation.